Oh yeah; it was his father Prescott who was the Senator. George H. W. was a Congressman (and UN Ambassador and CIA Director among other offices).
I'd think the point still stands: George W Bush, as the son of a Congressman and granson of a Senator (and scion of one of America's wealthier families) is the sort of person who doesn't need to ask for favors. He gets them without asking. When he claims that he never got any special treatment, he is likely telling the truth as he sees it. He could easily be blissfully unaware of such things.
Happy to help
Happy to correct my error. At least, I'm probably a lot happier than Dan Rather is right now.;-)
You can't apply one standard to the group you agree with, and then apply another standard to those you don't. That's just hypocrisy.
AKA "Politics As Usual".;-)
Consider, for example, those doctored photos showing John Kerry and Jane Fonda on the same stage. When people with a bit of photo experience pointed out the evidence that they were forgeries, the media just chuckled and went off on the next goose chase. No agonized re-examinations, no discussions of ethics. Just "Oops" and a quick change of subject.
We do know the Bush was discharged normally, which suggests strongly that even if he did miss a few sessions it wasn't enough to do something back then when he was a nobody.
Ummm, at the time in question, George W Bush was the son of a very wealthy senator. That's hardly a "nobody". He was exactly the sort of person who routinely gets special treatment without needing to ask.
Of course if you're also super-wealthy, you might consider him an ordinary person. But if so, how did you wander onto slashdot?;-)
Damn; you beat me to it. But I suppose this is an obvious "beowulf" topic.
Really, though, I wonder if this might be a practical approach. Modify a few of these little monsters to install a BIOS-like package that bootstraps a stripped-down linux kernel. Include wine or lindows^H^H^H^Hspire or whatever so that the "victim" will see their Windows apps still working. Have the kernel incorporate itself into a growing beowulf cluster whose task is primarily to run a few tasks that protect against new malware.
I wonder how long it would take for the security crowd to discover what had been done? Would they try to kill this "cluster"? Or would they take the sensible approach of quietly adding to its defense capabilities? And eventually pushing for incorporation of all Windows boxes into such a cluster...
As near as I can tell from the various reports, that's essentially true. Except that the pointing and working out signs happened mostly at the school. The kids made signs to each other and with the school personnel, and worked out some signs with common meaning. It wasn't entirely the kids' work, because their teachers contributed to the basic signs. The story seems to be mostly about the way that the kids (with apparently little input from the teachers) worked out an increasingly sophisticated syntax and a growing vocabulary of non-obvious and more efficient signs.
Of course, this had been predicted by lots of linguists' theories. And there have been similar developments before. It's scientifically interesting because it is a test that can discriminate between a number of theories. And it's always nice if a supposedly scientific theory can be tested.
This phenomenon is so common that such languages have a name: Creole.
It's true that these kids' language is going through the usual creolization process. But that's not the significant part of the story. The really interesting part is that these were children with no language at all, and they've invented one on their own.
This is a major nail in the coffin of the old "tabula rasa" concept. It's good supporting evidence to the conjecture that humans are born with a builtin competency for language. They don't have to be taught language by someone else.
Of course, it helps a lot if you can pick up a language from the environment. It has taken these kids several generations to develop a full language, and the first generation aren't particularly competent communicators. This is also support for what in the past has been mostly conjecture.
Some linguists have lamented the fact that experimentally raising a group of children without exposure to language would be obviously unethical. But the experiment has been done anyway, by accident, and apparently with little if any interference from adults. So it's useful as a sort of "natural experiment".
It'll be interesting to read the debates that are sure to follow.
And in any case, MS cares about people only when they are able to pay.
Actually, this isn't strictly true. There have been a number of stories lately about MS being very casual about the ripoffs of their software that are being sold in poorer parts of the world. They understand that 1) They can't make money there right now anyway, so it doesn't much matter; and 2) Some of those people will have money eventually, and it's best to get them used to thinking "Microsoft" right now.
It's similar to the logic of supplying schools below cost. Yes, you lose money now, but you want those kids to be familiar with your brand name when they grow up and have purchasing power.
