'Humans rely on healthy ecosystems, made up of organisms and their environments."
And that, my friends, is a prime example of what soft liberal earth-worship thinking will get you. We don't get our fuels or building materials or other raw materials from the "ecosystem" -- we smite the earth and take them out by force of will and machines built by the human mind. We don't hunt and gather like savages, and we don't even use primitive low yield agriculture -- we use industry powered by investment to get our food and textiles. And you think nature just made your Droid? That's intelligent design in action, not evolution.
We live off an ECONOMY. Ecosystems are made-up concepts by hippy-dippy types who'd rather save the life of some spotted owl than let a hard-working man earn an honest dollar. If ecosystems were valuable, you'd pay for them.
... to whom you say "Cut it out, or I'll give you something to whine about."
It's probably true that it's often better to be more articulate than to retaliate with a time-out or a spanking, but anyone who's dealt with an petulant child or telecom executive knows that it's tempting not to be.
Don't do that. Pushing the connection to carry things it wasn't meant to is pretty much theft of service, and it will get pushback from rightfully upset providers, and maybe more from policymakers who see hackers who can't behave themselves.
Do what you'd like with the devices and/or media that you've purchased, but recognize that there's a line of fairness and don't cross it.
-- you know, the ones where you can say "a method for conveying stateful customer information ON THE INTERNET -- then pretty much all I'll need to contribute to the progress of the useful arts and sciences and, more to the point, amass a formidable patent portfolio, is add USING SOLAR POWER.
I've already applied for the business method patent, but reasonable licensing is available!
Funny, that's what a lot of people who liked modula-2 and oberon have said about the recently released Go.
do perl afficionados think that this new version will enjoy the success that its predecessors have had?
Do you mean popularity or success?
Popularity is related to its success, since a bigger community can provide a significant boost to a language, both in terms of library development and in terms of perceived viability as part of a commercial product.
But widespread use isn't really the same thing. If it's an effective and pleasant tool for those who choose it, then it's successful.
(And sometimes, a small, experienced, and smart community puts out better libraries and tools than a large one. Consider PHP.)
My customer is the next poor slob who has to work on the source code
Likely you.:)
In most work situations, chances are better than not that once you create or touch something, responsibility for its maintenance is going to stick to you as long as it can.
And right now I'm looking at some hobby code I wrote a year and a half ago. I was probably less careful than I should have been when I wrote it, because I knew the only reader/user in the near future was likely to be me. But "me" over a year later is quite possibly just about as clueless about what undocumented single-letter variables are and how a dozen functions fit together as a completely new initiate might be.
You can only fully disable it if you completely opt out of using any Facebook applications. While it's true that most Facebook apps are crap, it'd be nice to be able to play Lexulous with friends without having any black-hat or social marketer who's written a quiz have access to my name and list of friends (along with whatever other info I'm not careful enough about).
The option they need is: "only reveal even my mere existence to apps I've explicitly opted into."
As what? State takeover of the presses? Hardly. Even leaving aside that it only ever applied to broadcast over spectrum (never applied to print, probably never would have applied to cable or internet), nothing in it chartered state-owned outlets. It was a set of rules allowing limited access to broadcasting via a scarce resource.
Since you've decided that we're going to have a conversation punctuated with insults, let me engage in the futility of explain to an obviously lobotomized moron as yourself why you're wrong, even though it's clear at this point that you don't have the cognitive capacity to understand it and the better option is to convince you or someone else to blow your worthless brains out before you contribute another bit of the hopelessly confused text-vomit that passes for commentary amongst you and your ilk.
(Or perhaps you'd like to have a civilized conversation. Whatever. Either one could be entertaining for me.)
I'm not sure if you're aware of what HARRY_READ_ME.txt is. It's actually an explanation of the problems encountered while in the process of constructing a database a bunch of disparate inconsistently formatted (and sometimes contradictory) datasets. If you digest the entire content at length, you'll realize that this isn't somebody cackling and waving their fingers Mr-Burns style while monologuing at length about how they've managed to commit fraud. It's someone complaining about how tedious and difficult putting together a database is and elaborating on the numerous problems they're encountering.
