RJ45 jacks tend to be a lot less secure than wireless. WPA2 is very strong encryption, while most RJ45 connections are completely open an unencrypted. Heck, many wired networks are even configured to automatically give unknown clients an internal IP address in response to a request! It doesn't get much less secure than that.
Neither of those two are in the actual GPL though, they are suggested as "best practices" but not really forced upon you in any way.
The article is about RMS claiming that Linus doesn't love freedom (a favorite accusation of political extremists these days), not necessarily about the text of the GPL. My point was that Stallman has pretty draconian ideas of "freedom" lately, and that Linus actually seems to believe in the spirit of the GPLv2 but not the GPLv3.
In the work place, most people might enter a fake installation code for example, but won't go as far as to apply a crack. If the software requires you to apply a crack to use it, then I think most people at work will get their company to buy it. If it just installs anyway with just a small nag screen or something, then most people won't buy it.
I think this is exactly right. Look at WinZip. I've seen places that use it in a "trial" mode for years. If it disabled itself and required a "crack", companies would just buy it rather than trust a hacker on their company's network.
In many interviews Linus has espoused the advantages of GPLv2 and called it a great license. He likes the idea of sharing code whose modifications others are forced to share back to you. But his religion ends at the code. GPLv2 enforces the sharing and sharing alike of code, so that's the "sweet spot" for Linus.
GPLv3, unlike GPLv2, attempts to dictate what you're allowed to *do* with the code. Like DRM and DCMA, it puts conditions on the hardware and software combinations in which the code can be used. That is where Linus and Stallman diverge: Linus just wants to enforce that the code to be free and GPLv2 already accomplishes this quite well.
What's more, Linus does not support the idea that every developer should sign over all the rights to all their code to Richard Stallman. Stallman wants everyone to assign copyright to FSF and add "or later" to their licensing clause, thus eliminating all rights the developer has over their creation and assigning them to Stallman. If you have that much trust in any one man (and his heirs once he dies), then great. Linus doesn't, and I don't think that's "anti-freedom".
Most of the best American "Software Engineers" I know had surpassed the equivalent of an Associates Degree in Programming by the time they finished High School. Certainly anyone who got a 5 on the AP Computer Science test had already gone beyond "programming". I think anyone graduating with a full Computer Science degree from a reasonable university is going to be able to skip that step. The question remains, of course, how to get that first dose of experience.
My recommendations: 1. Work as an undergrad, even if you don't have to. Find a job in a research lab in your field and get a few projects under your belt. Ideally, get your name attached to a paper or something and attend a conference, but that's icing. Also ideally, find a niche and become one of the best at it. There are a surprising number of under-served niches in the software industry, and a few months of intense work (in addition to a solid grounding in CS) can often make you an "expert", and a year a "guru". Everyone else in industry is very distracted with day-to-day minutiae to do this, so it gets you "in". 2. Actually take a "software engineering" course or two, but don't go into your first interview dictating policy to your new boss. But if asked, have some opinions on the matter. Do you "believe" in CMM? ISO 900x? Six sigma? Software Product Lines? Agile Development? At least be familiar with some of the common arguments for a couple of them. The problem with a "pure" Computer Science (rather than a Software Engineering) is that you know your algorithms and technical approaches, but there will be some doubt about whether you actually know how to ship software. In academia, projects tend to be isolated things that get thrown over the wall and not maintained or brought to a high quality level. 3. Software Engineering hiring is only increasing in my experience, even in the US and even with out-sourcing. I think limiting H-1Bs and revoking them when they lose their job has harmed job availability somewhat (it tends to drive engineers most familiar with US people and processes back overseas, where they start a new out-sourcing business and take jobs with them). But even with our stupid labor laws, the US needs more engineers than ever faster than they're being produced. My advice would be if you're interested and dedicated, do it.
It's like saying that you are stealing from Walmart if you walk into their store and you don't buy anything.
And I could see your argument up until this point. A better analogy would be if Walmart were charged rent based on how many people came into their store, and they made money simply by you looking at their displays. If tons of people then decided to go walk into Walmart with their eyes closed, that would be a silly but much more accurate analogy.
I remember when the www didn't exist, and Gopher was trying to put libraries online, so I'm not some precocious kid and your characterization of anyone who disagrees with you being so is insulting. The web has had banner ads very soon after Mosaic allowed images to be embedded into web pages, so the world you're imagining barely existed for a few months and was untrue during most of the web's explosive growth.
