IANAL, but I believe in the US they don't have to prove that the second group copied them, although that's obviously an open and shut case. I'm not sure of all the ins and outs of this, but if the first group thought of the idea first AND had a working implementation before the second group filed their patent application, then in the US at least they'd be considered the inventors. The burden of proof that they had a working implementation would be on them, but that wouldn't be a problem for the researchers.
The problem seems to be that this is sufficiently complicated and costly that the institution the inventors are currently working for doesn't have much financial incentive to fight this. After all, what do they get if they win? Another arrow for their IP quiver? Nope. They've just done a service to humanity, not their bottom line.
The probability of a scientists making a significant discovery in his lab isn't much better than zero. The Flemming "Gee this moldy stuff might kill germs" is not even a once-in-a-career moment for the vast majority of scientists. Scientists work in a community, and the majority of them advance that community by applying tiny deltas to the scientific consensus.
I think if you want to be an amateur scientist, you might find it most rewarding to choose a branch of science with an enthusiastic amateur community, such as comet hunting or meteorology.
Ok maybe so, but what is snobbish about a souffle? They're amazing right out of the oven but turn into a rubbery omelet ten minutes later. They aren't complicated to make; I taught my elementary school kids to make them. The reason many people have never had them is because timing is critical. You can't keep them under a heat lamp.
Or take pizza. Most of us are accustomed to eating lukewarm pizza, but it really is much better right out of the oven.
Ever eat gravy on a slice of roast beef? Isn't hot gravy much better than room temperature gravy? Gravy, by the way, is a sauce, and many sauces, particularly the fat based ones, go from wonderful at serving temperature to nasty at room temperature.
I'd have no problem with a Republican president backing standards that correspond to standards of historical scholarship.
The important thing is to educate, not indoctrinate. People complain about "revisionist history" -- usually conservatives, but in this particular fight it's liberals too. It's a stupid complaint. Revision is the very soul of history as a scholarly pursuit.
It's a fool's errand anyway. Intellects that aren't challenged with specious ideas have no defense against them. Instead of protecting students from opinions you don't like, it's better to have them exposed, but learn how to question. Of course you'll end up with a generation of students who don't believe what you believe, but if you want to raise a generation that is better educated than yours, that's inevitable.
Honestly people, there are more than enough valid reasons to dislike MS without adding imaginary ones.
Actually, you have that backwards. Once you have enough real reasons to hate Microsoft, there's really no practical purpose served by avoiding imaginary ones.
For example: I hate the Microsoft Office UI team because it is my belief they sodomize puppies. It's a job perk for them. Now should it prove that this particular belief is not entirely factual, there's no harm done. It wouldn't really change how I feel about them.
The way that would be done is to drill another hole, insert the nuke, then ignite it, crushing the troublesome well. Russia has done this with land-based wells and it works.
The problem is that the troublesome well is 1500m deep. Once you'd done the engineering to make nuking the well possible, there are probably other less drastic means that you could have employed with your time and money.
Re:Asynchronous and self modifying code.
on
Programming Clojure
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· Score: 1
Permitting self-modifying code and requiring that are two different things entirely.
The possibility of self-modifying code is entailed in a language which allows code as data. That's not tantamount to self-modifying code either. Compilers take code as data and generate code as output but they aren't self-modifying.
Data formats are essentially special purpose programming languages. That's clear to anyone who's ever looked at a postscript file, but it's also true of things like word processing formats. The distinction between code and data is arbitrary. Code is data at the machine language level.
Now it's true that *usually* self-modifying code is a bad idea. But the design philosophy that it's important to prevent programmers from deliberately making bad design choices is broken.
But a reasonably superficial examination of the passenger would make it extremely unlikely that a terrorist could blow up a plane with stuff he's carrying on his person.
If you posit an explosive powerful enough that 50cc of the stuff can blow up a plane from inside the passenger cabin, then your fancy scanners won't catch it anyway. The terrorist could tape it behind his scrotum, or carry it on-board in a suppository.
