For a second, I thought I submitted this question. You sound a lot like me!
I fancy myself knowledgeable, so I'll share.
The spread of open source software must come as a means to an end, not simply as an edict from the state legislature or DoEd. Remember that legislators move slow and what they write is law. The DoEd moves even slower. Campaign locally--get some success stories at one or two districts, then work on the DoEd and beyond. If you really want to, get yourself elected or appointed to the school board and work from within. However, watch conflicts of interest, as those are a political downfall.
Saving money on licenses for software should be a primary talking point for any advocacy of open source software, not just in education.
It is probably best to work in phases. In the first phase, do top-down, easy replacements: Firefox, OpenOffice. In the second phase, identify other education domain-specific software which needs to be replaced and try to find replacements. In the third phase, try a small lab with Linux and all non-replaced software running with Wine.
There will be software which simply doesn't work on Linux. A part of the planning is figuring out how to handle those cases. Photoshop cannot be replaced with GIMP, no matter how much anyone would have you believe this. GIMP suffices for many, many things, but Photoshop has a stranglehold which GIMP cannot ever break (if you don't know why, you've never worked in a printing or graphic design place).
Do not push Linux as a part of the first phase. It's too much of a change at once and could put a bad taste in administrators', teachers', students', and parents' mouth.
A smart move may be to convince some intrepid students to be the first to switch at home, thus proving that the students are capable of using open source software for educational tasks. Do the same with a few teachers.
Interoperability is key. If student would need to work on something at school then take it home, the student must have access to the same software in both places.
A point to hit for the state legislatures is the local developer factor. Buying Microsoft software benefits Redmond, Washington. Paying for open source software may benefit local developers, especially if there is a provider of Linux support nearby.
In summary, the my heaviest point is this: means to an end, not a solution looking for a problem.
That's one of the most disheartening pictures of Ron Paul in last year's presidential run, but it was just the look on his face at the moment the picture was taken. He was simply waiting for an interview to begin and doing some pondering.
I clicked on this story thinking that it might be regarding Congress, but then, as it was loading, I remembered that Congress and "collective intelligence" don't belong in the same, non-sarcastic sentence, especially after the passage of the most recent economic "stimulus" spending bill.
Now, we should all delete our accounts and threaten to sue Facebook if they don't remove everything we've ever uploaded, including messages and pokes and wall posts sent to other accounts.
That's all the new terms covered: "if you delete your account, we keep all of the stuff you uploaded, but simply mark it in accessible where appropriate so that messages, pokes, wall posts, and media contributed to groups stays in place." That would be a better way to phrase it, but, instead Facebook and every other company has to hide it in silly legalese which is purposefully ambiguous.
Sell the CPU time. You'd be able to afford the electricity and heat your home from the servers alone. Then you'd also be making extra money to cool it in the summer and probably go buy yourself some space in a datacenter after a few weeks;-)
Facebook doesn't have an actual "deletion" procedure for accounts. When someone wants to "delete" their account, it is simply disabled and their profile is no longer accessible, nor does it appear in search results. Their name will still appear in tagged photos and on wall posts, etc, but it will no longer be clickable.
The only way to truly delete one's account is to remove oneself from all tags, delete all posts, remove all pictures and videos, and all other user stuff manually, then "delete" the account. The only way not to leave a trace is to bomb the footsteps.
I think the reason this exists is because Facebook does not handle foreign key deletion well, if at all. The deletion of a user profile record would have to cascade down through every table in the database, removing every instance of that user. Who knows how long that could take. It's easier to simply mark the profile inactive and handle that in software.
This license change allows Facebook to hold on to all of the stuff a user has uploaded even after the user has "deleted" his or her account. IMO, Facebook is using legal means instead of developing a technological solution to the problem.
Is there case law proving intrastate traffic and/or transactions conducted via the Internet is/are interstate commerce?
If I buy something from a company the headquarters of which is in my state, but I bought it from its web site, is that interstate commerce?