I hoenstly believe that if web ads diappeared today, most of the web would collapse. You'd still have online stores and support sites, but you wouldn't be getting your news, comics, communities, etc. on the web.
Why are these people so intent on advertising to people who are clearly not interested in it. Are they of the belief that those of use who go out of the way to avoid these adverts, will somehow fall under their magic when we see their latest animations?
1. Brand recognition. Study after study has shown that people prefer the familiar, rate the familiar higher quality, and will tend to choose the familiar when making choices. Anything any advertiser can do to make their product seem more familiar to you is a win. You don't have to click on a thing for the advertiser to gain. 2. Nothing is "clear" about who's interested... it's possible the right ad will come up just when you're looking for something, and you'll click it. With a hundred million surfers out there and relatively low advertising costs, you only have to catch a tiny amount to profit. 3. Even if you're not going to buy something, if a brand gets tied to a purpose in your head, you may tell someone else about it if they ask on that topic. "I haven't used anything like that myself, but I seem to recall there's a product named Fruity Oatey Bars" that might do the trick for you." That sort of thing. 4. The whole reason they NEED the animations is because people are not interested in it. If the product was inherently interesting, animation wouldn't really be necessary (how many animated iPhone ads do you see online?) In order to accomplish #1, #2, and #3 above, it needs to draw your eye, and if the product itself is uninteresting the ad needs to compensate for that somehow.
So yes, visiting a site with an ad blocker is stealing. It's more "stealing" than copying MP3s, more "stealing" than violating EULAs, and more "stealing" than unlocking capabilities in a locked device. Why? Because while the costs for the producers don't change much with the other activities, with browsing you're incurring direct costs for the host each time you visit and not fulfilling your half of the bargain in letting them deliver the ads to you.
Those who believe in the ideology behind GPL (ideology which was never hidden by RMS or FSF) will continue to do so, and are pleased with the direction in which v3 is headed.
That's a pretty bold statement that has many outspoken counter-examples. A lot of people believe in GPLv2's software sharing principles but think GPLv3's dictation of hardware usage crossed the line into the realm of DRM and other evils ("You must use your software how we say or you're in violation of our license"). I suspect, if nothing else, GPLv3 will drive a lot of software to remove the "and later" provision from their licenses, since they now realize that including it is essentially handing all control of their software's future to one man who seems to have gotten more extreme in recent years.
Ironically, perhaps, because of a certain commercial 20 years ago, Apple patented a similar technology a few years ago.
Although, the first piece of media that this brought to my mind wasn't 1984, but that news sketch from The Kentucky Fried Movie... I guess I'm not as socially conscious as you.
Instead by using BSD they explicitly give you the legal right and moral OK to not give back.
No, just the legal right. Unlike the GPL, the BSD license does not attempt to dictate morals. It's up to the morals of the users to do with as they please. Now we see what the morals really are of the FSF in that they're eager to take and not share back when they get the opportunity.
I know I'm not new here, but I'd just like to say that the article is self-contradictory. NBC is not pulling anything off of iTunes for months at the earliest, and contract negotiations to keep them on the site continue.
In other words, this article can be summarized as "NBC, looking for some leverage in ongoing negotiations with Apple over iTunes, has called reporters to float the idea of pulling out of iTunes altogether."
Whether this is in violation of the GPLv3, I don't know; I haven't read it.
Since the GPLv3 is essentially a form of DRM, there's almost certainly a way around it. This approach seems reasonable.
What I don't understand is why the GPLv3 didn't have a clause stating, unequivocally, that software released under it cannot implement (encode or decode) Digital Rights Management schemes in any way, shape, or form. If they're going to be against user-hostile software, why not take a stand?
That would be ironic, since the GPLv3 *is* DRM. Or, if you're going to find some hair to split and come up with a reason why Stallman is allowed to tell people what to do with his software but Apple and Microsoft are not allowed to do the same with theirs, you're going to have to come up with a pretty craft definition of DRM.
If a court has ordered you to turn over the information in the RAM of your computer before turning it off, and you willingly turn it off without turning it over, then yes, you're at the very least in contempt of court with other charges like destruction of evidence, hindering prosecution, etc, a possibility... that is what this decision is essentially saying.
So does this mean MS is hoping to splinter FS development, into GPL 2 and 3?