This is basic engineering. There's no point in making one part of a system perfect if the rest of the system is far from perfect.
Oh, you can get a heavier aircraft aloft that way, but the wings in a biplane don't give anything like twice the lift. The main reason for the biplane design is not lift, but strength. If you're building a wing out of fabric covered lumber you want to make that sucker stiff so it doesn't bend and snap. That means big, heavy pieces if you have a monoplane. In the biplane the wings, struts and wires form a kind of truss that is lighter for the same stiffness.
It's a radically different design that can't be compared piece-wise that way to conventional designs. You might as well say, "That sucker will never fly, look how tiny the wings are!" Yes, a conventional design with wings like that literally wouldn't get off the ground, but that's irrelevant because in *this* design the body provides lift, which it doesn't in a conventional design.
I suspect that putting the engines literally behind the fuselage reduces turbulence, which would give you radically better aerodynamics. I'm also guessing that for some reason that configuration limits optimum cruising speed. It's a trade-off -- an entirely new kind of trade-off you don't see by tweaking minor details of a conventional design.
I'm also sure that the designers checked all the kinds of things like weight differences that you could do on the back of an envelope. I doubt they overlooked the detail of the fuselage's weight.
one, the settlers left the US to start new lives, literally in another country.
You have to be careful about such generalizations. All of them? Clearly not. Some of them? Obviously. A majority? Probably but if so, not overwhelmingly so.
Sam Houston, the first president of the Texas Republic, favored annexation. The Republic declared its independence on March 2, 1836. The Republic put its first proposal for annexation to Washington in August 1837. The US was not ready for war, and so did not accept and the proposal was rescinded the following year by an anti-annexation Texas President. Five years later an American President came out in favor of annexation and Texas *immediately* responded with a proposal. This was initially rejected by the US Senate by a Whig bloc that opposed adding more Democratic seats to Congress.
In 1845 a new US Congress passed a joint resolution in favor of Annexation and the Texas legislature approved almost unanimously (only one dissent). The annexation ordnance was put to the popular vote and won easily.
I don't want to oversimplify this. Certainly some people probably wanted to live in an independent republic. But there were also people all along who wanted annexation.
Now look at this from the Mexican standpoint. They invited Americans to come live under Mexican law. The American "Texians" flouted that law (of course the Texians had legitimate grievances). From the Louisiana Purchase on, the U.S. Government had been trying to get control of Texas, the only issue was one of means... the U.S. preferred to buy Texas. As soon as the Texians obtained military control of their territory they requested annexation, but the US administration was dealing with the Panic of 1837 and could not afford a war. The instant the U.S. Government was ready for annexation, the Texians wasted no time in accepting. Then the US followed up with a war of annexation to extend their new "possessions" all the way to the Pacific, forcing Mexico to sell all its coastal possessions north of Tijuana.
If you were at all inclined to sympathize with Mexico, the whole business can be painted in an extremely tawdry light.
As for the Indians who lived in Texas... well, it's a bit late to bring their interests into the debate, unless you are talking about some kind of reparations. "The Mexicans were worse than we were" is not a reasonable basis for any legal claim to Indian land.
Just to play devil's advocate for a moment, it is potentially a kind of crime against property, and none of the commonly used words for crimes against property are any more precise than "steal". Therefore a person fluent in English but not law would naturally refer to a crime against property as either "stealing" or "trespassing". Your choice of words depends on the position you want to argue. "Steal" says too much; "trespass" says too little.
Yes, it is true that you don't deprive the copyright owner of some tangible thing when you make an illegal copy. But that doesn't mean you don't deprive him of something. Furthermore the things you do with the unauthorized copy might deprive the copyright owner in ways that are more enduring than physical theft. If you watch a movie you haven't paid for, the law can't make you unwatch it. If you put the bootleg copy up on P2P, the genie will never be returned to the bottle.
What the article is talking about is the consumer's response to artificial scarcity. But that's what monopolists do to maximize profit, and copyright is a legally mandated monopoly. It is and always has been the intent of copyright to create artificial scarcity.
