I saw some fascinating coverage [...] suggesting that places such as New York and San Francisco in fact can offer higher real wages for high-income people
Perhaps in some cases. But some costs make this comparison difficult. For example, in a smaller city around a university in a different part of the U.S. (i.e., a place with an available talent pool), you are very likely to pay 1/10th of the cost to buy an equivalent apartment or house in the central hub of the small city, compared to the middle of Manhattan. When your housing price is $2 million instead of $200,000, it can take a long time to make up that difference, even if you're earning double the salary.
Most people just live with the fact that you don't get a lot of living space if you want to be a big city. For others, they may have different priorities.
If you happen to be one of the few lucky people who work their way up the ladder in jobs to get some managerial position that just doesn't tend to happen in a smaller city, you might earn enough money to justify the property expense. But that's not most people -- or even most tech workers.
But beyond just being paid well, such people also like to have enjoyable life experiences.
For young people just out of college, I completely agree. I've lived in everything from a small town to a mid-size city to a large city, and I definitely agree about the opportunities for entertainment, culture, etc. in large cities.
But some people also like to have other "enjoyable life experiences," perhaps the most important of which is called "having a family." Obviously lots of people raise kids in the middle of NYC and do great. But all of your costs for doing so are magnified greatly -- child care is expensive (which is huge if you actually want time to take advantage of all of those mostly adult-centered culture and entertainment activities that you're living in a city for), and unless you're living in the right place, you're looking at huge expenses for private schools, in addition to the housing costs I already mentioned.
Meanwhile, move to a small but respectable city like I mentioned above and you cut all of these costs by a huge factor, plus you can even afford a large house in the middle of town with only a 5-minute commute, along with a big yard for your kid to play in, and decent public schools (or even affordable private ones).
For people who are more than a few years out of school and actually have (or want to have) a family -- and yes, this does happen even for a lot of tech people -- there are significant advantages to get out of big cities, which is why you always hear about people with kids moving to the suburbs or whatever.
Except in a small city, you don't even need to move to the suburbs -- you could get all of that in town with a 5-10 minute commute, rather than taking an hour (or even two) each way to get out of NYC (and still often pay high prices).
And as for culture and entertainment opportunities, your appreciation changes with kids (unless you let someone else raise them, but that somewhat defeats the purpose of a "having a family"). Anyhow, you get some of these things in a small city (particularly a university town). And if you want something more, many of these cities are easily within an hour drive or a little more of a major city with all of those things... which you can take advantage of when you decide to take a night out with your spouse or a weekend with the family, all the while paying your child care provider a fraction of what you would elsewhere.
in summary... because that's where the cool kids want to hang out. and you want to hire the cool kids.
Exactly. Once you're no longer a "cool kid" and have your own kid, your perspective may change. "Cool adults" may have different priorities.
(Again, I'm not saying it's impossible or difficult to have a family in the city -- but I think it can potentially negate a lot of these positives in many cases.)
Just to be a bit silly: Actually, you'd still be a contributing factor to the rear-ender. If you are close enough that a low speed collision pushed you ahead into the car ahead of you, you are too close.
This isn't "silly" at all. Many official state drivers manuals and driver training programs advise you to leave a gap of a few feet or maybe half a car length in front of you when stopping. It not only prevents "chain reaction" collisions, but also provides maneuvering space if some other situation occurs (car in front stalls or is disabled, emergency vehicle needs to get through, etc.).
Despite how common this practice is, stopping only a few inches behind the guy in front is an unsafe driving practice, and if it causes you to collide with that car, you are at fault.
But religious people can do monstrous things while still being normal people.
I'm not AT ALL defending the bad acts done in the name of religion, but your statement is not unique to religion. You even seem to acknowledge this by adding "nationalism" later in your post... which is obviously huge (e.g., WWII).
But besides religion and nationalism you could include racism and various other forms of bigotry, various cult-like ideological movements that are neither religious nor nationalist, etc.
The key feature has nothing to do with religion per se. What allows "normal people" to do monstrous things is groupthink. If you belong to a group that says it's okay to torture or kill or enslave people, you're more likely to think it's okay. It's as simple as that. Whether the group is religious is beside the point -- you just have to have a strong association with the group and think it's in the right.
So, no, this isn't some revolutionary new discovery. Those claiming so are either ignorant of previous art - and that's *recent* previous art - or are deliberately trying to build up their own claims.
Or, maybe, just maybe, the Slashdot summary is merely quoting the first part of the press release that explains previously known information, but the Slashdot summary doesn't contain the actual details of the new findings, which describe some previously unknown aspects of the chemistry involved... some of which appear to be essential to the structural properties observed.
I find it odd that there are claims this is new information. Didn't Vitruvius describe it in his De Architectura, written about 15 BC?
Umm, care to RTFA? From the press release:
Descriptions of volcanic ash have survived from ancient times. First Vitruvius, an engineer for the Emperor Augustus, and later Pliny the Elder recorded that the best maritime concrete was made with ash from volcanic regions of the Gulf of Naples... especially from sites near todayâ(TM)s seaside town of Pozzuoli.
I'm not sure exactly all that is new here, but in the press release you can read about the role of aluminum, the effect of lower temperatures in the manufacturing process, the production of certain end products in curing that are not found in modern concrete (due to the things already mentioned), etc.
Perhaps the story is confusing the known composition with some mechanism that the new study discovered.
Or perhaps you just didn't read the link to find out that's exactly what the press release is about.
Roman concrete produces a significantly different compound [from modern concrete], with added aluminum and less silicon. The resulting calcium-aluminum-silicate-hydrate (C-A-S-H) is an exceptionally stable binder.... Another striking contribution of the Monteiro team concerns the hydration products in concrete. In theory, C-S-H in concrete made with Portland cement resembles a combination of naturally occurring layered minerals, called tobermorite and jennite. Unfortunately these ideal crystalline structures are nowhere to be found in conventional modern concrete. Tobermorite does occur in the mortar of ancient seawater concrete, however.
Etc.
(The article also, by the way, seems to be about streamlining manufacturing to produce a better product with less energy and heat, thereby reducing carbon emissions, etc.)
What are you talking about? There are 12 (not 13) semitones in a standard octave tuned to Western tuning, though I see the 13 if you count both endpoints.
Nevertheless, you couldn't fit C, C#, and D within 1/8 of an octave, since the last time I checked 2 * 1/12 = 1/6. The distance from C to D (a whole tone) is 1/6 of an octave, and I'm pretty sure 1/6 > 1/8.
And, why should I buy the album now when I'd be able to wait 5 years and download it in full quality for free?