It's especially valuable to get your brand into the minds of people while they are young and/or inexperienced and impressionable. If you have to spend a bit of money to do this, well, marketing always costs money. If it pays off in future purchases, it's not a loss.
Hmmm... Moderated as "insightful"... I thought this was obviously intended as humor. So where are the moderators that know a bit of the history of this topic?
I recall back when WMP (Windows Media Player) first came out, and the reviewers all mentioned that, after testing it, they found that all of their other audio software was disabled. Rebooting didn't help; they had to re-install their other audio packages. And they couldn't fully uninstall WMP. And whenever any part of it got triggered, all their other audio software died again.
During the trial, I kept watching to see when this would be entered as evidence. Maybe I missed something, but I never read about it. And today, it's pretty much the same. WMP seems to have a list of approved software packages, and it does a search-and-destroy for anything using the audio hardware without being on the list.
I know a number of people trying to write high-quality audio and video software who are getting rather depressed with the situation. They slowly face the fact that, unless they "license" their software to Microsoft, their customers will have to repeatedly reinstall after WMP kills it. And the "license" is slowly giving more and more control to Microsoft, with a pittance going to the actual author.
I tell them that this is really just a software version of how the recording industry has worked for decades. The folks at Microsoft have realized that the RIAA gang has gotten away with this sort of thing, demanding that artists sign an "industry standard" contract that gives away all rights to artistic works, in exchange for access to the tightly-controlled distribution channels. Microsoft has figured out that they can do the same thing with software, at least on their own platform. And if they can make their DRM an industry standard, they'll control AV software on all other platforms. This will give them ownership of all that software, and they'll control the terms of the royalty agreement.
In a few cases, I've persuaded a few developers to port their software to OSX and/or linux, where they can still own the rights to their own work. But so far, this doesn't give access to the mass market, only to the "audiophile" and professional customers.
We do have to face the fact that the US system of justice will never stop companies like Microsoft from doing this sort of thing. The legal system supports the RIAA, and it'll support Microsoft, an occasional slap on the wrist notwithstanding.
Heh, heh. Actually, she was probably beheaded mostly for being a rich twit.
But I don't think that her remark is in the same class as "To lead, walk in front". It's more like the advice a few years back that if lettuce wasn't profitable, farmers should grow endive. I.e., she was clueless about how the lower classes lived.
But there are lots of stupid politicians' saying in the record, too.
One good book of quotes, though it's not entirely about politicians' sayings, is "The Experts Speak", by Cerf and Navasky. It belongs on the bookshelf of every cynic.
You cannot lead by following. You cannot be a successful President by letting the polls dictate policy.
Lots of politicians throughout history would disagree with you. One of my favorite quotes from several of them (including Chairman Mao) is "To be a leader, figure out which way the People are going, and walk in front of them."
Looking at the historic record, one could easily infer that several American presidents have followed this advice.
Readers are invited to append quotes from other politicians that are variants of this...
North Korea says they have nuclear weapons.... How are they going to deliver them to US soil? By burro?
More likely by UPS. FedEx might have an office over there, too.
(This is really the main criticism of the "Star Wars" program. Missiles aren't a good way to deliver such things. Commercial freight can do the job a lot better, and anonymously.)
I really don't see the point of this kind of 'interview.'
Well, one thing I found interesting was a few things they gave away in their bland, scripted answers.
For example, in Kerry's answer to questuion 3, we read "... how to deal with these weapons and the often dual-use technology that underpins them." This tells us that at least one person on Kerry's staff understands the concept of a "two-edged sword", and that scientific results often have both good and bad applications.
If you read the Bush answer, you find nothing like this. Rather, you read of "preventing those seeking these weapons from gaining access to their most significant and technicaly challenging components." The implication is that these components are unique to the weapons and void of beneficial applications.
There are a number of other cases like this, where the Bush answer shows a simplistic good-vs-evil view of the world, while the Kerry answer shows a more sophisticated understanding that many things in this world are neither pure good nor pure evil.
A novel concept? WTF? Time sharing was invented back in the 1960's.
Why do we let people get away with claiming that such things are new ideas?
Is there anything new here other than using a fancy video display instead of a text-based terminal? And even then, multiple video cards and/or "thin client"/"X terminal" displays are more than a decade old.
