Wow, one man's "meh" is another man's glowing Chernobyl.
I jumped ship all the way to PC-BSD. The killer features (e.g. ZFS boot environments) have so far (for me) offset the learning curve and numerous small annoyances. Killer features showing no signs of going away, and the small annoyances have lessened with each new release. Would have been such a great business model for Canonical. Too bad they chose something else.
You don't even have your facts right. Much of the lawsuit concerned negligence on the part of the hotel staff, but that's obviously far too fine of a distinction to penetrate your plate mail.
As it happens, I spent the entire afternoon reading about the collapse of Internet comment sections. Comments of the sort you just made were mentioned. Rather frequently. Would you like to add something derogatory about native people to complete your full house? CBC cited in particular the incivility in any article concerning first nations people. Articles concerning women as victims were no doubt not all that far behind. A few women daring to share their stories online were received the friendly advice to go kill themselves.
Here's a hint. It could have ended a lot worse for this chick. For all anyone knows he actually tried the door handle, before settling for just a blurry keepsake. Even without this consideration, the violation of her physical privacy was already bad enough.
not sure if that's a result of the OS or the userbase but frankly it doesn't matter to me as it still results in more work for me per supported user
It ought to matter to you whether this this extra support burden is a direct by-product of this user base being more assertive/ambitious/productive on behalf of your corporate overlord.
Yes, you can reasonably ignore flavour of the month arcana, but if drive to be productive => machine preference A => more than normal support load, you really ought to put some thought into whether "machine preference A" is anything other than a way station for the ugly reality of supporting your most productive staff (like no-one has ever seen an enterprise "normalize" the support burden by forcibly imposing a low glass ceiling of mediocrity).
You probably already know this, but your "no panacea" argument strikes a note of tautological strawman (bogus reasoning => strawman: +1 insightful; strawman => anywhere useful: -1 missed boat).
The real economic argument is whether the marginal productivity gain from a technological choice exceeds the marginal support burden (and other TCO ripples). Socially, of course, cost-benefit accounting crosses fiefdom boundaries, and for this reason enterprises manage to screw the pooch on this particular calculation all the time.
Point A from your post: let's not model OS X as having a negligible support burden.
Passed.
Point B from your post: the OS X burden can actually be the fat man on the airplane.
We'll trust you on this observation. For myself, it doesn't surprise me at all.
Point C from your post: it doesn't really matter how the man got fat.
One had better remain "fully" in control at all times, because one slip of the finger is borderline irreversible for a great many people (here "borderline" is defined to mean "would require a substantial wallet flex"). Mounting mountains of psychology research show that humans are only "fully" in control of anything when their declared intention at the convenience of their best cognizance can be locked into place once and for all, until countermanded with equal and opposite intentional force.
Control as per our paleolithic instincts:
[*] don't ever ask me again, if you value your nut sack
What a surprising thing for HID professionals to fail to notice: human to human intentional declarations are expressed in eleven exponential shades of scatological glower.
Move over b2b / b2c, here comes DeepMind with some long-overdue h2c (human to computer) gesture recognition.
Primary standards such as NIST-F1 and NIST-F2 are operated for periods of a few weeks several times each year to calibrate NIST timescales, collections of stable commercial clocks such as hydrogen masers used to keep time... Technically, both F1 and F2 are frequency standards, meaning they are used to measure the size of the SI second and calibrate the "ticks" of other clocks.
Unfortunately, even contra TFA is weak geek tea:
Both NIST-F1 and NIST-F2 measure the frequency of a particular transition in the cesium atom—which is 9,192,631,770 vibrations per second, and is used to define the second, the international (SI) unit of time.
I guess there's a reason why people with tiny UIDs memorize pi to a silly number of places: it helps you not leave off the other five or six significant digits in the rare case where it actually matters. The real frequency standard is only, like, approximately a million times better than that long-assed, dock-tailed string of digits visually implies.
Truly inconceivable—almost—and yet barely able to time slice the total perspective vortex.