Are you serious? By that logic, no one ever goes to a first-run movie theatre; they can just wait and sit at home and watch it when it comes out on streaming or DVD a few months later. By that logic, no one ever pays the premium price to get a "new release" from Amazon instant-watch (or Blockbuster or whatever back in the day).
The purpose of copyright is to promote "progress" in the arts, which implicitly means you're engaging with culture enough that someone might buy your stuff. It's not supposed to be a "make a whole lot of crap and sit on it for decades to see whether something might become popular" scheme.
25 years at least ensures that anybody that really wanted it has probably already bought a copy.
The goal of copyright is not to ensure that a creator makes MAXIMUM profit. The goal of copyright is to allow sufficient time for a creator or distributor to recoup losses for an initial investment. I agree with the GP that 5 years is probably enough in the modern era of fast-changing pop culture. But I think the original 14 years (possibly with a renewal opportunity) specified in the original copyright terms of the 1790s would be more than generous.
Your arguments are a great reason for a set period of time for copyright, regardless of death, transfer of rights, corporate ownership, whatever -- just set the number of years and be done with it. Personally, I believe in no circumstances should that term be longer than the original copyright terms set after the Constitution called for them in the 1790s, namely 14 years plus a 14-year renewal. I don't know if the "renewal" thing is necessary -- but 28 years is more than enough to recoup losses for investing some time in generating one thing. (14 years is probably plenty too, but I think 28 should be an absolute maximum.)
If the creator dies within that 14-year or 28-year or whatever period, the rights go to the estate. If a corporation claims copyright over something they produced, it's the same term.
Here's one analogy I like to think of. Imagine that a state is accepting bids from construction firms to build a bridge. Rather than paying them up-front, the state project managers say: "We'll allow you to erect a toll booth for 14 years, and you get all the money from that toll booth. After 14 years, the bridge enters the 'public domain' and nobody can charge tolls."
If you signed a contract as a builder like that, you get the 14 years of tolls as your compensation. If you die, that compensation can be collected by your estate, family, corporation you will it to, whatever.
Obviously this hypothetical situation wouldn't happen in real life, because construction doesn't work along this sort of contract model. But a lot of investors put capital into initial research or start-ups while being promised a share of profits in a similar way. They make no money up-front, but if it becomes successful, they can collect later.
The only difference is that copyright terms should have defined limits, and a set number of years makes a lot more sense instead of some random set of time correlating to the author's lifespan. If we view copyright as a sort of temporary "lease" from the public domain, like my toll-booth on public bridge metaphor above, compensation should have a set amount or duration, not something tailored to how long someone lives.
Every time this suggestion comes up, I repeat that I don't want the law to create more incentives for homicide.
Easily solved. If the individual dies of anything other than natural causes the work immediately become public domain at the time of their death.
Please, please -- can we just get the author's lifespan out of the equation? The idea of copyright is to provide an incentive for an author to create a work in the first place (invest initial time and effort with ability to recoup investment later) as well as to foster further creative works after the first one. In the words of the original Constitutional stipulation, we're trying to encourage "progress" in the arts, not a reward system.
There's no reason for copyright to be longer than the initial specification in the original copyright act from the 1790s: 14 years, with a 14 year extension. I'd even argue for 14 years total these days, but 28 years would be significantly better than what we have.
But the author's lifespan shouldn't come into it. If the author dies, the rights should go to his/her estate for the 14 years or 28 years or whatever. This is still the rightful income of the author.
Suppose you were offered a job as a carpenter in constructing a building. But the prospective owner said, "I won't give you any money up-front, but you'll be allowed a percent of my rental income from the building for the next 14 years."
That's your compensation. That contract should not be voided just because you happen to die after completing the project (but before the 14 years is up) -- if your family was depending on that future income, they should still get it.
It's as if you had a job that, instead of a salary, you worked for years for NOTHING and were only guaranteed a share of company profits for X years in the future once your job was complete. You did your work expecting that income, and your family depends on it.
But why should a work published earlier in an author's lifetime have a longer period to earn royalties than a work published later? My reply to Impy applies equally well to your comment.
What the heck are you talking about?? You were replying to someone who was arguing for authors lifespan + N, i.e., the current broken STUPID system.
My comment specifically says X years, not author's lifespan + N. I'm talking about a straight standard length of time -- author's lifespan has nothing to do with it. For example, the original 14-year term specified in the original copyright act. If author dies, rights can get passed to estate. The number X from publication does not change in any situation.
I don't understand what your comment has to do with the ability to pass on your rights to widow, children, etc., as long as they are within term X. All copyright term lengths should be the same.
the song is over a hundred fucking years old. its practically an american standard and so ubiquitously used as to be unenforceable.
Really? Umm, you ever go to a chain restaurant and hear the staff come out singing some stupid "Birthday, birthday, birthday -- it's your happy birthday" chant or some such nonsense?
Why do they do that? Because they know they'll be sued or asked to pay royalties otherwise for public performance.
You'll also see that it is rarely sung on-screen in a movie or tv show or something for the same reason.
banthebirthdaysong.com or nomorebirthdaysong.org should point to a creative-commons or public-domain version of a song that anything from a synthesizer to a ten year old can sing without having to hire johnny cochran.
You figured it out. Yep -- that's what most businesses do when they have to celebrate a birthday and don't want to get sued.
(By the way, I agree that this copyright term is absolutely ridiculous and the song should have been in the public domain for many decades already....)
Post-mortem copyrights are supposed to encourage the author's estate to complete the author's unfinished works rather than shredding them.
That's not why they came into existence, and it would only really apply in cases of reasonably famous authors where there would actually be a significant market for posthumous works -- for most creators, no one would care.
Anyhow, if you read about the history of copyright in the 1800s, you'll see stories about widows and starving families who wanted the money due to them from copyright for their husbands'/fathers' work.
(And before I get a lot of responses about how the kids shouldn't get to live off their dad's work, keep in mind that an independent author received NO money up-front for his work. It's as if you had a job that, instead of a salary, you worked for years for NOTHING and were only guaranteed a share of company profits for X years in the future once your job was complete. You did your work expecting that income, and your family depends on it. That income source should not immediately disappear and the work contract voided just because you happen to die in an accident or something.)
We don't require construction workers to tear down their house every 5 years if they built it themselves, or for landlords to do the same, just because they're "coasting" on something that they did once.
This actually highlights the difference between copyrighted works and physical goods. Construction workers don't get a royalty check every time a house they helped build gets sold. Landlords get paid regularly because they own the physical good and are renting it to you on an ongoing basis.
Your analogies are flawed.
Imagine if you were a contractor bidding on a job. However, the prospective owner said: "I'm will pay you nothing up-front. You will build my building for free. But, for your work, you will get a share in the rents for the next X years."
