I handed the clerk money, she gave me the box, that's what called a sale. Now I own the box and contents, and can do whatever I want with them.
Anything? Really?
Hey, make a copy for me and 5000 of your other friends while you are at it!
Unfortunately, now that the DMCA is law, there's little distinction in Copyright law between making illegal copies and breaking in using activation keys.
That's why we needed to stop the DMCA before it became law.
Our hopes now lie in the DMCA being struck down as being too broad or ambiguous.
There's near zero chance that Congress would ever seriously review the DMCA as long as the Media Giants like the status quo.
This situation will become much worse if the current version of Campaign Finance Reform that just passed the US Congress becomes law. Under that law, we won't be able to get together and run issue ads against the DMCA around election time, but the Media Giants, through their news organizations, can run endless editorials and stilted "news" stories about how the DMCA is a good thing right up to and including on election day.
There's still a good chance that bans on issue ads wouldn't pass judicial review. See this page for a discussion of the issues. It seems that this ban would run against the 1976 Supreme Court Ruling Buckley vs. Valeo. There can be no ban on spending, only on individual contributions, which the "soft money" ban would effectively do.
In any case, I don't see much hope of getting the DMCA repealed. Even if we could try to drum up support, it would be an extreme uphill battle trying to get people to understand the issues, what's at stake and overcoming the powerful interests on the other side of the issue. There's some hope that it could be ruled unconstitutional. IANAL, but in my opinion, a bright spot is that recent ruling reported on/. where a judge ruled that put software sales back into the domain of "First Sale" like books regardless of whatever EULAs they might have you clicking through.
Minors cannot legally sign a contract. I say, to avoid ALL claims by M$ or anyone else that you are bound by a bullshit EULA, have an underage child handle all the initial parts of your software installs. YOU never saw, nor clicked on any "I Agree" button and the child is not legally bound by such.
IANAL, but I believe that this strategy would have you loading up unlicensed software on your machines. This could lead you into other legal difficulties.
Java was initially targetted for the embedded market.
Java, or rather Oak, was initially designed for the embedded market, but it never got any support to "come out of the lab" until someone got the idea of running it in the browser for desktop applications.
Yes, but from a practical standpoint, if Microsoft decides to take the products in a direction away from the Open Standard version, then the Open Standard version will immediately become irrelevant.
Which, come to think of it, was exactly what they intended to do with Java. Make the Sun version irrelevant.
Why? Apply that same question to Unix. Is Unix irrelevant because AT&T created a closed version of it? Or, for that matter, any number of other closed versions from any number of vendors? Or, even, an Open Source version? There is a common thread through all of those versions of Unix: Posix -- which is an open standard.
A completely ridiculous comparison. First off, when AT&T created the closed version of it, POSIX didn't exist at all. So, the comparison kinda falls flat. AT&T never tried to "embrace and extend" Unix away from competitors who were sticking to strict POSIX compliance.
In any case, AFAICT, POSIX is mostly irrelevant as a unifying standard. It's mostly a marketing buzzword. Most serious software, and all the commercial software I've ever been involved with, has not been written to strict POSIX compliance. Sure, lots of software may use POSIX standard interfaces, but that's only because those interfaces were actually drawn from existing interfaces in Unix software.
I do think that it's probably a good idea to stick to POSIX compliance, but that's just not the real world. In the real world, people use whatever API that makes sense to get a version out the door with the most features and that often means ditching POSIX for some vendor-supplied API.
The whole point of Java and what MS would have you believe is one of the points of C# and related standards is write once, run anywhere. This has never existed in any serious way with Unix APIs.
Now, back to the point I was trying to make. If MS saw that they had serious competition from Mono or other.NET implementations, then they'd just make their own V2 incompatible and immediately make those other implementations irrelevant.
Which, as I said above, is exactly what they wanted to do with their own incompatible version of Java.
There is nothing to keep Microsoft from 'embracing and extending' these standards if they do not like the direction they are going. Just as they can with any open standard. Just as you can with any open standard.
Yes, but from a practical standpoint, if Microsoft decides to take the products in a direction away from the Open Standard version, then the Open Standard version will immediately become irrelevant.
Which, come to think of it, was exactly what they intended to do with Java. Make the Sun version irrelevant.
Another thing that geeks like (at least I do), is PEACE AND QUIET... get them an office of their own, one that's soundproof.
