Great. Geoengineering. Us trying to "solve" a natural problem. Can you say "rabbits in Australia?" Everytime we try one of these "solutions" the result is trouble. I would be agreeable to letting the scientists play geoengineers if they agree to let us violently kill them WHEN it fucks things up even worse.
Actually, not every time. The introduction of the cactoblastis moth to Australia, to deal with prickly pear, was very successful. But I'm not so keen on the modern attempts at geoengineering -- dumping gazillions of tons of chemicals into a chaotic system without any chance of running a realistic trial first (only a simulation that by definition can only deal with known variables), and where you haven't got a spare atmosphere if you muck this one up.
If you go into research, you don't spend that much time coding (your deliverable is a research paper, not a program). There's also product management (though that's fairly high up the tree in most companies), and many companies have a growing interest in "user experience". Realistically, the user experience work in most companies is a bit of software engineering that people had forgotten about in the past ("hey, I've got a bright idea -- maybe we should check the specifications actually produce a product that the users can work with!") but that has come storming back into fashion. Pre-sales work is also a little different -- trying to check that your technology could deliver for a customer (or persuade them that it can). Or if you like playing with toys, embedded devices and control is a good area -- not just writing code but playing with geeky bits of hardware (like, if you're lucky, self-driving tractors).
Microsoft has built a business out of bad design which happens to fit the sloppy thinking and training of office workers.
Excel is a program that means that you can create shitty models with no proper auditability - which means that people who cannot be bothered to understand databases can think they are being clever
Because quite clearly when the secretary organises the annual office Secret Santa, the coffee rota, or the desk seating allocation, that should involve expensive programmers taking time setting up databases, servers, and UI front ends, rather than that secretary knocking out a spreadsheet in half an hour. Microsoft has built a business [ok, stolen Lotus's ground] out of realising that "cheap enough, quick enough, easy enough, and good enough" beats "theoretically pure and requires expensive trained people to do or change it" hands down 99% of the time in most companies.
Having said this, it's going to be difficult for Mozilla to find a revenue stream that even comes close to that from Google. If they want independence, they'll have a hard time finding it. Somehow I can't see Microsoft stepping in with a bid if Google were to eventually pull out...
Oh I can. They paid Facebook enough to get access to Facebook's advertising and search market, they still make mention of doing a search deal with Yahoo, and Ballmer has made mutterings about open source browsers recently. If Google dropped their deal, I imagine Microsoft would pounce pretty fast. Great marketing with the techie crowd, and a darn site cheaper than a lot of what they've been doing with live.com
It's not like Mozilla has some trade secrets to hide from their partner. All the secrets of making a browser seem to be released regularly as source code.
Source code isn't everything. There is a lot of trade wisdom, such as "oh, this is why this other on-the-surface simpler technique doesn't actually work out in practice", that is rarely written into the source code or documentation but that you can get access to if you have a close relationship with the developers. So Google's relationship with Mozilla was probably much more useful for producing Chrome than just having access to Mozilla's source code repository (epecially as Google used WebKit for the source code!)
You've just readily admitted to accepting arguments from authority. It shouldn't matter who I am, or what my accreditations are
No, I've just told you I don't accept medical diagnoses from amateur cranks who have neither medical accreditation, evidence, nor reason. Especially when they are making patently silly claims such as that most of the rest of the world have a mental illness because they disagree with your position on religion.
You're more than welcome to reply again, but honestly, I'm done with this discussion since I don't think either of us will be able to say anything the other side would be willing to consider (unfortunately). I'm willing to consider rational arguments, but haven't received any yet in my opinion.
Ah, but you are the one trying to make the outlandish assertion (diagnosing most of the world with mental illnesses) and thus need to provide solid evidence and arguments, which you have not. I'm just merrily driving busses through the holes in your logic.
I am a little disappointed that you haven't had the wit to recognise the irony of your position: that you are making an outlandish claim without evidence (diagnosing most of the world with a mental illness), while your complaint is that you think they make outlandish claims without evidence. And so we come back to my original response to you: physician heal thyself.