I know you're probably not a lawyer, so I'm not expecting you to be able to pull out case numbers or such, but a link to some article on it would be nice.
I did a little bit of research and found something which might help:
"Simply stated, we decline to assume that Internet use automatically equates with a movement across state lines. With respect to such interstate movement, the government must introduce sufficient evidence to satisfy its burden of proof."
10th Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Jerome A. Holmes in U.S. v. Schaefer, No. 06-3080 wrote that. I think it has some bearing here. This essay might have some bearing, too, but I don't have the time at the moment to read it in its entirety.
Net neutrality is best governed at the state level, especially in large states such as California, Texas, Pennsylvania, New York, and Florida. If those states, plus a few others, implemented net neutrality laws, then ISPs would have to follow those states' laws in order to do business in those states. Because they're the largest states, the effects will trickle down to the other states who have yet to pass the legislation.
When an federal constitutional amendment is passed which gives Congress the power to legislate Internet protocol, then Congress can decide what's best for the country given the states' laws. This is how the process is supposed to occur, as dictated in the Constitution.
Just like the citizens, the states must assert their rights, or they, too, will lose them.
I think Mitchell Baker, Mozilla CEO, and Mike Conner, Firefox architect, need to talk about yesterday's Slashdot article, Firefox Exec Says Windows Bundling Is a Bad Idea and figure out exactly what Mozilla wants.
Encryption will save your and your institution versus legal attacks, but if others' "people" may talk to your "people" with a wrench, then only iron will can save you.
Even biometrics can be fooled (e.g., eyeballs and fingers aren't that hard to remove these days).
You are pretty much correct, and primarily because I was not sufficiently specific.
Graphics design and media art majors should waste little time on GIMP, Krita, Inkscape, and the like. You are correct--these packages are not as robust as Photoshop and Illustrator and probably won't be.
However, 100 level classes which out-of-major students might take to fill credits or get some kind of liberal arts visual performance credit could talk a little about these options. It's unlikely that an English major is going to drop hundreds of dollars on Photoshop to crop pictures and remove red eye when they could do it for free with GIMP.
What's more important, though, is teaching the theory behind the methods instead of teaching the software.
Getting Firefox on all university-owned machines is a great first step. Install the IETab extension on Windows machines as a transition measure for those pesky sites which work better in IE (Blackboard, for example).
Next, get OpenOffice installed in the same manner.
Then, do the con suggested in this comment. Get MS to shower you in free licenses for things just so you can see how much you'd save if things were free.
Next up is policy. Move towards a policy which favors open, published standards, not just open source. For instance, that comment says to make ODF the official format of college-student communications because it is the most accessible format (since it doesn't virtually require an expensive program to read). If any university staff so much as utters something like, "We should use whatever format we like. Students should expect to make purchases in order to advance their education," you need to combat that mentality promptly with something like, "We're in a position to lower the cost of education in both visible and transparent ways by offering better choices to our students, we need to do that."
The last step I'll talk about is to work on the professorial end. Get professors to send documentation in ODF and PDF and require submissions in those formats. Get graphics teachers to do a week or two on open source graphics tools. Get a professor to teach a class or hold lunch-time discussions on the use of TeX for research documents and proposals and such. There are very few science majors who would not benefit from instruction in TeX.
Slashdot Mirror
This news did some interesting things to TSMC's stock today.
http://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE:TSM
It shot up to ~$7.82 in very early trading, but closed down 1.19% at $7.45.
For a second, I thought I submitted this question. You sound a lot like me!
I fancy myself knowledgeable, so I'll share.
The spread of open source software must come as a means to an end, not simply as an edict from the state legislature or DoEd. Remember that legislators move slow and what they write is law. The DoEd moves even slower. Campaign locally--get some success stories at one or two districts, then work on the DoEd and beyond. If you really want to, get yourself elected or appointed to the school board and work from within. However, watch conflicts of interest, as those are a political downfall.