Now, let's go back to this phrase that you want to discuss. In fact, let's look at a larger portion of it than you selected:
NOTE: recent decline in tree-ring density has been ARTIFICIALLY REMOVED to facilitate calibration. THEREFORE, post-1960 values will be much closer to observed temperatures then they should be, which will incorrectly imply the reconstruction is more skilful than it actually is. See Osborn et al. (2004).
Looks to me he's actually warning would-be users that this is less accurate than it looks and he's telling you why. What isn't apparent to a lay reader -- and I might go out on a limb in suggesting that you and many of the other critics here are in that camp -- is what his justification actually is. Perhaps you know what he meant by "facilitate calibration." If so, you're welcome to explain it, but I'm gonna bet that you don't have the first idea. In fact, I'll bet you don't even know what he meant by artificially removed. Which process did he use? Did he drop all the data, did he introduce a temporary constraint, did he selectively drop data? What's his rationale?
I'll bet you don't know the answers to these questions. And I further bet that you don't care. Because that isn't how you form your opinions, is it? You don't actually dig until you understand the topic -- hell, you obviously don't even have the first idea of what HARRY_READ_ME.txt actually is, you just saw a few phrases that you could interpolate to support an idea that you already had and you ran with it. And I'm wasting my time because even though I'm right, rather than thinking about this, you're already getting angry over the topic because you've invested yourself in a position and you care far more about not having to feel wrong than you do about actually learning anything or contributing genuine knowledge to the world around you.
But you know what? If you can explain the actual science here, and if you can put it up to real explanations of what Ian Harris was doing, and show how they're not compatible, I'll admit I'm wrong and listen to what you have to say.
But you know what else? I'm pretty sure I'm safe on that front. I'm pretty sure selective interpretation of little phrases -- and interpretations that depend on the idea that there's a conspiracy that makes researches act in bad faith -- are all you've got.
No. I don't mean non-proof like that. What you're talking about here doesn't meet the criteria I mentioned. It's "proof" that depends on lay interpolation of short, selected phrases. I mean proof that depends on an involved explanation of what the researchers were actually doing and why it was not only wrong but intentionally wrong.
If phrases like "artificially adjusted" immediately imply fraud to you, you're approaching the problem incorrectly.
Of course it was manipulated. You don't do science without data manipulation.
they threw out both the raw data and any audit trail.
This constitutes proof of misrepresentation how?
I'd agree with anyone who says that discarding raw data makes a given work based on it less scientifically credible. The more independent researchers can recreate/verify, the stronger the science is. But it isn't evidence of misrepresentation.
Here's what proof of misrepresentation looks like a statement by one of the parties involved saying "I did to to produce " followed by either:
1) a further statement something like "to make it look like is true even though we have no indication it might be."
2) an examination of dataset Y0 before procedure X is applied to makes it clear that X(Y0) != Y and further evidence that this is intentional.
3) a detailed explanation as to why not only would procedure X produce problematic results but also why it's probable that the only reason someone would use would be to misrepresent facts, preferably unrefuted by any reasonable argument as to why procedure X could be helpful.
Maybe this is in the emails, but so far, I haven't seen anything like it.
Citing realclimate.org doesn't help your cause. Several contributors to that site have been implicated in the leaked emails.
Which would actually make them uniquely qualified to comment on the content, since they participated in the discussions and know the context and what was behind some of the comments.
With regards to the content of your post, the data was most certainly manipulated.
Sure. In fact, in order to do science, you have to manipulate data.
Have you not taken the time to discover the coding travesty documented in the HARRY_READ_ME file that was leaked along with the emails? Here are a couple good links to start with.
This isn't what proof of intentional data misrepresentation looks like.