Now, imagine that for some reason we lived in a society where all construction projects were funded like that. Contractors would operate differently, producing various sorts of work on various buildings to try and build up a portfolio that would get them income in future years, since they get nothing up-front for their work.
We could have a patronage system where only rich people pay to produce art, or where only independently wealthy people get to decide what art they want to make. Creators would just be employees. That's how it worked for hundreds of years.
Copyright allows a creator to be an "independent contractor" and choose where to invest his/her time, in hopes in choosing the right project that will generate income and allow them to continue making money while still working.
Creators depend on the promise of future compensation for their effort in the same way that building contractors would in my hypothetical example. Without that promise, they'd have no reason to invest significant time or effort or do a quality job.
The problem with the current system is that the terms have gotten out of control. In 1790 it was 14 years, with a 14-year renewal possible. I cannot see any reason why it should have ever been extended beyond that.
Look, you're making this too complicated by tying it to the life of a "person," and then worrying about how to deal with corporations.
There's a simple answer -- go back to something like the original system as put in place when the Constitution was ratified. At that time, it was 14 years. If the author applied for renewal, it could be another 14 years. Personally, I still think 28 years is a little long, but the point is that it's a limited duration. You could go back to the original Statue of Anne length and make it 7, maybe with a 7-year renewal. Originally, it was a reasonable amount of time for a publisher to sell the first print-run and thereby recoup an investment in materials. These days, a short term is even more justified, since the investment in materials is smaller for publishers.
The idea that it should last for a creator's lifetime is ridiculous. The point is not that a creator should get to live out his/her days making money off of one creation.
1) Copyrights are supposed to encourage the creator to create more work. As soon as the creator is dead, the chances of her/him creating more work are somewhat diminished. At most a copyright period should be for N years or natural death of the creator, whichever comes first.
Well, that's partly right. Copyrights are supposed to encourage the creation of work, period -- not necessarily MORE work. The original statement from the Constitution:
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
So, we want to encourage "progress," which means we want quality works in the first place. Creators need a way to get compensation for their initial investment of time and effort; otherwise, only rich people or people with rich patrons will put in the time and effort to make something great.
Here's a simple analogy for you:
Suppose you're a carpenter or contractor or whatever. Instead of getting paid X dollars at the end of completing a job at a building site, the owner says to you: "Rather than giving you a one-time payment, I'll give you Y percent of the rent on this property for the first Z years."
Most building contracts don't work like that, but that's essentially the way copyright works. In 1790, as I pointed out, it was for 14 years.
Now, if this were the standard way of doing building contracts, the way carpenters do business would be different. They might try a bunch of different things, working on different sorts of buildings, hoping to be involved in enough good projects to generate a good amount of income in the future.
But to the question at hand -- this money paid shouldn't just disappear if the carpenter happens to die early. He might have a family to support, and that family, unlike in other situations, didn't get the salary up-front. They expected to depend on his "salary," which just happened to be coming in spread out over Z years, rather than all at once up-front. He was guaranteed the rent for Z years according to the contract, so if he dies, his estate should still be able to claim it.
2) Corporations should be allowed to have some sort of copyright, after all, their payments to creators enables the creators' work.
Corporations should only get copyright automatically over things they actually create as a corporation. Creators should be able to pass their income over to a corporation, just as they could with the income from other contracts.
The duration should be no different. It shouldn't be longer than the original 1790 terms.
Is anything actually achieved by oral arguments? It seems mainly an opportunity for lawyers to get flustered, choose the wrong tack while thinking on their feet, be manipulated by the justices, and oversimplify.
These days, oral arguments tend to be a place for the justices to prod attorneys with particular questions. Often, it seems they do this with the intention of bringing up a point that might influence or accentuate an idea that could sway one of the other justices, rather than necessarily to clarify a question for themselves -- though, if they are really curious about a particular issue themselves, you can tell. They will keep cutting through the BS spouted by the attorney and hammer the same question until they get an answer. Maybe this is to prove a point to the other justices, but it can also be to assure themselves that they've gotten all possible perspectives on the question. Another common tactic in oral arguments is for the justices to pose interesting hypotheticals that they think may clarify the case, but which may not have been adequately addressed in briefs.
Is Thomas' silence really a comment on the fact that this is a waste of his, and everybody else's, time?
Actually, he's explicitly said why he doesn't talk. Oral arguments tend to be a lot of banter among the justices these days, but they used to let lawyers at least speak a little more. Thomas has said that he thinks his colleagues should give a little more room for attorneys to try to make points and bring up what they think is important.
I think he'd like to hear a little more and perhaps then ask questions relevant to the lawyers' points. But in the current court, we rarely ever get to hear a lawyer talk for more than 30 seconds on his/her own material before being interrupted. Thomas thinks this makes oral arguments more about the justices' preoccupations rather than what the lawyers think is important.
I can see his point. The justices get to debate each other and their clerks for hours on end about their preoccupations. Oral argument could be a place to get a few insights into the major concerns of the litigants, if we could ever hear them talk.
On the other hand, the justices will be the ones who ultimately decide things, so maybe it's best if they stick to the stuff that actually concerns them. It's just unfortunate when they start using lawyers as legal "punching bags," clearly only to drive home a point to one of the other justices.
The unanimous part was the weird bit for me. Partly because they all agreed, and partly because I thought the kind of cases that would have unanimous decisions usually didn't make it to the SCOTUS.
With the Roberts Court, roughly 40% of all decisions have tended to be unanimous. Another 10% or so tend to be 8-1, so roughly half of the decisions can't even have the possibility of showing an "ideological" division along the 5/4 supposed conservative/liberal divide.
Even among the 5-4 decisions, about 1/4 to 1/3 of the time, the division isn't along the supposed "factional" division the media always reports on. Those closely divided politicized opinions don't tend to occur more than 20% of the time.
The court is not "fairly divided". Something like 80% of their decisions are unanimous. You only hear press about the 5-4 decisions which are an extremely small proportion (about 10%).
No, something like 40% of their decisions are unanimous in the Roberts Court (a little higher than normal, but not shockingly so). Another 10% of so tend to be 8-1. So, in roughly half of cases, there is not even the possibility of an ideological division. That's still significantly higher than most people think, but it's not 80%.
Among the 5-4 decisions, roughly 1/3 of them aren't along the supposed ideological lines... the "partisan" 5-4 decisions still happen something like 20% of the time, though.
It never really was, at least not the majority of "the public." The goal of educational reform beginning a century ago was to emphasize conformity and get young people with dangerous ideas off the streets and into institutions that could teach them the bare minimum to be a good citizen and a good worker.