Does anyone actually want Unicode, or just a small subset of features missing from whatever encoding they now use, in the dominant encoding of the era? We've lived with parsimony for a long time now, just scrub everything in Unicode that isn't obviously a feature with a minimal down-side.
Here's a sane approach. Go to the New York Times or The Atlantic or the WSJ or The Economist, download the top 1000 articles from the last 100 days and include every character you consistently find there (plus obvious gap fillers). That's all I ever wanted. Few or none of these characters will facilitate injection attacks. Then people can suggest other parts of Unicode on a case by case basis.
Good grief, why would anyone adopt the whole seething enchilada all at once?
1000 CPU's isn't even a rack. It's not even enough to handle a pittance of an Internet service.
WhatsApp is hardly my definition of a "pittance". 140 million concurrent connections on 800 servers, mostly dual-socket Ivy Bridge (40 threads each). That's 1600 CPUs and definitely more than twice a pittance. Contents of all that traffic is another story, a few precious needles embedded in even more of a pittance plague than our Slashdot exchange here.
For the quasi mathematicians among us, the size of the Go search space is completely irrelevant, as chess already exceeds direct search by repeatedly told (but generally uncomprehended) orders of magnitude. What makes chess different that Go is that a pruning gradient was far easier to construct, with material advantage acting as a New York phone book booster seat (they still had those then).
The search gradient in Go is far more subtle, but whatever it might be it didn't escape the neural networks for very long once they became any good. A really good article on this is The Believers by Paul Voosen, but it's moved behind a subscriber paywall since I last accessed it.
Here's a snippet for flavour:
These neural nets were little different from what existed in the 1980s. This was simple supervised learning. It didn't even require Hinton's 2006 breakthrough. It just turned out that no other algorithm scaled up like these nets. "Retrospectively, it was a just a question of the amount of data and the amount of computations," Hinton says.
You missed the absolutely critical corollary that restores balance to the force: after Bob succeeds, he's already halfway to his next success where after Alice succeeds, she needs to snooze for one toss before she's back in the game, where apparently the game involves some gender-swap role play.
It's so totally male to cease thinking the problem through after attaining the initial success condition.
I think I could teach a very interesting grade XI math class.
It ought to be made illegal to refer to accepting a fundamentally new TOS as an "upgrade".
Alternatively, it ought to be possible to click "I do not accept" on the new TOS and thus having made this tick mark never to see another "upgrade" suggestion that doesn't offer you a TOS you might actually accept.
That Monte Carlo algorithm they used is kind of weird, I wouldn't have expected it to work.
Monte Carlo bidding algorithms in Bridge were showing surprising strength back in the mid nineties. In addition to modelling uncertainty from the other participants at the table, it protects the analysis from becoming overly fixated on sharp features.
I wouldn't say that Monte Carlo works so much as I'd say it's a surprisingly effective remedy for a mode of dysfunction that ought to be regarded as blatantly obvious, but for some strange reason many people choose not to see it that way.
Perhaps Monte Carlo might also help humans take a broader perspective on engineering problems. No wait, there's an entire book about how easy it is to teach feeble humans about how better to assess complex uncertainties: Tetlock recent book on Superforecasting.
Hint: If the problem is set up so that the behaviour of Israel can be depicted as black or white (name your poison), some large subgroup of otherwise strong forecasters are incapable of constructing themselves a Israel judgement-free alternative view.
My lord, humans are stupid as bricks about some things.
But singling out one of these for headline space on Slashdot is just blantant astro turfing.
Au contraire, you mean "masturbatory astroturfing".
Performance is far from the primary concern in the builder space.
Case in point: A modified F16 without all the hardpoints for weapons systems and external fuel tanks would win more 1-on-1 dogfight engagements than the F16 as build (supposing it had something left to shoot with at all).
John Boyd, bless his hyper-competitive heart, was bitterly disappointed that they watered down his flight model on the version delivered, he whose cranial thought-system spent a lot of time telling people that flexibility in war-fighting systems is not a priori a bad thing. Boyd actually lived that split existence. The rest of us make this mistake out of pure envy.
Message to the new overlords: we could do with a less of the Top Gun-style stick wagging.