The FOSS community doesn't need Microsoft for that one. The FSF managed it all on their own.
isn't it a forgone conclusion that everything will (some day) be GPL v3?
Definitely not. There are a lot of people, including Linus Torvalds, who consider GPLv2 a much preferable license to GPLv3. In addition, some of these developer did not sign away all their rights to FSF by putting "or later" into their license. So no, all that happened with GPLv3 is that there's now yet another FOSS license that will co-exist with GPLv2, BSD, Apache, and others indefinitely.
I am confused what this means for all those that signed on with MS?
It means nothing. I'm no fan of MS, but the FSF is blowing hot air here. There's no way any judge is going to make anything of the voucher situation with regards to a license that was released after the deal was made... and the FSF has a very good chance of weakening the GPL legally by trying these tricks of legal technicality.
So all in all, the FSF seems to be playing right into Microsoft's hands lately.
The fiber they ran into my basement last week wasn't built 100 years ago, but in the last 5-10 years. Nor was the fiber backbones that were built in the 90's. And getting 20Mb down (and 5 up) to my home is zippy enough that it honestly doesn't matter if it was 5x that rate-- I wouldn't notice, and I'm a geek. (In my area, FiOS 20/5 internet, FiOS tv, and unlimited telephone is $105/mo before taxes).
In short, while it's possible the US had a bit of a bandwidth gap for awhile, it's not huge and it's being rectified. I don't think there's any widespread systematic problem in the US that needs correcting except the expectation that we will always be absolutely first with anything.
Yes, but Sun are the ones to whom Java success matters. If they cared about the Mac platform, they'd make sure the releases at least happened in the same year. Apple has never seemed to care much about Java. The only saving grace is that with the Intel switchover, the Apple JDK will be a lot closer to the Sun JDK. I would expect a rapid dropoff of PowerPC support in future JDK offerings on the Mac, because it will be so much easier to just tweak Sun's code than maintain your own JIT compiler and port to another ISA.
In the latest JDK6 and JDK7 builds, Swing has been replaced with something that doesn't suck in terms of performance and looks halfway decent-- it's called "Swing" and has the same API as Swing. Seriously, there have been vast improvements in Swing lately, from using hardware acceleration to themes that very closely match native L&F's. I'm not sure what year you last tried Swing, but give it another look.
In the latest JDK7 build, they even fixed the "mixing heavyweight and lightweight" z-order problem, so you can mix native AWT widgets into a lightweight Swing UI.
Java still has legs on the desktop. For one thing, the Army's Future Combat System allows Java (but not.NET) development, and the Army is no small customer. That and other vertical solutions will hold the business over until Sun works out the kinks, and then an embedded-to-enterprise cross-platform solution could bring people back over from.NET. Especially once they realize that Mono is not going to cut it for a "cross platform" solution.
The Wright Brothers patented the method of inducing roll by differentially changing the angle of attack of each wing. It was the key invention that made the controllable airplane, and the many requests Curtiss made to the Wrights for details (promising only to use them non-commercially) shows Curtiss deception in that area. I'd call the Wright's patent a great example of when the patent system worked. The Wrights innovated, Curtiss stole, and the Wrights successfully sued them for it in exchange for reasonable licensing fees (they didn't shut down Curtiss aircraft or refuse to license, despite actively building their own aircraft.)
Yeah, Java back in the 90's left a lot to be desired. Luckily, a decade later, those problems are solved. The real problem to applets catching on is the long startup times for Java, and now that's being solved, too. A huge problem with Java on the desktop was the look and feel of the UI and the ability to embed heavyweight native frames into lightweight Swing frames... and now that's been fixed.
All in all, I'd expect a resurgence of Java soon. With Java so ubiquitous on cellphones, Blu-Ray players, middleware servers, etc., I think Sun has a good chance at a counter-attack on the desktop. Sure, Flash took away a lot of their thunder on the web and.NET on the desktop, but Java is becoming competitive in those areas again.
Do you think it makes a difference that you were an elected official-- responsible to the people who elected you-- while this rule regards employees? I know in any private company it seems perfectly reasonable to ask employees not to talk to the press. I'm trying to decide whether it's appropriate to have similar restrictions for any employees of the government.
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RJ45 jacks tend to be a lot less secure than wireless. WPA2 is very strong encryption, while most RJ45 connections are completely open an unencrypted. Heck, many wired networks are even configured to automatically give unknown clients an internal IP address in response to a request! It doesn't get much less secure than that.