You'd think having a more dynamic, informed, educated, productive economy would more than outweigh having a complacent, idiotic populace, but it turns out the latter is a lot easier to do than the former, and politics is nothing if not pragmatic.
Yeah, if you actually read the words of those behind the educational reforms of the mid-late 1800s and early 1900s, you can clearly see the goals. It wasn't so much to have a "complacent, idiotic populace" as a set of obedient workers who could listen to authority, be "good citizens," move around from task to task when a bell rings, and have enough basic training in things like reading and writing to do simple tasks in factories and blue-collar jobs. Much of this could have been accomplished (and used to be) in primary school before 1930 or so, but then the realization that most dangerous radicals tended to get teenagers to follow them led to the high school movement.
The problem happened when educators forgot this history. Then in the 1950s and early 1960s when the GI bill came into place and there was concern about the Space Race, we were suddenly trying to teach middle-class and lower-class students "higher education" within a system designed to keep them as blue-collar workers.
With the huge influx of college students beginning in the late 1960s, the "radicals" emerged again -- rather than teenagers, they were now college kids and college dropouts with time on their hands.
Luckily for the government, this one solved itself. The arguments against authority in the late 1960s and early 1970s classrooms led to reforms in the upper tiers of higher ed that dumbed everything down significantly... to do otherwise was to be "authoritarian" within the liberal campus environment.
In the 1950s and 1960s, the GI Bill had led state colleges to become more like vocational schools than they already were. But with the dissolution of "authoritarian" critical inquiry at top-tier schools (which generally required an actual broad set of knowledge and openness to critical thinking), even traditional liberal arts universities became glorified trade schools. And since they effectively became "certification" programs to grant degrees in certain practical fields of study, rather than to actually educate broadly, it's not surprising that the business model has taken them over to encourage profit over everything else.
So, like the 1920s through 1950s generation that was convinced to send their kids to high school in hope of a "better life," we now have politicians who repeatedly keep talking about trying to allow everyone to go to college... regardless if that makes any sense. What we need are better trade schools and apprenticeship programs for most practical "college majors," rather than wasting four or more years and paying huge sums within an educational paradigm that was never designed to be "practical."
And that's what we have now -- a high-school system that's failing to educate students for higher ed. because it was designed to confine radical teens and teach them to be good obedient workers and citizens, along with a college system that is trying to be a glorified trade school using old educational methods that were designed to introduce abstract reasoning to good students (when done well), not teach practical skills to those of moderate intelligence.
But most people don't realize that our systems are dysfunctional because they were designed to do other things... not to provide education beyond basic skills.
"We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we
Essentially you are arguing we turn universities into trade schools and trade schools into universities.
No.
Trade school? [...] If you aren't gonna use it every day for the rest of your career it wont be in the curriculum.
Precisely. Which is why the vast majority of professions, including many "college majors" these days would be better off going to trade schools. If you want to be a "business major" or an engineer or anything else where you want college to "train" you to do your job, there should be trade schools and apprenticeships for you.
If you're interested in research, generating new ideas, thinking creatively about problems in general (and not just being trained for a job), you should go to a university. By doing so, you should be better equipped to confront problems in a multitude of fields, as was the idea of a "liberal arts education" even a half-century ago or less. Universities aren't very effective at training anyone to do anything specific, except perhaps abstract fields and research.
One of the biggest issues today with colleges is that everyone thinks they should go to college, usually for training, certification (otherwise known as a "degree"), or to increase their salary. These are not the reasons for higher education -- they are the reasons to go to a trade school.
Trade schools don't teach rote anything.
First of all, I don't think trade schools teach a lot of "rote learning," but if "rote learning" is appropriate anywhere, it would be in a trade school environment rather than a university. "Rote learning" is just another term for "memorization through repetition." While trade schools aren't about memorization of facts, they are about learning skills, which are generally acquired through repetition of similar tasks again and again.
Note how your example of its value specifically refers to graduate students. Undergrads just don't interact that much with faculty and learn mostly the same thing you could learn at a hundred different schools.
No, my specific example refers to how a university might want to get undergraduates from different institutions to go to graduate school in one place in order to keep an influx of new ideas. The impetus behind this is that, despite having somewhat standard curricula, the differences between different schools and the way students are taught as undergraduates is significant enough to have a major effect on what a student does and how he/she thinks after undergraduate work.
The same argument would apply for jobs undergraduates take after school rather than going to graduate school. If you only ever hire undergraduates who came from one department at one particular university, you're going to have some limitations on the experience pool among your employees -- they just were all taught in a certain way and only exposed to certain aspects of the field that were emphasized at their university.
As someone who has taught at the university level for a number of years, I can tell you that I still enjoy having curriculum discussions with colleagues at other schools -- and not just "elite" schools, either: standard state universities and small colleges. It's really interesting to discover that some people will explain introductory concepts in completely different ways. This will often create a chain-reaction effect for understanding so that 2-3 years later as more advanced students, their undergraduate understanding of the subject and ability to confront certain problems will be biased by what seems like a relatively minor modification to the introductory curriculum.
Obviously such differences are generally not huge. But for any good teacher who doesn't just read out of a textbook, they will exist. (Unfortunately, a lot of profs aren't good teachers, but that's at least partly due to the system which usually emphasizes publication and research over teaching in order to retain a job and get tenure.)
By the way, for just one example, I have a friend who has created a number of useful pieces of free instructional software in his field. However, he is careful never to put these things up on his university's website, nor does he ever take grants from the university to develop such tools. By doing so, he'd risk the university claiming ownership and saying (1) he can't distribute this stuff for free and can only use it to teach at his university and (2) if he ever leaves, he can't take this stuff with him.
I've heard similar stories from other universities. I know a number of people who have stopped posting course materials on their official university website and instead host their own website to be sure they have control and can post the stuff for free. The professors are often not the "bad guys" here -- they actually want to create interesting stuff, and most of them would be happy if it were used widely.
However, they also want to be able to keep using it themselves even if they need to get a new job, and the whole argument here is about how some universities won't let that happen because the stuff can't be released the way you suggest.
So put the materials under a Creative Commons license. A prof posting above already does.
That's great if you even have that option. Most universities want to claim sole rights over the materials so they can try to license and make money off of them. That's actually what TFA is about in part: arguing that profs need to be able to gain control over how this stuff gets licensed, rather than just by default becoming the property of the university.
Slashdot Mirror
I saw some fascinating coverage [...] suggesting that places such as New York and San Francisco in fact can offer higher real wages for high-income people
Perhaps in some cases. But some costs make this comparison difficult. For example, in a smaller city around a university in a different part of the U.S. (i.e., a place with an available talent pool), you are very likely to pay 1/10th of the cost to buy an equivalent apartment or house in the central hub of the small city, compared to the middle of Manhattan. When your housing price is $2 million instead of $200,000, it can take a long time to make up that difference, even if you're earning double the salary.
