Hate to burst your bubble but while the MPAA and RIAA in and of themselves are not a vendors they are made up of vendors. You can choose not to purchase products from those vendors any time you like. You will of course pretty much have to stop watching commercial television and your choices for music and movies will be rather severely limited, but you can definitely still do it.
I'm not a computer scientist or a mathematician, I write LoB applications for a living. I doubt anything I'll ever code will be worthy of a patent, and would be horrified if it ever were. That doesn't mean that nothing that can be coded should be patentable.
The way I view it is that most mathematics is unpatentable because it describes what is. For all intents 1 + 1 = 2, the area of a circle is pi*r^2, those things are simply true with or without human intervention, we might have put labels on the thing, but that doesn't change them in any way.
A computer program on the other hand, takes a rather arbitrary set of input and produces an arbitrary set of output, there is no universal truth that says when you type "ls -a" on a *nix box it will show you a list of all files, that's just the way it was decided to be. A series of steps is taken based on what is given to produce a result, and if that series of steps is sufficiently original and non trivial it should be patentable.
I'm not saying this particular patent is valid, merely that software can be seen as a series of steps(a lot of which involve math), and series of steps both as business processes and as steps for constructing a device are currently patentable.
Personally I think the vast majority of recent patents are probably either trivial or non original, and that most of them shouldn't have been granted. Most likely this patent is an example of that. That doesn't mean that the concept is in and of itself flawed. Copyright and Patents are both excellent tools for furthering the creative arts(their express constitutional intent), and abolishing them would probably be overly destructive, but they've both been corrupted away from their original intent and need some clean up.
ActiveX is a piece of shit, but I guess it made some vague sort of sense in 2001, and it's not used all that much anymore.
Everyone compares IE 6 to modern browsers, but it's not a modern browser it's a dinosaur. I'm a web developer and the fact that they let that dinosaur live has caused me endless pain, but I'm old enough to remember when it wasn't a dinosaur and to remember what the competition was like.
Microsoft's sin is not creating IE 6, it wasn't half bad the better part of a decade ago, their sin is not replacing it back in 2002 or 2003. It's a sin Microsoft is paying for in any number of ways, and it's a sin they deserve to pay for.
IE did not deliberately break standards, it didn't even ignore standards. What it did was fail to update for 10 years. Every single browser contemporary with IE 6 was an even worse than it was and in most cases even less standards compliant. People don't seem to remember that IE 6 predates the Mozilla foundation let alone any Mozilla product. It was released in 2001 ffs.
I'm not saying that keeping IE 6 around as long as they did isn't something I may never forgive Microsoft for(the only thing that makes up for it at all is the fact that they're now suffering as much as we all were trying to get rid of it), but they really didn't ignore standards, they ignored IE.
Your caseis true of most programmers, but not all. The work of most programmers isn't(or shouldn't be) patentable in any country. Just as the work of most engineers and other people who create physical machines isn't covered by patents.
That doesn't mean that there aren't engineers, programmers, doctors out there who are creating work which should be covered by patents. A software application is just a process and if that process is sufficiently innovative and non trivial, then it shouldn't be treated any differently than if that same process were carried out by a physical machine.
You're obviously not a programmer. Computer programming is no more a form of mathematics than engineering is. They both involve maths, but they are not maths.
A computer program is a series of steps designed to transform or produce something, no different than an assembly line, not some way of describing the way the universe already is like Mathematics.
Claiming that a series of steps implemented in code should not be patentable where a series of steps implemented with a hammer is simply because it's easier to copy a series of steps in code and it's harder to quantify the result is really rather short sighted and ignorant.
A codec isn't a mathematical formula, it's a series of steps for transforming data into sound based on a set of arbitrary standards, not some reflection of universal truth. A mathematician won't come up with a formula for H.264 because H.264 isn't a mathematical formula.
I never said the current patent system didn't have its issues, like the current copyright system it certainly does.
That doesn't change the fact that while there are certainly low hanging fruit that can be created through a moment of brilliance, most ideas take a huge amount of effort to bring an idea to fruition and if there's no financial reward for that effort, then most people are not going to do it. Either because they can't(no time) or won't(too much effort). Without patents and copyright any idea you come up with can simply be stolen by your competitors without them incurring the R&D costs.
Patents going to corporations isn't fundamentally a bad thing, again, the people doing the development have to eat and if someone is willing to pay them so they can they deserve some compensation.