Whatever happened to offices? Some years ago, you always heard how much productivity of Engineering staff was enhanced by offices, but now, all you hear about is that "open" workspaces encourage collaboration.
Personally, I much prefer collaborating passing documents back and forth. Collaborating face to face has it's place, but to build anything of value, it's best to get all the ideas and opinions down in writing and diagrams, so they can be studied objectively. Usually when technical decisions are made in meetings, even informal drop-by-the cube or office meetings without anything written down, I find that they are poorly thought out.
That's what I want from management. An environment that values my ideas, but also READS and tries to understand the issues. Shoot from the hip environments are generally poor for a number of reasons, in my experience:
Forceful personalities who can get away with interrupting and talking loud get more weight.
Decisions are made without much thought.
The politics are ultimately worse, because it's like you are performing in front of people all the time, so it encourages sucking up and group think.
That being said, I do want to point out that there are a lot of comments in this thread about how good management insulates technical staff from politics. I agree with this, but I want to add that good workers who have management that does what they can to insulate workers from good management have a responsibility to do what they can to insulate their management from politics also. The corporate edicts may be stupid, but most middle management is powerless to fight a lot of these things. It's best to stand up and do what needs to be done to protect your (good) managers from feeling the heat if the edicts aren't followed.
Sometimes, like schedules dictated on high, it's not always possible, but at least give your boss lots of good technical reasons (not just whining) as to why the schedules can't be met.
I wonder if the US government is going to threaten a trade embargo with Taiwan until its government passes a DMCA-like law.
Maybe Taiwan already has a DMCA-like law. Who knows?
This seems to be an entirely different issue altogether. Taiwan just insists on certain time limits wrt Copyright registration and protection.
Seems pretty reasonable to me. This requirement just makes sorting out copyright infringement claims later much easier.
What will almost certainly happen is that the Studios will take care to make sure the Copyright protection is in place in Taiwan before opening movies now.
IANAL, but it would seem that telcos and ISPs might be at risk for carrying this in the US. Any knowledgeable lawyers out there who can speak to this?
Buyers of labor power often don't need to band
together because a single buyer is effectively
a cartel all by itself. Have you ever heard of
a one-company town?
Ever heard of moving?
A lot of people move to urban areas for those jobs. They should be able to move away.
Employers can have kids, but most employment comes
from corporations, and corporations do not have
children (though they do pay rent).
What you say is technically true, but most of the economy is actually small business. Many of these corporations support a small number of business owners whose livlihoods depends upon that enterprise. I'm sorry if this doesn't jibe with your "big bad corporation" vs. "poor mother with children" worldview.
In any case, even the big corporations fund pension plans with their equity and have an affirmative fudiciary responsibility to keep their costs, including their labor costs, at a minimum. Those pension plans support retirees that might otherwise be impoverished.
You're missing
the point though. Employers can always afford to
let a low-skill worker go, whereas a low-skill
worker can't always afford to go or be let go.
You're missing the point that a high-skilled employee might leave some small company and ruin it, whereas the poor small businessman can't always afford to pay what another concern can.
You're right, a worker who doesn't ensure that he
won't be in a bad situation has a "bad business
plan". So what? Do you want to live in a nation
of 300 million MBAs?
No. Just people who make prudent decisions regarding their futures. People who are motivated to train for more skilled positions, people who save and keep an eye toward their options. The paternalistic society we've come to depend upon actually discourages this.
Look. I don't think all employee/employer relationships are symmetrical. I do think that some businesses gain too much power in society through various means (collusion, government support, many others). I also think that big labor sometimes exercises these same mechanisms. I do believe that our attempts to make things "fair" oftentimes have unforeseen negative consequences. I don't favor always taking the side of the "powerless" worker.
The thing you market fundies always forget is that
the "buyers" and "sellers" of labor power are
never on an equal footing.
You're right. "buyers" of labor power aren't allowed to form cartels and set prices like "sellers" can with unions. "Sellers" have the minimum price for their product set by government decree.
I see your point. They aren't on equal footing.
But she has
rent to make and kids to feed and is not free to
act as an ideal market participant.
Like employers don't have kids to feed or rent to make... Like employers aren't sometimes driven out of business because they can't afford labor. Not all employers are multi-national corporations, you know. Some of them are just getting by also. A rich and powerful employer like some huge business is similar to some employee with lots of options and marketable skills.