Most people just live with the fact that you don't get a lot of living space if you want to be a big city. For others, they may have different priorities.
If you happen to be one of the few lucky people who work their way up the ladder in jobs to get some managerial position that just doesn't tend to happen in a smaller city, you might earn enough money to justify the property expense. But that's not most people -- or even most tech workers.
But beyond just being paid well, such people also like to have enjoyable life experiences.
For young people just out of college, I completely agree. I've lived in everything from a small town to a mid-size city to a large city, and I definitely agree about the opportunities for entertainment, culture, etc. in large cities.
But some people also like to have other "enjoyable life experiences," perhaps the most important of which is called "having a family." Obviously lots of people raise kids in the middle of NYC and do great. But all of your costs for doing so are magnified greatly -- child care is expensive (which is huge if you actually want time to take advantage of all of those mostly adult-centered culture and entertainment activities that you're living in a city for), and unless you're living in the right place, you're looking at huge expenses for private schools, in addition to the housing costs I already mentioned.
Meanwhile, move to a small but respectable city like I mentioned above and you cut all of these costs by a huge factor, plus you can even afford a large house in the middle of town with only a 5-minute commute, along with a big yard for your kid to play in, and decent public schools (or even affordable private ones).
For people who are more than a few years out of school and actually have (or want to have) a family -- and yes, this does happen even for a lot of tech people -- there are significant advantages to get out of big cities, which is why you always hear about people with kids moving to the suburbs or whatever.
Except in a small city, you don't even need to move to the suburbs -- you could get all of that in town with a 5-10 minute commute, rather than taking an hour (or even two) each way to get out of NYC (and still often pay high prices).
And as for culture and entertainment opportunities, your appreciation changes with kids (unless you let someone else raise them, but that somewhat defeats the purpose of a "having a family"). Anyhow, you get some of these things in a small city (particularly a university town). And if you want something more, many of these cities are easily within an hour drive or a little more of a major city with all of those things... which you can take advantage of when you decide to take a night out with your spouse or a weekend with the family, all the while paying your child care provider a fraction of what you would elsewhere.
in summary... because that's where the cool kids want to hang out. and you want to hire the cool kids.
Exactly. Once you're no longer a "cool kid" and have your own kid, your perspective may change. "Cool adults" may have different priorities.
(Again, I'm not saying it's impossible or difficult to have a family in the city -- but I think it can potentially negate a lot of these positives in many cases.)
Just to be a bit silly: Actually, you'd still be a contributing factor to the rear-ender. If you are close enough that a low speed collision pushed you ahead into the car ahead of you, you are too close.
This isn't "silly" at all. Many official state drivers manuals and driver training programs advise you to leave a gap of a few feet or maybe half a car length in front of you when stopping. It not only prevents "chain reaction" collisions, but also provides maneuvering space if some other situation occurs (car in front stalls or is disabled, emergency vehicle needs to get through, etc.).
Despite how common this practice is, stopping only a few inches behind the guy in front is an unsafe driving practice, and if it causes you to collide with that car, you are at fault.
Your're right- non religious people do bad things too. They usually need to be a sociopath to do evil things.
You may want to read up on various psychological experiments that how "normal people" can easily end up doing evil things -- even if they are just put in a situation of authority or simply told that a scientific experiment requires them to torture other people.
But religious people can do monstrous things while still being normal people.
I'm not AT ALL defending the bad acts done in the name of religion, but your statement is not unique to religion. You even seem to acknowledge this by adding "nationalism" later in your post... which is obviously huge (e.g., WWII).
But besides religion and nationalism you could include racism and various other forms of bigotry, various cult-like ideological movements that are neither religious nor nationalist, etc.
The key feature has nothing to do with religion per se. What allows "normal people" to do monstrous things is groupthink. If you belong to a group that says it's okay to torture or kill or enslave people, you're more likely to think it's okay. It's as simple as that. Whether the group is religious is beside the point -- you just have to have a strong association with the group and think it's in the right.
So, no, this isn't some revolutionary new discovery. Those claiming so are either ignorant of previous art - and that's *recent* previous art - or are deliberately trying to build up their own claims.
Or, maybe, just maybe, the Slashdot summary is merely quoting the first part of the press release that explains previously known information, but the Slashdot summary doesn't contain the actual details of the new findings, which describe some previously unknown aspects of the chemistry involved... some of which appear to be essential to the structural properties observed.
But, oops... for that you'd have to RTFA.
I find it odd that there are claims this is new information. Didn't Vitruvius describe it in his De Architectura, written about 15 BC?
Umm, care to RTFA? From the press release:
Descriptions of volcanic ash have survived from ancient times. First Vitruvius, an engineer for the Emperor Augustus, and later Pliny the Elder recorded that the best maritime concrete was made with ash from volcanic regions of the Gulf of Naples ... especially from sites near todayâ(TM)s seaside town of Pozzuoli.
I'm not sure exactly all that is new here, but in the press release you can read about the role of aluminum, the effect of lower temperatures in the manufacturing process, the production of certain end products in curing that are not found in modern concrete (due to the things already mentioned), etc.
Perhaps the story is confusing the known composition with some mechanism that the new study discovered.
Or perhaps you just didn't read the link to find out that's exactly what the press release is about.
Roman concrete produces a significantly different compound [from modern concrete], with added aluminum and less silicon. The resulting calcium-aluminum-silicate-hydrate (C-A-S-H) is an exceptionally stable binder.... Another striking contribution of the Monteiro team concerns the hydration products in concrete. In theory, C-S-H in concrete made with Portland cement resembles a combination of naturally occurring layered minerals, called tobermorite and jennite. Unfortunately these ideal crystalline structures are nowhere to be found in conventional modern concrete. Tobermorite does occur in the mortar of ancient seawater concrete, however.
Etc.
(The article also, by the way, seems to be about streamlining manufacturing to produce a better product with less energy and heat, thereby reducing carbon emissions, etc.)
What are you talking about? There are 12 (not 13) semitones in a standard octave tuned to Western tuning, though I see the 13 if you count both endpoints.
Nevertheless, you couldn't fit C, C#, and D within 1/8 of an octave, since the last time I checked 2 * 1/12 = 1/6. The distance from C to D (a whole tone) is 1/6 of an octave, and I'm pretty sure 1/6 > 1/8.
And, why should I buy the album now when I'd be able to wait 5 years and download it in full quality for free?