What has changed is: * The expectations of consumers for ease of use of information have risen as the intrinsic barriers to copying have fallen. * The ability to copyright holders to use technological measures to offer and enforce new kinds of packages of usage rights. * The ability of copyright holders to create new, de facto extra-legal rights for themselves using TPMs. *The absurd lengthening of copyright terms.
Nobody is happy. Despite laws becoming unconscionably imbalanced toward the interests of copyright holders, the ability of copyright holders to protect their interests is precarious. The public, on the other hand, resents the unreasonableness of the restrictions content providers put on their product. This situation encourages a vicious circle, where laws become ever more draconian, and ever more erratically enforce; and users become ever more cavalier toward the law as the law becomes even more unreasonable.
My own sense is that balance could be restored by allowing copyright holders to enjoy their new, extra-legal "rights" but at the cost of copyright term. You want a 100 year copyright term? OK, but you must allow the broadest scope for fair use imaginable. You want to *completely* restrict fair use using TPMs? OK, but you have to put your work into the public domain within five years of publishing.
If people were rational, they'd accept this deal. It maximizes the amount of creative information in circulation, which is the point of copyright. It enables creators to choose a model which will surely capture most of the foreseeable revenues they'd get under a draconian copyright regime, plus gives them access to an expanded public domain.
What does "cleared" mean in this situation? Did the disciplinary body decide the accusations were untrue? Did they decide they were true but did not rise to the level where legal action or official sanctions would be taken? That this was a case of "he said/she said", and that the best they could do is say, "We'll let this go, but we'll keep an eye peeled?"
That said, clearly there are usable, practical subsets of the HTML spec that are supported by multiple HTML rendering projects. The question with HTML is whether the *other stuff in there* should be in there.
It's not a straightforward question. Look at SQL -- a language in near universal use in relational databases but with a relatively weak standard. The SQL standard is next to worthless for the things you want a standard for. You can't take an application that uses SQL to talk to its datastore and just point it at a different vendor's database. You need some kind of database abstraction framework that allows you to rewrite (!!!) every dang query in each vendor's SQL dialect without dealing with the mess at the application design level. Oh, there's other benefits to that of course, but we've lived with that situation so long it's easy to lose sight of the fact that the most pressing need for those frameworks is that the standard is too weak to address user needs.
So given my druthers, I'll take a standard like HTML that is rough on vendors over a standard like SQL that is rough on users.
I'd say that a word processing format standard that doesn't include revision tracking is too weak to do one of the fundamental things a reasonable person would expect from such a standard: allow users working with different word processors to collaborate on document creation. If it's just document *rendering* we care about, then we could just pass around postscript files, or some reasonably secure subset of PDF.
But there isn't. That demonstrates that the real policy aim isn't protecting American jobs or securing American borders. It's the kind of problem that both sides perpetuate because they both profit from it.
Yes, most of NASAs contractors also contract for the military because it just makes sense, but that does not make NASA a military organization.
But it does make NASA part of the military/industrial complex that Eisenhower warned us about in his farewell address:
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.
Dwight D. Eisenhower, January 17, 1961
That's where the phrase actually comes from. It's not some liberal talking point. This case is a exactly the kind of thing Eisenhower was talking about, a cozy relationship between military bureaucrats whose career depends on certain programs with contractors who profit by those programs and the Congressmen they have in their pockets.
Actually, both parties have a Terry Pratchett-esque gentleman's agreement on the "illegal immigration" issue. The Republicans agree to keep keep cheap foreign labor illegal so long as the Democrats don't try to enforce the law. The Democrats agree to let cheap foreign labor into the country so long as we pretend they aren't supposed to be here.
The Republicans then rail against the illegality of the cheap labor they crave. The Democrats rail against the inhumanity of the Republicans toward "undocumented workers", while at the same time being complicit in the legal fiction that strips those workers of basic legal protections.
The poor bastards living in a hole in the friggin' ground with no running water just want a roof of their family's head and drinking water that won't kill their children. They want to work create wealth, and better their lives. And they know blatant hypocrisy when they see it.
