On top of what you say, there are lots of places in the government that focus on tech transfer. The very essence of it is that the government and one or more private entities jointly share in the development cost and risk. The government then usually gets some perpetual royalty-free right to the product of the endeavor, while the commercial interest gets the right to further develop the technology and market/sell to the commercial public. There is almost always a requirement that those two don't interfere with each other. The biggest concern is usually on the part of the commercial interests which worry that the government will give away the technology at some later time, thereby destroying their market. So, there is usually a prohibition on just that sort of thing when a tech transfer takes place.
To make the "all software developed at tax payer expense open source" thing come true, the government would have to completely re-think the idea of how tech transfer works. Don't get me wrong. I am in favor making as much government-funded software as possible open source. I'm just saying it is more complex than that.
The employees' concerns also provide insight into a company culture that despite the trappings of Silicon Valley wealth still views the world through the decades-old, anti-establishment prism of its co-founders Steven P. Jobs and Steve Wozniak.
The culture is not anti-establishment. Some of the employees might have a general anti-establishment leaning, but Apple is the establishment. Just have a look at their market cap. Also, if the culture of Apple is anti-establishment, then why were they so vigorous in going after white box vendors trying to sell generic systems running OS X? The way in which Apple handled that particular situation, as an example, was very establishment like and worthy of Microsoft, IBM, and even the auto manufacturers and dealers trying to stop Tesla's direct-to-consumer approach.
I'm always amazed that the rich think they can hide in their gated communities and enjoy the fruits of other people's labor.
I'm always amazed that people don't get this simple truth:People tend to avoid whatever the government makes more expensive and gravitate toward whatever the government makes cheaper
This can be accomplished by active tax policy (e.g., raising taxes on luxury items or "sin taxes," enacting tax credits like for having children or performing energy saving upgrades to your primary residence), or by passive tax policy (e.g., allowing nearby jurisdictions to be more competitive from a taxation stand point).
For example, this is precisely why people constantly travel from New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and even further away to buy stuff in Delaware. NJ, PA, & MD all have relatively high sales taxes, while DE has none. This is also why lots of big US companies (Microsoft is the only one that springs to mind recently, but there are others) funnel lots of their revenue and profits through affiliates in Ireland (which has a much lower corporate tax rate than most other industrialized nations). This isn't rocket science, it is simply understanding fundamental human behavior.
The biggest flaw in your assumption, however, is that we can keep widening the social safety net indefinitely. Eventually, people will need to become responsible for themselves again and own their own fate.
Secondly, I'm white. I don't want to support a company that will discriminate against me or my kids.
Well, I'm Hispanic (even share their diversity VP's last name) and this is alarming to me as well. I'm not keen on supporting a company that discriminates (even if it would happen to be in my favor) and I definitely don't want to deal with a company that makes things worse for me. Let me explain. I've worked for every single thing I have, every single award and honor I've received, and so on. I resent people who perpetuate an environment that causes people to ask, "Is this person here because he's the best, or because we went on a diversity kick this quarter?" I've worked too hard to have people wonder that when they look at me.
I agree. In fact, when I read the summary I was dumbfounded by the idea that someone would grab code off the Internet without adding a comment along with it explaining what it does and its origin. What happens when you look at the code again in 6 weeks, 6 months or another developer comes along after you and has to maintain/modify it?
I find this also very helpful in the case where the borrowed approach is not otherwise consistent with the style and architecture of the project.
This is just another example of the nanny state. If I want a phone with remote kill switch or wipe capability, I will buy one that has it, or one on which I can install an app that has the capability. They do exist. Making this capability mandatory is only going to increase the cost of phones.
There are instances where such an increase in cost to the consumer is arguably warranted (e.g., seatbelts, airbags, etc.). But there is no public safety or public health argument here. It is strictly a matter of convenience.
Republicans have stalled the Cybersecurity Act of 2012 with a Senate vote of 51-47 against the legislation
So, I am not an expert on politics, but in the current congress, there 51 democratic senators, 47 republican senators, and 2 independents (both of whom caucus with the democrats). By my count, if every single senate republican voted against this, that still only comes to 47 votes. That means that the other 4 would have had to break ranks with the democratic party. So, just who is at fault here?
the only thing tax breaks do is line the pockets of big corporations. There is no "trickle down" effect any more.