Are you serious? By that logic, no one ever goes to a first-run movie theatre; they can just wait and sit at home and watch it when it comes out on streaming or DVD a few months later. By that logic, no one ever pays the premium price to get a "new release" from Amazon instant-watch (or Blockbuster or whatever back in the day). The purpose of copyright is to promote "progress" in the arts, which implicitly means you're engaging with culture enough that someone might buy your stuff. It's not supposed to be a "make a whole lot of crap and sit on it for decades to see whether something might become popular" scheme.
25 years at least ensures that anybody that really wanted it has probably already bought a copy.
The goal of copyright is not to ensure that a creator makes MAXIMUM profit. The goal of copyright is to allow sufficient time for a creator or distributor to recoup losses for an initial investment. I agree with the GP that 5 years is probably enough in the modern era of fast-changing pop culture. But I think the original 14 years (possibly with a renewal opportunity) specified in the original copyright terms of the 1790s would be more than generous.
Your arguments are a great reason for a set period of time for copyright, regardless of death, transfer of rights, corporate ownership, whatever -- just set the number of years and be done with it. Personally, I believe in no circumstances should that term be longer than the original copyright terms set after the Constitution called for them in the 1790s, namely 14 years plus a 14-year renewal. I don't know if the "renewal" thing is necessary -- but 28 years is more than enough to recoup losses for investing some time in generating one thing. (14 years is probably plenty too, but I think 28 should be an absolute maximum.)
If the creator dies within that 14-year or 28-year or whatever period, the rights go to the estate. If a corporation claims copyright over something they produced, it's the same term.
Here's one analogy I like to think of. Imagine that a state is accepting bids from construction firms to build a bridge. Rather than paying them up-front, the state project managers say: "We'll allow you to erect a toll booth for 14 years, and you get all the money from that toll booth. After 14 years, the bridge enters the 'public domain' and nobody can charge tolls."
If you signed a contract as a builder like that, you get the 14 years of tolls as your compensation. If you die, that compensation can be collected by your estate, family, corporation you will it to, whatever.
Obviously this hypothetical situation wouldn't happen in real life, because construction doesn't work along this sort of contract model. But a lot of investors put capital into initial research or start-ups while being promised a share of profits in a similar way. They make no money up-front, but if it becomes successful, they can collect later.
The only difference is that copyright terms should have defined limits, and a set number of years makes a lot more sense instead of some random set of time correlating to the author's lifespan. If we view copyright as a sort of temporary "lease" from the public domain, like my toll-booth on public bridge metaphor above, compensation should have a set amount or duration, not something tailored to how long someone lives.
Every time this suggestion comes up, I repeat that I don't want the law to create more incentives for homicide.
Easily solved. If the individual dies of anything other than natural causes the work immediately become public domain at the time of their death.
Please, please -- can we just get the author's lifespan out of the equation? The idea of copyright is to provide an incentive for an author to create a work in the first place (invest initial time and effort with ability to recoup investment later) as well as to foster further creative works after the first one. In the words of the original Constitutional stipulation, we're trying to encourage "progress" in the arts, not a reward system.
There's no reason for copyright to be longer than the initial specification in the original copyright act from the 1790s: 14 years, with a 14 year extension. I'd even argue for 14 years total these days, but 28 years would be significantly better than what we have.
But the author's lifespan shouldn't come into it. If the author dies, the rights should go to his/her estate for the 14 years or 28 years or whatever. This is still the rightful income of the author.
Suppose you were offered a job as a carpenter in constructing a building. But the prospective owner said, "I won't give you any money up-front, but you'll be allowed a percent of my rental income from the building for the next 14 years."
That's your compensation. That contract should not be voided just because you happen to die after completing the project (but before the 14 years is up) -- if your family was depending on that future income, they should still get it.
It's as if you had a job that, instead of a salary, you worked for years for NOTHING and were only guaranteed a share of company profits for X years in the future once your job was complete. You did your work expecting that income, and your family depends on it.
But why should a work published earlier in an author's lifetime have a longer period to earn royalties than a work published later? My reply to Impy applies equally well to your comment.
What the heck are you talking about?? You were replying to someone who was arguing for authors lifespan + N, i.e., the current broken STUPID system.
My comment specifically says X years, not author's lifespan + N. I'm talking about a straight standard length of time -- author's lifespan has nothing to do with it. For example, the original 14-year term specified in the original copyright act. If author dies, rights can get passed to estate. The number X from publication does not change in any situation.
I don't understand what your comment has to do with the ability to pass on your rights to widow, children, etc., as long as they are within term X. All copyright term lengths should be the same.
the song is over a hundred fucking years old. its practically an american standard and so ubiquitously used as to be unenforceable.
Really? Umm, you ever go to a chain restaurant and hear the staff come out singing some stupid "Birthday, birthday, birthday -- it's your happy birthday" chant or some such nonsense?
Why do they do that? Because they know they'll be sued or asked to pay royalties otherwise for public performance.
You'll also see that it is rarely sung on-screen in a movie or tv show or something for the same reason.
banthebirthdaysong.com or nomorebirthdaysong.org should point to a creative-commons or public-domain version of a song that anything from a synthesizer to a ten year old can sing without having to hire johnny cochran.
You figured it out. Yep -- that's what most businesses do when they have to celebrate a birthday and don't want to get sued.
(By the way, I agree that this copyright term is absolutely ridiculous and the song should have been in the public domain for many decades already....)
Post-mortem copyrights are supposed to encourage the author's estate to complete the author's unfinished works rather than shredding them.
That's not why they came into existence, and it would only really apply in cases of reasonably famous authors where there would actually be a significant market for posthumous works -- for most creators, no one would care.
Anyhow, if you read about the history of copyright in the 1800s, you'll see stories about widows and starving families who wanted the money due to them from copyright for their husbands'/fathers' work.
(And before I get a lot of responses about how the kids shouldn't get to live off their dad's work, keep in mind that an independent author received NO money up-front for his work. It's as if you had a job that, instead of a salary, you worked for years for NOTHING and were only guaranteed a share of company profits for X years in the future once your job was complete. You did your work expecting that income, and your family depends on it. That income source should not immediately disappear and the work contract voided just because you happen to die in an accident or something.)
We don't require construction workers to tear down their house every 5 years if they built it themselves, or for landlords to do the same, just because they're "coasting" on something that they did once.
This actually highlights the difference between copyrighted works and physical goods. Construction workers don't get a royalty check every time a house they helped build gets sold. Landlords get paid regularly because they own the physical good and are renting it to you on an ongoing basis.
Your analogies are flawed.
Imagine if you were a contractor bidding on a job. However, the prospective owner said: "I'm will pay you nothing up-front. You will build my building for free. But, for your work, you will get a share in the rents for the next X years."