If you want to secure the border, there's two things that you have to do. First, you have to increase the number of legal immigrants so they can provide the cheap labor which our economy is dependent upon. The second is you have to support economic development in the places they come from. You can't keep them out with walls or border patrols, much less laws written down in books they'll never read. You've got to reduce the force that drives them over the border, then reduce the economic incentive for subverting the border.
But nobody inside really wants to fix it. It's so hard to establish a career there. The tenure system is a bit like medical residency. If you look at the practice, it's frankly nuts,but there are two kinds of people in the system: those who are going through it right now and are trying to keep their head above the water, and those who've made it out of the water and don't want to rock the boat.
The fundamental problem is with the idea that really drives the acquisition of degrees as a kind of vocational qualification: the notion that you can certify a person's intellect at some point in time, and then it never needs to be upgraded. That idea may have worked in late medieval times. Gentlemen to University and received a pretty solid sample of every branch of knowledge there was. After the invention of movable type, they could purchase a library for themselves on the way home that also represented a majority of all the books that were worth having. Thirty years later they could bequeath that library to their descendants, who need add no more than a few new volumes to bring it up to date.
Even if such a library could be amassed today, much of it would need replacing every decade, if not every year. The same goes for the information inside the young baccalaureate's head.
A four year degree with a liberal smattering of liberal arts as a lifelong job credential makes zero sense today. And all those 20 year old kids taking classes in literature, politics and psychology to fulfill their distribution requirements... well sure, they get some benefit from that, but how much more benefit would they get if they took those classes when they were 30, or 40? And as for the vocational aspects of a degree, even an engineering degree is only the start of your education.
If I were philosopher king, I'd ban the Bachelor's degree. Instead, I'd send students for an Associate's and then a certificate, renewed every five years, of lifelong learning. A BS takes something like 128 Credit Hours. I"d let them out after 64 and require 16 credits every five years for the rest of your life to keep your lifelong learner's accreditation current. That system would be cheaper and more effective.
What you don't say is that it is just plain stupid for a university to modify GPL'd code but to forbid the person doing the modification to cooperate with the community maintaining that code. Not illegal. Not immoral. Just plain dumb as in against their obvious self-interest.
If this were twenty years ago, they might be a point. What is the GPL thing? What does it legally obligate us to do? What liability does it open us up to? But it's 2010, and bolder organizations (including many universities) have benefited from cooperation on on GPL'd projects.
If this were a commercial company where priority #1 was simply swiping the lunch money of competitors working in the same market space, there'd be a point. We can't let those guys get our super-duper modifications, that's our competitive advantage. But it's not a commercial company we're talking about. It's a university. Even though universities do of course compete for funding and students, it's not supposed to be anything that allows you to stick a thumb in the other guy's eye is a good thing. You don't misrepresent other scholars' work or tear down their reputation simply because it is convenient to you. You don't hold your own work closely to your vest, restricting the academic freedom of your own community. In any case, I've seldom seem modifications so super-duper that they are really worth protecting this way -- which is why commercial outfits can and do cooperate with other companies in a plus sum fashion on this kind of thing. If you're looking to a near term exit strategy, maybe selling yourself to a VC or a bigger fish, it's understandable that you might look at monetizing everything you can think of. But that doesn't apply to the university.
Contributing and cooperating with the open source/free software community is the course of action that is most in the university's self-interest, the one that gives the greatest bang for the buck. It's also the choice most consistent with a university's values of scholarship, openness, and academic freedom.
Perhaps, but I'd guess he's probably not enough an idiot that he makes arguments about the change in the distribution remaining oil reserves with a plot of gas production for a single year.
That takes a special brand of idiocy... one that probably requires a new word.
Slashdot Mirror
Numbers tasty? Not until you sauce them with dimensions.
I prefer to think of "4.8 million person-hours of productivity wasted," as "4.8 million person-hours of delight created."