Next someone's going to claim a wild new idea of letting two remote users log in simultaneously.
Sheesh...
Re:Nothing unusual about right/left stance here!
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Is IP Property?
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Heh; yeah. But that's a term that doesn't seem to occur in American political discourse now.
"Authoritarian? What do book writers have to do with it?";-)
That's why I asked about a well-understood term. I get the impression that in American politics, we don't talk about authoritarianism these days. Maybe it's because it hits too close to home for too many people. Or maybe six syllables is too many for the average citizen's brain to deal with at once.
Anyway, it was refreshing to read a comment from someone who sees more than a simple one-dimensional political spectrum. That's also rare.
I've always thought that we should be openly ridiculing people who impose a linear view on politics. But I suppose that would just go over the heads of most people, including media people.
Lemley's distinction also points to the unusual fact that in IP, traditional liberals are often calling for less and less government, while conservatives demand regulation in order to protect their exclusive right to use their intellectual creations.
What a load of bullshit.
Not necessarily. Note the use of lower-case "liberals" and "conservatives". The writer was just using the old-fashioned dictionary definitions. This meant that a "liberal" was one who favored liberty in most things, and you'd expect such a person to favor less governance in most subject areas. Economists still mostly use the term in this sense.
The explanation for "conservatives" is more complex, but it basically used to mean supporting things as they have been in the past, and objecting to newfangled ideas. You don't have to go very far back in most of the world to find absolute monarchy, and (as others have pointed out) our current IP laws arose as royal monopolies that favored chosen individuals by giving them all the income from something (plus taxes for the monarch). The "conservative" under this older sense would indeed favor government regulation of intellectual creations, or of all ideas for that matter. The people who tried Galileo were "conservatives" in this sense.
The problem is that American politics has perverted the meanings of "liberal" and "conservative" beyond recognition, to the point that they are nearly meaningless propaganda terms. But the US isn't the only country where this has happened; it's a standard part of political rhetoric everywhere.
Re:Nothing unusual about right/left stance here!
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Liberals want high self-governance for personal matters but low self-governance for fiscal matters.
Conservatives want low self-governance for personal matters but high self-governance for fiscal matters.
Good summary. And, of course, if there are two variables, each with two values, there are four combinations. One of the others we all know here:
Libertarians want high self-governance for personal matters and high self-governance for fiscal matters.
Is there a well-understood term for the fourth combo, with low self-governance for everything? I suppose "monarchy" or "theocracy" might work, but those have additional connotations, and they aren't all that often used in current American political rhetoric. It does seem to be the direction we're heading right now.
(And who was it that said that eventually everything becomes either forbidden or mandatory?;-)
It's already clear that the main discussion is about legality. So I'll suggest something else: This is incredibly stupid policy for a university that claims to be educating its students.
For a few decades now, I've hung out with the MIT crowd, where there is an interesting contrary policy. For example, MIT's administration has a firm rule of no institute-level firewalls. The air over MIT is purportedly the densest concentration of microwaves on the planet, because the official policy is no restrictions. (There are a lot of jokes about roast squab falling out of the air.;-)
Why do they do this? Simple. They want their graduates to have experience with such things. If you install a firewall, everyone is protected - and nobody but a chosen handful can get any experience. If you control wireless comm links, your pigeons are safe - but your graduates have no experience setting up and managing wireless comm equipment.
This UT policy will just get grins from the MIT (and Cal Tech and...) administrations. So the UT is preventing their students from learning to install and manage wireless comm networks. Wonderful! This makes the job prospects so much better for our graduates. Let's encourage other universities to "protect" their students this way.
I wonder what Texas A&M's policy is? I don't know, but I'll stick my neck out and guess that they encourage their students to learn about setting up wireless comm networks. If not, well, they just dropped from first tier to fifth tier...
It might be interesting to get together a list of such policies at various schools. This could be useful to someone trying to decide where to go to get their tech degree. Anyone know if there's a list like this online somewhere?
Re:the whole IP issue is invalid
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Is IP Property?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Who really loses if they decide to base a new server package on the linux kernel, without credit to the authors?
