You're asking for examples that are too specific, for a phenomenon that is too new (GPL has only been at issue, what, 10 years?).
I'm not a legal scholar, but if you insist, I'll dig up at least a few modern, technological cases, where the good guys were slammed.
And I'll tell you what, I admit it, I'm a worrier. Can't help it. I can't even guess what avenue they'll use... maybe by equivocating free software with piracy (it doesn't have to be logical). Maybe they'll decide capitalism is better served, or the economy is better served, when an exception is made specifically for the GPL.
I'll tell you another thing, too. It doesn't hurt to be a worrier, it's a good thing if I'm wrong! And if I'm (somewhat)right, maybe I'll have given just enough warning to those that can figure out the angle that they can do something about it.
Far from saying that you shouldn't teach it (I *have* used it in my adult life, as a non-engineer), I'm saying that we're presented with a more compelling way to engage students while teaching it.
As an engineer, do you still work with your slide rule sitting in front of the drafting table? Could an elementary school afford to put a drafting table in front of every 3rd grader? No.
But with these iBooks, they did. There's gotta be something possible there, that wasn't possible before. Admittedly, I only see this from an IT angle, but damn. Potential was squandered there. Massive potential.
If we discover a tribe of neanderthals still alive on some lonely tropical island, why do I feel that we'd do better airdropping them a crate of laptops, than we would giving the same to a public school? It's positively heartbreaking.
They simply don't know how to use them. Period. Wasn't Henrico, was some other school system, that after giving all the kids laptops, still insisted that the parents buy $100 graphing calculators. Wish I could remember the name, might have read about it here on/. That's the problem I'm trying to point out, that one instance isn't a fluke, practically everything they do with the computers amounts to the same lack of vision.
I love the GPL as much as anyone. I'm just a pessimist, You can't seperate your love of it from your critical thinking skills.
There doesn't have to be an act barring that. Only one bad judicial ruling that holds up. Maybe not even forever, just 6 months or a year. The courts are a seperate universe with their own rules of logic that don't necessarilly overlap our own in any of the important places.
$1000 could have went far for supplementary textbooks, known/proven teaching extras, tutoring for slow students (oh wait, they're all in RPS, not the wealthy burbs) and lord knows what else.
No wonder schools are such a mess. First off, what if you did teach kids to be geeks? What would be so horrible about that? Instead of a boring as shit geometry class that they'll never use (I've use trig twice in my adult life, and the one instance I can remember the details of amounted to trying to figure out if a tree would block my satellite dish) they could have been taught that alongside 3d animation. Why do you need to know all this boring math? Good question, how do you expect to do the cool 3d?
Even the general teaching stuff might have succeeded, but how many of your teachers know how to use computers to full effect? When they write up a handout, is it some static word processor document, or are they doing it as a filemaker pro db, that spits out a randomized (anti-cheating) unique handout for every kid (that can be scored by program when turned in, so that they don't spend 2 hours every night* grading the damn things, so that they have more time for other teaching tasks) ? There must be 1000 little things like that, that I wouldn't even think of unless I was a teacher also, that could have all added up (but that I wouldn't think of if I were only a teacher and not also a geek).
So I suppose all these teachers will have to improve education themselves, and quit looking for magic potions to do the job for them.
I worked on that program too. Let's just say no one had any idea how to use the things, but don't blame it on the laptops.
As $1000 toys, what could they be other than a distraction? And how could they be anything else, when you had them locked down tighter than OS/2 at an ATM kiosk?
These kids sure as hell couldn't learn anything from an IT standpoint, which arguably might be their most useful function. Terminal was locked out, which means all the unix tools, period. Did you bother to have the Apple developer tools on them (forget what Apple calls the damn things, not an OSX geek, I'm just typecast as one). Again, no. So they can't learn programming at all, either.
And while I never stepped foot in a classroom, I put the odds at 100 to 1 that more than one teacher in the entire school district quit giving out paper handouts. And assuming that is the case, you can't even claim to have saved money on xerox costs.
No Macromedia Flash, they weren't going to learn animation.
No 3d tools, they weren't going to learn that.
No MySQL, PostgreSQL, or Filemaker. Guess they weren't going to learn DB skills.
Did you have some G4 towers and firewire camcorders in a lab that I never heard of? No? Then they weren't going to learn video editing.
So, you turn a $1000 laptop into essentially what is a piece of paper and a pencil, and you wonder why it's nothing more than a distraction? Oh, the new Dells won't do any better, btw. Not to mention the virus, spyware and general windows crashiness problems you'll soon have.