Neither of those two are in the actual GPL though, they are suggested as "best practices" but not really forced upon you in any way.
The article is about RMS claiming that Linus doesn't love freedom (a favorite accusation of political extremists these days), not necessarily about the text of the GPL. My point was that Stallman has pretty draconian ideas of "freedom" lately, and that Linus actually seems to believe in the spirit of the GPLv2 but not the GPLv3.
In the work place, most people might enter a fake installation code for example, but won't go as far as to apply a crack. If the software requires you to apply a crack to use it, then I think most people at work will get their company to buy it. If it just installs anyway with just a small nag screen or something, then most people won't buy it.
I think this is exactly right. Look at WinZip. I've seen places that use it in a "trial" mode for years. If it disabled itself and required a "crack", companies would just buy it rather than trust a hacker on their company's network.
In many interviews Linus has espoused the advantages of GPLv2 and called it a great license. He likes the idea of sharing code whose modifications others are forced to share back to you. But his religion ends at the code. GPLv2 enforces the sharing and sharing alike of code, so that's the "sweet spot" for Linus.
GPLv3, unlike GPLv2, attempts to dictate what you're allowed to *do* with the code. Like DRM and DCMA, it puts conditions on the hardware and software combinations in which the code can be used. That is where Linus and Stallman diverge: Linus just wants to enforce that the code to be free and GPLv2 already accomplishes this quite well.
What's more, Linus does not support the idea that every developer should sign over all the rights to all their code to Richard Stallman. Stallman wants everyone to assign copyright to FSF and add "or later" to their licensing clause, thus eliminating all rights the developer has over their creation and assigning them to Stallman. If you have that much trust in any one man (and his heirs once he dies), then great. Linus doesn't, and I don't think that's "anti-freedom".
Most of the best American "Software Engineers" I know had surpassed the equivalent of an Associates Degree in Programming by the time they finished High School. Certainly anyone who got a 5 on the AP Computer Science test had already gone beyond "programming". I think anyone graduating with a full Computer Science degree from a reasonable university is going to be able to skip that step. The question remains, of course, how to get that first dose of experience.
My recommendations:
1. Work as an undergrad, even if you don't have to. Find a job in a research lab in your field and get a few projects under your belt. Ideally, get your name attached to a paper or something and attend a conference, but that's icing. Also ideally, find a niche and become one of the best at it. There are a surprising number of under-served niches in the software industry, and a few months of intense work (in addition to a solid grounding in CS) can often make you an "expert", and a year a "guru". Everyone else in industry is very distracted with day-to-day minutiae to do this, so it gets you "in".
2. Actually take a "software engineering" course or two, but don't go into your first interview dictating policy to your new boss. But if asked, have some opinions on the matter. Do you "believe" in CMM? ISO 900x? Six sigma? Software Product Lines? Agile Development? At least be familiar with some of the common arguments for a couple of them. The problem with a "pure" Computer Science (rather than a Software Engineering) is that you know your algorithms and technical approaches, but there will be some doubt about whether you actually know how to ship software. In academia, projects tend to be isolated things that get thrown over the wall and not maintained or brought to a high quality level.
3. Software Engineering hiring is only increasing in my experience, even in the US and even with out-sourcing. I think limiting H-1Bs and revoking them when they lose their job has harmed job availability somewhat (it tends to drive engineers most familiar with US people and processes back overseas, where they start a new out-sourcing business and take jobs with them). But even with our stupid labor laws, the US needs more engineers than ever faster than they're being produced. My advice would be if you're interested and dedicated, do it.
It's like saying that you are stealing from Walmart if you walk into their store and you don't buy anything.
And I could see your argument up until this point. A better analogy would be if Walmart were charged rent based on how many people came into their store, and they made money simply by you looking at their displays. If tons of people then decided to go walk into Walmart with their eyes closed, that would be a silly but much more accurate analogy.
I remember when the www didn't exist, and Gopher was trying to put libraries online, so I'm not some precocious kid and your characterization of anyone who disagrees with you being so is insulting. The web has had banner ads very soon after Mosaic allowed images to be embedded into web pages, so the world you're imagining barely existed for a few months and was untrue during most of the web's explosive growth.
I hoenstly believe that if web ads diappeared today, most of the web would collapse. You'd still have online stores and support sites, but you wouldn't be getting your news, comics, communities, etc. on the web.