Why? For many uses, the asynchronous/parallel execution you get from setTimeout and setInterval work great. And if you're working on Mozilla's Rhino, you can use Java's threads.
2D/3D libraries
I think your larger point that many languages don't have this built in by default is a good one, but I wanted to point out there's some great stuff emerging on top of the canvas tag and SVG, and again, if you're not working in the browser, you're welcome to help yourself to anything Java's got by using Rhino.
Language designers need to think big from the get-go. When they don't, people suffer.
Or they learn to use the language.
Namespacing in Javascript isn't hard, you define a global object that becomes your namespace and everything else you implement becomes a property of that object.
Block scoping? Easy-peasy, if you really need it. Make an instantly-called anonymous function.
Global variables? Know your scoping rules and use them appropriately. This is the same solution as one has to apply in most of the languages out there, from C to Python.
Inability to perform CPU-intensive computations due to these dynamic types of yours
The dynamic types really don't slow it down that much, and it depends on your implementation. Google's V8 does well enough to run an NES Emulator at comfortable speeds.
lack of threading or any other explicit or implicit parallelism support
Parallel execution is actually pretty easy in a browser context using setTimeout and setInterval, though synchronization is a bit of an issue. But if you really want threads, hop on Rhino and pull from Java.
no library facilities to modern 2D/3D graphics libraries
In the context of a browser, Canvas actually gives you a lot. But outside of that, Rhino gives you everything Java's got.
We are supposed to have a House of Representatives but it's really a House of whatever [insert current speaker here] wants to allow to the floor.
And the house leadership is selected by elected members of the house, who are presumably representatives of their district, given that's how they get elected. Sounds representative to me. Probably was more so before the mid 90s when party loyalty and fundraising became a bigger criteria for leadership than seniority, so if you're complaining that party politics distorts the picture, I'd agree, but it's still essentially a function of who gets elected.
Our Government stopped being about transparency and democratic principles a long time ago.
To the extent that this is true, it's because this is what we (as a whole) really want. Not what we say we want. We might say we want information and transparency, but frankly, even most of the attentive people I know outside the legislature simply don't pay *careful* attention. They might have hobby horses and hot-button topics, but very few of us have the stomach for careful analysis.
We get the government we have because generally we prefer to focus on our own lives, and when we're not, we prefer entertainment and passionate expression of our general philosophies over thoughtful, nuanced, nuts-and-bolts policy discussion. And because most of us need to be *paid* to seriously research a position and then go down and talk to members of congress about it -- or talk to each other reasonably about it. No surprise the people who will pay others to do that are best represented.
If you're one of the few people who donates to organizations that lobby and do legal work, that takes the time to cite policy research instead of simply ranting when you write your reps and senators, that understands the opposition positions and research well enough to know which of their points are respectable and which are refutable, that might even know (and be known to) some of the congressional staff by name, then congratulations, you're one of the few what I'm saying doesn't apply to.
But for the rest of us, well, the government as it now stands is essentially a reflection of our real habits and values instead of our ideals.
if the economics do not currently support a single provider, they are even less likely to support multiple providers.
Invoking economic arguments may not be the most self-interested thing for Verizon to do, because if we're doing that, we may as well admit telecom tends towards natural monopoly and network effects, and that having telecom infrastructure managed by self-interested private parties isn't ever going to produce the same kind of yields that markets do by competition in other sectors.
The fact that the Verizon argument quoted above is correct doesn't even help their case. It's another brick in the wall: in contrast to areas where they tend towards anticompetitive, it's hard for private telecom to serve some markets profitably at all. We and they have sortof accepted this as a balance, and that's one way to do it, but there's always this level of finagling discussed in the post. It might be better to just stop messing around and move to private service over public infrastructure common carriage if we really think of telecom as a utility or public good.
So, yeah, the iPhone's great and everything, but I don't think Apple has even 20% of the smartphone market. How exactly does an antitrust suit work against a player that doesn't have anything resembling monopoly power in the market in which it operates?