Patents which aren't actually implemented, or patents which are given for trivial or non original implementations are certainly a problem, but they're implementation not concept and they're still better than the alternative.
No. The GP's post is an example of why software patents(and all patents) need to be sane.
New ideas provide value for society, new ways of doing things, new things to do, all help to enhance everyone's quality of life. Without some form of protection, the only way to make any money off good ideas(and therefor the only way to encourage people to spend time coming up with good ideas) is by keeping them secret which doesn't really benefit anyone.
You do not have some sort of right to implement someone else's idea without compensation simply because implementing an idea in software once someone has thought of it is easy. Easy to implement is not the same thing as obvious.
The problem with patents, both software and otherwise is that patent offices all over the world are really bad at determining what is non trivial and non obvious. "Do the same thing everyone has been doing for centuries ON THE INTERNET", should not be patentable. "Solve a problem which no one else has ever been able to find an answer for" should be, whether you're solving that problem with metal or with code.
Open formats accomplish a whole lot of nothing for anyone. A billion open formats don't help the situation, what is required is a standard format, open or otherwise, which essentially legislates what features a document can have.
Because they don't sell you the bandwidth that's the whole rub.
If you paid for the bandwidth, they'd sell you as much of it as they could because they'd make more money and with the usual provisions(you're not using the bandwidth to steal they're property) they wouldn't care what you did with it.
In reality though, what they're selling to you is access to the network, if you download 1KB or 1TB they get paid the same, but it doesn't cost them the same.
Most places in the world charge you per meg or cap your data allowance or some combination of the above, the cap is usually quite ludicrously high if you're willing to pay an even halfway reasonable amount of money, but it's there none the less, if you want more than that you pay for it, which provides them with the cash to pay for infrastructure to give it to you.
Unlimited bandwidth plans just do not work when your customers are capable of and likely to utilize more than you have. There's just no way to cover the cost of infrastructure upgrades. The business model just does not work.
None of those actually spoof your IP address, they just do some clever routing tricks, there still has to be a way for traffic to get from point a to point b, there might be another dozen points in between, but each point has to know the point before it and the point after it and so it can be traced.
As for the IP to physical address, so far it seems the legal view point is that the person who pays for the connection is responsible for its use or misuse whether they were aware or not, this defense doesn't generally work unless you've actually been hacked and there is evidence. The fact that your brother, mother, roommate, lover might have done it, no one cares.
As for the legal issue. As an ordrinary individual sure, no one cares, but if you're one of those people who publish the torrents to begin with, the cops have cared about that before.
Terry Child's crime was being a borderline psychotic control freak, ensuring that no one other than himself had access to any system and that they could not easily recover the system and then refusing to turn over any of the passwords or configuration.
This was not a system designed to resist sustained viscious attack. Apparently the switches all came back up from a power cut without any configuration and he was the only person who knew where the configurations or how to decrypt them. You could guarantee major downtime for the city just by cutting the power and hitting this guy with a crowbar.
You can't tell the government how to spend tax revenue, or how to utilize the things they bought with tax revenue. The money isn't yours and you don't own the things they bought.
What you can do, is suggest how you'd like the money and resource to be utilized, and vote out people who don't utilize it that way. The job of the government is to govern, the job of the people is to choose the people who do the governing. That's how a representative government works, you don't make the decisions, you choose the people who do.
However, failing to document the passwords and then refusing the release the passwords to the owners of the system because he thought they didn't deserve to have them should make him unemployable in IT(and for that matter almost any job requiring an element of trust) for the rest of his life regardless of any convictions or lack thereof.
It doesn't really matter if he's convicted or not, if I give you the keys to the office and then you get fired and refuse to return those keys, you are untrustworthy and unreliable and don't deserve to be given keys again until and unless you can prove that you've changed.
This guy was a control freak and an asshole, he essentially sabotaged his employer by not storing any service level passwords(as he was obligated to do by policy) and then refusing to turn over those passwords. It's no different than a logic bomb or any other angry departing gift a sys admin might give. The fact that they ought to have checked to see if the passwords really were in the system and sacked his ass much earlier if he'd refused to do so doesn't really enter into it.
if the agency head(s) ask you to do something job related, even if it's against the policy that's printed out, you get the request in writing and then do it.