Umm, a very large number of people in the US with any sort of retirement savings have them in stocks of some form or another (either through direct ownership or through mutual funds). So, when a public company becomes more profitable, the price of its stock increases, which in turn helps out many people. But then, I guess I was always a "glass half full" sort of person.
Now everything is going "cloud", I can see a gap in the market for "family cloud" appliances - plonk them on your home network, trust a few similar units on the networks of family members, and get the benefits of redundant backups, mail service, etc, exchanging the cost of your privacy for a few hundred dollars.
That is exactly what Eben Moglen discussed during his presentation at DebConf10. Info on the presentation (including links to video) is available. Also check out Joey Hess' commentary on the presentation. His objective price point is less than one hundred dollars, IIRC.
Sorry, but prayer led by state paid employees in a state-funded institution i.e. public school is obviously establishment of a state religion.
Let's try a little word substitution:
Sorry, but prayer led by state paid chaplain in a state-funded institution i.e. state penitentiary is obviously establishment of a state religion.
Or how about this one:
Sorry, but prayer led by military chaplain in a military-funded institution i.e. chapel is obviously establishment of a state religion.
What about if the "employee" is not paid? What about when congress opens its session with a prayer? (That is done at the opening of every congress, IIRC.) What about when a school sponsored club meets on the school grounds, but wants to start with a student-led prayer? (There are instances that can be cited where such things have been prohibited.) What about the case of the Boy Scout council in Philadelphia that was essentially evicted from the property the city was leasing them for $1/year? (The argument there was that the city's favorable lease to the Boy Scouts constituted an establishment of religion, because of the Boy Scouts' policy against atheists.) Is each one of those a state establishment of religion?
I'm not buying it. I'm not saying that I have the answer, but it sure is not as clear-cut as you make it out to be.
there's hardly any fallback if any of the services dies or an office is disconnected. Now, as the hardware must be replaced, I'd like to buff things up a bit: distributed instances of services (at least one instance per office) and a fallback/load-balancing scheme (either to an instance in another office or a duplicated one within the same).
Is that really necessary? I know that we all would like to have bullet-proof services. However, is the network service to the various offices so unreliable that it justifies the added complexity of instantiating services at every location? Or even introducing redundancy at each location? If you were talking about thousands or tens of thousands of users at each location, it might make sense just because you would have to distribute the load in some way.
What you need to do is evaluate your connectivity and its reliability. For example:
How reliable is the current connectivity?
If it is not reliable enough, how much would it cost over the long run to upgrade to a sufficiently reliable service?
If the connection goes down, how does it affect that office? (I.e., if the Internet is completely inaccessible, will having all those duplicated services at the remote office enable them to continue working as though nothing were wrong? If the service being out causes such a disruption that having duplicate services at the remote office doesn't help, then why bother?)
How much will it cost over the long run to add all that extra hardware, along with the burden of maintaining it and all the services running on it?
Once you answer at least those questions, then you have the information you need in order to make a sensible decision.
comparable to measuring from Earth the heat produced by a rabbit sitting on the Moon
Is anyone else dissapointed we don't already have this capability?
I'm actually a little disappointed that this wasn't expressed in standard metric terms. I thought here on Slashdot, the agreed upon standard was something in terms of libraries of congress. Is there a conversion factor or something we can apply here?
The one thing that Cisco is clear on is who is signing off on these deals: the CIO. Cisco and its partners are going right to the top to push the California systems, right over the heads of server, storage, and network managers who want to protect their own fiefdoms.
Presumably, they are doing this because they know that the CIOs, on average, are less well informed than their technical subordinates. It is a classic salesman's tactic: go straight to the "decision maker." I'm not saying that CIOs are not well qualified and intelligent people (I'm sure that most are). However, at the CxO level in a large company, you are a strategic thinker. You are most likely not going to be on the bleeding edge of the latest hardware trend.
To put it another way, the CIO is the "soft" target. You always go for the soft target.
Naturally, Cisco (and other vendors) know this. Hence, you go after the CIO and dazzle him with fancy presentations and wine and dine him and viola, you get a big sale. This how MS does it, and how other big tech companies do it.