Why are these people so intent on advertising to people who are clearly not interested in it. Are they of the belief that those of use who go out of the way to avoid these adverts, will somehow fall under their magic when we see their latest animations?
1. Brand recognition. Study after study has shown that people prefer the familiar, rate the familiar higher quality, and will tend to choose the familiar when making choices. Anything any advertiser can do to make their product seem more familiar to you is a win. You don't have to click on a thing for the advertiser to gain.
2. Nothing is "clear" about who's interested... it's possible the right ad will come up just when you're looking for something, and you'll click it. With a hundred million surfers out there and relatively low advertising costs, you only have to catch a tiny amount to profit.
3. Even if you're not going to buy something, if a brand gets tied to a purpose in your head, you may tell someone else about it if they ask on that topic. "I haven't used anything like that myself, but I seem to recall there's a product named Fruity Oatey Bars" that might do the trick for you." That sort of thing.
4. The whole reason they NEED the animations is because people are not interested in it. If the product was inherently interesting, animation wouldn't really be necessary (how many animated iPhone ads do you see online?) In order to accomplish #1, #2, and #3 above, it needs to draw your eye, and if the product itself is uninteresting the ad needs to compensate for that somehow.
So yes, visiting a site with an ad blocker is stealing. It's more "stealing" than copying MP3s, more "stealing" than violating EULAs, and more "stealing" than unlocking capabilities in a locked device. Why? Because while the costs for the producers don't change much with the other activities, with browsing you're incurring direct costs for the host each time you visit and not fulfilling your half of the bargain in letting them deliver the ads to you.
If you don't like the ads, don't visit the site.
Those who believe in the ideology behind GPL (ideology which was never hidden by RMS or FSF) will continue to do so, and are pleased with the direction in which v3 is headed.
That's a pretty bold statement that has many outspoken counter-examples. A lot of people believe in GPLv2's software sharing principles but think GPLv3's dictation of hardware usage crossed the line into the realm of DRM and other evils ("You must use your software how we say or you're in violation of our license"). I suspect, if nothing else, GPLv3 will drive a lot of software to remove the "and later" provision from their licenses, since they now realize that including it is essentially handing all control of their software's future to one man who seems to have gotten more extreme in recent years.
"Give me liberty or give me death!" --Patrick Henry
Seriously-- the whole point of our revolution was to trade the "security" of tyranny for freedom.
Yes, but.... he's not there, either.
Ironically, perhaps, because of a certain commercial 20 years ago, Apple patented a similar technology a few years ago.
Although, the first piece of media that this brought to my mind wasn't 1984, but that news sketch from The Kentucky Fried Movie... I guess I'm not as socially conscious as you.
Instead by using BSD they explicitly give you the legal right and moral OK to not give back.
No, just the legal right. Unlike the GPL, the BSD license does not attempt to dictate morals. It's up to the morals of the users to do with as they please. Now we see what the morals really are of the FSF in that they're eager to take and not share back when they get the opportunity.
As long as negotiations are continuing, it's STILL just PR wars and nothing substantiative yet.
Sounds a lot like the AVE Mizar (AKA "The Flying Pinto").
I know I'm not new here, but I'd just like to say that the article is self-contradictory. NBC is not pulling anything off of iTunes for months at the earliest, and contract negotiations to keep them on the site continue.
In other words, this article can be summarized as "NBC, looking for some leverage in ongoing negotiations with Apple over iTunes, has called reporters to float the idea of pulling out of iTunes altogether."
Whether this is in violation of the GPLv3, I don't know; I haven't read it.
Since the GPLv3 is essentially a form of DRM, there's almost certainly a way around it. This approach seems reasonable.
What I don't understand is why the GPLv3 didn't have a clause stating, unequivocally, that software released under it cannot implement (encode or decode) Digital Rights Management schemes in any way, shape, or form. If they're going to be against user-hostile software, why not take a stand?
That would be ironic, since the GPLv3 *is* DRM. Or, if you're going to find some hair to split and come up with a reason why Stallman is allowed to tell people what to do with his software but Apple and Microsoft are not allowed to do the same with theirs, you're going to have to come up with a pretty craft definition of DRM.
If a court has ordered you to turn over the information in the RAM of your computer before turning it off, and you willingly turn it off without turning it over, then yes, you're at the very least in contempt of court with other charges like destruction of evidence, hindering prosecution, etc, a possibility... that is what this decision is essentially saying.