Web apps exist primarily to avoid all the pain of distribution and installation. If you code one properly, distributing the application to someone involves sending a link, and presuming they have an even moderately recent browser(ie released in the last 10 years) 99.999% of the time the application will "just work".
Now true, desktop apps have a lot going for them, and for people who know how to install, manage and maintain them, they're still vastly superior. Most people on the other hand don't know how to do those things, and pretty much every currently existing technology for reliably distributing them without having to send someone round to every PC involves having rather strict control over how the PCs are configured and what software is installed on them.
Sun doesn't have any hardware anymore. They killed off most of the value in SPARC years ago. Solaris isn't going to win back the data center in any major way any time soon(if ever), and it's the only OS which really runs particularly well on SPARC. Intel has pretty much taken the general purpose CPU crown at this point and may very well stand alone in that arena by the time the economy comes back to normal.
The rest of SUN's supposed hardware is the same stuff everyone else distributes upmarket models of the same stuff that's in your home PC. The prices they charged were mostly for the software stack they sold with it and the support they provided. No different than Apple, IBM, HP, or anyone else for that matter anymore. There's no margin in specialized hardware unless it serves a specialized task, and in computing that basically leaves appliances and mainframes, neither of which is the kind of gold mine that would make all the hell Oracle went through to get SUN worthwhile.
As far as I can tell, Oracle bought SUN for two reasons. To try to turn some of Sun's great ideas into actual revenue generators and to stop anyone else from doing the same.
Let's face it, despite the fact that their managers couldn't find a profit to save their lives, Sun's R&D department has come up with some seriously cool stuff over the last decade or so. True their own implementations of their ideas have mostly sucked and the best implementations(and most of the money) have been made by other companies, but they're still good ideas. Oracle can squeeze blood from a stone when it comes to making money, and I'm sure they have some pretty exciting ideas on how to generate cash out of Sun's assets.
Even if they can't, they most likely couldn't afford to risk that IBM or one of their other competitors could. A lot of Oracle databases still run on SPARC and Solaris, and IBM and Oracle aren't exactly the best of friends.
And the astute teacher would be right, but still a crappy teacher.
However, the only way to find teachers who aren't teaching before it's too late is to periodically check their performance which means testing the students to see what they know.
The good teacher might question whether the test was doing an adequate job of measuring their performance(is it actually checking if the students are being taught what they need to know as opposed to what is on the test), and they might complain about the burden the test put on them when they're doing their job correctly, but they'd understand what the test was for.
Compliance is an expensive exercise, be it through testing or audits or whatever other avenue it might arrive, but the only way to determine whether someone is doing what they say they are before it's too late to change things is to check every so often. The issue for discussion is whether the checks are checking the right things.
I miss HIPPA. I work in health IT in a country which doesn't have it(we have health security laws but they're a lot more general and vague), and not having it is more of a pain than having it.
Security regulations are necessary because "Doing what you've asked for is a bad idea because of X" doesn't work unless X is "the government will come and throw your rear in jail". HIPPA isn't perfect, and regulatory compliance certainly eats up a lot of your time, but the default position for most execs in most industries in regards to security is at best "I don't understand, go away and do what I want" and at worst "I don't care, go away and do what I want" unless you've got some legal muscle to back them up.
The study basically tells you why we need regulation. 62% of a corporations data assets are their own IP. From a purely economic standpoint, protecting that data makes more sense so, if any data is going to be protected it's going to be that. Great for the corporation, bad for everyone else.
In an ideal world, execs would understand and value doing the right thing(be it protecting health information, or making sure no one is pulling an Enron), and we could worry more about doing it right than about legislative compliance, but the market as it is currently structured doesn't appreciate security costs unless their are monetary losses or jail time involved.
Apple won the portable music market for the same reason they won the smart phone market, because they're competitors had gotten lazy and/or lost vision and were releasing unusable crap or products not intended for the consumer market(blackberry). They jumped into an established market where all the existing players had failed to give consumers what they actually wanted, most of those players are still failing to give consumers what they want so Apple is doing very well. This isn't a criticism of their products, it's just the facts, they came into the market with a product which was vastly superior, but most of that vastness was due to the complete and total mediocrity of the competition.
The search engine market on the other hand, is not a market full of companies delivering mediocre products, it's a market full of Google. It's a market in which the main players brand name has become a verb, and which has no upfront cost to users so you can't compete on price.