What's this you say? Any employer who doesn't account for labor costs has a bad business plan?
Any worker who doesn't gain marketable skills or save during good times to guard against being forced into unpalatable labor conditions has a bad business plan as well.
/. is neither deleting nor suppressing those comments.
The reader is suppressing it by reading at a threshold higher than -1. Why does one read at higher than -1? Because the comments at -1 are, for the most part, just crap.
There's a lot of stuff that's just crap that I don't read. I guess to your way of thinking, I'm censoring because I don't spend all my time reading crap.
Now, if you insist that moderation is censorship, let me ask a question. Would/. be better with no moderation?
It's clear to me that there's no hypocrisy. What the/. editors mean by censorship is something very different from what you mean by it.
It's not censorship. It's called editorial control.
In all media I know of, there is some level of editorial control over what is presented. Even at Kuro5hin there is, it's just that the editorial control is exercised by the readership. If you like that level of editorial control, feel free to participate there.
Don't complain because this particular media doesn't wish to "feature" what you personally think is important. It's not censorship, it's just not. To say that it is censorship is to suggest that all media practices censorship. Is it censorship, in your mind, when a newspaper editor doesn't print your feature or letter? No, it's just an editor doing his or her job.
Slashdot practices FAR less editorial control that 99.999% of all media, and yet you still complain. Go figure.
I like/. It's far from perfect, but it is more interesting than most other media, to me, including Kuro5hin. If I wanted to have total editorial control, I'd start my own blog or slash site. I don't.
I guess you can figure out what I'm suggesting that you should do if you don't like the editorial policy here.
Hey, I'm happy I read this. I'm stalling on my decision for Broadband right now because the options are RR or Earthlink (both through TWI Cable) and Ameritech DSL.
I've pretty much eliminated Ameritech DSL from consideration, but I'm wondering what really is the difference between the other two.
From some things I've read, like the above, but other things as well, I'm leaning toward Earthlink, but I am concerned about TW pulling tricks down the line to screw over those who haven't selected their service similar to what the phone companies did to people who chose third-party DSL providers.
Anybody got any suggestions or ideas?
I've started a Journal entry to capture any ideas anybody has. Thanks.
The reason it's old news...is that they've not only stopped light, but made it go backwards, reversing time, so this 'discovery' got projected into the future, where we're reading about it now as if it were new, altho it's been done some time ago.
That won't excuse the inevitable dupe posting of this.
Or is this article the dupe? If so, that's very proactive of the/. editors! Posting the dupe first, getting it out of the way.
You have to balance this against the huge staff salaries, the huge sports facilities, scholarship costs, etc.
You'd have to prove to me that many of these gifts wouldn't have been made anyway. It's like the goodies that NPR station pledge drives gives away. The people would give anyway, but the momento (the football in this case) is a fun way to frame it.
Like I said, read Sperber's book. He points out that a lot of schools with poor sports programs have tremendous endowments, while some other power house schools show a huge outlay to support their sport's programs.
Lose the expensive football or men's basketball coach, or the jock's for those sports, and watch tuition go up. Programs that pay coaches like that generate tons of revenue for the university.
Can you support this often-heard assertion?
Murray Sperber's book Beer and Circus : How Big-Time College Sports Is Crippling Undergraduate Education offers a differing opinion with research to back it up.
Money alone does not buy you intellectual property. If you fund a research project, that money assures that the project gets done, nothing else. If you want to fund a project and maintain the intellectual property, you might think about maintaining in infrastructure that can support researchers careers, instead of just donating a few hundred thousand dollars.
Money alone buys IP all the time. In fact, as you point out, the Universities own the IP because they support (pay money to and spend money to facilitate) the researchers.
I would think that tenure, both at Universities and Research Institutions is exactly this "maintaining in (sic) infrastructure that can support researchers' careers".
Typically, researchers in the public sector have committed to various high-minded ideals about supporting civilization through their efforts. If they wanted to get rich from their scientific research, or they wanted to contribute to the ongoing funding of a Corporation, there are many private avenues for this.
Would you deny that such IP laws have had benefits ? For example. the Cohen-Boyer patent between UCSF and Stanford created Genentech, and has funnelled a BILLION dollars back to those universities, which are now boosting research. Cohen and Boyer did not have to make this patent to keep their jobs, but the careers of hundreds of investigators that followed them are much easier as a result, and more basic science research will get done.