It has nothing to do with reason. It has nothing to do with justice. It has nothing to do with quality and or merits. It has nothing to do with "who deserves to win".
If not SCO, then someone else will win. It will be the stupidest ruling in the history of law, no doubt, but somehow it will win. IBM on our side or not. I am not a troll, though it should be obvious I'm far from being an optimist.
I hope I am wrong.
All that said, does it suprise you that with SCO being an embarrassment, that Microsoft would start up a few other legal experiments? They no doubt have people whose sole job is to dream up possible litigation, and we can expect 1-3 of these things per year, until one succeeds or they run out of money. Guess which one will happen first.
Unfortunately, the ID proponents claim the opposite. Most of their evidence for this amounts to propaganda, but still.
Supposedly, atheists are always out there scheming to try and lure people away from God, but the biggest stumbling block had always been the existence of life on the planet. So, the evil Darwin dreams up a scam that shows that said life doesn't even require a creator! Now, if that isn't a case of trying to make the facts fit your pre-determined conclusion...
(Never mind that he seemed more concerned with explaining how some finches would have so much beak shape variation, even though they were very similar otherwise.)
I'd sooner believe he hears an inner voice, than that any such voice is God or an angel. I'm an atheist, mind you, but I tend to refrain from all the psychobabble that would label the guy a schizo that needs to be medicated.
Maybe this inner voice is simply his own intuition... it tells him "You're getting too old for this, something bad will happen if you continue." It draws that conclusion on a premise that is reasonable, and later shows to be true. And if it really is just an expression of his intuition, then hey, that's a pretty amazing thing. It's somewhat understandable how a person might mistake that as something supernatural.
The inner voice also apparently tells some stories that are a little more difficult to swallow, though. Just goes to show, keep your inner voices on a short leash, eh?
If you want an explanation minus a god figure, read some science fiction. Greg Bear is a hell of an author, and he has 2 different books with a similar backplot.
Bacteria evolved, apparently from nothing, but all multicellular life was literally engineered by a planetwide intelligent colony of the germs. That's even used as an explanation why evolution isn't smooth, they get another bright idea, and within a single generation, another species is created.
It's even plausible, in a science fiction sort of way.
We oughtta co-opt the ID bandwagon, and peddle that as the primary theory. They might abandon it rather quickly.
Dismissing Intelligent Design is more like dismissing Crazy Earl's hypothesis that the sky is actually purple but the Trilateral Commission uses hallucigenic radio waves to make people think differently.
Some suppositions (I refuse to call ID a hypothesis, it's not even worthy of that) are just too stupid to waste time on. Besides which, all the more reasonable ID suppositions have absolutely zero to do with god.
Aliens were experimenting 4 billion years ago, in an attempt to explain their own existence? I suppose that might be true.
An superintelligent planetwide colony of bacteria designed human beings to be their spaceships, ala Greg Bear's Vitals/Darwin's Radio? Makes for a nice story at least.
What we need to do, is pollute the ID meme-pool with these 2 ideas. Make it so that ID can't be mentioned without someone bringing those up and saying "Well, God didn't design us though, space aliens did, long ago...". Watch the biblethumpers squirm.
Picking on the wrong people. Unlike Flash, SVG isn't some binary kludge. Which means that by using CSS properly, the browser will actually be able to render non-SVG alternatives with little trouble (not even lame javascript browser/plugin detectors).
Not that I was after a +1, Insightful, but not all insights need be 32 volume, 60,000 page treatises full of words that break the 8 syllable barrier.
And it wasn't flamebait. Maybe that means I think Mutant X was superior, or the person who modded me thought that.
If Whedon was a horror novelist, his works would be Goosebumps instead of Lovecraft.
If he was a fantasy novelist, his works would be Harry Potter, not Lord of the Rings.
He wants to grow up so much, to be more than the guy that does Buffy... but Firefly should have been named Buffy 20x6.
Where is his science? Hell, even as space fantasy goes, it's subpar. I'd rather watch Enterprise, it was that bad.
B5 needs a second chance. Star Trek needs a 4th chance. Hell, I'd give Lucas another shot at a trilogy before I'd give Whedon the time of day. There are thousands of talented science fiction story tellers out there that deserve their shot at it.
He is the perfect example of fanboy phenomenon. No one would give a rat's ass if Firefly was made by anyone else.
The worst episode of Space: Above and Beyond had more going for it than the cumulative aborted season of Firefly.
There. Is that better than my previous "one line flame" ?