Wrong. A COW mirror with automatic snapshots protects against many other scenarios, and most (but not all) hardware failures. A COW mirror with frequent scheduled incremental snapshot replication to a remote location protects against just about everything, with no USB drives involved.
Unfortunately, COW mirrors won't win any write performance benchmarks against XFS, as the internal write path tends to be far more complex. But seriously, use the Volvo for 90% of daily errands, and haul out the turbo eggshell only for special occasions.
A 6 mph frontal full collision racked up $5,486 in damage to a Mercedes C class sedan. The Infiniti G35, Acura TL and Lexus IS weren't far behind.
The winner was a 1981 Ford Escort, a sturdy little car that is no longer made. When the institute tested an old model it still had around, the Escort came out of two of the crash tests with zero damage and a fraction of the damage that the best performing new cars had.
In my books, UFS is the 1981 Ford Escort, ZFS is the mythical Volvo, and Btrfs is the Tesla Model S—totally awesome, but I wouldn't touch it myself.
Breitbart News reported in October, with Tesla's stock plunging by 10 percent, that Consumer Reports had pulled its "best car ever" rating from Tesla's Model S.
(BTW, I fixed the -10 percent stock "plunge". Happiness is a left-leaning plungeometer. Somehow I don't think that's what they meant.)
You do realize you're defining the needs of the 1 by how 99 other people (people they don't know and will likely never meet) are choosing to satisfy different needs until different circumstances?
"The" market isn't just how 99 people satisfy their needs, it's how all 100 people satisfy their needs. In a good market, all 100 people achieve satisfaction.
"The" market as viewed through the corporate lens of WhatsApp is a different thing, of course.
In some aspects of my life, I'm part of the 99, in other aspects (because of a long standing sleep disorder), I'm definitely part of the 1 (and sometimes part of the 0.01).
Probably thirty percent of the 99-hugger sheep find themselves becoming the 1 some of the time. If they're not very smart, the presume that all the unmitigated extra difficulties caused by 99-hugging is the machinations of a perverse universe; if they're more insightful, they realize that they're own 99-hugging has an ugly cadmium lining.
They might even go so far as I did, and push the entire lot of 99-huggers over a cliff, so far as my voluntary personal associations are concerned.
Be conservative in what you send, generous in what you receive, and—ideally—exclude no one. This can almost always be achieved with less feature bling (which for me is a usually a good thing anyway, because I only end up trying to ignore or defeat the new shiny in any case).
WhatsApp just made themselves less relevant to the 1, and all of us who care about the 1, and the moral principles behind this.
Fair enough. It's their dog. But at least we can count the costs against the correct denominator.
I felt there was a lot more of these trollish summary statements a while back. It would be nice to see this gone completely.
Sure, it starts discussion, but it starts a bad discussion and then heroic posts to get the discussion back on track again, but by then half the readers have skimmed, gagged, and moved along leaving behind a trail of short sentences from contributors with the poorest sense of smell.
Having the user compile them is just another means of distributing a binary.
You're the reason the rest of us have to constantly write IANAL as if that's the only thing that makes it permissible to so much as clear your throat, when all that really needs to be clear is that we're capable of distinguishing A from B to any necessary degree.
"Having people cook their own pseudoephedrine is just another means of distributing methamphetamine."
Actually, no. What you actually distribute, and the end result of what people are perhaps likely to do with it are two entirely different things. This is not Hair Splitting 101 with a laser scalpel. This is retiring your flexible plastic picnic knife. There exist, of course, various ways to spin language to link these things together, if that is indeed desired. But then we should be analyzing that extra language, not wishing it into existence by waving our hands and muttering "kids there days".
Digression: Lawyers might make better guesses about the "necessary degree", but in practice lawyers are about as useful as political pundits empanelled on ISIS Today in speculating about the future will of the court. Maybe we should just all write CTLNKS instead (concerning the law, nobody knows shit). The main difference between critical thought at large and your lawyer is mainly that your lawyer can get into heaps of trouble by giving you a failing grade of shit. Pretty much the only thing I really want from intelligent agents of xmas future is to see the profession of law refactored, with all of their muddles and uncertainties hopelessly exposed to eternal ridicule, until we actually find in necessary to draft legislation to a sane standard (including an automated regression test suite, an unintended consequence verification gauntlet, and some Valgrind fuzz testing).