If you are fortunate enough to have the ear of your CIO, make sure to warn him about snake oil peddlers.
The $6 billion is considered a down payment on efforts Obama will make in this area over the next several years. Of course let's not forget the $200 billion broadband scandal that the large telecommunication companies have been paid but never delivered on.
I'm so glad that the Democrats are so generous with MY money. Of course, the Republicans before them were basically the same, as were the Democrats before those Republicans, and so on going back quite a ways.
Seriously, why is the answer to mismanagement of money (tax payer or private money as the recent market troubles have shown) always to give away tax payer money?
School run out of money? Here is more tax payer money. Spent too much building your pro sports team's venue? Here is some tax payer money. Make bad choices in the marketplace? Here is some tax payer money. When is this going to stop? When we've mortgaged how many generations' future earnings on today's ridiculous growth of government?
A US$3,000.00 per student/per year federal voucher will fix education very quickly.
Actually, a US$3,000.00 federal voucher will have many strings attached. A US$3,000.00 federal tax credit will, on the other hand, be way more effective.
Get the parents more involved. For kids, school should be akin to their 9-5 job. In order to excel they need to put the time in at home, and the only people that can help instill that discipline are the parents.
I still think that the best way to "fix" education is to get the government out of it. The chief problem with education as it stands today is that it is nothing more than government provided day care to most people.
but how could anybody possibly justify this level of ostentation(or, for the amoral weasels who just don't care, how could they possibly believe that they could get away with this level of ostentation(erm, besides a quick assessment of what people have been able to get away with these days, that is, never mind about that one))?
Basically, just about every political appointee and other federal elected official thinks (rightly or wrongly) that he/she is entitled to better than first-class treatment when they fly. When they have to fly military airlift (especially on something like a C-17 instead of a real business-type jet), the military has to put those "comfort capsules" on there. (Imaging riding for 8 hours in a C-17 sitting on a jump seat like a paratrooper instead.) Now, because those officials think they are entitled to kingly treatment, they probably always complain about the quality of the accommodations. Heck, if I was the unfortunate captain of that aircraft, I'd get tired of hearing about it really fast.
In fact, I'll bet that some of the people in congress who sought to deny the Air Force the permission to spend the funds that way are some of the very same people who have complained or berated Air Force crews about the accommodations. Hypocrites and all that.
Since the Air Force is the U.S. military branch claiming dominance in "cyberspace" (along with air and space), how do you view the Army's relationship with the Air Force in "cyberspace"? Will the Army seek to take over all of the "cyberspace warfare", carve out its own niche in cyberspace, or peacefully coexist with the Air Force?
With respect to leadership in this area across the DoD, do you feel that the Air Force being denied the program executive role for all DoD UAV endeavors represents an opportunity for the Army increase its role with respect to UAVs (as many people see cyberspace and UAVs to be inextricably linked)?
Besides, there's a more direct method of breaking the encryption: track down the people who wrote the virus and force them to talk.
That depends on whether you think it is acceptable to compel someone to reveal something like that. If, as for example in the US, someone cannot be forced to incriminate himself, then he can just refuse and there is no further recourse. That is, if the only way of getting information out of someone is to ask them nicely for it.
claiming that it 'is no more than a wish to benefit from a lot of work that Novell and Red Hat are already doing in the Enterprise space.'
Red Hat has not provided a consumer desktop distribution in over 5 years. It used to be that most new comers were introduced to Linux via Red Hat. I would wager that today most new comers are introduced to Linux via Ubuntu. When those people who are introduced to Ubuntu have an opportunity to influence decisions in the enterprise, I would expect that many (or most, depending on the environment) are recommending RHEL because of the tremendous brand recognition within the IT world. (I know that Red Hat is not the only game in town, but they are far more prevalent in the enterprise and any other distro.) After all "it's all Linux."
So, I would say that Red Hat has already benefited from Ubuntu's run away popularity in the space the Red Hat vacated 5 years ago. What's wrong with a little reciprocity?
So it may not be as simple of an issue as "profile 1.0 can't use spiffy new 1.1 features". It may be more an issue of "Samsung rushed buggy new product to market and now won't support it."