Not only that -- why exactly would relief by gained by Apple turning over the source to the iPhone OS? Canceling copyright is pretty serious business, there'd better be a pretty compelling reason to do it, both in terms of justifying the cancellation and strength of benefits that'd follow it.
I don't like some of the Apple/AT&T restrictions either. Or the idea of signing a contract with AT&T, particularly for the advertised prices. That doesn't mean they've broken the law.
Not necessarily true. Have we really already paid for the rights to any creative work a teacher does while they're a school employee? I'm pretty uncomfortable with that idea, just like I'm uncomfortable with employment or contracting agreements that make broad claims of ownership of work I produce while I'm employed with them.
De facto ownership of any intellectual output shouldn't be by attached standard to a salary.
I work for a university. Any work-related ideas I come up with belong to the university.
I presume, then, it's an uncommon arrangement for faculty to get any kind of royalties or other compensation for authoring textbooks or other works?
If you write software for a living, you can't go home and sell your days coding, it belongs to your employer.
Au contraire. In fact, on a number of occasions, I've negotiated precisely that arrangement and refused to sign employment agreements that didn't respect some semblance of it.
Let's take a step back for a minute. Imagine that I don't. Explain to me what a competitive free market it is, and how the competition within it produces companies that provide effective services to their customers.
... because that's the thing about a good economic deal, at a certain point, if it's good enough, it can overcome your feelings and prejudices.
So, yeah, I've been thinking that maybe some of Verizon's offerings were good enough that relative to the extra amount of evil I'd have to put up with from them, it might be worthwhile.
Thankfully, though, every time I think about this, Verizon decides to up the level of evil or decrease the potential of the economic bargain.
Thanks Verizon: you and I both know it'd never work. It's good to remind each other.
Slashdot Mirror
'Humans rely on healthy ecosystems, made up of organisms and their environments."
And that, my friends, is a prime example of what soft liberal earth-worship thinking will get you. We don't get our fuels or building materials or other raw materials from the "ecosystem" -- we smite the earth and take them out by force of will and machines built by the human mind. We don't hunt and gather like savages, and we don't even use primitive low yield agriculture -- we use industry powered by investment to get our food and textiles. And you think nature just made your Droid? That's intelligent design in action, not evolution.
We live off an ECONOMY. Ecosystems are made-up concepts by hippy-dippy types who'd rather save the life of some spotted owl than let a hard-working man earn an honest dollar. If ecosystems were valuable, you'd pay for them.
... to whom you say "Cut it out, or I'll give you something to whine about."
It's probably true that it's often better to be more articulate than to retaliate with a time-out or a spanking, but anyone who's dealt with an petulant child or telecom executive knows that it's tempting not to be.
We've been down this road before.
Don't do that. Pushing the connection to carry things it wasn't meant to is pretty much theft of service, and it will get pushback from rightfully upset providers, and maybe more from policymakers who see hackers who can't behave themselves.
Do what you'd like with the devices and/or media that you've purchased, but recognize that there's a line of fairness and don't cross it.
-- you know, the ones where you can say "a method for conveying stateful customer information ON THE INTERNET -- then pretty much all I'll need to contribute to the progress of the useful arts and sciences and, more to the point, amass a formidable patent portfolio, is add USING SOLAR POWER.
I've already applied for the business method patent, but reasonable licensing is available!
... than one retailer, when it comes to choice.
the pascal/modula-2/oberon phenomenon
Funny, that's what a lot of people who liked modula-2 and oberon have said about the recently released Go.
do perl afficionados think that this new version will enjoy the success that its predecessors have had?
Do you mean popularity or success?
Popularity is related to its success, since a bigger community can provide a significant boost to a language, both in terms of library development and in terms of perceived viability as part of a commercial product.
But widespread use isn't really the same thing. If it's an effective and pleasant tool for those who choose it, then it's successful.