Back to the matter at hand, I completely disagree that this analysis should start with the semantics of static/dynamic linkage.
The real question should be this: if zfs.ko is erased from your system, does what remains function 99.99% the same way, minus only those features that zfs.ko provides?
With static linkage you can't do this, and thus you can't ask this question, either.
The key issue here is separability. What natural line exists between dynamic linkage and a ZeroMQ socket layer? And what about Joyent's "double hull" virtualization where ZFS is native to the underlying OS which provides a Linux API to the client OS? "Linking" is just indirection with more established history. And we all know you can solve every problem in computer science with another layer of indirection, except for too many layers of indirection.
I think my "separability" question above is far more likely to be legally productive, but then IANAL YMMV & CTLNKS.
If I put this story in a bottle (along with enough context to make it meaningful), and put the bottle into a time machine, and set my former self as the recipient, I'd have to dial all the way back to cow-pasture Iowa 80386 (circa 1986) before my former self would do much more than go "oh my god, that's awful, but not actually all that hard to envision—if mass society remains dumber than trees for another three entire decades".
Then my former self would think, "wow, the generation gap is truly smaller than it first appears" and then "shit, I was kind of hoping the enter key would be gone by then" and soon I'd be in my cups and on my way to rent a copy of WarGames so as to even more earnestly root on the WOPR.
Ah, the flaws in GR that we've pretty much always known become incrementally harder to ignore.
I visited Fermilab once, a long time ago. Along with the tunnels, we walked beside the famous atrium cafeteria, with the unlimited napkin supply.
I'm pretty sure that these particular eggheads, when they scribbled a formula on a napkin for the 1000th time, didn't bother to give it the 180-degrees courtesy revolution so that the egghead across the table could read it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah... it hardly changes anything to read the backside of the revolving chalk board (bonus: the whole fragile, physical edifice is abundantly clear).
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, one man's "meh" is another man's glowing Chernobyl.
I jumped ship all the way to PC-BSD. The killer features (e.g. ZFS boot environments) have so far (for me) offset the learning curve and numerous small annoyances. Killer features showing no signs of going away, and the small annoyances have lessened with each new release. Would have been such a great business model for Canonical. Too bad they chose something else.
You don't even have your facts right. Much of the lawsuit concerned negligence on the part of the hotel staff, but that's obviously far too fine of a distinction to penetrate your plate mail.
As it happens, I spent the entire afternoon reading about the collapse of Internet comment sections. Comments of the sort you just made were mentioned. Rather frequently. Would you like to add something derogatory about native people to complete your full house? CBC cited in particular the incivility in any article concerning first nations people. Articles concerning women as victims were no doubt not all that far behind. A few women daring to share their stories online were received the friendly advice to go kill themselves.
Here's a hint. It could have ended a lot worse for this chick. For all anyone knows he actually tried the door handle, before settling for just a blurry keepsake. Even without this consideration, the violation of her physical privacy was already bad enough.
It ought to matter to you whether this this extra support burden is a direct by-product of this user base being more assertive/ambitious/productive on behalf of your corporate overlord.
Yes, you can reasonably ignore flavour of the month arcana, but if drive to be productive => machine preference A => more than normal support load, you really ought to put some thought into whether "machine preference A" is anything other than a way station for the ugly reality of supporting your most productive staff (like no-one has ever seen an enterprise "normalize" the support burden by forcibly imposing a low glass ceiling of mediocrity).
You probably already know this, but your "no panacea" argument strikes a note of tautological strawman (bogus reasoning => strawman: +1 insightful; strawman => anywhere useful: -1 missed boat).
The real economic argument is whether the marginal productivity gain from a technological choice exceeds the marginal support burden (and other TCO ripples). Socially, of course, cost-benefit accounting crosses fiefdom boundaries, and for this reason enterprises manage to screw the pooch on this particular calculation all the time.