So does this mean MS is hoping to splinter FS development, into GPL 2 and 3?
The FOSS community doesn't need Microsoft for that one. The FSF managed it all on their own.
isn't it a forgone conclusion that everything will (some day) be GPL v3?
Definitely not. There are a lot of people, including Linus Torvalds, who consider GPLv2 a much preferable license to GPLv3. In addition, some of these developer did not sign away all their rights to FSF by putting "or later" into their license. So no, all that happened with GPLv3 is that there's now yet another FOSS license that will co-exist with GPLv2, BSD, Apache, and others indefinitely.
I am confused what this means for all those that signed on with MS?
It means nothing. I'm no fan of MS, but the FSF is blowing hot air here. There's no way any judge is going to make anything of the voucher situation with regards to a license that was released after the deal was made... and the FSF has a very good chance of weakening the GPL legally by trying these tricks of legal technicality.
So all in all, the FSF seems to be playing right into Microsoft's hands lately.
The fiber they ran into my basement last week wasn't built 100 years ago, but in the last 5-10 years. Nor was the fiber backbones that were built in the 90's. And getting 20Mb down (and 5 up) to my home is zippy enough that it honestly doesn't matter if it was 5x that rate-- I wouldn't notice, and I'm a geek. (In my area, FiOS 20/5 internet, FiOS tv, and unlimited telephone is $105/mo before taxes).
In short, while it's possible the US had a bit of a bandwidth gap for awhile, it's not huge and it's being rectified. I don't think there's any widespread systematic problem in the US that needs correcting except the expectation that we will always be absolutely first with anything.
Now a cellphone gap, that's another story...
Yes, but Sun are the ones to whom Java success matters. If they cared about the Mac platform, they'd make sure the releases at least happened in the same year. Apple has never seemed to care much about Java. The only saving grace is that with the Intel switchover, the Apple JDK will be a lot closer to the Sun JDK. I would expect a rapid dropoff of PowerPC support in future JDK offerings on the Mac, because it will be so much easier to just tweak Sun's code than maintain your own JIT compiler and port to another ISA.
In the latest JDK6 and JDK7 builds, Swing has been replaced with something that doesn't suck in terms of performance and looks halfway decent-- it's called "Swing" and has the same API as Swing. Seriously, there have been vast improvements in Swing lately, from using hardware acceleration to themes that very closely match native L&F's. I'm not sure what year you last tried Swing, but give it another look.
In the latest JDK7 build, they even fixed the "mixing heavyweight and lightweight" z-order problem, so you can mix native AWT widgets into a lightweight Swing UI.
Java still has legs on the desktop. For one thing, the Army's Future Combat System allows Java (but not .NET) development, and the Army is no small customer. That and other vertical solutions will hold the business over until Sun works out the kinks, and then an embedded-to-enterprise cross-platform solution could bring people back over from .NET. Especially once they realize that Mono is not going to cut it for a "cross platform" solution.
The Wright Brothers patented the method of inducing roll by differentially changing the angle of attack of each wing. It was the key invention that made the controllable airplane, and the many requests Curtiss made to the Wrights for details (promising only to use them non-commercially) shows Curtiss deception in that area. I'd call the Wright's patent a great example of when the patent system worked. The Wrights innovated, Curtiss stole, and the Wrights successfully sued them for it in exchange for reasonable licensing fees (they didn't shut down Curtiss aircraft or refuse to license, despite actively building their own aircraft.)
Yeah, Java back in the 90's left a lot to be desired. Luckily, a decade later, those problems are solved. The real problem to applets catching on is the long startup times for Java, and now that's being solved, too. A huge problem with Java on the desktop was the look and feel of the UI and the ability to embed heavyweight native frames into lightweight Swing frames... and now that's been fixed.
.NET on the desktop, but Java is becoming competitive in those areas again.
All in all, I'd expect a resurgence of Java soon. With Java so ubiquitous on cellphones, Blu-Ray players, middleware servers, etc., I think Sun has a good chance at a counter-attack on the desktop. Sure, Flash took away a lot of their thunder on the web and
Do you think it makes a difference that you were an elected official-- responsible to the people who elected you-- while this rule regards employees? I know in any private company it seems perfectly reasonable to ask employees not to talk to the press. I'm trying to decide whether it's appropriate to have similar restrictions for any employees of the government.