While "women" is a subject I don't claim to be an expert in, in any way, my limited intuition tells me that wouldn't be an option. At work, I see this in customers all the time, where their choice of "broken by design" operating systems keeps them from doing basic things but we still catch the blame for any number of reasons.
ICQ is broken (or at least was, this was a couple years ago), but that doesn't stop them from wanting it. It didn't stop my girlfriend from wanting it. Obviously, other people make it work, and if I can't, well, then that's because I'm not nearly as good with computers as I say I am. Blahblahblahblahblah blah blah. Two weeks of hearing that, and you'd reconsider.
With the windows-themed linux, she'd never know. I could even claim "I'm installing it under administrator privs, and it still won't work". But the usefulness of a windows-themed linux wouldn't end there. Imagine all the pointy haired bosses at work, unable to tell the difference. The only bad possible thing is if people started praising Microsoft for finally "fixing the bugs" that make it crash, when they wake up one morning six months later realizing their machine has worked perfectly for the longest while...
Set my girlfriend up with a non-admin account. So, I end up having to install all her software for her... except at the time, things like ICQ simply wouldn't run right, even when installed by admin and ran as user. Many of those have changed, many haven't. Still too many dumb apps and games that won't run with anything less, even if you did manage to install them.
What I really need, is a firefox theme that looks like IE, and a desktop theme that looks like XP. She'd never know the difference. (and when wine fails to run the dumb shareware games she tries to install, I'd be like "They must not have programmed them very well, I can't make them work!".)
Next time I tell the story, if I ever do, I'll be sure to give them both fine british accents, and not cockney. Actually, let me try again.
Student: "Dear me, I do believe this computer program is trying to inform me that I may have indeed won the lottery. Imagine that."...
Teacher: "Now don't be spiteful, this lottery is surely fair, and you had your chance to win just as everyone else. Your doubts speak more about jealously than the odds. How unvirtuous."
Slashdot Mirror
You're asking for examples that are too specific, for a phenomenon that is too new (GPL has only been at issue, what, 10 years?).
I'm not a legal scholar, but if you insist, I'll dig up at least a few modern, technological cases, where the good guys were slammed.
And I'll tell you what, I admit it, I'm a worrier. Can't help it. I can't even guess what avenue they'll use... maybe by equivocating free software with piracy (it doesn't have to be logical). Maybe they'll decide capitalism is better served, or the economy is better served, when an exception is made specifically for the GPL.
I'll tell you another thing, too. It doesn't hurt to be a worrier, it's a good thing if I'm wrong! And if I'm (somewhat)right, maybe I'll have given just enough warning to those that can figure out the angle that they can do something about it.
Far from saying that you shouldn't teach it (I *have* used it in my adult life, as a non-engineer), I'm saying that we're presented with a more compelling way to engage students while teaching it.
/. That's the problem I'm trying to point out, that one instance isn't a fluke, practically everything they do with the computers amounts to the same lack of vision.
As an engineer, do you still work with your slide rule sitting in front of the drafting table? Could an elementary school afford to put a drafting table in front of every 3rd grader? No.
But with these iBooks, they did. There's gotta be something possible there, that wasn't possible before. Admittedly, I only see this from an IT angle, but damn. Potential was squandered there. Massive potential.
If we discover a tribe of neanderthals still alive on some lonely tropical island, why do I feel that we'd do better airdropping them a crate of laptops, than we would giving the same to a public school? It's positively heartbreaking.
They simply don't know how to use them. Period. Wasn't Henrico, was some other school system, that after giving all the kids laptops, still insisted that the parents buy $100 graphing calculators. Wish I could remember the name, might have read about it here on
Great, DSL is acting up. Try this one too.
;)
Same machine, cable modem though. Lord help me that I don't have to dialup in and put up a third link...
I love the GPL as much as anyone. I'm just a pessimist, You can't seperate your love of it from your critical thinking skills.
There doesn't have to be an act barring that. Only one bad judicial ruling that holds up. Maybe not even forever, just 6 months or a year. The courts are a seperate universe with their own rules of logic that don't necessarilly overlap our own in any of the important places.
Well, then you weren't sold, you were scammed.
$1000 could have went far for supplementary textbooks, known/proven teaching extras, tutoring for slow students (oh wait, they're all in RPS, not the wealthy burbs) and lord knows what else.
No wonder schools are such a mess. First off, what if you did teach kids to be geeks? What would be so horrible about that? Instead of a boring as shit geometry class that they'll never use (I've use trig twice in my adult life, and the one instance I can remember the details of amounted to trying to figure out if a tree would block my satellite dish) they could have been taught that alongside 3d animation. Why do you need to know all this boring math? Good question, how do you expect to do the cool 3d?