Come to think of it, it's interesting that the BBC got burned for their decision only to support Windows for downloads, but haven't been told off for only supporting Adobe's platform for streaming, and tying even closer to them with the AIR announcement. (They usually draw complaints whenever they distort markets, not just when they make some viewers miss out)
Also correct. I never stated that others shouldn't/couldn't/wouldn't find the evidence compelling enough to believe it, only that I consider it a mental illness if you do, as it is extra-ordinarily flimsy and relies on an incredible amount of very obvious logical fallacies such as circular reasoning. The evidence MAY be enough for some reasoning people to entertain it as a continued line of investigation, but after this continued investigation, I'd expect them to come to the conclusion that it's all a load of complete bollocks.
"I'm not saying others shouldn't, only that they are mad if they do so". Hmm, someone didn't proofread his post for self-contradictions! In the middle part you do a little handwaving, plucking a few derogatives from the air as your "reasons", forgetting you are claiming that all people of any faith are mad, and you clearly have not read all the evidence in any depth. And then at the end, you fail to sanity-check your expectation. A reasonable person, when faced with such a deluge of people disagreeing with their expectation -- more than half those who have ever lived -- would think "hmm, maybe my expectation of how people should rate this evidence was wrong, or I missed an argument or misinterpreted some evidence that clearly a lot of people find to be reasonable, whether or not I might disagree with it". You on the other hand just claim "Nah, they're all mad."
Actually, no I was just being lazy and didn't bother elaborating. By saying, "this looks not very different to", I was actually referring to an analysis of the symptoms of the mental illness that I had and the behaviour exhibited by religious people.
And if you were an accredited practitioner with the British Psychological Society, or its equivalent where you live, maybe we'd take your analysis seriously. As it is, it just sounds like bullshit.
I do lack absolute proof in a lack of a god/gods, however there's nothing wrong with that, because I lack absolute proof of everything (you can't ever really KNOW, just weigh the evidence at hand and come to conclusions). However, when it comes to god(s), not only do I lack absolute proof of them, but I also lack ANY compelling evidence for them, OR any evidence that anyone else might have evidence for them. Therefore, I can only come to the conclusion that these people have an equal or lesser amount of information regarding god(s), and yet on this information, somehow have managed to come to a belief. This looks not very different to a mental illness that I suffered as a child where I had difficulty distinguishing between fantasy and reality.
Your argument here rests entirely on two things, both of which are wrong: 1) The weasel-word "compelling". You are no doubt aware there is some evidence (if nothing else at least you must be aware of the texts of the religious documents themselves, and a good few dozen philosophical arguments, though there is more that you might not have looked at) but you don't personally find that evidence compelling. But we know that already because you don't believe -- you haven't been compelled. However you then do the illogical and arrogant thing of claiming that because you personally don't find the evidence compelling it is "a lack of any compelling evidence" for everybody and thus anybody who disagrees with your opinion must be mad. 2) Your "this looks not very different to a mental illness I had..." is again a weasel-phrase. Firstly you will note that because you want to justify a libel, your requirement for evidence has suddenly disappeared -- you don't ask for studies or psychologists' reports, but are happy to take "this looks not very different to" as your only evidence. Furthermore, your argument is a repeat of your earlier fallacy. Because you don't believe in God, therefore you claim he doesn't exist, therefore anybody who believes he does believes in something that doesn't exist, therefore they cannot distinguish fantasy from reality. It is entirely predicated and based on an underlying arrogant claim that anybody who disagrees with you must be mad because your opinion could not possibly be wrong.
So you've shown that religion isn't necessary for violence. I don't think that's what anyone is saying. Would you say it's easier or harder to organize a violent effort when religion is involved?
The evidence is that it is much much harder. Even just recently, Rwanda, Chechnya, much of the Balkans all sparked off very easily for tribal or nationalist reasons, and killed many times more people than the religious terrorists have managed in decades of trying. Similarly the "famous religious bloodshed" of the crusades and inquisition that get trumpeted on Slashdot actually had a very small number of casualties as wars and oppressions go. Although religious violence gets a lot of press, it is a tiny dot against the massive non-religious bloodshed of human history.