This contains the critical point that has made the scientific community so successful. In scientific circles, the rules traditionally have been: 1) Nobody owns an idea, and you can use others' ideas freely for any purpose; but 2) You must give credit for ideas that you use.
Now, granted, point 2 isn't always followed. But if you want to continue as a working scientist, your violations should be minimal, and mostly restricted to the "common knowledge" shared by everyone in your field. Appropriating someone else's ideas as your own only works until someone discovers your plagiarism and publishes the fact. You then have to deal with a major hit to your reputation.
One problem with the "IP" issue is that current copyright and patent laws don't work this way. They make it possible for someone to prevent others from using ideas at all (or at an exorbitant cost). And they allow "IP transfer", so that the actual originator of an idea no longer gets any credit.
Until both of these are solved, our IP laws will be a dead weight on innovation (by preventing the free use of others' ideas). And these laws will be used to prevent credit going to the actual creators. This is a social and economic disaster in the making, unlike the rapid advances that the scientific system has created over the past several centuries.
At least with strong IP laws... the little guy will get paid under the law.
Hmm... In my business (software development), this doesn't seem to be the way it works. In my hobby (music), it doesn't seem to work that way, either.
With software, if I want a paycheck, I have to agree that all rights to everything I write belong to my employer. When the job is done (Is it ever done?;-), I'm laid off, the employer sells the software, and I get nothing further. If I don't like this, well, I don't have to work there. But all other employers require the same contract, so if I don't sign over all my rights, I don't have a job.
With music, if I want my work to be heard through any of the traditional distribution media, I must sign an "industry standard" contract that gives all rights to my music to the company that handles the recording and distribution. They claim to pay a royalty, but they deduct all their costs from this, so in fact I can't make any money at all unless I'm one of the top 3 or 4 sellers in the Market. If I don't like this, I don't have to sign, but then nobody will ever hear me.
In both cases, the Internet is the core of a pending big shakeup. With software and music, I can put it online, and then people can use it. I don't make much money this way, but at least someone will see/hear my stuff. And people do tend to want things like hard copy, new features, support, live bands, etc., and if I've made a name for myself, I can charge for these things without sharing the money with a corporation.
We really haven't figured out a good way to reward inventors and innovators. We have figured out a way to allow corporations to claim everything produced by the actual creators. Those corporations understand that it's in their interest to have a few showcase examples of people who "made it big", so they pick a handful of creators to publicly reward. This system fails badly for the overwhelming majority of the creators.
The best solution so far seems to be in the sciences, where we have a tradition that knowledge must be published openly for everyone to use. This doesn't itself give income; it gives reputation. But there is no "Intellectual Property", and the scientific community has developed ways to translate reputation into grants and salaries for most of the people involved. Few people strike it rich, but a lot of people make a good life for themselves and their family.
Music hasn't been able to do this. Software has succeeded to some extent, but there's no job security, most of us work anonymously, and the future doesn't look any better right now.
It's possible that the Internet can materially change this, by making the scientists' approach work for others (such as programmers and musicians). It's also possible that the IP fight will fail, and we'll all have to pull our own music and software off the Net because it's all covered by patents owned by corporations. Or Bill Gates will succeed in owning the Internet, and everything we put there will become his property (as happens now if msn.com is your ISP).
RMS isn't just a famous singer; he has written some excellent documentation for some of his important software. This is a talent that's sorely lacking in the entire software industry.
What they want to do here is exempt unclassified things that do not impact national security. I can't see a legitimate reason for doing that.
It seems self-explanatory when you put it that way. There are some major campaign contributors that are responsible for some of the serious environmental desctruuction (pollution, clearcutting, etc.) that's happening in a lot of the world. They need a way of keeping satellite imagery of their sites out of the hands of people like you and me. The old "national security" excuse doesn't work too well. They need a ruse to block release of photos of those sites, and this sure looks like a way to do it.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh yeah; it was his father Prescott who was the Senator. George H. W. was a Congressman (and UN Ambassador and CIA Director among other offices).