IANAL, but I believe in the US they don't have to prove that the second group copied them, although that's obviously an open and shut case. I'm not sure of all the ins and outs of this, but if the first group thought of the idea first AND had a working implementation before the second group filed their patent application, then in the US at least they'd be considered the inventors. The burden of proof that they had a working implementation would be on them, but that wouldn't be a problem for the researchers.
The problem seems to be that this is sufficiently complicated and costly that the institution the inventors are currently working for doesn't have much financial incentive to fight this. After all, what do they get if they win? Another arrow for their IP quiver? Nope. They've just done a service to humanity, not their bottom line.
The probability of a scientists making a significant discovery in his lab isn't much better than zero. The Flemming "Gee this moldy stuff might kill germs" is not even a once-in-a-career moment for the vast majority of scientists. Scientists work in a community, and the majority of them advance that community by applying tiny deltas to the scientific consensus.
I think if you want to be an amateur scientist, you might find it most rewarding to choose a branch of science with an enthusiastic amateur community, such as comet hunting or meteorology.
Ok maybe so, but what is snobbish about a souffle? They're amazing right out of the oven but turn into a rubbery omelet ten minutes later. They aren't complicated to make; I taught my elementary school kids to make them. The reason many people have never had them is because timing is critical. You can't keep them under a heat lamp.
Or take pizza. Most of us are accustomed to eating lukewarm pizza, but it really is much better right out of the oven.
Ever eat gravy on a slice of roast beef? Isn't hot gravy much better than room temperature gravy? Gravy, by the way, is a sauce, and many sauces, particularly the fat based ones, go from wonderful at serving temperature to nasty at room temperature.
I'd have no problem with a Republican president backing standards that correspond to standards of historical scholarship.
The important thing is to educate, not indoctrinate. People complain about "revisionist history" -- usually conservatives, but in this particular fight it's liberals too. It's a stupid complaint. Revision is the very soul of history as a scholarly pursuit.
It's a fool's errand anyway. Intellects that aren't challenged with specious ideas have no defense against them. Instead of protecting students from opinions you don't like, it's better to have them exposed, but learn how to question. Of course you'll end up with a generation of students who don't believe what you believe, but if you want to raise a generation that is better educated than yours, that's inevitable.
Honestly people, there are more than enough valid reasons to dislike MS without adding imaginary ones.
Actually, you have that backwards. Once you have enough real reasons to hate Microsoft, there's really no practical purpose served by avoiding imaginary ones.
For example: I hate the Microsoft Office UI team because it is my belief they sodomize puppies. It's a job perk for them. Now should it prove that this particular belief is not entirely factual, there's no harm done. It wouldn't really change how I feel about them.
I'm an American; I need that expressed in football fields.
Oddly enough, so does the rest of the world, although their "football field" has an area of 71.4 ares instead of 53.51 ares.
One that, in Winston Churchill's immortal words, runs on "flogging, grog and sodomy." ... No, wait. That was the Royal Navy.
The way that would be done is to drill another hole, insert the nuke, then ignite it, crushing the troublesome well. Russia has done this with land-based wells and it works.
The problem is that the troublesome well is 1500m deep. Once you'd done the engineering to make nuking the well possible, there are probably other less drastic means that you could have employed with your time and money.
Permitting self-modifying code and requiring that are two different things entirely.
The possibility of self-modifying code is entailed in a language which allows code as data. That's not tantamount to self-modifying code either. Compilers take code as data and generate code as output but they aren't self-modifying.
Data formats are essentially special purpose programming languages. That's clear to anyone who's ever looked at a postscript file, but it's also true of things like word processing formats. The distinction between code and data is arbitrary. Code is data at the machine language level.
Now it's true that *usually* self-modifying code is a bad idea. But the design philosophy that it's important to prevent programmers from deliberately making bad design choices is broken.
But a reasonably superficial examination of the passenger would make it extremely unlikely that a terrorist could blow up a plane with stuff he's carrying on his person.
If you posit an explosive powerful enough that 50cc of the stuff can blow up a plane from inside the passenger cabin, then your fancy scanners won't catch it anyway. The terrorist could tape it behind his scrotum, or carry it on-board in a suppository.