Saving money on licenses for software should be a primary talking point for any advocacy of open source software, not just in education.
It is probably best to work in phases. In the first phase, do top-down, easy replacements: Firefox, OpenOffice. In the second phase, identify other education domain-specific software which needs to be replaced and try to find replacements. In the third phase, try a small lab with Linux and all non-replaced software running with Wine.
There will be software which simply doesn't work on Linux. A part of the planning is figuring out how to handle those cases. Photoshop cannot be replaced with GIMP, no matter how much anyone would have you believe this. GIMP suffices for many, many things, but Photoshop has a stranglehold which GIMP cannot ever break (if you don't know why, you've never worked in a printing or graphic design place).
Do not push Linux as a part of the first phase. It's too much of a change at once and could put a bad taste in administrators', teachers', students', and parents' mouth.
A smart move may be to convince some intrepid students to be the first to switch at home, thus proving that the students are capable of using open source software for educational tasks. Do the same with a few teachers.
Interoperability is key. If student would need to work on something at school then take it home, the student must have access to the same software in both places.
A point to hit for the state legislatures is the local developer factor. Buying Microsoft software benefits Redmond, Washington. Paying for open source software may benefit local developers, especially if there is a provider of Linux support nearby.
In summary, the my heaviest point is this: means to an end, not a solution looking for a problem.
Sorry, samzenpus, I'm revoking your geek card. You should know the difference between a short, fuzzy Ewok and a tall, amphibian Gungan.
FZOOOOOK.
That's one of the most disheartening pictures of Ron Paul in last year's presidential run, but it was just the look on his face at the moment the picture was taken. He was simply waiting for an interview to begin and doing some pondering.
This bad news is delicious food for Stallman's argument against "cloud" services.
It wasn't OK when Bush did it! His was arguably worse!
I clicked on this story thinking that it might be regarding Congress, but then, as it was loading, I remembered that Congress and "collective intelligence" don't belong in the same, non-sarcastic sentence, especially after the passage of the most recent economic "stimulus" spending bill.
Now, we should all delete our accounts and threaten to sue Facebook if they don't remove everything we've ever uploaded, including messages and pokes and wall posts sent to other accounts.
That's all the new terms covered: "if you delete your account, we keep all of the stuff you uploaded, but simply mark it in accessible where appropriate so that messages, pokes, wall posts, and media contributed to groups stays in place." That would be a better way to phrase it, but, instead Facebook and every other company has to hide it in silly legalese which is purposefully ambiguous.
I DON'T TRUST YOU!
Beowulf those servers.
Sell the CPU time. You'd be able to afford the electricity and heat your home from the servers alone. Then you'd also be making extra money to cool it in the summer and probably go buy yourself some space in a datacenter after a few weeks ;-)
Let them sue you and let them watch gag orders get thrown out as unconscionable.
Right?
Facebook doesn't have an actual "deletion" procedure for accounts. When someone wants to "delete" their account, it is simply disabled and their profile is no longer accessible, nor does it appear in search results. Their name will still appear in tagged photos and on wall posts, etc, but it will no longer be clickable.
The only way to truly delete one's account is to remove oneself from all tags, delete all posts, remove all pictures and videos, and all other user stuff manually , then "delete" the account. The only way not to leave a trace is to bomb the footsteps.
I think the reason this exists is because Facebook does not handle foreign key deletion well, if at all. The deletion of a user profile record would have to cascade down through every table in the database, removing every instance of that user. Who knows how long that could take. It's easier to simply mark the profile inactive and handle that in software.
This license change allows Facebook to hold on to all of the stuff a user has uploaded even after the user has "deleted" his or her account. IMO, Facebook is using legal means instead of developing a technological solution to the problem.
Is there case law proving intrastate traffic and/or transactions conducted via the Internet is/are interstate commerce?
If I buy something from a company the headquarters of which is in my state, but I bought it from its web site, is that interstate commerce?