Lack of funding? Young man, I learned Pascal on a TRS-80 Model II. The cellphone that is likely in your pocket is probably more powerful in just about every aspect. The book we learned from was probably close to a decade old at the time and was sad in the shadow of what you can get at Borders for 25 bucks. I learned programming just fine.
You don't need the latest and greatest to learn how to code.
Well, if you want to motivate a child, perhaps you do have to have the latest and greatest, or at least something with some cool factor. If you were a child today, you wouldn't feel an urge to play with a TRS-80 Model II (or BBC Micro in my case) because it is now old obsolete technology. You certainly wouldn't ask your parents to buy one for Christmas. So, you are unlikely to learn to program it. One of the major reasons so many people grew up liking to program from the late 70s to early 90s was because all the "latest and greatest" home and school computing devices had simple accessible programming languages pre-installed, and in many cases the manuals that came with them taught basic programming. And it was the coolest, latest, greatest thing. Children getting a PC now face a tytanny of choice, wondering "what's a good language to learn", while having to dodge the armies of angry geeks arguing furiously for and against each of them, before they start. And the chances are, whatever language they get hold of, it's most popular manual linked from its homepage will not teach you how to write Galaxians, but how to write a Pet Store's inventory management software. How many eleven year olds are going to shout "way cool!" to that? Today, if you want fun motivating programming for children, you have to a lot more to hunt it out than you did in the 80s.
Frankly, the recent trend of middle-aged geeks moaning about kids of today not wanting to download kits to reprogram their mobile phones that have such powerful processors (but just muck around making game levels in LittleBigPlanet), is rather like our grandparents moaning that we didn't want to play with Meccano, but just mucked about with that infantile brainless Lego...
Ok, we all pass this cross roads as developers. You are hired for a purpose, and if your job is to produce software for that company then they own the software.
Actually, it's rather different for university researchers, such as the original poster. We are employed to research. If we are in computing, then part of that research might involve writing some code, but many of us are not simply employed "to produce software". (Though some are.) As academics, there is a much greater expectation of being able to continue our research at another institution (universities are not in product competition, but are expected to cooperate -- it's mostly public funding after all). A history researcher can reasonably expect to continue his history research if he moves post or goes on sabbatical. As can a social scientist. For a computing researcher (or for microbiologists), however, the IP of the written code becomes a complicating factor. If one university claims copyright, but the only researcher involved moves to another university, it could completely stymie any research progress. So, for instance, Cambridge University does not usually claim copyright over software its researchers produce -- this isn't so much a matter of commercialisation rights as of academic freedom. It's no wonder then that the GPL, BSD licence, and Creative Commons all came out of university environments, not the commercial sector.
Something the original poster has not mentioned is why this decision "must be made soon". Is it because he is signing a new contract (it would be unusual for an employment contract with a university to claim ownership of code predating the contract), or because he's at loggerheads with the IP department?
(2) Programs manipulate numbers. Mathematic formulae manipulate numbers. It's an entirely reasonable conclusion that he has reached that a program is merely a formula.
Pedantically, no they don't. They manipulate properties (usually potentials) of solid state devices. For convenience's sake, the mathematically minded consider the properties of the solid state devices to be a binary representation of a number. Note: not a number itself in the abstract number theory sense of the successor function, but a particular representation of a number. However, there is no special requirement for this to be the analogy we use. To use a trivial example: stating that the character 'A' can be represented by the number 65 (or whatever the modern unicode equivalent is) is a mathematical bias; they do share the same representation in memory under ASCII, and there are CPU operations that can act on either -- but it would be just as true to say that "the number 65 can be represented by the character 'A'". That we say the potential patterns are representations of numbers is entirely a matter of human interpretation. Modern software engineering has started to abstract away from this number-prejudice, for instance references are less frequently described as "a representation of a look-up number" and are increasingly treated just an abstraction of a unique reference to an item (we skip the artificial intermediary of calling the reference a 'number').
My business partner and I both reserved '09 Tesla Roadsters. Why? Not because it's a hot car, or it drives like a rocket, but because we want to see electric car research pushed faster. And it was the next best thing to investing in the company. It drives me nuts when some fool comes out and says "Tesla can have help when their car is priced for the average person". They won't need help by than. They need help getting to that point.