;-)
I'd think the point still stands: George W Bush, as the son of a Congressman and granson of a Senator (and scion of one of America's wealthier families) is the sort of person who doesn't need to ask for favors. He gets them without asking. When he claims that he never got any special treatment, he is likely telling the truth as he sees it. He could easily be blissfully unaware of such things.
Happy to help
Happy to correct my error. At least, I'm probably a lot happier than Dan Rather is right now.
You can't apply one standard to the group you agree with, and then apply another standard to those you don't. That's just hypocrisy.
;-)
AKA "Politics As Usual".
Consider, for example, those doctored photos showing John Kerry and Jane Fonda on the same stage. When people with a bit of photo experience pointed out the evidence that they were forgeries, the media just chuckled and went off on the next goose chase. No agonized re-examinations, no discussions of ethics. Just "Oops" and a quick change of subject.
Probably the best comment on this particular flap is this Stuart Carlson cartoon.
We do know the Bush was discharged normally, which suggests strongly that even if he did miss a few sessions it wasn't enough to do something back then when he was a nobody.
;-)
Ummm, at the time in question, George W Bush was the son of a very wealthy senator. That's hardly a "nobody". He was exactly the sort of person who routinely gets special treatment without needing to ask.
Of course if you're also super-wealthy, you might consider him an ordinary person. But if so, how did you wander onto slashdot?
no "beowulf cluster" joke, this time, hu ?
...
Damn; you beat me to it. But I suppose this is an obvious "beowulf" topic.
Really, though, I wonder if this might be a practical approach. Modify a few of these little monsters to install a BIOS-like package that bootstraps a stripped-down linux kernel. Include wine or lindows^H^H^H^Hspire or whatever so that the "victim" will see their Windows apps still working. Have the kernel incorporate itself into a growing beowulf cluster whose task is primarily to run a few tasks that protect against new malware.
I wonder how long it would take for the security crowd to discover what had been done? Would they try to kill this "cluster"? Or would they take the sensible approach of quietly adding to its defense capabilities? And eventually pushing for incorporation of all Windows boxes into such a cluster
Nah; probably not a chance.
As near as I can tell from the various reports, that's essentially true. Except that the pointing and working out signs happened mostly at the school. The kids made signs to each other and with the school personnel, and worked out some signs with common meaning. It wasn't entirely the kids' work, because their teachers contributed to the basic signs. The story seems to be mostly about the way that the kids (with apparently little input from the teachers) worked out an increasingly sophisticated syntax and a growing vocabulary of non-obvious and more efficient signs.
Of course, this had been predicted by lots of linguists' theories. And there have been similar developments before. It's scientifically interesting because it is a test that can discriminate between a number of theories. And it's always nice if a supposedly scientific theory can be tested.
This phenomenon is so common that such languages have a name: Creole.
It's true that these kids' language is going through the usual creolization process. But that's not the significant part of the story. The really interesting part is that these were children with no language at all, and they've invented one on their own.
This is a major nail in the coffin of the old "tabula rasa" concept. It's good supporting evidence to the conjecture that humans are born with a builtin competency for language. They don't have to be taught language by someone else.
Of course, it helps a lot if you can pick up a language from the environment. It has taken these kids several generations to develop a full language, and the first generation aren't particularly competent communicators. This is also support for what in the past has been mostly conjecture.
Some linguists have lamented the fact that experimentally raising a group of children without exposure to language would be obviously unethical. But the experiment has been done anyway, by accident, and apparently with little if any interference from adults. So it's useful as a sort of "natural experiment".
It'll be interesting to read the debates that are sure to follow.
You mispelled "Diebold".
;-)
And you mispeled "misspelled".
(Actually, I've always thought that "misspell" is a word that should be misspelt.)
And in any case, MS cares about people only when they are able to pay.
Actually, this isn't strictly true. There have been a number of stories lately about MS being very casual about the ripoffs of their software that are being sold in poorer parts of the world. They understand that 1) They can't make money there right now anyway, so it doesn't much matter; and 2) Some of those people will have money eventually, and it's best to get them used to thinking "Microsoft" right now.
It's similar to the logic of supplying schools below cost. Yes, you lose money now, but you want those kids to be familiar with your brand name when they grow up and have purchasing power.