I know you're probably not a lawyer, so I'm not expecting you to be able to pull out case numbers or such, but a link to some article on it would be nice.
I did a little bit of research and found something which might help:
10th Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Jerome A. Holmes in U.S. v. Schaefer, No. 06-3080 wrote that. I think it has some bearing here. This essay might have some bearing, too, but I don't have the time at the moment to read it in its entirety.
Net neutrality is best governed at the state level, especially in large states such as California, Texas, Pennsylvania, New York, and Florida. If those states, plus a few others, implemented net neutrality laws, then ISPs would have to follow those states' laws in order to do business in those states. Because they're the largest states, the effects will trickle down to the other states who have yet to pass the legislation.
When an federal constitutional amendment is passed which gives Congress the power to legislate Internet protocol, then Congress can decide what's best for the country given the states' laws. This is how the process is supposed to occur, as dictated in the Constitution.
Just like the citizens, the states must assert their rights, or they, too, will lose them.
I think Mitchell Baker, Mozilla CEO, and Mike Conner, Firefox architect, need to talk about yesterday's Slashdot article, Firefox Exec Says Windows Bundling Is a Bad Idea and figure out exactly what Mozilla wants.
I wonder how much of that loss of fun is the airlines' fault and how much is the result of the FAA bureaucracy?
Yeah...
Encryption will save your and your institution versus legal attacks, but if others' "people" may talk to your "people" with a wrench, then only iron will can save you.
Even biometrics can be fooled (e.g., eyeballs and fingers aren't that hard to remove these days).
You are pretty much correct, and primarily because I was not sufficiently specific.
Graphics design and media art majors should waste little time on GIMP, Krita, Inkscape, and the like. You are correct--these packages are not as robust as Photoshop and Illustrator and probably won't be.
However, 100 level classes which out-of-major students might take to fill credits or get some kind of liberal arts visual performance credit could talk a little about these options. It's unlikely that an English major is going to drop hundreds of dollars on Photoshop to crop pictures and remove red eye when they could do it for free with GIMP.
What's more important, though, is teaching the theory behind the methods instead of teaching the software.
Getting Firefox on all university-owned machines is a great first step. Install the IETab extension on Windows machines as a transition measure for those pesky sites which work better in IE (Blackboard, for example).
Next, get OpenOffice installed in the same manner.
Then, do the con suggested in this comment. Get MS to shower you in free licenses for things just so you can see how much you'd save if things were free.
Next up is policy. Move towards a policy which favors open, published standards, not just open source. For instance, that comment says to make ODF the official format of college-student communications because it is the most accessible format (since it doesn't virtually require an expensive program to read). If any university staff so much as utters something like, "We should use whatever format we like. Students should expect to make purchases in order to advance their education," you need to combat that mentality promptly with something like, "We're in a position to lower the cost of education in both visible and transparent ways by offering better choices to our students, we need to do that."
The last step I'll talk about is to work on the professorial end. Get professors to send documentation in ODF and PDF and require submissions in those formats. Get graphics teachers to do a week or two on open source graphics tools. Get a professor to teach a class or hold lunch-time discussions on the use of TeX for research documents and proposals and such. There are very few science majors who would not benefit from instruction in TeX.
Jack Thompson is always coming up with these solutions, but he has yet to prove a problem.
He's been in court for 10 years about this? Please tell me he actually got his degree elsewhere in that time.
Otherwise...BIGGEST WASTE OF TIME EVER.
Try out Amazon MP3.
It's cheap, DRM-less, and easy. Plus, it runs on Linux just fine (32-bit has packages, force it on 64-bit, use getlibs, and it works fine).
YEARwithoutDRM
Didn't the US.gov already do that in the '90s and we saw nothing out of it?
I see no problem with the LHC accidentally creating a blackhole.
Why?
If it does, we're all dead anyways, so it's not like it's really going to matter since there will be no one alive to place or take blame.
One Subject at a Time Act by Downsize DC would prevent that!
Call your Congresspeople and tell them to support it!