(And sometimes, a small, experienced, and smart community puts out better libraries and tools than a large one. Consider PHP.)
My customer is the next poor slob who has to work on the source code
Likely you. :)
In most work situations, chances are better than not that once you create or touch something, responsibility for its maintenance is going to stick to you as long as it can.
And right now I'm looking at some hobby code I wrote a year and a half ago. I was probably less careful than I should have been when I wrote it, because I knew the only reader/user in the near future was likely to be me. But "me" over a year later is quite possibly just about as clueless about what undocumented single-letter variables are and how a dozen functions fit together as a completely new initiate might be.
You can disable that.
You can only fully disable it if you completely opt out of using any Facebook applications. While it's true that most Facebook apps are crap, it'd be nice to be able to play Lexulous with friends without having any black-hat or social marketer who's written a quiz have access to my name and list of friends (along with whatever other info I'm not careful enough about).
The option they need is: "only reveal even my mere existence to apps I've explicitly opted into."
The so-called "Fairness Doctrine" stands out...
As what? State takeover of the presses? Hardly. Even leaving aside that it only ever applied to broadcast over spectrum (never applied to print, probably never would have applied to cable or internet), nothing in it chartered state-owned outlets. It was a set of rules allowing limited access to broadcasting via a scarce resource.
Can you understand the English language?
Since you've decided that we're going to have a conversation punctuated with insults, let me engage in the futility of explain to an obviously lobotomized moron as yourself why you're wrong, even though it's clear at this point that you don't have the cognitive capacity to understand it and the better option is to convince you or someone else to blow your worthless brains out before you contribute another bit of the hopelessly confused text-vomit that passes for commentary amongst you and your ilk.
(Or perhaps you'd like to have a civilized conversation. Whatever. Either one could be entertaining for me.)
I'm not sure if you're aware of what HARRY_READ_ME.txt is. It's actually an explanation of the problems encountered while in the process of constructing a database a bunch of disparate inconsistently formatted (and sometimes contradictory) datasets. If you digest the entire content at length, you'll realize that this isn't somebody cackling and waving their fingers Mr-Burns style while monologuing at length about how they've managed to commit fraud. It's someone complaining about how tedious and difficult putting together a database is and elaborating on the numerous problems they're encountering.
Now, let's go back to this phrase that you want to discuss. In fact, let's look at a larger portion of it than you selected:
Looks to me he's actually warning would-be users that this is less accurate than it looks and he's telling you why. What isn't apparent to a lay reader -- and I might go out on a limb in suggesting that you and many of the other critics here are in that camp -- is what his justification actually is. Perhaps you know what he meant by "facilitate calibration." If so, you're welcome to explain it, but I'm gonna bet that you don't have the first idea. In fact, I'll bet you don't even know what he meant by artificially removed. Which process did he use? Did he drop all the data, did he introduce a temporary constraint, did he selectively drop data? What's his rationale?
I'll bet you don't know the answers to these questions. And I further bet that you don't care. Because that isn't how you form your opinions, is it? You don't actually dig until you understand the topic -- hell, you obviously don't even have the first idea of what HARRY_READ_ME.txt actually is, you just saw a few phrases that you could interpolate to support an idea that you already had and you ran with it. And I'm wasting my time because even though I'm right, rather than thinking about this, you're already getting angry over the topic because you've invested yourself in a position and you care far more about not having to feel wrong than you do about actually learning anything or contributing genuine knowledge to the world around you.
But you know what? If you can explain the actual science here, and if you can put it up to real explanations of what Ian Harris was doing, and show how they're not compatible, I'll admit I'm wrong and listen to what you have to say.
But you know what else? I'm pretty sure I'm safe on that front. I'm pretty sure selective interpretation of little phrases -- and interpretations that depend on the idea that there's a conspiracy that makes researches act in bad faith -- are all you've got.