Now, imagine that for some reason we lived in a society where all construction projects were funded like that. Contractors would operate differently, producing various sorts of work on various buildings to try and build up a portfolio that would get them income in future years, since they get nothing up-front for their work.
We could have a patronage system where only rich people pay to produce art, or where only independently wealthy people get to decide what art they want to make. Creators would just be employees. That's how it worked for hundreds of years.
Copyright allows a creator to be an "independent contractor" and choose where to invest his/her time, in hopes in choosing the right project that will generate income and allow them to continue making money while still working.
Creators depend on the promise of future compensation for their effort in the same way that building contractors would in my hypothetical example. Without that promise, they'd have no reason to invest significant time or effort or do a quality job.
The problem with the current system is that the terms have gotten out of control. In 1790 it was 14 years, with a 14-year renewal possible. I cannot see any reason why it should have ever been extended beyond that.
Look, you're making this too complicated by tying it to the life of a "person," and then worrying about how to deal with corporations.
There's a simple answer -- go back to something like the original system as put in place when the Constitution was ratified. At that time, it was 14 years. If the author applied for renewal, it could be another 14 years. Personally, I still think 28 years is a little long, but the point is that it's a limited duration. You could go back to the original Statue of Anne length and make it 7, maybe with a 7-year renewal. Originally, it was a reasonable amount of time for a publisher to sell the first print-run and thereby recoup an investment in materials. These days, a short term is even more justified, since the investment in materials is smaller for publishers.
The idea that it should last for a creator's lifetime is ridiculous. The point is not that a creator should get to live out his/her days making money off of one creation.
1) Copyrights are supposed to encourage the creator to create more work. As soon as the creator is dead, the chances of her/him creating more work are somewhat diminished. At most a copyright period should be for N years or natural death of the creator, whichever comes first.
Well, that's partly right. Copyrights are supposed to encourage the creation of work, period -- not necessarily MORE work. The original statement from the Constitution:
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
So, we want to encourage "progress," which means we want quality works in the first place. Creators need a way to get compensation for their initial investment of time and effort; otherwise, only rich people or people with rich patrons will put in the time and effort to make something great. Here's a simple analogy for you:
Suppose you're a carpenter or contractor or whatever. Instead of getting paid X dollars at the end of completing a job at a building site, the owner says to you: "Rather than giving you a one-time payment, I'll give you Y percent of the rent on this property for the first Z years."
Most building contracts don't work like that, but that's essentially the way copyright works. In 1790, as I pointed out, it was for 14 years.
Now, if this were the standard way of doing building contracts, the way carpenters do business would be different. They might try a bunch of different things, working on different sorts of buildings, hoping to be involved in enough good projects to generate a good amount of income in the future.
But to the question at hand -- this money paid shouldn't just disappear if the carpenter happens to die early. He might have a family to support, and that family, unlike in other situations, didn't get the salary up-front. They expected to depend on his "salary," which just happened to be coming in spread out over Z years, rather than all at once up-front. He was guaranteed the rent for Z years according to the contract, so if he dies, his estate should still be able to claim it.
2) Corporations should be allowed to have some sort of copyright, after all, their payments to creators enables the creators' work.
Corporations should only get copyright automatically over things they actually create as a corporation. Creators should be able to pass their income over to a corporation, just as they could with the income from other contracts.
The duration should be no different. It shouldn't be longer than the original 1790 terms.
The Roberts Court actually puts out unanimous decisions roughly 40% of the time.
Is anything actually achieved by oral arguments? It seems mainly an opportunity for lawyers to get flustered, choose the wrong tack while thinking on their feet, be manipulated by the justices, and oversimplify.
These days, oral arguments tend to be a place for the justices to prod attorneys with particular questions. Often, it seems they do this with the intention of bringing up a point that might influence or accentuate an idea that could sway one of the other justices, rather than necessarily to clarify a question for themselves -- though, if they are really curious about a particular issue themselves, you can tell. They will keep cutting through the BS spouted by the attorney and hammer the same question until they get an answer. Maybe this is to prove a point to the other justices, but it can also be to assure themselves that they've gotten all possible perspectives on the question. Another common tactic in oral arguments is for the justices to pose interesting hypotheticals that they think may clarify the case, but which may not have been adequately addressed in briefs.
Is Thomas' silence really a comment on the fact that this is a waste of his, and everybody else's, time?
Actually, he's explicitly said why he doesn't talk. Oral arguments tend to be a lot of banter among the justices these days, but they used to let lawyers at least speak a little more. Thomas has said that he thinks his colleagues should give a little more room for attorneys to try to make points and bring up what they think is important.
I think he'd like to hear a little more and perhaps then ask questions relevant to the lawyers' points. But in the current court, we rarely ever get to hear a lawyer talk for more than 30 seconds on his/her own material before being interrupted. Thomas thinks this makes oral arguments more about the justices' preoccupations rather than what the lawyers think is important.
I can see his point. The justices get to debate each other and their clerks for hours on end about their preoccupations. Oral argument could be a place to get a few insights into the major concerns of the litigants, if we could ever hear them talk.
On the other hand, the justices will be the ones who ultimately decide things, so maybe it's best if they stick to the stuff that actually concerns them. It's just unfortunate when they start using lawyers as legal "punching bags," clearly only to drive home a point to one of the other justices.
The unanimous part was the weird bit for me. Partly because they all agreed, and partly because I thought the kind of cases that would have unanimous decisions usually didn't make it to the SCOTUS.
With the Roberts Court, roughly 40% of all decisions have tended to be unanimous. Another 10% or so tend to be 8-1, so roughly half of the decisions can't even have the possibility of showing an "ideological" division along the 5/4 supposed conservative/liberal divide.
Even among the 5-4 decisions, about 1/4 to 1/3 of the time, the division isn't along the supposed "factional" division the media always reports on. Those closely divided politicized opinions don't tend to occur more than 20% of the time.
The court is not "fairly divided". Something like 80% of their decisions are unanimous. You only hear press about the 5-4 decisions which are an extremely small proportion (about 10%).
No, something like 40% of their decisions are unanimous in the Roberts Court (a little higher than normal, but not shockingly so). Another 10% of so tend to be 8-1. So, in roughly half of cases, there is not even the possibility of an ideological division. That's still significantly higher than most people think, but it's not 80%.
Among the 5-4 decisions, roughly 1/3 of them aren't along the supposed ideological lines... the "partisan" 5-4 decisions still happen something like 20% of the time, though.
Yes, it's relatively easy to PCR up the sequence from the genome once you know what you're looking for.
When I hear some sort of detailed computer analogy about some application of PCR, somehow all can think of is this video.