Point A from your post: let's not model OS X as having a negligible support burden.
Passed.
Point B from your post: the OS X burden can actually be the fat man on the airplane.
We'll trust you on this observation. For myself, it doesn't surprise me at all.
Point C from your post: it doesn't really matter how the man got fat.
Bzzzzzt.
Try again.
One had better remain "fully" in control at all times, because one slip of the finger is borderline irreversible for a great many people (here "borderline" is defined to mean "would require a substantial wallet flex"). Mounting mountains of psychology research show that humans are only "fully" in control of anything when their declared intention at the convenience of their best cognizance can be locked into place once and for all, until countermanded with equal and opposite intentional force.
Control as per our paleolithic instincts:
[*] don't ever ask me again, if you value your nut sack
What a surprising thing for HID professionals to fail to notice: human to human intentional declarations are expressed in eleven exponential shades of scatological glower.
Move over b2b / b2c, here comes DeepMind with some long-overdue h2c (human to computer) gesture recognition.
TFA:
First of all, that's aspirational (or was) in most of the other articles I found.
Contra TFA: NIST Launches NIST-F2
Unfortunately, even contra TFA is weak geek tea:
I guess there's a reason why people with tiny UIDs memorize pi to a silly number of places: it helps you not leave off the other five or six significant digits in the rare case where it actually matters. The real frequency standard is only, like, approximately a million times better than that long-assed, dock-tailed string of digits visually implies.
Truly inconceivable—almost—and yet barely able to time slice the total perspective vortex.
Finally, some obligatory geek porn: Atomic fountain
Does anyone actually want Unicode, or just a small subset of features missing from whatever encoding they now use, in the dominant encoding of the era? We've lived with parsimony for a long time now, just scrub everything in Unicode that isn't obviously a feature with a minimal down-side.
Here's a sane approach. Go to the New York Times or The Atlantic or the WSJ or The Economist, download the top 1000 articles from the last 100 days and include every character you consistently find there (plus obvious gap fillers). That's all I ever wanted. Few or none of these characters will facilitate injection attacks. Then people can suggest other parts of Unicode on a case by case basis.
Good grief, why would anyone adopt the whole seething enchilada all at once?
WhatsApp is hardly my definition of a "pittance". 140 million concurrent connections on 800 servers, mostly dual-socket Ivy Bridge (40 threads each). That's 1600 CPUs and definitely more than twice a pittance. Contents of all that traffic is another story, a few precious needles embedded in even more of a pittance plague than our Slashdot exchange here.
For the quasi mathematicians among us, the size of the Go search space is completely irrelevant, as chess already exceeds direct search by repeatedly told (but generally uncomprehended) orders of magnitude. What makes chess different that Go is that a pruning gradient was far easier to construct, with material advantage acting as a New York phone book booster seat (they still had those then).
The search gradient in Go is far more subtle, but whatever it might be it didn't escape the neural networks for very long once they became any good. A really good article on this is The Believers by Paul Voosen, but it's moved behind a subscriber paywall since I last accessed it.
Here's a snippet for flavour:
You missed the absolutely critical corollary that restores balance to the force: after Bob succeeds, he's already halfway to his next success where after Alice succeeds, she needs to snooze for one toss before she's back in the game, where apparently the game involves some gender-swap role play.
It's so totally male to cease thinking the problem through after attaining the initial success condition.
I think I could teach a very interesting grade XI math class.
Corollary: I would end up behind bars.
FTFY.
Where they really move the industry needle is shaking off yesterday's abrasive crusties. I give them full marks for death of the floppy.
It ought to be made illegal to refer to accepting a fundamentally new TOS as an "upgrade".
Alternatively, it ought to be possible to click "I do not accept" on the new TOS and thus having made this tick mark never to see another "upgrade" suggestion that doesn't offer you a TOS you might actually accept.
Monte Carlo bidding algorithms in Bridge were showing surprising strength back in the mid nineties. In addition to modelling uncertainty from the other participants at the table, it protects the analysis from becoming overly fixated on sharp features.