It's especially valuable to get your brand into the minds of people while they are young and/or inexperienced and impressionable. If you have to spend a bit of money to do this, well, marketing always costs money. If it pays off in future purchases, it's not a loss.
Hmmm ... Moderated as "insightful" ... I thought this was obviously intended as humor. So where are the moderators that know a bit of the history of this topic?
I recall back when WMP (Windows Media Player) first came out, and the reviewers all mentioned that, after testing it, they found that all of their other audio software was disabled. Rebooting didn't help; they had to re-install their other audio packages. And they couldn't fully uninstall WMP. And whenever any part of it got triggered, all their other audio software died again.
During the trial, I kept watching to see when this would be entered as evidence. Maybe I missed something, but I never read about it. And today, it's pretty much the same. WMP seems to have a list of approved software packages, and it does a search-and-destroy for anything using the audio hardware without being on the list.
I know a number of people trying to write high-quality audio and video software who are getting rather depressed with the situation. They slowly face the fact that, unless they "license" their software to Microsoft, their customers will have to repeatedly reinstall after WMP kills it. And the "license" is slowly giving more and more control to Microsoft, with a pittance going to the actual author.
I tell them that this is really just a software version of how the recording industry has worked for decades. The folks at Microsoft have realized that the RIAA gang has gotten away with this sort of thing, demanding that artists sign an "industry standard" contract that gives away all rights to artistic works, in exchange for access to the tightly-controlled distribution channels. Microsoft has figured out that they can do the same thing with software, at least on their own platform. And if they can make their DRM an industry standard, they'll control AV software on all other platforms. This will give them ownership of all that software, and they'll control the terms of the royalty agreement.
In a few cases, I've persuaded a few developers to port their software to OSX and/or linux, where they can still own the rights to their own work. But so far, this doesn't give access to the mass market, only to the "audiophile" and professional customers.
We do have to face the fact that the US system of justice will never stop companies like Microsoft from doing this sort of thing. The legal system supports the RIAA, and it'll support Microsoft, an occasional slap on the wrist notwithstanding.
I have nothing against Microsoft. Its their Shitty software I can't stand.
;-)
So you approve of their "marketing" tactics?
I don't think I've ever heard anyone admit that.
(But I'll commend you for at least having a sig that's on topic.
Yeah, but think of how great it'll be for advertisers ...
Heh, heh. Actually, she was probably beheaded mostly for being a rich twit.
But I don't think that her remark is in the same class as "To lead, walk in front". It's more like the advice a few years back that if lettuce wasn't profitable, farmers should grow endive. I.e., she was clueless about how the lower classes lived.
But there are lots of stupid politicians' saying in the record, too.
One good book of quotes, though it's not entirely about politicians' sayings, is "The Experts Speak", by Cerf and Navasky. It belongs on the bookshelf of every cynic.
You cannot lead by following. You cannot be a successful President by letting the polls dictate policy.
...
Lots of politicians throughout history would disagree with you. One of my favorite quotes from several of them (including Chairman Mao) is "To be a leader, figure out which way the People are going, and walk in front of them."
Looking at the historic record, one could easily infer that several American presidents have followed this advice.
Readers are invited to append quotes from other politicians that are variants of this
North Korea says they have nuclear weapons. ... How are they going to deliver them to US soil? By burro?
More likely by UPS. FedEx might have an office over there, too.
(This is really the main criticism of the "Star Wars" program. Missiles aren't a good way to deliver such things. Commercial freight can do the job a lot better, and anonymously.)
I really don't see the point of this kind of 'interview.'
Well, one thing I found interesting was a few things they gave away in their bland, scripted answers.
For example, in Kerry's answer to questuion 3, we read "... how to deal with these weapons and the often dual-use technology that underpins them." This tells us that at least one person on Kerry's staff understands the concept of a "two-edged sword", and that scientific results often have both good and bad applications.
If you read the Bush answer, you find nothing like this. Rather, you read of "preventing those seeking these weapons from gaining access to their most significant and technicaly challenging components." The implication is that these components are unique to the weapons and void of beneficial applications.