This is basic engineering. There's no point in making one part of a system perfect if the rest of the system is far from perfect.
Oh, you can get a heavier aircraft aloft that way, but the wings in a biplane don't give anything like twice the lift. The main reason for the biplane design is not lift, but strength. If you're building a wing out of fabric covered lumber you want to make that sucker stiff so it doesn't bend and snap. That means big, heavy pieces if you have a monoplane. In the biplane the wings, struts and wires form a kind of truss that is lighter for the same stiffness.
It's a radically different design that can't be compared piece-wise that way to conventional designs. You might as well say, "That sucker will never fly, look how tiny the wings are!" Yes, a conventional design with wings like that literally wouldn't get off the ground, but that's irrelevant because in *this* design the body provides lift, which it doesn't in a conventional design.
I suspect that putting the engines literally behind the fuselage reduces turbulence, which would give you radically better aerodynamics. I'm also guessing that for some reason that configuration limits optimum cruising speed. It's a trade-off -- an entirely new kind of trade-off you don't see by tweaking minor details of a conventional design.
I'm also sure that the designers checked all the kinds of things like weight differences that you could do on the back of an envelope. I doubt they overlooked the detail of the fuselage's weight.
who's first reaction was to wonder what it might be like to live there, in the cannibal galaxy's nucleus?
one, the settlers left the US to start new lives, literally in another country.
You have to be careful about such generalizations. All of them? Clearly not. Some of them? Obviously. A majority? Probably but if so, not overwhelmingly so.
Sam Houston, the first president of the Texas Republic, favored annexation. The Republic declared its independence on March 2, 1836. The Republic put its first proposal for annexation to Washington in August 1837. The US was not ready for war, and so did not accept and the proposal was rescinded the following year by an anti-annexation Texas President. Five years later an American President came out in favor of annexation and Texas *immediately* responded with a proposal. This was initially rejected by the US Senate by a Whig bloc that opposed adding more Democratic seats to Congress.
In 1845 a new US Congress passed a joint resolution in favor of Annexation and the Texas legislature approved almost unanimously (only one dissent). The annexation ordnance was put to the popular vote and won easily.
I don't want to oversimplify this. Certainly some people probably wanted to live in an independent republic. But there were also people all along who wanted annexation.
Now look at this from the Mexican standpoint. They invited Americans to come live under Mexican law. The American "Texians" flouted that law (of course the Texians had legitimate grievances). From the Louisiana Purchase on, the U.S. Government had been trying to get control of Texas, the only issue was one of means... the U.S. preferred to buy Texas. As soon as the Texians obtained military control of their territory they requested annexation, but the US administration was dealing with the Panic of 1837 and could not afford a war. The instant the U.S. Government was ready for annexation, the Texians wasted no time in accepting. Then the US followed up with a war of annexation to extend their new "possessions" all the way to the Pacific, forcing Mexico to sell all its coastal possessions north of Tijuana.
If you were at all inclined to sympathize with Mexico, the whole business can be painted in an extremely tawdry light.
As for the Indians who lived in Texas ... well, it's a bit late to bring their interests into the debate, unless you are talking about some kind of reparations. "The Mexicans were worse than we were" is not a reasonable basis for any legal claim to Indian land.
Just to play devil's advocate for a moment, it is potentially a kind of crime against property, and none of the commonly used words for crimes against property are any more precise than "steal". Therefore a person fluent in English but not law would naturally refer to a crime against property as either "stealing" or "trespassing". Your choice of words depends on the position you want to argue. "Steal" says too much; "trespass" says too little.
Yes, it is true that you don't deprive the copyright owner of some tangible thing when you make an illegal copy. But that doesn't mean you don't deprive him of something. Furthermore the things you do with the unauthorized copy might deprive the copyright owner in ways that are more enduring than physical theft. If you watch a movie you haven't paid for, the law can't make you unwatch it. If you put the bootleg copy up on P2P, the genie will never be returned to the bottle.