Educating the public simply isn't a priority.
It never really was, at least not the majority of "the public." The goal of educational reform beginning a century ago was to emphasize conformity and get young people with dangerous ideas off the streets and into institutions that could teach them the bare minimum to be a good citizen and a good worker.
You'd think having a more dynamic, informed, educated, productive economy would more than outweigh having a complacent, idiotic populace, but it turns out the latter is a lot easier to do than the former, and politics is nothing if not pragmatic.
Yeah, if you actually read the words of those behind the educational reforms of the mid-late 1800s and early 1900s, you can clearly see the goals. It wasn't so much to have a "complacent, idiotic populace" as a set of obedient workers who could listen to authority, be "good citizens," move around from task to task when a bell rings, and have enough basic training in things like reading and writing to do simple tasks in factories and blue-collar jobs. Much of this could have been accomplished (and used to be) in primary school before 1930 or so, but then the realization that most dangerous radicals tended to get teenagers to follow them led to the high school movement.
The problem happened when educators forgot this history. Then in the 1950s and early 1960s when the GI bill came into place and there was concern about the Space Race, we were suddenly trying to teach middle-class and lower-class students "higher education" within a system designed to keep them as blue-collar workers.
With the huge influx of college students beginning in the late 1960s, the "radicals" emerged again -- rather than teenagers, they were now college kids and college dropouts with time on their hands.
Luckily for the government, this one solved itself. The arguments against authority in the late 1960s and early 1970s classrooms led to reforms in the upper tiers of higher ed that dumbed everything down significantly... to do otherwise was to be "authoritarian" within the liberal campus environment.
In the 1950s and 1960s, the GI Bill had led state colleges to become more like vocational schools than they already were. But with the dissolution of "authoritarian" critical inquiry at top-tier schools (which generally required an actual broad set of knowledge and openness to critical thinking), even traditional liberal arts universities became glorified trade schools. And since they effectively became "certification" programs to grant degrees in certain practical fields of study, rather than to actually educate broadly, it's not surprising that the business model has taken them over to encourage profit over everything else.
So, like the 1920s through 1950s generation that was convinced to send their kids to high school in hope of a "better life," we now have politicians who repeatedly keep talking about trying to allow everyone to go to college... regardless if that makes any sense. What we need are better trade schools and apprenticeship programs for most practical "college majors," rather than wasting four or more years and paying huge sums within an educational paradigm that was never designed to be "practical."
And that's what we have now -- a high-school system that's failing to educate students for higher ed. because it was designed to confine radical teens and teach them to be good obedient workers and citizens, along with a college system that is trying to be a glorified trade school using old educational methods that were designed to introduce abstract reasoning to good students (when done well), not teach practical skills to those of moderate intelligence.
But most people don't realize that our systems are dysfunctional because they were designed to do other things... not to provide education beyond basic skills.
"We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we
Essentially you are arguing we turn universities into trade schools and trade schools into universities.
No.
Trade school? [...] If you aren't gonna use it every day for the rest of your career it wont be in the curriculum.
Precisely. Which is why the vast majority of professions, including many "college majors" these days would be better off going to trade schools. If you want to be a "business major" or an engineer or anything else where you want college to "train" you to do your job, there should be trade schools and apprenticeships for you.
If you're interested in research, generating new ideas, thinking creatively about problems in general (and not just being trained for a job), you should go to a university. By doing so, you should be better equipped to confront problems in a multitude of fields, as was the idea of a "liberal arts education" even a half-century ago or less. Universities aren't very effective at training anyone to do anything specific, except perhaps abstract fields and research.
One of the biggest issues today with colleges is that everyone thinks they should go to college, usually for training, certification (otherwise known as a "degree"), or to increase their salary. These are not the reasons for higher education -- they are the reasons to go to a trade school.
Trade schools don't teach rote anything.
First of all, I don't think trade schools teach a lot of "rote learning," but if "rote learning" is appropriate anywhere, it would be in a trade school environment rather than a university. "Rote learning" is just another term for "memorization through repetition." While trade schools aren't about memorization of facts, they are about learning skills, which are generally acquired through repetition of similar tasks again and again.
Note how your example of its value specifically refers to graduate students. Undergrads just don't interact that much with faculty and learn mostly the same thing you could learn at a hundred different schools.
No, my specific example refers to how a university might want to get undergraduates from different institutions to go to graduate school in one place in order to keep an influx of new ideas. The impetus behind this is that, despite having somewhat standard curricula, the differences between different schools and the way students are taught as undergraduates is significant enough to have a major effect on what a student does and how he/she thinks after undergraduate work.
The same argument would apply for jobs undergraduates take after school rather than going to graduate school. If you only ever hire undergraduates who came from one department at one particular university, you're going to have some limitations on the experience pool among your employees -- they just were all taught in a certain way and only exposed to certain aspects of the field that were emphasized at their university.
As someone who has taught at the university level for a number of years, I can tell you that I still enjoy having curriculum discussions with colleagues at other schools -- and not just "elite" schools, either: standard state universities and small colleges. It's really interesting to discover that some people will explain introductory concepts in completely different ways. This will often create a chain-reaction effect for understanding so that 2-3 years later as more advanced students, their undergraduate understanding of the subject and ability to confront certain problems will be biased by what seems like a relatively minor modification to the introductory curriculum.
Obviously such differences are generally not huge. But for any good teacher who doesn't just read out of a textbook, they will exist. (Unfortunately, a lot of profs aren't good teachers, but that's at least partly due to the system which usually emphasizes publication and research over teaching in order to retain a job and get tenure.)
By the way, for just one example, I have a friend who has created a number of useful pieces of free instructional software in his field. However, he is careful never to put these things up on his university's website, nor does he ever take grants from the university to develop such tools. By doing so, he'd risk the university claiming ownership and saying (1) he can't distribute this stuff for free and can only use it to teach at his university and (2) if he ever leaves, he can't take this stuff with him.
I've heard similar stories from other universities. I know a number of people who have stopped posting course materials on their official university website and instead host their own website to be sure they have control and can post the stuff for free. The professors are often not the "bad guys" here -- they actually want to create interesting stuff, and most of them would be happy if it were used widely.
However, they also want to be able to keep using it themselves even if they need to get a new job, and the whole argument here is about how some universities won't let that happen because the stuff can't be released the way you suggest.
So put the materials under a Creative Commons license. A prof posting above already does.
That's great if you even have that option. Most universities want to claim sole rights over the materials so they can try to license and make money off of them. That's actually what TFA is about in part: arguing that profs need to be able to gain control over how this stuff gets licensed, rather than just by default becoming the property of the university.