There are a number of other cases like this, where the Bush answer shows a simplistic good-vs-evil view of the world, while the Kerry answer shows a more sophisticated understanding that many things in this world are neither pure good nor pure evil.
A novel concept? WTF? Time sharing was invented back in the 1960's.
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Why do we let people get away with claiming that such things are new ideas?
Is there anything new here other than using a fancy video display instead of a text-based terminal? And even then, multiple video cards and/or "thin client"/"X terminal" displays are more than a decade old.
Next someone's going to claim a wild new idea of letting two remote users log in simultaneously.
Sheesh
Heh; yeah. But that's a term that doesn't seem to occur in American political discourse now.
;-)
"Authoritarian? What do book writers have to do with it?"
That's why I asked about a well-understood term. I get the impression that in American politics, we don't talk about authoritarianism these days. Maybe it's because it hits too close to home for too many people. Or maybe six syllables is too many for the average citizen's brain to deal with at once.
Anyway, it was refreshing to read a comment from someone who sees more than a simple one-dimensional political spectrum. That's also rare.
I've always thought that we should be openly ridiculing people who impose a linear view on politics. But I suppose that would just go over the heads of most people, including media people.
What a load of bullshit.
Not necessarily. Note the use of lower-case "liberals" and "conservatives". The writer was just using the old-fashioned dictionary definitions. This meant that a "liberal" was one who favored liberty in most things, and you'd expect such a person to favor less governance in most subject areas. Economists still mostly use the term in this sense.
The explanation for "conservatives" is more complex, but it basically used to mean supporting things as they have been in the past, and objecting to newfangled ideas. You don't have to go very far back in most of the world to find absolute monarchy, and (as others have pointed out) our current IP laws arose as royal monopolies that favored chosen individuals by giving them all the income from something (plus taxes for the monarch). The "conservative" under this older sense would indeed favor government regulation of intellectual creations, or of all ideas for that matter. The people who tried Galileo were "conservatives" in this sense.
The problem is that American politics has perverted the meanings of "liberal" and "conservative" beyond recognition, to the point that they are nearly meaningless propaganda terms. But the US isn't the only country where this has happened; it's a standard part of political rhetoric everywhere.
Liberals want high self-governance for personal matters but low self-governance for fiscal matters.
;-)
Conservatives want low self-governance for personal matters but high self-governance for fiscal matters.
Good summary. And, of course, if there are two variables, each with two values, there are four combinations. One of the others we all know here:
Libertarians want high self-governance for personal matters and high self-governance for fiscal matters.
Is there a well-understood term for the fourth combo, with low self-governance for everything? I suppose "monarchy" or "theocracy" might work, but those have additional connotations, and they aren't all that often used in current American political rhetoric. It does seem to be the direction we're heading right now.
(And who was it that said that eventually everything becomes either forbidden or mandatory?
It's already clear that the main discussion is about legality. So I'll suggest something else: This is incredibly stupid policy for a university that claims to be educating its students.
;-)
...) administrations. So the UT is preventing their students from learning to install and manage wireless comm networks. Wonderful! This makes the job prospects so much better for our graduates. Let's encourage other universities to "protect" their students this way.
...
For a few decades now, I've hung out with the MIT crowd, where there is an interesting contrary policy. For example, MIT's administration has a firm rule of no institute-level firewalls. The air over MIT is purportedly the densest concentration of microwaves on the planet, because the official policy is no restrictions. (There are a lot of jokes about roast squab falling out of the air.
Why do they do this? Simple. They want their graduates to have experience with such things. If you install a firewall, everyone is protected - and nobody but a chosen handful can get any experience. If you control wireless comm links, your pigeons are safe - but your graduates have no experience setting up and managing wireless comm equipment.
This UT policy will just get grins from the MIT (and Cal Tech and
I wonder what Texas A&M's policy is? I don't know, but I'll stick my neck out and guess that they encourage their students to learn about setting up wireless comm networks. If not, well, they just dropped from first tier to fifth tier
It might be interesting to get together a list of such policies at various schools. This could be useful to someone trying to decide where to go to get their tech degree. Anyone know if there's a list like this online somewhere?
Who really loses if they decide to base a new server package on the linux kernel, without credit to the authors?