So you would be meaning, proof like
No. I don't mean non-proof like that. What you're talking about here doesn't meet the criteria I mentioned. It's "proof" that depends on lay interpolation of short, selected phrases. I mean proof that depends on an involved explanation of what the researchers were actually doing and why it was not only wrong but intentionally wrong.
If phrases like "artificially adjusted" immediately imply fraud to you, you're approaching the problem incorrectly.
Not only was it manipulated
Of course it was manipulated. You don't do science without data manipulation.
they threw out both the raw data and any audit trail.
This constitutes proof of misrepresentation how?
I'd agree with anyone who says that discarding raw data makes a given work based on it less scientifically credible. The more independent researchers can recreate/verify, the stronger the science is. But it isn't evidence of misrepresentation.
Here's what proof of misrepresentation looks like a statement by one of the parties involved saying "I did to to produce " followed by either:
1) a further statement something like "to make it look like is true even though we have no indication it might be."
2) an examination of dataset Y0 before procedure X is applied to makes it clear that X(Y0) != Y and further evidence that this is intentional.
3) a detailed explanation as to why not only would procedure X produce problematic results but also why it's probable that the only reason someone would use would be to misrepresent facts, preferably unrefuted by any reasonable argument as to why procedure X could be helpful.
Maybe this is in the emails, but so far, I haven't seen anything like it.
Citing realclimate.org doesn't help your cause. Several contributors to that site have been implicated in the leaked emails.
Which would actually make them uniquely qualified to comment on the content, since they participated in the discussions and know the context and what was behind some of the comments.
With regards to the content of your post, the data was most certainly manipulated.
Sure. In fact, in order to do science, you have to manipulate data.
Have you not taken the time to discover the coding travesty documented in the HARRY_READ_ME file that was leaked along with the emails? Here are a couple good links to start with.
This isn't what proof of intentional data misrepresentation looks like.
I'll give you the lack of threading.
Why? For many uses, the asynchronous/parallel execution you get from setTimeout and setInterval work great. And if you're working on Mozilla's Rhino, you can use Java's threads.
2D/3D libraries
I think your larger point that many languages don't have this built in by default is a good one, but I wanted to point out there's some great stuff emerging on top of the canvas tag and SVG, and again, if you're not working in the browser, you're welcome to help yourself to anything Java's got by using Rhino.
Language designers need to think big from the get-go. When they don't, people suffer.
Or they learn to use the language.
Namespacing in Javascript isn't hard, you define a global object that becomes your namespace and everything else you implement becomes a property of that object.
Block scoping? Easy-peasy, if you really need it. Make an instantly-called anonymous function.
Global variables? Know your scoping rules and use them appropriately. This is the same solution as one has to apply in most of the languages out there, from C to Python.
Javascript has some warts, but these aren't it.
Inability to perform CPU-intensive computations due to these dynamic types of yours
The dynamic types really don't slow it down that much, and it depends on your implementation. Google's V8 does well enough to run an NES Emulator at comfortable speeds.
lack of threading or any other explicit or implicit parallelism support
Parallel execution is actually pretty easy in a browser context using setTimeout and setInterval, though synchronization is a bit of an issue. But if you really want threads, hop on Rhino and pull from Java.
no library facilities to modern 2D/3D graphics libraries
In the context of a browser, Canvas actually gives you a lot. But outside of that, Rhino gives you everything Java's got.
We are supposed to have a House of Representatives but it's really a House of whatever [insert current speaker here] wants to allow to the floor.
And the house leadership is selected by elected members of the house, who are presumably representatives of their district, given that's how they get elected. Sounds representative to me. Probably was more so before the mid 90s when party loyalty and fundraising became a bigger criteria for leadership than seniority, so if you're complaining that party politics distorts the picture, I'd agree, but it's still essentially a function of who gets elected.
Our Government stopped being about transparency and democratic principles a long time ago.