Even the general teaching stuff might have succeeded, but how many of your teachers know how to use computers to full effect? When they write up a handout, is it some static word processor document, or are they doing it as a filemaker pro db, that spits out a randomized (anti-cheating) unique handout for every kid (that can be scored by program when turned in, so that they don't spend 2 hours every night* grading the damn things, so that they have more time for other teaching tasks) ? There must be 1000 little things like that, that I wouldn't even think of unless I was a teacher also, that could have all added up (but that I wouldn't think of if I were only a teacher and not also a geek).
So I suppose all these teachers will have to improve education themselves, and quit looking for magic potions to do the job for them.
*Exception: English teachers.
I worked on that program too. Let's just say no one had any idea how to use the things, but don't blame it on the laptops.
As $1000 toys, what could they be other than a distraction? And how could they be anything else, when you had them locked down tighter than OS/2 at an ATM kiosk?
These kids sure as hell couldn't learn anything from an IT standpoint, which arguably might be their most useful function. Terminal was locked out, which means all the unix tools, period. Did you bother to have the Apple developer tools on them (forget what Apple calls the damn things, not an OSX geek, I'm just typecast as one). Again, no. So they can't learn programming at all, either.
And while I never stepped foot in a classroom, I put the odds at 100 to 1 that more than one teacher in the entire school district quit giving out paper handouts. And assuming that is the case, you can't even claim to have saved money on xerox costs.
No Macromedia Flash, they weren't going to learn animation.
No 3d tools, they weren't going to learn that.
No MySQL, PostgreSQL, or Filemaker. Guess they weren't going to learn DB skills.
Did you have some G4 towers and firewire camcorders in a lab that I never heard of? No? Then they weren't going to learn video editing.
So, you turn a $1000 laptop into essentially what is a piece of paper and a pencil, and you wonder why it's nothing more than a distraction? Oh, the new Dells won't do any better, btw. Not to mention the virus, spyware and general windows crashiness problems you'll soon have.
I mean, look what that's gotten us so far.
We could do it ourselves if we really wanted to.
Yeh, and we'll never have a Patriot act as long as there is a bill of rights.
Oh.
Wait.
It has nothing to do with reason.
It has nothing to do with justice.
It has nothing to do with quality and or merits.
It has nothing to do with "who deserves to win".
If not SCO, then someone else will win. It will be the stupidest ruling in the history of law, no doubt, but somehow it will win. IBM on our side or not. I am not a troll, though it should be obvious I'm far from being an optimist.
I hope I am wrong.
All that said, does it suprise you that with SCO being an embarrassment, that Microsoft would start up a few other legal experiments? They no doubt have people whose sole job is to dream up possible litigation, and we can expect 1-3 of these things per year, until one succeeds or they run out of money. Guess which one will happen first.
Unfortunately, the ID proponents claim the opposite. Most of their evidence for this amounts to propaganda, but still.
Supposedly, atheists are always out there scheming to try and lure people away from God, but the biggest stumbling block had always been the existence of life on the planet. So, the evil Darwin dreams up a scam that shows that said life doesn't even require a creator! Now, if that isn't a case of trying to make the facts fit your pre-determined conclusion...
(Never mind that he seemed more concerned with explaining how some finches would have so much beak shape variation, even though they were very similar otherwise.)
I'd sooner believe he hears an inner voice, than that any such voice is God or an angel. I'm an atheist, mind you, but I tend to refrain from all the psychobabble that would label the guy a schizo that needs to be medicated.
Maybe this inner voice is simply his own intuition... it tells him "You're getting too old for this, something bad will happen if you continue." It draws that conclusion on a premise that is reasonable, and later shows to be true. And if it really is just an expression of his intuition, then hey, that's a pretty amazing thing. It's somewhat understandable how a person might mistake that as something supernatural.
The inner voice also apparently tells some stories that are a little more difficult to swallow, though. Just goes to show, keep your inner voices on a short leash, eh?
If you want an explanation minus a god figure, read some science fiction. Greg Bear is a hell of an author, and he has 2 different books with a similar backplot.
Bacteria evolved, apparently from nothing, but all multicellular life was literally engineered by a planetwide intelligent colony of the germs. That's even used as an explanation why evolution isn't smooth, they get another bright idea, and within a single generation, another species is created.
It's even plausible, in a science fiction sort of way.
We oughtta co-opt the ID bandwagon, and peddle that as the primary theory. They might abandon it rather quickly.
That goes without saying. We are talking about religion, after all.