Except that means that this is a case of "I want to be an early adopter but I don't want to pay the price." Sorry buddy (to the litigant, not the parent), but that comes with being an early adopter.
Slashdot Mirror
On top of what you say, there are lots of places in the government that focus on tech transfer. The very essence of it is that the government and one or more private entities jointly share in the development cost and risk. The government then usually gets some perpetual royalty-free right to the product of the endeavor, while the commercial interest gets the right to further develop the technology and market/sell to the commercial public. There is almost always a requirement that those two don't interfere with each other. The biggest concern is usually on the part of the commercial interests which worry that the government will give away the technology at some later time, thereby destroying their market. So, there is usually a prohibition on just that sort of thing when a tech transfer takes place.
To make the "all software developed at tax payer expense open source" thing come true, the government would have to completely re-think the idea of how tech transfer works. Don't get me wrong. I am in favor making as much government-funded software as possible open source. I'm just saying it is more complex than that.
The employees' concerns also provide insight into a company culture that despite the trappings of Silicon Valley wealth still views the world through the decades-old, anti-establishment prism of its co-founders Steven P. Jobs and Steve Wozniak.
The culture is not anti-establishment. Some of the employees might have a general anti-establishment leaning, but Apple is the establishment. Just have a look at their market cap. Also, if the culture of Apple is anti-establishment, then why were they so vigorous in going after white box vendors trying to sell generic systems running OS X? The way in which Apple handled that particular situation, as an example, was very establishment like and worthy of Microsoft, IBM, and even the auto manufacturers and dealers trying to stop Tesla's direct-to-consumer approach.
I'm always amazed that the rich think they can hide in their gated communities and enjoy the fruits of other people's labor.
I'm always amazed that people don't get this simple truth:People tend to avoid whatever the government makes more expensive and gravitate toward whatever the government makes cheaper
This can be accomplished by active tax policy (e.g., raising taxes on luxury items or "sin taxes," enacting tax credits like for having children or performing energy saving upgrades to your primary residence), or by passive tax policy (e.g., allowing nearby jurisdictions to be more competitive from a taxation stand point).
For example, this is precisely why people constantly travel from New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and even further away to buy stuff in Delaware. NJ, PA, & MD all have relatively high sales taxes, while DE has none. This is also why lots of big US companies (Microsoft is the only one that springs to mind recently, but there are others) funnel lots of their revenue and profits through affiliates in Ireland (which has a much lower corporate tax rate than most other industrialized nations). This isn't rocket science, it is simply understanding fundamental human behavior.
The biggest flaw in your assumption, however, is that we can keep widening the social safety net indefinitely. Eventually, people will need to become responsible for themselves again and own their own fate.
Secondly, I'm white. I don't want to support a company that will discriminate against me or my kids.
Well, I'm Hispanic (even share their diversity VP's last name) and this is alarming to me as well. I'm not keen on supporting a company that discriminates (even if it would happen to be in my favor) and I definitely don't want to deal with a company that makes things worse for me. Let me explain. I've worked for every single thing I have, every single award and honor I've received, and so on. I resent people who perpetuate an environment that causes people to ask, "Is this person here because he's the best, or because we went on a diversity kick this quarter?" I've worked too hard to have people wonder that when they look at me.
I agree. In fact, when I read the summary I was dumbfounded by the idea that someone would grab code off the Internet without adding a comment along with it explaining what it does and its origin. What happens when you look at the code again in 6 weeks, 6 months or another developer comes along after you and has to maintain/modify it?
I find this also very helpful in the case where the borrowed approach is not otherwise consistent with the style and architecture of the project.
This is just another example of the nanny state. If I want a phone with remote kill switch or wipe capability, I will buy one that has it, or one on which I can install an app that has the capability. They do exist. Making this capability mandatory is only going to increase the cost of phones.
There are instances where such an increase in cost to the consumer is arguably warranted (e.g., seatbelts, airbags, etc.). But there is no public safety or public health argument here. It is strictly a matter of convenience.
I am familiar with both the filibuster and supermajority. However, neither was mentioned in the summary or even the linked article.