Nonetheless, until that point it is a distortion of the market to negligible public benefit. Tesla are funded by venture capital, the entire point of which is that they are taking the high risk that Tesla will fail to make electric vehicles economic, and that instead it'll be the company that comes along and learns from all of Tesla's mistakes that will be successful. If the public bails out the venture, then the primary beneficiaries are the VCs that have effectively had their risk underwritten by the taxpayer (nationalising the risk, privatising the reward). The public gains comparatively little -- it really doesn't matter whether it's Tesla's roll of the dice that wins or the next VC-backed company after them; and the limitation of liability ensures there is a greater upside reward than downside risk so there will be a next VC-backed company rolling the dice on green or electric vehicles. (I've already heard of a few other up-and-coming "green" car ventures.)
Copyright was a bargain between a creator and the public. Now it's an ever-extending new property right that benefits neither. I do not believe copyright in its current form to be an ethical restriction of free speech any longer, so I feel no ethical duty to respect it.
Then take it up with your MP or Representative. In a democratic society, you do not get to choose which laws you feel like respecting today. (A conservationist down the road from you might be very utilitarian about your carbon footprint, and feel "no ethical duty" to refrain from bludgeoning you to death with a meat-axe... you probably don't want him rationalising which laws he should be excused from either.)
And the other side of the coin is that IT is not a producing industry. IT merely allows other industries to produce their goods and services in a more efficient fashion. From this you can clearly see that the real source of money for IT is serving other industries as custom solutions.
That's not actually true. To use a facetious example, what industry does World of Warcraft make more more efficient? (Except maybe "extracting money from geeks".) Even if it were true, it's substantially irrelevant as the same argument can be applied to almost every industry except mining and agriculture. Everything from vocational training, to automatic knitting machines, to heavy goods vehicles are purchased to allow some other industry or activity to be more efficient, rather than for their own sake. Pre-trained bricklayers make construction more efficient; knitting machines make clothes production more efficient than [properly paid] manual labourers; lorries make the movement of goods more efficient than horses and carts. This does not mean that most lorries on the road must be custom jobs.
Commodity market can go to 0 without a significant impact on global IT economy, because even now 9 out of 10 programmers work for non-IT companies. If your company is not selling software, then raise of free software is only to your benefit.
Again this is not true. First, we've recently seen quite how problematic economic knock-on effects can be. Secondly, if the rise of free software were to cause the end of proprietary software sales, then this could make it significantly harder to source new "commidity-to-be" software: the first customer either has to pay full development costs, or build a coalition to cover the development costs before work begins (damned hard if you want to do anything remotely new) -- no longer can you go to an enterprising bunch of developers who figure they can make enough money selling it to others afterwards that your sale price is not just a fraction of the cost, but a discounted fraction because you're their pilot customer. (In proprietary markets, of course, these enterprising bunches are constantly coming to you.)
However, in many areas it turns out you can compete with free (as in beer). A trivial example: XPadder (a free tool that lets you use a gamepad on games that only allow keyboard and mouse input) has ceased development and its site is up for sale. It's commercial competitors, though from all accounts no more capable, live on, making their owners happy profits. No doubt the commercial competitors will gain even more market share now xpadder effectively has a big "in liquidation" sign up. By driving profits to zero, free (as in beer or speech) projects can end up being the first thing they drive out of business themselves -- an economic black hole that pinches itself off.
I don't recall the case name, but just a couple of years ago it was ruled that employees had to be paid during periods where they were putting on and taking off protective gear and uniforms. I can't see waiting for a machine to boot up to be any different.
Major back-pay is coming their way for this. All those 15 to 30 minute periods add up. Plus probable punitive damages, and sometimes the feds even decide to toss a fine in for good measure.
Being mean to computer programmers and IT staff isn't as politically or socially shock-inducing as being mean to firemen or miners (outside of California, anyway). I wouldn't be overly surprised if the result went the other way. That said, it sounds like a terrible employer to work for -- so if the network or the computer on your desk fails and you can't clock in, you're personally out of pocket? There's not (yet) such a shortage of good employers, so just vote with your feet.