Dismissing Intelligent Design is more like dismissing Crazy Earl's hypothesis that the sky is actually purple but the Trilateral Commission uses hallucigenic radio waves to make people think differently.
Some suppositions (I refuse to call ID a hypothesis, it's not even worthy of that) are just too stupid to waste time on. Besides which, all the more reasonable ID suppositions have absolutely zero to do with god.
Aliens were experimenting 4 billion years ago, in an attempt to explain their own existence? I suppose that might be true.
An superintelligent planetwide colony of bacteria designed human beings to be their spaceships, ala Greg Bear's Vitals/Darwin's Radio? Makes for a nice story at least.
What we need to do, is pollute the ID meme-pool with these 2 ideas. Make it so that ID can't be mentioned without someone bringing those up and saying "Well, God didn't design us though, space aliens did, long ago...". Watch the biblethumpers squirm.
Picking on the wrong people. Unlike Flash, SVG isn't some binary kludge. Which means that by using CSS properly, the browser will actually be able to render non-SVG alternatives with little trouble (not even lame javascript browser/plugin detectors).
Is that one of the usenet messages in Vernor Vinge's book?
Not that I was after a +1, Insightful, but not all insights need be 32 volume, 60,000 page treatises full of words that break the 8 syllable barrier.
And it wasn't flamebait. Maybe that means I think Mutant X was superior, or the person who modded me thought that.
If Whedon was a horror novelist, his works would be Goosebumps instead of Lovecraft.
If he was a fantasy novelist, his works would be Harry Potter, not Lord of the Rings.
He wants to grow up so much, to be more than the guy that does Buffy... but Firefly should have been named Buffy 20x6.
Where is his science? Hell, even as space fantasy goes, it's subpar. I'd rather watch Enterprise, it was that bad.
B5 needs a second chance. Star Trek needs a 4th chance. Hell, I'd give Lucas another shot at a trilogy before I'd give Whedon the time of day. There are thousands of talented science fiction story tellers out there that deserve their shot at it.
He is the perfect example of fanboy phenomenon. No one would give a rat's ass if Firefly was made by anyone else.
The worst episode of Space: Above and Beyond had more going for it than the cumulative aborted season of Firefly.
There. Is that better than my previous "one line flame" ?
But Firefly is to good scifi what Mutant X is to X-Men 2.
I fully support his career move to Master Grocer. On the condition that he hires someone else to do the TV commercials, of course.
I'm thinking the first scene from Braveheart, myself.
Nah, the first is good. The other just wants to be similar.. would need to use the actual XP skin to work the way I want.
So painful to read...agh. Even though I asked for it, I don't know that I could live with myself after doing this, crippling the poor thing.
*sob*
While "women" is a subject I don't claim to be an expert in, in any way, my limited intuition tells me that wouldn't be an option. At work, I see this in customers all the time, where their choice of "broken by design" operating systems keeps them from doing basic things but we still catch the blame for any number of reasons.
ICQ is broken (or at least was, this was a couple years ago), but that doesn't stop them from wanting it. It didn't stop my girlfriend from wanting it. Obviously, other people make it work, and if I can't, well, then that's because I'm not nearly as good with computers as I say I am. Blahblahblahblahblah blah blah. Two weeks of hearing that, and you'd reconsider.
With the windows-themed linux, she'd never know. I could even claim "I'm installing it under administrator privs, and it still won't work". But the usefulness of a windows-themed linux wouldn't end there. Imagine all the pointy haired bosses at work, unable to tell the difference. The only bad possible thing is if people started praising Microsoft for finally "fixing the bugs" that make it crash, when they wake up one morning six months later realizing their machine has worked perfectly for the longest while...
Set my girlfriend up with a non-admin account. So, I end up having to install all her software for her... except at the time, things like ICQ simply wouldn't run right, even when installed by admin and ran as user. Many of those have changed, many haven't. Still too many dumb apps and games that won't run with anything less, even if you did manage to install them.
What I really need, is a firefox theme that looks like IE, and a desktop theme that looks like XP. She'd never know the difference. (and when wine fails to run the dumb shareware games she tries to install, I'd be like "They must not have programmed them very well, I can't make them work!".)
Next time I tell the story, if I ever do, I'll be sure to give them both fine british accents, and not cockney. Actually, let me try again.
...
Student: "Dear me, I do believe this computer program is trying to inform me that I may have indeed won the lottery. Imagine that."
Teacher: "Now don't be spiteful, this lottery is surely fair, and you had your chance to win just as everyone else. Your doubts speak more about jealously than the odds. How unvirtuous."