To the extent that this is true, it's because this is what we (as a whole) really want. Not what we say we want. We might say we want information and transparency, but frankly, even most of the attentive people I know outside the legislature simply don't pay *careful* attention. They might have hobby horses and hot-button topics, but very few of us have the stomach for careful analysis.
We get the government we have because generally we prefer to focus on our own lives, and when we're not, we prefer entertainment and passionate expression of our general philosophies over thoughtful, nuanced, nuts-and-bolts policy discussion. And because most of us need to be *paid* to seriously research a position and then go down and talk to members of congress about it -- or talk to each other reasonably about it. No surprise the people who will pay others to do that are best represented.
If you're one of the few people who donates to organizations that lobby and do legal work, that takes the time to cite policy research instead of simply ranting when you write your reps and senators, that understands the opposition positions and research well enough to know which of their points are respectable and which are refutable, that might even know (and be known to) some of the congressional staff by name, then congratulations, you're one of the few what I'm saying doesn't apply to.
But for the rest of us, well, the government as it now stands is essentially a reflection of our real habits and values instead of our ideals.
...what exactly are the people who funded you going to do to force an issue? :)
if the economics do not currently support a single provider, they are even less likely to support multiple providers.
Invoking economic arguments may not be the most self-interested thing for Verizon to do, because if we're doing that, we may as well admit telecom tends towards natural monopoly and network effects, and that having telecom infrastructure managed by self-interested private parties isn't ever going to produce the same kind of yields that markets do by competition in other sectors.
The fact that the Verizon argument quoted above is correct doesn't even help their case. It's another brick in the wall: in contrast to areas where they tend towards anticompetitive, it's hard for private telecom to serve some markets profitably at all. We and they have sortof accepted this as a balance, and that's one way to do it, but there's always this level of finagling discussed in the post. It might be better to just stop messing around and move to private service over public infrastructure common carriage if we really think of telecom as a utility or public good.
Could you come up with a process that pulls CO2 from the atmosphere?
So, yeah, the iPhone's great and everything, but I don't think Apple has even 20% of the smartphone market. How exactly does an antitrust suit work against a player that doesn't have anything resembling monopoly power in the market in which it operates?
Not only that -- why exactly would relief by gained by Apple turning over the source to the iPhone OS? Canceling copyright is pretty serious business, there'd better be a pretty compelling reason to do it, both in terms of justifying the cancellation and strength of benefits that'd follow it.
I don't like some of the Apple/AT&T restrictions either. Or the idea of signing a contract with AT&T, particularly for the advertised prices. That doesn't mean they've broken the law.
The world needs more Open Source curricula.
True.
Let's take the resource we've already paid for
Not necessarily true. Have we really already paid for the rights to any creative work a teacher does while they're a school employee? I'm pretty uncomfortable with that idea, just like I'm uncomfortable with employment or contracting agreements that make broad claims of ownership of work I produce while I'm employed with them.
De facto ownership of any intellectual output shouldn't be by attached standard to a salary.
I work for a university. Any work-related ideas I come up with belong to the university.
I presume, then, it's an uncommon arrangement for faculty to get any kind of royalties or other compensation for authoring textbooks or other works?
If you write software for a living, you can't go home and sell your days coding, it belongs to your employer.
Au contraire. In fact, on a number of occasions, I've negotiated precisely that arrangement and refused to sign employment agreements that didn't respect some semblance of it.
Do you know what a free market is?
Let's take a step back for a minute. Imagine that I don't. Explain to me what a competitive free market it is, and how the competition within it produces companies that provide effective services to their customers.
... because that's the thing about a good economic deal, at a certain point, if it's good enough, it can overcome your feelings and prejudices.
So, yeah, I've been thinking that maybe some of Verizon's offerings were good enough that relative to the extra amount of evil I'd have to put up with from them, it might be worthwhile.
Thankfully, though, every time I think about this, Verizon decides to up the level of evil or decrease the potential of the economic bargain.
Thanks Verizon: you and I both know it'd never work. It's good to remind each other.