I wouldn't say that Monte Carlo works so much as I'd say it's a surprisingly effective remedy for a mode of dysfunction that ought to be regarded as blatantly obvious, but for some strange reason many people choose not to see it that way.
Perhaps Monte Carlo might also help humans take a broader perspective on engineering problems. No wait, there's an entire book about how easy it is to teach feeble humans about how better to assess complex uncertainties: Tetlock recent book on Superforecasting.
Hint: If the problem is set up so that the behaviour of Israel can be depicted as black or white (name your poison), some large subgroup of otherwise strong forecasters are incapable of constructing themselves a Israel judgement-free alternative view.
My lord, humans are stupid as bricks about some things.
1/sqrt(3*4) = 28.9% which puts 29% a titch closer to 1/3 by the harmonic mean.
Measure twice. Cut once.
Au contraire, you mean "masturbatory astroturfing".
Performance is far from the primary concern in the builder space.
Case in point: A modified F16 without all the hardpoints for weapons systems and external fuel tanks would win more 1-on-1 dogfight engagements than the F16 as build (supposing it had something left to shoot with at all).
John Boyd, bless his hyper-competitive heart, was bitterly disappointed that they watered down his flight model on the version delivered, he whose cranial thought-system spent a lot of time telling people that flexibility in war-fighting systems is not a priori a bad thing. Boyd actually lived that split existence. The rest of us make this mistake out of pure envy.
Message to the new overlords: we could do with a less of the Top Gun-style stick wagging.
I think I need to hack the Drumphinator to also replace all instances of the word "could" in headline font with "kud", as in "I kud you not".
Wrong. A COW mirror with automatic snapshots protects against many other scenarios, and most (but not all) hardware failures. A COW mirror with frequent scheduled incremental snapshot replication to a remote location protects against just about everything, with no USB drives involved.
Unfortunately, COW mirrors won't win any write performance benchmarks against XFS, as the internal write path tends to be far more complex. But seriously, use the Volvo for 90% of daily errands, and haul out the turbo eggshell only for special occasions.
Insurance tests show cars have become far more fragile — 2007
In my books, UFS is the 1981 Ford Escort, ZFS is the mythical Volvo, and Btrfs is the Tesla Model S—totally awesome, but I wouldn't touch it myself.
Tesla Report: Two-Thirds of all Tesla Model S Drivetrains Replaced by 60K Miles
(BTW, I fixed the -10 percent stock "plunge". Happiness is a left-leaning plungeometer. Somehow I don't think that's what they meant.)
Fuck! I got a "their" wrong. Someone kill me now, please.
You do realize you're defining the needs of the 1 by how 99 other people (people they don't know and will likely never meet) are choosing to satisfy different needs until different circumstances?
"The" market isn't just how 99 people satisfy their needs, it's how all 100 people satisfy their needs. In a good market, all 100 people achieve satisfaction.
"The" market as viewed through the corporate lens of WhatsApp is a different thing, of course.
In some aspects of my life, I'm part of the 99, in other aspects (because of a long standing sleep disorder), I'm definitely part of the 1 (and sometimes part of the 0.01).
Probably thirty percent of the 99-hugger sheep find themselves becoming the 1 some of the time. If they're not very smart, the presume that all the unmitigated extra difficulties caused by 99-hugging is the machinations of a perverse universe; if they're more insightful, they realize that they're own 99-hugging has an ugly cadmium lining.
They might even go so far as I did, and push the entire lot of 99-huggers over a cliff, so far as my voluntary personal associations are concerned.
Be conservative in what you send, generous in what you receive, and—ideally—exclude no one. This can almost always be achieved with less feature bling (which for me is a usually a good thing anyway, because I only end up trying to ignore or defeat the new shiny in any case).
WhatsApp just made themselves less relevant to the 1, and all of us who care about the 1, and the moral principles behind this.
Fair enough. It's their dog. But at least we can count the costs against the correct denominator.
I felt there was a lot more of these trollish summary statements a while back. It would be nice to see this gone completely.