Also, this is not a contract. Clicking 'I agree' is not a legal way to sign a contract and it is not legal to unilaterally add conditions once a deal is done (once you gave them money, they can't force more conditions on you). They know this, this is why they call it a license. However, a license cannot only grant you rights, it cannot remove them from you.
Hence, EULAs are bogus.
Some courts have upheld EULAs in the past. In some cases they have even upheld shrinkwrap EULAs that you cannot see until after you have accepted them (where a 'reasonable person' would have expected the clause to be present in the contract). I am not a lawyer, but I strongly suspect the parent poster isn't either and you should think twice about taking his "EULAs are bogus" advice.
We used an interesting system here in London to pick our mayor: Your ballot has two columns - your first choice and your second choice. You can't vote for the same person in both.
The idea is that the votes from everyone's first column are totalled up. If nobody gets more than 50% of the vote, they eliminate all but the top two candidates. They then add to each candidate's total all of the votes for that candidate in the second column. The winner is the one with the highest total from both columns combined.
In practice what this means is that you vote in column 1 for the candidate you'd really prefer, even if he has no chance of winning. You vote in the column 2 for a candidate who has a realistic chance of winning and whom you don't mind too much.
Applied to the national elections in America, it would mean that the greens could all vote for Nader safe in the knowledge that it wouldn't result in a "lost vote" for the Democrats. And libertarians could vote for Paul.
The beauty of such a system is that the final result would be a better reflection of the electorate's will (Gore would have won, for instance), and the true extent of minority candidates' support would also be more obvious, so those candidates would have a bigger influence on the election - for instance, they might not fall foul of the 15% "viability" standard required to participate in the debates. And in the long run, it's just possible that a third party might break the stranglehold of the Dems and Reps.
Australia uses a system of preferential voting (in the UK I believe it is referred to as "single transferrable vote"), but still effectively has a two-party system between Labor and the Liberal/National coalition (theoretically separate parties but in practice they've been coalesced for decades). Other parties, such as the Democrats and Family First, still find it quite tough to break through. Partly this is because the biggest two parties always always campaign against each other -- in a sense this gives them free publicity from their opponents' adverts, while the minor parties are completely ignored. So frankly most voters don't have much of a clue who the minor parties are or what they stand for.
I would think it quite hard to be duped into believing a program is a human.
Hmm, I'm not so sure. I've always thought the Turing Test isn't so much a test of artificial intelligence as of natural gullability. Given the alarming number of people who can't tell their bank from a Nigerian scammer*, why does anyone think the Turing test is valuable?
* although these days I suppose it does seem more like picking one bunch of villains from another. "Dear Ben Bernanke, if you just send us $700bn we can fix your banking system for you..."
The summary is also misleading when it says "they have failed to consider 21st Century protocol support". BT no doubt have considered it; they are apparently well aware of the routers that would need patching; but at the moment IPv6 does not have enough market share for the benefit to justify the operational cost of patching and re-testing the equipment at fault; in a few years time it probably will. (It's not as if BT will have to rip out the entire network and start again, just fix those last few recalcitrant devices that are stopping them from saying "we support IPv6 now".)
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, not every time. The introduction of the cactoblastis moth to Australia, to deal with prickly pear, was very successful. But I'm not so keen on the modern attempts at geoengineering -- dumping gazillions of tons of chemicals into a chaotic system without any chance of running a realistic trial first (only a simulation that by definition can only deal with known variables), and where you haven't got a spare atmosphere if you muck this one up.
If you go into research, you don't spend that much time coding (your deliverable is a research paper, not a program). There's also product management (though that's fairly high up the tree in most companies), and many companies have a growing interest in "user experience". Realistically, the user experience work in most companies is a bit of software engineering that people had forgotten about in the past ("hey, I've got a bright idea -- maybe we should check the specifications actually produce a product that the users can work with!") but that has come storming back into fashion. Pre-sales work is also a little different -- trying to check that your technology could deliver for a customer (or persuade them that it can). Or if you like playing with toys, embedded devices and control is a good area -- not just writing code but playing with geeky bits of hardware (like, if you're lucky, self-driving tractors).