On the other side, if Berkeley has licensed BSD originally, there would probably be no FreeBSD today, and much of our Internet software would perform much worse. Somehow there is a time to sell licensing rights, and a time to give them away, and a morass of ethical issues in between.
Maybe the lesson to be learned from licensing BSD and TCP/IP software is that it's always better to give away IP that is generated by Government (Community) support.
Who knows what tremendous benefits to society and the world would have accrued had the Cohen-Boyer patent been available to ALL the world's researchers without paying a tax back to these Government Institutions.
Before you knee-jerk assert that this isn't beneficial to research in the long term, I think you need to come up with something better than:
Somehow there is a time to sell licensing rights, and a time to give them away, and a morass of ethical issues in between.
to support this. Since the obvious benefits of releasing IP to the public are indicated in the cases of BSD and TCP/IP software, you'll need to come up with something better than "it's helped the UCSF and Stanford Universities and researchers" to weigh against this.
We should understand when it is better and when it is not better to license publicly funded IP. Right now, I think the only motivation is the perceived benefit to the institution. As the article points out, had they known that the BSD TCP/IP software would have been so successful, they would have licensed it, and that would not have benefitted society nearly so much as others in this discussion have pointed out the success of freely available standards/software when compared to licensed standards/software.
Sheesh... Why, oh why, do we need a law to protect people from doing stupid things?
I could see a law where the vendor had to inform you to protect the numbers, but not allow them to give you a slip of paper with the number on it? That's pretty paternal, don't you think?
A lot of receipts have credit card numbers on them, too, which is why you should always dispose of receipts carefully. It's a real convenience to have this reference information on a receipt, and I imagine there's a good business case for having the gift card number on the receipt as well. Makes it easier to bring the card back and get it worked out if the magstrip goes bad, for example.
What we need is a less paternalistic government to train people to be smarter and more responsible for themselves.
Oh, never mind, most people with a public school education have been trained not to think for so long now that any arguments are useless. OK, I give up... What we NEED is for these gift cards to be implanted in a chip in your wrist so you don't accidentally throw them away. That's the law we REALLY need.
If I gave every crack pot the benefit of the doubt we'ld all be flying through space in cold fusion propelled star ships saying "I Captian, I'm givin her all I got".
We would? Sounds pretty cool to me. Gee, if you'd just suspend your skepticism, maybe we could get off this planet.
Uhh... except that part about we'd all be saying "I Captian [sic], I'm givin her all I got". I don't see any point in all of us saying that...
Another advantage of option 3 is that you can be insulated from billing problems.
Many large companies have complicated billing procedures that can break down and cause you to go without pay for weeks or even months at a time. Sure, you'll get it all in the end, but it's a hassle.
You might get assurances that this is not a problem today, and you might even talk to people who swear they've never had a problem with billing, but should the organization change it's billing procedures/software/personnel, or there be major reorganization or merger, things could change. If the company hits a rough spot, they might try paying slower to improve their cash flow numbers also.
...japanese never really seemed all that great at managing Americans in a factory environment.
Can you give me some examples? The Japanese seem to do a good job at managing Americans in all the Auto plants that have sprung up in the ten or twenty years. At least, I've heard good things from the workers at Honda and Toyota plants and the products that come from those plants seem to be of comparable quality to what is produced in Japan.
Slashdot Mirror
Anything? Really?
Hey, make a copy for me and 5000 of your other friends while you are at it!
Unfortunately, now that the DMCA is law, there's little distinction in Copyright law between making illegal copies and breaking in using activation keys.
That's why we needed to stop the DMCA before it became law.
Our hopes now lie in the DMCA being struck down as being too broad or ambiguous.
There's near zero chance that Congress would ever seriously review the DMCA as long as the Media Giants like the status quo.
This situation will become much worse if the current version of Campaign Finance Reform that just passed the US Congress becomes law. Under that law, we won't be able to get together and run issue ads against the DMCA around election time, but the Media Giants, through their news organizations, can run endless editorials and stilted "news" stories about how the DMCA is a good thing right up to and including on election day.