Now it's possible that Apple could swap the search on their iPhoneOS products to something non google and survive it, people will use what they're given I guess, but I'd put my money on them bringing Microsoft on board for their petty hate fest with Google rather than building their own money pit.
Oh, I'm well aware you can do that. When I say that's what Flash has devolved to, I mean that it's essentially become almost synonymous with animations and video players.
People can build RIAs with it, and one could even argue that that was essentially its original intent, even before Flex, and some of what gets built in it is actually fairly good(barring the god awful design legacies Flash is stuck with from the hack jobs it took to make it work on the systems available when it began).
My general point was that people always think that things like SVG and HTML5 will have Microsoft shaking in their boots because we don't need Silverlight to play animations and videos anymore, which is really just missing the boat.
The market always works, it just doesn't always work the way free market fundamentalists think it does.
You are indeed right, most of the time it will eventually find the optimal situation, though like most optimizing routines it has the occasional issue with local maximums.
The issue comes in your definition of optimal. It is perhaps true that in a truly 100% free market, optimal would really be optimal, but a truly 100% free market has not and cannot ever exist. In the absence of such perfection, you need to be a bit careful about the constraints you put on the system so that you end up with an optimal you can live with. The current system seems to have the constraints set in such a way that the optimal solution is that rich people get richer and poor people get poorer, long term consequences are ignored, and generally greed is the driving factor.
Now personally I believe that as a society we should, generally through our government set the constraints we want, and then let the free market find the optimal solution for those constraints. If a behavior is socially or environmentally costly tax it, if a behavior is socially or environmentally beneficial, provide tax relief for it. Generally make the things you want to have happen more desirable and the things you don't less so, then let the free market find the optimal solution within the constraints you have set.
Unfortunately at the moment taxes are largely about political expediency as opposed to providing rational constraints for the market. Non behavior related corporate taxes for instance are largely a waste of time. Corporations just raise the prices of their goods and/or services and it ends up just being a sales tax on individuals again.
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Hate to burst your bubble but while the MPAA and RIAA in and of themselves are not a vendors they are made up of vendors. You can choose not to purchase products from those vendors any time you like. You will of course pretty much have to stop watching commercial television and your choices for music and movies will be rather severely limited, but you can definitely still do it.
I'm not a computer scientist or a mathematician, I write LoB applications for a living. I doubt anything I'll ever code will be worthy of a patent, and would be horrified if it ever were. That doesn't mean that nothing that can be coded should be patentable.
The way I view it is that most mathematics is unpatentable because it describes what is. For all intents 1 + 1 = 2, the area of a circle is pi*r^2, those things are simply true with or without human intervention, we might have put labels on the thing, but that doesn't change them in any way.
A computer program on the other hand, takes a rather arbitrary set of input and produces an arbitrary set of output, there is no universal truth that says when you type "ls -a" on a *nix box it will show you a list of all files, that's just the way it was decided to be. A series of steps is taken based on what is given to produce a result, and if that series of steps is sufficiently original and non trivial it should be patentable.
I'm not saying this particular patent is valid, merely that software can be seen as a series of steps(a lot of which involve math), and series of steps both as business processes and as steps for constructing a device are currently patentable.
Personally I think the vast majority of recent patents are probably either trivial or non original, and that most of them shouldn't have been granted. Most likely this patent is an example of that. That doesn't mean that the concept is in and of itself flawed. Copyright and Patents are both excellent tools for furthering the creative arts(their express constitutional intent), and abolishing them would probably be overly destructive, but they've both been corrupted away from their original intent and need some clean up.
ActiveX is a piece of shit, but I guess it made some vague sort of sense in 2001, and it's not used all that much anymore.
Everyone compares IE 6 to modern browsers, but it's not a modern browser it's a dinosaur. I'm a web developer and the fact that they let that dinosaur live has caused me endless pain, but I'm old enough to remember when it wasn't a dinosaur and to remember what the competition was like.
Microsoft's sin is not creating IE 6, it wasn't half bad the better part of a decade ago, their sin is not replacing it back in 2002 or 2003. It's a sin Microsoft is paying for in any number of ways, and it's a sin they deserve to pay for.