Because quite clearly when the secretary organises the annual office Secret Santa, the coffee rota, or the desk seating allocation, that should involve expensive programmers taking time setting up databases, servers, and UI front ends, rather than that secretary knocking out a spreadsheet in half an hour. Microsoft has built a business [ok, stolen Lotus's ground] out of realising that "cheap enough, quick enough, easy enough, and good enough" beats "theoretically pure and requires expensive trained people to do or change it" hands down 99% of the time in most companies.
Oh I can. They paid Facebook enough to get access to Facebook's advertising and search market, they still make mention of doing a search deal with Yahoo, and Ballmer has made mutterings about open source browsers recently. If Google dropped their deal, I imagine Microsoft would pounce pretty fast. Great marketing with the techie crowd, and a darn site cheaper than a lot of what they've been doing with live.com
Source code isn't everything. There is a lot of trade wisdom, such as "oh, this is why this other on-the-surface simpler technique doesn't actually work out in practice", that is rarely written into the source code or documentation but that you can get access to if you have a close relationship with the developers. So Google's relationship with Mozilla was probably much more useful for producing Chrome than just having access to Mozilla's source code repository (epecially as Google used WebKit for the source code!)
No, I've just told you I don't accept medical diagnoses from amateur cranks who have neither medical accreditation, evidence, nor reason. Especially when they are making patently silly claims such as that most of the rest of the world have a mental illness because they disagree with your position on religion.
Ah, but you are the one trying to make the outlandish assertion (diagnosing most of the world with mental illnesses) and thus need to provide solid evidence and arguments, which you have not. I'm just merrily driving busses through the holes in your logic.
I am a little disappointed that you haven't had the wit to recognise the irony of your position: that you are making an outlandish claim without evidence (diagnosing most of the world with a mental illness), while your complaint is that you think they make outlandish claims without evidence. And so we come back to my original response to you: physician heal thyself.
Come to think of it, it's interesting that the BBC got burned for their decision only to support Windows for downloads, but haven't been told off for only supporting Adobe's platform for streaming, and tying even closer to them with the AIR announcement. (They usually draw complaints whenever they distort markets, not just when they make some viewers miss out)
"I'm not saying others shouldn't, only that they are mad if they do so". Hmm, someone didn't proofread his post for self-contradictions! In the middle part you do a little handwaving, plucking a few derogatives from the air as your "reasons", forgetting you are claiming that all people of any faith are mad, and you clearly have not read all the evidence in any depth. And then at the end, you fail to sanity-check your expectation. A reasonable person, when faced with such a deluge of people disagreeing with their expectation -- more than half those who have ever lived -- would think "hmm, maybe my expectation of how people should rate this evidence was wrong, or I missed an argument or misinterpreted some evidence that clearly a lot of people find to be reasonable, whether or not I might disagree with it". You on the other hand just claim "Nah, they're all mad."
And if you were an accredited practitioner with the British Psychological Society, or its equivalent where you live, maybe we'd take your analysis seriously. As it is, it just sounds like bullshit.
Your argument here rests entirely on two things, both of which are wrong:
1) The weasel-word "compelling". You are no doubt aware there is some evidence (if nothing else at least you must be aware of the texts of the religious documents themselves, and a good few dozen philosophical arguments, though there is more that you might not have looked at) but you don't personally find that evidence compelling. But we know that already because you don't believe -- you haven't been compelled. However you then do the illogical and arrogant thing of claiming that because you personally don't find the evidence compelling it is "a lack of any compelling evidence" for everybody and thus anybody who disagrees with your opinion must be mad.
2) Your "this looks not very different to a mental illness I had..." is again a weasel-phrase. Firstly you will note that because you want to justify a libel, your requirement for evidence has suddenly disappeared -- you don't ask for studies or psychologists' reports, but are happy to take "this looks not very different to" as your only evidence. Furthermore, your argument is a repeat of your earlier fallacy. Because you don't believe in God, therefore you claim he doesn't exist, therefore anybody who believes he does believes in something that doesn't exist, therefore they cannot distinguish fantasy from reality. It is entirely predicated and based on an underlying arrogant claim that anybody who disagrees with you must be mad because your opinion could not possibly be wrong.