This contains the critical point that has made the scientific community so successful. In scientific circles, the rules traditionally have been: 1) Nobody owns an idea, and you can use others' ideas freely for any purpose; but 2) You must give credit for ideas that you use.
Now, granted, point 2 isn't always followed. But if you want to continue as a working scientist, your violations should be minimal, and mostly restricted to the "common knowledge" shared by everyone in your field. Appropriating someone else's ideas as your own only works until someone discovers your plagiarism and publishes the fact. You then have to deal with a major hit to your reputation.
One problem with the "IP" issue is that current copyright and patent laws don't work this way. They make it possible for someone to prevent others from using ideas at all (or at an exorbitant cost). And they allow "IP transfer", so that the actual originator of an idea no longer gets any credit.
Until both of these are solved, our IP laws will be a dead weight on innovation (by preventing the free use of others' ideas). And these laws will be used to prevent credit going to the actual creators. This is a social and economic disaster in the making, unlike the rapid advances that the scientific system has created over the past several centuries.
At least with strong IP laws ... the little guy will get paid under the law.
... In my business (software development), this doesn't seem to be the way it works. In my hobby (music), it doesn't seem to work that way, either.
;-), I'm laid off, the employer sells the software, and I get nothing further. If I don't like this, well, I don't have to work there. But all other employers require the same contract, so if I don't sign over all my rights, I don't have a job.
...
Hmm
With software, if I want a paycheck, I have to agree that all rights to everything I write belong to my employer. When the job is done (Is it ever done?
With music, if I want my work to be heard through any of the traditional distribution media, I must sign an "industry standard" contract that gives all rights to my music to the company that handles the recording and distribution. They claim to pay a royalty, but they deduct all their costs from this, so in fact I can't make any money at all unless I'm one of the top 3 or 4 sellers in the Market. If I don't like this, I don't have to sign, but then nobody will ever hear me.
In both cases, the Internet is the core of a pending big shakeup. With software and music, I can put it online, and then people can use it. I don't make much money this way, but at least someone will see/hear my stuff. And people do tend to want things like hard copy, new features, support, live bands, etc., and if I've made a name for myself, I can charge for these things without sharing the money with a corporation.
We really haven't figured out a good way to reward inventors and innovators. We have figured out a way to allow corporations to claim everything produced by the actual creators. Those corporations understand that it's in their interest to have a few showcase examples of people who "made it big", so they pick a handful of creators to publicly reward. This system fails badly for the overwhelming majority of the creators.
The best solution so far seems to be in the sciences, where we have a tradition that knowledge must be published openly for everyone to use. This doesn't itself give income; it gives reputation. But there is no "Intellectual Property", and the scientific community has developed ways to translate reputation into grants and salaries for most of the people involved. Few people strike it rich, but a lot of people make a good life for themselves and their family.
Music hasn't been able to do this. Software has succeeded to some extent, but there's no job security, most of us work anonymously, and the future doesn't look any better right now.
It's possible that the Internet can materially change this, by making the scientists' approach work for others (such as programmers and musicians). It's also possible that the IP fight will fail, and we'll all have to pull our own music and software off the Net because it's all covered by patents owned by corporations. Or Bill Gates will succeed in owning the Internet, and everything we put there will become his property (as happens now if msn.com is your ISP).
Stick around and watch
RMS isn't just a famous singer; he has written some excellent documentation for some of his important software. This is a talent that's sorely lacking in the entire software industry.
I remember noticing that the phrase "War on Poverty" disappeared very quickly and quietly when people started asking "Where do I go to surrender?"
;-).
We need something equally clever for the "War on Terror" (or the "War on Terra" as they pronounce it here in New England
What they want to do here is exempt unclassified things that do not impact national security. I can't see a legitimate reason for doing that.
It seems self-explanatory when you put it that way. There are some major campaign contributors that are responsible for some of the serious environmental desctruuction (pollution, clearcutting, etc.) that's happening in a lot of the world. They need a way of keeping satellite imagery of their sites out of the hands of people like you and me. The old "national security" excuse doesn't work too well. They need a ruse to block release of photos of those sites, and this sure looks like a way to do it.