IE did not deliberately break standards, it didn't even ignore standards. What it did was fail to update for 10 years. Every single browser contemporary with IE 6 was an even worse than it was and in most cases even less standards compliant. People don't seem to remember that IE 6 predates the Mozilla foundation let alone any Mozilla product. It was released in 2001 ffs.
I'm not saying that keeping IE 6 around as long as they did isn't something I may never forgive Microsoft for(the only thing that makes up for it at all is the fact that they're now suffering as much as we all were trying to get rid of it), but they really didn't ignore standards, they ignored IE.
Your caseis true of most programmers, but not all. The work of most programmers isn't(or shouldn't be) patentable in any country. Just as the work of most engineers and other people who create physical machines isn't covered by patents.
That doesn't mean that there aren't engineers, programmers, doctors out there who are creating work which should be covered by patents. A software application is just a process and if that process is sufficiently innovative and non trivial, then it shouldn't be treated any differently than if that same process were carried out by a physical machine.
You're obviously not a programmer. Computer programming is no more a form of mathematics than engineering is. They both involve maths, but they are not maths.
A computer program is a series of steps designed to transform or produce something, no different than an assembly line, not some way of describing the way the universe already is like Mathematics.
Claiming that a series of steps implemented in code should not be patentable where a series of steps implemented with a hammer is simply because it's easier to copy a series of steps in code and it's harder to quantify the result is really rather short sighted and ignorant.
A codec isn't a mathematical formula, it's a series of steps for transforming data into sound based on a set of arbitrary standards, not some reflection of universal truth. A mathematician won't come up with a formula for H.264 because H.264 isn't a mathematical formula.
I never said the current patent system didn't have its issues, like the current copyright system it certainly does.
That doesn't change the fact that while there are certainly low hanging fruit that can be created through a moment of brilliance, most ideas take a huge amount of effort to bring an idea to fruition and if there's no financial reward for that effort, then most people are not going to do it. Either because they can't(no time) or won't(too much effort). Without patents and copyright any idea you come up with can simply be stolen by your competitors without them incurring the R&D costs.
Patents going to corporations isn't fundamentally a bad thing, again, the people doing the development have to eat and if someone is willing to pay them so they can they deserve some compensation.
Patents which aren't actually implemented, or patents which are given for trivial or non original implementations are certainly a problem, but they're implementation not concept and they're still better than the alternative.
No. The GP's post is an example of why software patents(and all patents) need to be sane.
New ideas provide value for society, new ways of doing things, new things to do, all help to enhance everyone's quality of life. Without some form of protection, the only way to make any money off good ideas(and therefor the only way to encourage people to spend time coming up with good ideas) is by keeping them secret which doesn't really benefit anyone.
You do not have some sort of right to implement someone else's idea without compensation simply because implementing an idea in software once someone has thought of it is easy. Easy to implement is not the same thing as obvious.
The problem with patents, both software and otherwise is that patent offices all over the world are really bad at determining what is non trivial and non obvious. "Do the same thing everyone has been doing for centuries ON THE INTERNET", should not be patentable. "Solve a problem which no one else has ever been able to find an answer for" should be, whether you're solving that problem with metal or with code.
Open formats accomplish a whole lot of nothing for anyone. A billion open formats don't help the situation, what is required is a standard format, open or otherwise, which essentially legislates what features a document can have.
Some slave traders like to reformat your resume or otherwise adjust it, with a PDF they can't do that, so they won't bother.
Not a problem if you're in a really strong position, but pretty major if you're in a more competitive market.
Because they don't sell you the bandwidth that's the whole rub.
If you paid for the bandwidth, they'd sell you as much of it as they could because they'd make more money and with the usual provisions(you're not using the bandwidth to steal they're property) they wouldn't care what you did with it.
In reality though, what they're selling to you is access to the network, if you download 1KB or 1TB they get paid the same, but it doesn't cost them the same.
Most places in the world charge you per meg or cap your data allowance or some combination of the above, the cap is usually quite ludicrously high if you're willing to pay an even halfway reasonable amount of money, but it's there none the less, if you want more than that you pay for it, which provides them with the cash to pay for infrastructure to give it to you.
Unlimited bandwidth plans just do not work when your customers are capable of and likely to utilize more than you have. There's just no way to cover the cost of infrastructure upgrades. The business model just does not work.
None of those actually spoof your IP address, they just do some clever routing tricks, there still has to be a way for traffic to get from point a to point b, there might be another dozen points in between, but each point has to know the point before it and the point after it and so it can be traced.