There's still a good chance that bans on issue ads wouldn't pass judicial review. See this page for a discussion of the issues. It seems that this ban would run against the 1976 Supreme Court Ruling Buckley vs. Valeo. There can be no ban on spending, only on individual contributions, which the "soft money" ban would effectively do.
In any case, I don't see much hope of getting the DMCA repealed. Even if we could try to drum up support, it would be an extreme uphill battle trying to get people to understand the issues, what's at stake and overcoming the powerful interests on the other side of the issue. There's some hope that it could be ruled unconstitutional. IANAL, but in my opinion, a bright spot is that recent ruling reported on /. where a judge ruled that put software sales back into the domain of "First Sale" like books regardless of whatever EULAs they might have you clicking through.
IANAL, but I believe that this strategy would have you loading up unlicensed software on your machines. This could lead you into other legal difficulties.
Java, or rather Oak, was initially designed for the embedded market, but it never got any support to "come out of the lab" until someone got the idea of running it in the browser for desktop applications.
Which, come to think of it, was exactly what they intended to do with Java. Make the Sun version irrelevant.
A completely ridiculous comparison. First off, when AT&T created the closed version of it, POSIX didn't exist at all. So, the comparison kinda falls flat. AT&T never tried to "embrace and extend" Unix away from competitors who were sticking to strict POSIX compliance.
In any case, AFAICT, POSIX is mostly irrelevant as a unifying standard. It's mostly a marketing buzzword. Most serious software, and all the commercial software I've ever been involved with, has not been written to strict POSIX compliance. Sure, lots of software may use POSIX standard interfaces, but that's only because those interfaces were actually drawn from existing interfaces in Unix software.
I do think that it's probably a good idea to stick to POSIX compliance, but that's just not the real world. In the real world, people use whatever API that makes sense to get a version out the door with the most features and that often means ditching POSIX for some vendor-supplied API.
The whole point of Java and what MS would have you believe is one of the points of C# and related standards is write once, run anywhere. This has never existed in any serious way with Unix APIs.
Now, back to the point I was trying to make. If MS saw that they had serious competition from Mono or other .NET implementations, then they'd just make their own V2 incompatible and immediately make those other implementations irrelevant.
Which, as I said above, is exactly what they wanted to do with their own incompatible version of Java.
Yes, but from a practical standpoint, if Microsoft decides to take the products in a direction away from the Open Standard version, then the Open Standard version will immediately become irrelevant.
Which, come to think of it, was exactly what they intended to do with Java. Make the Sun version irrelevant.
Whatever happened to offices? Some years ago, you always heard how much productivity of Engineering staff was enhanced by offices, but now, all you hear about is that "open" workspaces encourage collaboration.
Personally, I much prefer collaborating passing documents back and forth. Collaborating face to face has it's place, but to build anything of value, it's best to get all the ideas and opinions down in writing and diagrams, so they can be studied objectively. Usually when technical decisions are made in meetings, even informal drop-by-the cube or office meetings without anything written down, I find that they are poorly thought out.
That's what I want from management. An environment that values my ideas, but also READS and tries to understand the issues. Shoot from the hip environments are generally poor for a number of reasons, in my experience:
That being said, I do want to point out that there are a lot of comments in this thread about how good management insulates technical staff from politics. I agree with this, but I want to add that good workers who have management that does what they can to insulate workers from good management have a responsibility to do what they can to insulate their management from politics also. The corporate edicts may be stupid, but most middle management is powerless to fight a lot of these things. It's best to stand up and do what needs to be done to protect your (good) managers from feeling the heat if the edicts aren't followed.
Sometimes, like schedules dictated on high, it's not always possible, but at least give your boss lots of good technical reasons (not just whining) as to why the schedules can't be met.
Just my 2 cents.
What's evil about it? Smart maybe, but evil?
Anybody who would enter such a contest is primarily motivated by the challenge, I would think. Getting the $10K gives you bragging rights is all.
Sure, Google gets some value, but a lot of highly motivated programmers get a challenging problem.
If all good programmers were primarily motivated by money, there'd be no Linux, BSD, Apache, Emacs, Vim...
I reserve evil for things that actually hurt someone. This seems like a win-win to me.
Maybe Taiwan already has a DMCA-like law. Who knows?
This seems to be an entirely different issue altogether. Taiwan just insists on certain time limits wrt Copyright registration and protection.