What the article is talking about is the consumer's response to artificial scarcity. But that's what monopolists do to maximize profit, and copyright is a legally mandated monopoly. It is and always has been the intent of copyright to create artificial scarcity.
What has changed is:
* The expectations of consumers for ease of use of information have risen as the intrinsic barriers to copying have fallen.
* The ability to copyright holders to use technological measures to offer and enforce new kinds of packages of usage rights.
* The ability of copyright holders to create new, de facto extra-legal rights for themselves using TPMs.
*The absurd lengthening of copyright terms.
Nobody is happy. Despite laws becoming unconscionably imbalanced toward the interests of copyright holders, the ability of copyright holders to protect their interests is precarious. The public, on the other hand, resents the unreasonableness of the restrictions content providers put on their product. This situation encourages a vicious circle, where laws become ever more draconian, and ever more erratically enforce; and users become ever more cavalier toward the law as the law becomes even more unreasonable.
My own sense is that balance could be restored by allowing copyright holders to enjoy their new, extra-legal "rights" but at the cost of copyright term. You want a 100 year copyright term? OK, but you must allow the broadest scope for fair use imaginable. You want to *completely* restrict fair use using TPMs? OK, but you have to put your work into the public domain within five years of publishing.
If people were rational, they'd accept this deal. It maximizes the amount of creative information in circulation, which is the point of copyright. It enables creators to choose a model which will surely capture most of the foreseeable revenues they'd get under a draconian copyright regime, plus gives them access to an expanded public domain.
What does "cleared" mean in this situation? Did the disciplinary body decide the accusations were untrue? Did they decide they were true but did not rise to the level where legal action or official sanctions would be taken? That this was a case of "he said/she said", and that the best they could do is say, "We'll let this go, but we'll keep an eye peeled?"
You make a very interesting point about HTML.
That said, clearly there are usable, practical subsets of the HTML spec that are supported by multiple HTML rendering projects. The question with HTML is whether the *other stuff in there* should be in there.
It's not a straightforward question. Look at SQL -- a language in near universal use in relational databases but with a relatively weak standard. The SQL standard is next to worthless for the things you want a standard for. You can't take an application that uses SQL to talk to its datastore and just point it at a different vendor's database. You need some kind of database abstraction framework that allows you to rewrite (!!!) every dang query in each vendor's SQL dialect without dealing with the mess at the application design level. Oh, there's other benefits to that of course, but we've lived with that situation so long it's easy to lose sight of the fact that the most pressing need for those frameworks is that the standard is too weak to address user needs.
So given my druthers, I'll take a standard like HTML that is rough on vendors over a standard like SQL that is rough on users.
I'd say that a word processing format standard that doesn't include revision tracking is too weak to do one of the fundamental things a reasonable person would expect from such a standard: allow users working with different word processors to collaborate on document creation. If it's just document *rendering* we care about, then we could just pass around postscript files, or some reasonably secure subset of PDF.
If there were the political will to do that.
But there isn't. That demonstrates that the real policy aim isn't protecting American jobs or securing American borders. It's the kind of problem that both sides perpetuate because they both profit from it.
But it does make NASA part of the military/industrial complex that Eisenhower warned us about in his farewell address:
Dwight D. Eisenhower, January 17, 1961
That's where the phrase actually comes from. It's not some liberal talking point. This case is a exactly the kind of thing Eisenhower was talking about, a cozy relationship between military bureaucrats whose career depends on certain programs with contractors who profit by those programs and the Congressmen they have in their pockets.
Actually, both parties have a Terry Pratchett-esque gentleman's agreement on the "illegal immigration" issue. The Republicans agree to keep keep cheap foreign labor illegal so long as the Democrats don't try to enforce the law. The Democrats agree to let cheap foreign labor into the country so long as we pretend they aren't supposed to be here.
The Republicans then rail against the illegality of the cheap labor they crave. The Democrats rail against the inhumanity of the Republicans toward "undocumented workers", while at the same time being complicit in the legal fiction that strips those workers of basic legal protections.