As for the IP to physical address, so far it seems the legal view point is that the person who pays for the connection is responsible for its use or misuse whether they were aware or not, this defense doesn't generally work unless you've actually been hacked and there is evidence. The fact that your brother, mother, roommate, lover might have done it, no one cares.
As for the legal issue. As an ordrinary individual sure, no one cares, but if you're one of those people who publish the torrents to begin with, the cops have cared about that before.
Terry Child's crime was being a borderline psychotic control freak, ensuring that no one other than himself had access to any system and that they could not easily recover the system and then refusing to turn over any of the passwords or configuration.
This was not a system designed to resist sustained viscious attack. Apparently the switches all came back up from a power cut without any configuration and he was the only person who knew where the configurations or how to decrypt them. You could guarantee major downtime for the city just by cutting the power and hitting this guy with a crowbar.
Wrong.
You can't tell the government how to spend tax revenue, or how to utilize the things they bought with tax revenue. The money isn't yours and you don't own the things they bought.
What you can do, is suggest how you'd like the money and resource to be utilized, and vote out people who don't utilize it that way. The job of the government is to govern, the job of the people is to choose the people who do the governing. That's how a representative government works, you don't make the decisions, you choose the people who do.
No, of course not.
However, failing to document the passwords and then refusing the release the passwords to the owners of the system because he thought they didn't deserve to have them should make him unemployable in IT(and for that matter almost any job requiring an element of trust) for the rest of his life regardless of any convictions or lack thereof.
It doesn't really matter if he's convicted or not, if I give you the keys to the office and then you get fired and refuse to return those keys, you are untrustworthy and unreliable and don't deserve to be given keys again until and unless you can prove that you've changed.
This guy was a control freak and an asshole, he essentially sabotaged his employer by not storing any service level passwords(as he was obligated to do by policy) and then refusing to turn over those passwords. It's no different than a logic bomb or any other angry departing gift a sys admin might give. The fact that they ought to have checked to see if the passwords really were in the system and sacked his ass much earlier if he'd refused to do so doesn't really enter into it.
if the agency head(s) ask you to do something job related, even if it's against the policy that's printed out, you get the request in writing and then do it.
There fixed that for you.
Web apps exist primarily to avoid all the pain of distribution and installation. If you code one properly, distributing the application to someone involves sending a link, and presuming they have an even moderately recent browser(ie released in the last 10 years) 99.999% of the time the application will "just work".
Now true, desktop apps have a lot going for them, and for people who know how to install, manage and maintain them, they're still vastly superior. Most people on the other hand don't know how to do those things, and pretty much every currently existing technology for reliably distributing them without having to send someone round to every PC involves having rather strict control over how the PCs are configured and what software is installed on them.
Sun doesn't have any hardware anymore. They killed off most of the value in SPARC years ago. Solaris isn't going to win back the data center in any major way any time soon(if ever), and it's the only OS which really runs particularly well on SPARC. Intel has pretty much taken the general purpose CPU crown at this point and may very well stand alone in that arena by the time the economy comes back to normal.
The rest of SUN's supposed hardware is the same stuff everyone else distributes upmarket models of the same stuff that's in your home PC. The prices they charged were mostly for the software stack they sold with it and the support they provided. No different than Apple, IBM, HP, or anyone else for that matter anymore. There's no margin in specialized hardware unless it serves a specialized task, and in computing that basically leaves appliances and mainframes, neither of which is the kind of gold mine that would make all the hell Oracle went through to get SUN worthwhile.
As far as I can tell, Oracle bought SUN for two reasons. To try to turn some of Sun's great ideas into actual revenue generators and to stop anyone else from doing the same.
Let's face it, despite the fact that their managers couldn't find a profit to save their lives, Sun's R&D department has come up with some seriously cool stuff over the last decade or so. True their own implementations of their ideas have mostly sucked and the best implementations(and most of the money) have been made by other companies, but they're still good ideas. Oracle can squeeze blood from a stone when it comes to making money, and I'm sure they have some pretty exciting ideas on how to generate cash out of Sun's assets.
Even if they can't, they most likely couldn't afford to risk that IBM or one of their other competitors could. A lot of Oracle databases still run on SPARC and Solaris, and IBM and Oracle aren't exactly the best of friends.
