There may be legal limits on 3(b).. it does seem unreasonable at that extreme.

In reality, though, the simple answer is use 3(a) - give them the source right away and end your obligation immediatley.

The GPL isn't about compensating people for group projects....

If you don't have the source, or a binary, then you have no work to which the GPL can apply in the first place.

To be really really obtuse - only the rightsholders who's work he based his own on (DOSBox) are in a position to say if he is violating their licenses or not - the authors could have collectively licensed the sotware to him and not spoken publicly about it.

I realize that didn't happen.... but for the sake of argument.

This all depends on how you define egg. Is it the egg that the first "chicken" came out of, or the first egg a "chicken" laid?

I would argue that the egg came first, because at some point, a creature that was genetically different enough to not be considered a chicken laid an egg, and out of that egg came something that we consider a chicken. Therefore, the egg came first - the first egg that a chicken came out of - the first chicken-egg.

TRIM isn't about blocksize - it's about letting the drive know that a block can be freed up and reset to a fast-writeable state - only the filesystem driver can do that in a meaningful way - the drive can't automatically know on it's own.

You an cleverly hack around with GC and spare blocks and whatnot to keep SOME blocks free and available all the time, but they won't necessarily represent what the filesystem thinks are free - so it's sub-optimal. TRIm isn't an abstraction layer - it's a simple command to effect a simple action that wasn't previously necessary because this limitation simply does not exist on magnetic media - we don't have to erase it before writing to it again.

"Any controller will detect a block of zero's as being unused data and just mark the block as such." - can you cite a source for that? It makes sense, as long as we're talking about full, raw blocks full of zeroes.

And it's still a hack, compared to a simple command like TRIM which simply says "No longer in use - zap away" - it's just something we never had to worry about before, and now we do - there are lots of other clever hacks - but it's still necessary.

That.... makes sense.... I think you just made something click for me.
Thanks.

Care to post your xbench results?

The write performance can and should drop significnatly as soon as you've burned through all the unused blocks - so unless you are really sparse on the disk writes over the last year and haven't hit that point, or the drive was already degraded when you got it (which is still good and damn fast compared to the non-SSD drives) - this sounds suspicious.

It's "just" from people who don't actually get what theories and models are actually all about.... people who think there is some absolute truth out there to be discovered.

"We just want to know how the universe behaves; we don't need to calculate anything fancier."

If we had a set of laws that predicted everything we could observe in the universe precisely,then not only would we not need to calculate anyhting fancier, the entire concept of calculating anything fancier would have no meaning, as we would already have the theory of *Everything*

Right - but the mental model you work with to figure out how much counterbalance and weight you need on a construction crane, or ballistics for firing large rounds from a warship doesn't need to include relativistic effects. You don't need to consider spacetime or einstein when doing these things... newton's model is just fine.

And let's be clear - both are just models. Relativity goes further to model more about cosmology and goes off on a bigger, deeper scale - but it's not the theory of everything, and we know that. It's still just a model.

So fundamentally - you apply the correct model to the correct situation. Neither newton nor einstein have the whole picture, nor could they, nor shoudl they - they just worked with the evidence and observations they were capable of making, and came up with models.

40 years? Check your history a bit.....

Also, how would that system work, exactly? 1 million infected machines from all over the world, from hundreds, if not thousands, of networks, suddenly opening a few connections a minute and sending a relatively small amount of traffic at a target host looks just like normal traffic, unless you are on the receiving end and run out of bandwidth HARD.

(but yeah, in the end, some kind of automated alert system and cooperation between ISPs will probably be needed to combat this type of thing if nothing else changes... if only to cut down on the manpower needed right now to track it down. eg: let someone punch in an attack signature and find all requesting hosts globally, then request that they be blocked at their component ISPs, subject to the approval of those ISps, etc.... something like that.

Having been on the receiving end of huge, huge attacks - I can say with certainty that, push come to shove, in the end it's about bandwidth.

They'll try resource attacks first - to see if they can take your app down (syn flood, perhaps HTTP app-level attacks....) - but in the end, they just *hammer* you with hundreds of thousands of hosts with useless traffic - like UDP floods (which won't hit any application at all) and syn floods that are dead easy to filter out. It's quite rare to see a well-thought out application level attack these days - though it still happens.

Larger botnets can generate tens of gigabits of traffic.... even highly profitable business can't keep enough bandwidth around to deal with that - which is why you end up with dedicated solutions that work close to the core (eg: Prolexic.com). You get attacked, you re-route your traffic through them, they sanitize it, and send you back the clean stuff.

Sure about that? They were 12 years ago - where on machine could syn-flood a huge machine - but nowadays it's actually really tends or hundreds of thousands of zombied machnes all sending a few requests. Botnets are all the rage, and have been for ages.
Networks these days have proper egress filtering (as well as other filtering - like your cable modem or whatever) and plain old spoofing is harder than it used to be.