The poor bastards living in a hole in the friggin' ground with no running water just want a roof of their family's head and drinking water that won't kill their children. They want to work create wealth, and better their lives. And they know blatant hypocrisy when they see it.
If you want to secure the border, there's two things that you have to do. First, you have to increase the number of legal immigrants so they can provide the cheap labor which our economy is dependent upon. The second is you have to support economic development in the places they come from. You can't keep them out with walls or border patrols, much less laws written down in books they'll never read. You've got to reduce the force that drives them over the border, then reduce the economic incentive for subverting the border.
But nobody inside really wants to fix it. It's so hard to establish a career there. The tenure system is a bit like medical residency. If you look at the practice, it's frankly nuts,but there are two kinds of people in the system: those who are going through it right now and are trying to keep their head above the water, and those who've made it out of the water and don't want to rock the boat.
The fundamental problem is with the idea that really drives the acquisition of degrees as a kind of vocational qualification: the notion that you can certify a person's intellect at some point in time, and then it never needs to be upgraded. That idea may have worked in late medieval times. Gentlemen to University and received a pretty solid sample of every branch of knowledge there was. After the invention of movable type, they could purchase a library for themselves on the way home that also represented a majority of all the books that were worth having. Thirty years later they could bequeath that library to their descendants, who need add no more than a few new volumes to bring it up to date.
Even if such a library could be amassed today, much of it would need replacing every decade, if not every year. The same goes for the information inside the young baccalaureate's head.
A four year degree with a liberal smattering of liberal arts as a lifelong job credential makes zero sense today. And all those 20 year old kids taking classes in literature, politics and psychology to fulfill their distribution requirements... well sure, they get some benefit from that, but how much more benefit would they get if they took those classes when they were 30, or 40? And as for the vocational aspects of a degree, even an engineering degree is only the start of your education.
If I were philosopher king, I'd ban the Bachelor's degree. Instead, I'd send students for an Associate's and then a certificate, renewed every five years, of lifelong learning. A BS takes something like 128 Credit Hours. I"d let them out after 64 and require 16 credits every five years for the rest of your life to keep your lifelong learner's accreditation current. That system would be cheaper and more effective.
Yes, but by the time honored catch-22, anyone who'd accept a one way ticket to Mars is not worth risking the price of a ticket on.
You're absolutely right. As far as you go.
What you don't say is that it is just plain stupid for a university to modify GPL'd code but to forbid the person doing the modification to cooperate with the community maintaining that code. Not illegal. Not immoral. Just plain dumb as in against their obvious self-interest.
If this were twenty years ago, they might be a point. What is the GPL thing? What does it legally obligate us to do? What liability does it open us up to? But it's 2010, and bolder organizations (including many universities) have benefited from cooperation on on GPL'd projects.
If this were a commercial company where priority #1 was simply swiping the lunch money of competitors working in the same market space, there'd be a point. We can't let those guys get our super-duper modifications, that's our competitive advantage. But it's not a commercial company we're talking about. It's a university. Even though universities do of course compete for funding and students, it's not supposed to be anything that allows you to stick a thumb in the other guy's eye is a good thing. You don't misrepresent other scholars' work or tear down their reputation simply because it is convenient to you. You don't hold your own work closely to your vest, restricting the academic freedom of your own community. In any case, I've seldom seem modifications so super-duper that they are really worth protecting this way -- which is why commercial outfits can and do cooperate with other companies in a plus sum fashion on this kind of thing. If you're looking to a near term exit strategy, maybe selling yourself to a VC or a bigger fish, it's understandable that you might look at monetizing everything you can think of. But that doesn't apply to the university.
Contributing and cooperating with the open source/free software community is the course of action that is most in the university's self-interest, the one that gives the greatest bang for the buck. It's also the choice most consistent with a university's values of scholarship, openness, and academic freedom.
Perhaps, but I'd guess he's probably not enough an idiot that he makes arguments about the change in the distribution remaining oil reserves with a plot of gas production for a single year.
That takes a special brand of idiocy... one that probably requires a new word.