Sure, it starts discussion, but it starts a bad discussion and then heroic posts to get the discussion back on track again, but by then half the readers have skimmed, gagged, and moved along leaving behind a trail of short sentences from contributors with the poorest sense of smell.
That expression is like mating a $50 straight man to a $5 funny man—Bud Abbott teamed with Rosie O'Donell, as scripted by Vince McMahon?
Who needs scare quotes when you've got "proclivities" near to hand?
Totally by chance, I'm watching an old Cantrill presentation (2011) and he'd got a slide at 24m28 which reads:
Fork Yeah! The Rise and Development of illumos
He calls CDDL "file-based copyleft" and says it was explicitly designed to allow combined works with proprietary elements.
You're the reason the rest of us have to constantly write IANAL as if that's the only thing that makes it permissible to so much as clear your throat, when all that really needs to be clear is that we're capable of distinguishing A from B to any necessary degree.
"Having people cook their own pseudoephedrine is just another means of distributing methamphetamine."
Actually, no. What you actually distribute, and the end result of what people are perhaps likely to do with it are two entirely different things. This is not Hair Splitting 101 with a laser scalpel. This is retiring your flexible plastic picnic knife. There exist, of course, various ways to spin language to link these things together, if that is indeed desired. But then we should be analyzing that extra language, not wishing it into existence by waving our hands and muttering "kids there days".
Digression: Lawyers might make better guesses about the "necessary degree", but in practice lawyers are about as useful as political pundits empanelled on ISIS Today in speculating about the future will of the court. Maybe we should just all write CTLNKS instead (concerning the law, nobody knows shit). The main difference between critical thought at large and your lawyer is mainly that your lawyer can get into heaps of trouble by giving you a failing grade of shit. Pretty much the only thing I really want from intelligent agents of xmas future is to see the profession of law refactored, with all of their muddles and uncertainties hopelessly exposed to eternal ridicule, until we actually find in necessary to draft legislation to a sane standard (including an automated regression test suite, an unintended consequence verification gauntlet, and some Valgrind fuzz testing).
Back to the matter at hand, I completely disagree that this analysis should start with the semantics of static/dynamic linkage.
The real question should be this: if zfs.ko is erased from your system, does what remains function 99.99% the same way, minus only those features that zfs.ko provides?
With static linkage you can't do this, and thus you can't ask this question, either.
The key issue here is separability. What natural line exists between dynamic linkage and a ZeroMQ socket layer? And what about Joyent's "double hull" virtualization where ZFS is native to the underlying OS which provides a Linux API to the client OS? "Linking" is just indirection with more established history. And we all know you can solve every problem in computer science with another layer of indirection, except for too many layers of indirection.
I think my "separability" question above is far more likely to be legally productive, but then IANAL YMMV & CTLNKS.
Parity error in that first sentence went undetected. Probably should have installed that ninth RAM chip.
If I put this story in a bottle (along with enough context to make it meaningful), and put the bottle into a time machine, and set my former self as the recipient, I'd have to dial all the way back to cow-pasture Iowa 80386 (circa 1986) before my former self would do much more than go "oh my god, that's awful, but not actually all that hard to envision—if mass society remains dumber than trees for another three entire decades".
Then my former self would think, "wow, the generation gap is truly smaller than it first appears" and then "shit, I was kind of hoping the enter key would be gone by then" and soon I'd be in my cups and on my way to rent a copy of WarGames so as to even more earnestly root on the WOPR.
What's the matter? Can't even work yourself up to rathering, much less something usefully concrete?
Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Slownewsday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday.
Ah, the flaws in GR that we've pretty much always known become incrementally harder to ignore.
I visited Fermilab once, a long time ago. Along with the tunnels, we walked beside the famous atrium cafeteria, with the unlimited napkin supply.
I'm pretty sure that these particular eggheads, when they scribbled a formula on a napkin for the 1000th time, didn't bother to give it the 180-degrees courtesy revolution so that the egghead across the table could read it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah ... it hardly changes anything to read the backside of the revolving chalk board (bonus: the whole fragile, physical edifice is abundantly clear).