Seems pretty reasonable to me. This requirement just makes sorting out copyright infringement claims later much easier.
What will almost certainly happen is that the Studios will take care to make sure the Copyright protection is in place in Taiwan before opening movies now.
IANAL, but it would seem that telcos and ISPs might be at risk for carrying this in the US. Any knowledgeable lawyers out there who can speak to this?
Sure he did. To make sure that the enemy doesn't catch on, the references were encoded so that only really smart people would, uh.
Oh, uhhmm. You're right. No mention of a new War on Stupidity.
Have you no shame?
No.
Ever heard of moving?
A lot of people move to urban areas for those jobs. They should be able to move away.
What you say is technically true, but most of the economy is actually small business. Many of these corporations support a small number of business owners whose livlihoods depends upon that enterprise. I'm sorry if this doesn't jibe with your "big bad corporation" vs. "poor mother with children" worldview.
In any case, even the big corporations fund pension plans with their equity and have an affirmative fudiciary responsibility to keep their costs, including their labor costs, at a minimum. Those pension plans support retirees that might otherwise be impoverished.
You're missing the point that a high-skilled employee might leave some small company and ruin it, whereas the poor small businessman can't always afford to pay what another concern can.
No. Just people who make prudent decisions regarding their futures. People who are motivated to train for more skilled positions, people who save and keep an eye toward their options. The paternalistic society we've come to depend upon actually discourages this.
Look. I don't think all employee/employer relationships are symmetrical. I do think that some businesses gain too much power in society through various means (collusion, government support, many others). I also think that big labor sometimes exercises these same mechanisms. I do believe that our attempts to make things "fair" oftentimes have unforeseen negative consequences. I don't favor always taking the side of the "powerless" worker.
the "buyers" and "sellers" of labor power are
never on an equal footing.
You're right. "buyers" of labor power aren't allowed to form cartels and set prices like "sellers" can with unions. "Sellers" have the minimum price for their product set by government decree.
I see your point. They aren't on equal footing.
rent to make and kids to feed and is not free to
act as an ideal market participant.
Like employers don't have kids to feed or rent to make... Like employers aren't sometimes driven out of business because they can't afford labor. Not all employers are multi-national corporations, you know. Some of them are just getting by also. A rich and powerful employer like some huge business is similar to some employee with lots of options and marketable skills.
What's this you say? Any employer who doesn't account for labor costs has a bad business plan?
Any worker who doesn't gain marketable skills or save during good times to guard against being forced into unpalatable labor conditions has a bad business plan as well.
/. is neither deleting nor suppressing those comments.
The reader is suppressing it by reading at a threshold higher than -1. Why does one read at higher than -1? Because the comments at -1 are, for the most part, just crap.
There's a lot of stuff that's just crap that I don't read. I guess to your way of thinking, I'm censoring because I don't spend all my time reading crap.
Now, if you insist that moderation is censorship, let me ask a question. Would /. be better with no moderation?
It's clear to me that there's no hypocrisy. What the /. editors mean by censorship is something very different from what you mean by it.
It's not censorship. It's called editorial control.
In all media I know of, there is some level of editorial control over what is presented. Even at Kuro5hin there is, it's just that the editorial control is exercised by the readership. If you like that level of editorial control, feel free to participate there.
Don't complain because this particular media doesn't wish to "feature" what you personally think is important. It's not censorship, it's just not. To say that it is censorship is to suggest that all media practices censorship. Is it censorship, in your mind, when a newspaper editor doesn't print your feature or letter? No, it's just an editor doing his or her job.
Slashdot practices FAR less editorial control that 99.999% of all media, and yet you still complain. Go figure.
I like /. It's far from perfect, but it is more interesting than most other media, to me, including Kuro5hin. If I wanted to have total editorial control, I'd start my own blog or slash site. I don't.
I guess you can figure out what I'm suggesting that you should do if you don't like the editorial policy here.
I've pretty much eliminated Ameritech DSL from consideration, but I'm wondering what really is the difference between the other two.
From some things I've read, like the above, but other things as well, I'm leaning toward Earthlink, but I am concerned about TW pulling tricks down the line to screw over those who haven't selected their service similar to what the phone companies did to people who chose third-party DSL providers.
Anybody got any suggestions or ideas?
I've started a Journal entry to capture any ideas anybody has. Thanks.