Republicans have stalled the Cybersecurity Act of 2012 with a Senate vote of 51-47 against the legislation
So, I am not an expert on politics, but in the current congress, there 51 democratic senators, 47 republican senators, and 2 independents (both of whom caucus with the democrats). By my count, if every single senate republican voted against this, that still only comes to 47 votes. That means that the other 4 would have had to break ranks with the democratic party. So, just who is at fault here?
Just saying.
the only thing tax breaks do is line the pockets of big corporations. There is no "trickle down" effect any more.
Umm, a very large number of people in the US with any sort of retirement savings have them in stocks of some form or another (either through direct ownership or through mutual funds). So, when a public company becomes more profitable, the price of its stock increases, which in turn helps out many people. But then, I guess I was always a "glass half full" sort of person.
Now everything is going "cloud", I can see a gap in the market for "family cloud" appliances - plonk them on your home network, trust a few similar units on the networks of family members, and get the benefits of redundant backups, mail service, etc, exchanging the cost of your privacy for a few hundred dollars.
That is exactly what Eben Moglen discussed during his presentation at DebConf10. Info on the presentation (including links to video) is available. Also check out Joey Hess' commentary on the presentation. His objective price point is less than one hundred dollars, IIRC.
Sorry, but prayer led by state paid employees in a state-funded institution i.e. public school is obviously establishment of a state religion.
Let's try a little word substitution:
Sorry, but prayer led by state paid chaplain in a state-funded institution i.e. state penitentiary is obviously establishment of a state religion.
Or how about this one:
Sorry, but prayer led by military chaplain in a military-funded institution i.e. chapel is obviously establishment of a state religion.
What about if the "employee" is not paid? What about when congress opens its session with a prayer? (That is done at the opening of every congress, IIRC.) What about when a school sponsored club meets on the school grounds, but wants to start with a student-led prayer? (There are instances that can be cited where such things have been prohibited.) What about the case of the Boy Scout council in Philadelphia that was essentially evicted from the property the city was leasing them for $1/year? (The argument there was that the city's favorable lease to the Boy Scouts constituted an establishment of religion, because of the Boy Scouts' policy against atheists.) Is each one of those a state establishment of religion?
I'm not buying it. I'm not saying that I have the answer, but it sure is not as clear-cut as you make it out to be.
there's hardly any fallback if any of the services dies or an office is disconnected. Now, as the hardware must be replaced, I'd like to buff things up a bit: distributed instances of services (at least one instance per office) and a fallback/load-balancing scheme (either to an instance in another office or a duplicated one within the same).
Is that really necessary? I know that we all would like to have bullet-proof services. However, is the network service to the various offices so unreliable that it justifies the added complexity of instantiating services at every location? Or even introducing redundancy at each location? If you were talking about thousands or tens of thousands of users at each location, it might make sense just because you would have to distribute the load in some way.
What you need to do is evaluate your connectivity and its reliability. For example:
Once you answer at least those questions, then you have the information you need in order to make a sensible decision.
Is anyone else dissapointed we don't already have this capability?
I'm actually a little disappointed that this wasn't expressed in standard metric terms. I thought here on Slashdot, the agreed upon standard was something in terms of libraries of congress. Is there a conversion factor or something we can apply here?
The one thing that Cisco is clear on is who is signing off on these deals: the CIO. Cisco and its partners are going right to the top to push the California systems, right over the heads of server, storage, and network managers who want to protect their own fiefdoms.
Presumably, they are doing this because they know that the CIOs, on average, are less well informed than their technical subordinates. It is a classic salesman's tactic: go straight to the "decision maker." I'm not saying that CIOs are not well qualified and intelligent people (I'm sure that most are). However, at the CxO level in a large company, you are a strategic thinker. You are most likely not going to be on the bleeding edge of the latest hardware trend.
To put it another way, the CIO is the "soft" target. You always go for the soft target.
Naturally, Cisco (and other vendors) know this. Hence, you go after the CIO and dazzle him with fancy presentations and wine and dine him and viola, you get a big sale. This how MS does it, and how other big tech companies do it.
If you are fortunate enough to have the ear of your CIO, make sure to warn him about snake oil peddlers.
The $6 billion is considered a down payment on efforts Obama will make in this area over the next several years. Of course let's not forget the $200 billion broadband scandal that the large telecommunication companies have been paid but never delivered on.