Not the standardized ones, yes they're teachers making them, but not the same ones being tested.
And the astute teacher would be right, but still a crappy teacher.
However, the only way to find teachers who aren't teaching before it's too late is to periodically check their performance which means testing the students to see what they know.
The good teacher might question whether the test was doing an adequate job of measuring their performance(is it actually checking if the students are being taught what they need to know as opposed to what is on the test), and they might complain about the burden the test put on them when they're doing their job correctly, but they'd understand what the test was for.
Compliance is an expensive exercise, be it through testing or audits or whatever other avenue it might arrive, but the only way to determine whether someone is doing what they say they are before it's too late to change things is to check every so often. The issue for discussion is whether the checks are checking the right things.
I miss HIPPA. I work in health IT in a country which doesn't have it(we have health security laws but they're a lot more general and vague), and not having it is more of a pain than having it.
Security regulations are necessary because "Doing what you've asked for is a bad idea because of X" doesn't work unless X is "the government will come and throw your rear in jail". HIPPA isn't perfect, and regulatory compliance certainly eats up a lot of your time, but the default position for most execs in most industries in regards to security is at best "I don't understand, go away and do what I want" and at worst "I don't care, go away and do what I want" unless you've got some legal muscle to back them up.
The study basically tells you why we need regulation. 62% of a corporations data assets are their own IP. From a purely economic standpoint, protecting that data makes more sense so, if any data is going to be protected it's going to be that. Great for the corporation, bad for everyone else.
In an ideal world, execs would understand and value doing the right thing(be it protecting health information, or making sure no one is pulling an Enron), and we could worry more about doing it right than about legislative compliance, but the market as it is currently structured doesn't appreciate security costs unless their are monetary losses or jail time involved.
Apple won the portable music market for the same reason they won the smart phone market, because they're competitors had gotten lazy and/or lost vision and were releasing unusable crap or products not intended for the consumer market(blackberry). They jumped into an established market where all the existing players had failed to give consumers what they actually wanted, most of those players are still failing to give consumers what they want so Apple is doing very well. This isn't a criticism of their products, it's just the facts, they came into the market with a product which was vastly superior, but most of that vastness was due to the complete and total mediocrity of the competition.
The search engine market on the other hand, is not a market full of companies delivering mediocre products, it's a market full of Google. It's a market in which the main players brand name has become a verb, and which has no upfront cost to users so you can't compete on price.
Now it's possible that Apple could swap the search on their iPhoneOS products to something non google and survive it, people will use what they're given I guess, but I'd put my money on them bringing Microsoft on board for their petty hate fest with Google rather than building their own money pit.
Oh, I'm well aware you can do that. When I say that's what Flash has devolved to, I mean that it's essentially become almost synonymous with animations and video players.
People can build RIAs with it, and one could even argue that that was essentially its original intent, even before Flex, and some of what gets built in it is actually fairly good(barring the god awful design legacies Flash is stuck with from the hack jobs it took to make it work on the systems available when it began).
My general point was that people always think that things like SVG and HTML5 will have Microsoft shaking in their boots because we don't need Silverlight to play animations and videos anymore, which is really just missing the boat.
The market always works, it just doesn't always work the way free market fundamentalists think it does.
You are indeed right, most of the time it will eventually find the optimal situation, though like most optimizing routines it has the occasional issue with local maximums.
The issue comes in your definition of optimal. It is perhaps true that in a truly 100% free market, optimal would really be optimal, but a truly 100% free market has not and cannot ever exist. In the absence of such perfection, you need to be a bit careful about the constraints you put on the system so that you end up with an optimal you can live with. The current system seems to have the constraints set in such a way that the optimal solution is that rich people get richer and poor people get poorer, long term consequences are ignored, and generally greed is the driving factor.
Now personally I believe that as a society we should, generally through our government set the constraints we want, and then let the free market find the optimal solution for those constraints. If a behavior is socially or environmentally costly tax it, if a behavior is socially or environmentally beneficial, provide tax relief for it. Generally make the things you want to have happen more desirable and the things you don't less so, then let the free market find the optimal solution within the constraints you have set.
Unfortunately at the moment taxes are largely about political expediency as opposed to providing rational constraints for the market. Non behavior related corporate taxes for instance are largely a waste of time. Corporations just raise the prices of their goods and/or services and it ends up just being a sales tax on individuals again.