'Fishy'
Except that Dolphins aren't fish, they are mammals. But, it's not a bad idea...
'Mammy'!!
That won't excuse the inevitable dupe posting of this.
Or is this article the dupe? If so, that's very proactive of the /. editors! Posting the dupe first, getting it out of the way.
Possibly in this one case, but that doesn't prove the point that overall sports are a net income gain to Universities.
You'd have to prove to me that many of these gifts wouldn't have been made anyway. It's like the goodies that NPR station pledge drives gives away. The people would give anyway, but the momento (the football in this case) is a fun way to frame it.
Like I said, read Sperber's book. He points out that a lot of schools with poor sports programs have tremendous endowments, while some other power house schools show a huge outlay to support their sport's programs.
Can you support this often-heard assertion?
Murray Sperber's book Beer and Circus : How Big-Time College Sports Is Crippling Undergraduate Education offers a differing opinion with research to back it up.
Money alone buys IP all the time. In fact, as you point out, the Universities own the IP because they support (pay money to and spend money to facilitate) the researchers.
I would think that tenure, both at Universities and Research Institutions is exactly this "maintaining in (sic) infrastructure that can support researchers' careers".
Typically, researchers in the public sector have committed to various high-minded ideals about supporting civilization through their efforts. If they wanted to get rich from their scientific research, or they wanted to contribute to the ongoing funding of a Corporation, there are many private avenues for this.
On the other side, if Berkeley has licensed BSD originally, there would probably be no FreeBSD today, and much of our Internet software would perform much worse. Somehow there is a time to sell licensing rights, and a time to give them away, and a morass of ethical issues in between.
Maybe the lesson to be learned from licensing BSD and TCP/IP software is that it's always better to give away IP that is generated by Government (Community) support.
Who knows what tremendous benefits to society and the world would have accrued had the Cohen-Boyer patent been available to ALL the world's researchers without paying a tax back to these Government Institutions.
Before you knee-jerk assert that this isn't beneficial to research in the long term, I think you need to come up with something better than:
to support this. Since the obvious benefits of releasing IP to the public are indicated in the cases of BSD and TCP/IP software, you'll need to come up with something better than "it's helped the UCSF and Stanford Universities and researchers" to weigh against this.
We should understand when it is better and when it is not better to license publicly funded IP. Right now, I think the only motivation is the perceived benefit to the institution. As the article points out, had they known that the BSD TCP/IP software would have been so successful, they would have licensed it, and that would not have benefitted society nearly so much as others in this discussion have pointed out the success of freely available standards/software when compared to licensed standards/software.
Sheesh... Why, oh why, do we need a law to protect people from doing stupid things?
I could see a law where the vendor had to inform you to protect the numbers, but not allow them to give you a slip of paper with the number on it? That's pretty paternal, don't you think?
A lot of receipts have credit card numbers on them, too, which is why you should always dispose of receipts carefully. It's a real convenience to have this reference information on a receipt, and I imagine there's a good business case for having the gift card number on the receipt as well. Makes it easier to bring the card back and get it worked out if the magstrip goes bad, for example.
What we need is a less paternalistic government to train people to be smarter and more responsible for themselves.
Oh, never mind, most people with a public school education have been trained not to think for so long now that any arguments are useless. OK, I give up... What we NEED is for these gift cards to be implanted in a chip in your wrist so you don't accidentally throw them away. That's the law we REALLY need.
We would? Sounds pretty cool to me. Gee, if you'd just suspend your skepticism, maybe we could get off this planet.
Uhh... except that part about we'd all be saying "I Captian [sic], I'm givin her all I got". I don't see any point in all of us saying that...
Many large companies have complicated billing procedures that can break down and cause you to go without pay for weeks or even months at a time. Sure, you'll get it all in the end, but it's a hassle.
You might get assurances that this is not a problem today, and you might even talk to people who swear they've never had a problem with billing, but should the organization change it's billing procedures/software/personnel, or there be major reorganization or merger, things could change. If the company hits a rough spot, they might try paying slower to improve their cash flow numbers also.
Can you give me some examples? The Japanese seem to do a good job at managing Americans in all the Auto plants that have sprung up in the ten or twenty years. At least, I've heard good things from the workers at Honda and Toyota plants and the products that come from those plants seem to be of comparable quality to what is produced in Japan.