I'm so glad that the Democrats are so generous with MY money. Of course, the Republicans before them were basically the same, as were the Democrats before those Republicans, and so on going back quite a ways.
Seriously, why is the answer to mismanagement of money (tax payer or private money as the recent market troubles have shown) always to give away tax payer money?
School run out of money? Here is more tax payer money. Spent too much building your pro sports team's venue? Here is some tax payer money. Make bad choices in the marketplace? Here is some tax payer money. When is this going to stop? When we've mortgaged how many generations' future earnings on today's ridiculous growth of government?
For ASP, I personally prefer http://www.apache-asp.org/
A US$3,000.00 per student/per year federal voucher will fix education very quickly.
Actually, a US$3,000.00 federal voucher will have many strings attached. A US$3,000.00 federal tax credit will, on the other hand, be way more effective.
How Do You Fix Education?
Get the parents more involved. For kids, school should be akin to their 9-5 job. In order to excel they need to put the time in at home, and the only people that can help instill that discipline are the parents.
I still think that the best way to "fix" education is to get the government out of it. The chief problem with education as it stands today is that it is nothing more than government provided day care to most people.
but how could anybody possibly justify this level of ostentation(or, for the amoral weasels who just don't care, how could they possibly believe that they could get away with this level of ostentation(erm, besides a quick assessment of what people have been able to get away with these days, that is, never mind about that one))?
Basically, just about every political appointee and other federal elected official thinks (rightly or wrongly) that he/she is entitled to better than first-class treatment when they fly. When they have to fly military airlift (especially on something like a C-17 instead of a real business-type jet), the military has to put those "comfort capsules" on there. (Imaging riding for 8 hours in a C-17 sitting on a jump seat like a paratrooper instead.) Now, because those officials think they are entitled to kingly treatment, they probably always complain about the quality of the accommodations. Heck, if I was the unfortunate captain of that aircraft, I'd get tired of hearing about it really fast.
In fact, I'll bet that some of the people in congress who sought to deny the Air Force the permission to spend the funds that way are some of the very same people who have complained or berated Air Force crews about the accommodations. Hypocrites and all that.
Since the Air Force is the U.S. military branch claiming dominance in "cyberspace" (along with air and space), how do you view the Army's relationship with the Air Force in "cyberspace"? Will the Army seek to take over all of the "cyberspace warfare", carve out its own niche in cyberspace, or peacefully coexist with the Air Force?
With respect to leadership in this area across the DoD, do you feel that the Air Force being denied the program executive role for all DoD UAV endeavors represents an opportunity for the Army increase its role with respect to UAVs (as many people see cyberspace and UAVs to be inextricably linked)?
Besides, there's a more direct method of breaking the encryption: track down the people who wrote the virus and force them to talk.
That depends on whether you think it is acceptable to compel someone to reveal something like that. If, as for example in the US, someone cannot be forced to incriminate himself, then he can just refuse and there is no further recourse. That is, if the only way of getting information out of someone is to ask them nicely for it.
claiming that it 'is no more than a wish to benefit from a lot of work that Novell and Red Hat are already doing in the Enterprise space.'
Red Hat has not provided a consumer desktop distribution in over 5 years. It used to be that most new comers were introduced to Linux via Red Hat. I would wager that today most new comers are introduced to Linux via Ubuntu. When those people who are introduced to Ubuntu have an opportunity to influence decisions in the enterprise, I would expect that many (or most, depending on the environment) are recommending RHEL because of the tremendous brand recognition within the IT world. (I know that Red Hat is not the only game in town, but they are far more prevalent in the enterprise and any other distro.) After all "it's all Linux."
So, I would say that Red Hat has already benefited from Ubuntu's run away popularity in the space the Red Hat vacated 5 years ago. What's wrong with a little reciprocity?
So it may not be as simple of an issue as "profile 1.0 can't use spiffy new 1.1 features". It may be more an issue of "Samsung rushed buggy new product to market and now won't support it."
Except that means that this is a case of "I want to be an early adopter but I don't want to pay the price." Sorry buddy (to the litigant, not the parent), but that comes with being an early adopter.
For the majority of applications that use it, it's overboard.
You mean like this?
I stand corrected.