As you appear to place quite strong belief in that without evidence, one might say "Doctor heal thyself".
(Or at least "put the Dawkins book down and actually think, rather than just parroting his text".)
The evidence is that it is much much harder. Even just recently, Rwanda, Chechnya, much of the Balkans all sparked off very easily for tribal or nationalist reasons, and killed many times more people than the religious terrorists have managed in decades of trying. Similarly the "famous religious bloodshed" of the crusades and inquisition that get trumpeted on Slashdot actually had a very small number of casualties as wars and oppressions go. Although religious violence gets a lot of press, it is a tiny dot against the massive non-religious bloodshed of human history.
Well, if you want to motivate a child, perhaps you do have to have the latest and greatest, or at least something with some cool factor. If you were a child today, you wouldn't feel an urge to play with a TRS-80 Model II (or BBC Micro in my case) because it is now old obsolete technology. You certainly wouldn't ask your parents to buy one for Christmas. So, you are unlikely to learn to program it. One of the major reasons so many people grew up liking to program from the late 70s to early 90s was because all the "latest and greatest" home and school computing devices had simple accessible programming languages pre-installed, and in many cases the manuals that came with them taught basic programming. And it was the coolest, latest, greatest thing. Children getting a PC now face a tytanny of choice, wondering "what's a good language to learn", while having to dodge the armies of angry geeks arguing furiously for and against each of them, before they start. And the chances are, whatever language they get hold of, it's most popular manual linked from its homepage will not teach you how to write Galaxians, but how to write a Pet Store's inventory management software. How many eleven year olds are going to shout "way cool!" to that? Today, if you want fun motivating programming for children, you have to a lot more to hunt it out than you did in the 80s.
Frankly, the recent trend of middle-aged geeks moaning about kids of today not wanting to download kits to reprogram their mobile phones that have such powerful processors (but just muck around making game levels in LittleBigPlanet), is rather like our grandparents moaning that we didn't want to play with Meccano, but just mucked about with that infantile brainless Lego...
Actually, it's rather different for university researchers, such as the original poster. We are employed to research. If we are in computing, then part of that research might involve writing some code, but many of us are not simply employed "to produce software". (Though some are.) As academics, there is a much greater expectation of being able to continue our research at another institution (universities are not in product competition, but are expected to cooperate -- it's mostly public funding after all). A history researcher can reasonably expect to continue his history research if he moves post or goes on sabbatical. As can a social scientist. For a computing researcher (or for microbiologists), however, the IP of the written code becomes a complicating factor. If one university claims copyright, but the only researcher involved moves to another university, it could completely stymie any research progress. So, for instance, Cambridge University does not usually claim copyright over software its researchers produce -- this isn't so much a matter of commercialisation rights as of academic freedom. It's no wonder then that the GPL, BSD licence, and Creative Commons all came out of university environments, not the commercial sector.
Something the original poster has not mentioned is why this decision "must be made soon". Is it because he is signing a new contract (it would be unusual for an employment contract with a university to claim ownership of code predating the contract), or because he's at loggerheads with the IP department?
Ah yes -- humbugs are fabulous sweets to include in any advent calendar, but I do like to have a few toffee eclairs and mint imperials in there too!
Pedantically, no they don't. They manipulate properties (usually potentials) of solid state devices. For convenience's sake, the mathematically minded consider the properties of the solid state devices to be a binary representation of a number. Note: not a number itself in the abstract number theory sense of the successor function, but a particular representation of a number. However, there is no special requirement for this to be the analogy we use. To use a trivial example: stating that the character 'A' can be represented by the number 65 (or whatever the modern unicode equivalent is) is a mathematical bias; they do share the same representation in memory under ASCII, and there are CPU operations that can act on either -- but it would be just as true to say that "the number 65 can be represented by the character 'A'". That we say the potential patterns are representations of numbers is entirely a matter of human interpretation. Modern software engineering has started to abstract away from this number-prejudice, for instance references are less frequently described as "a representation of a look-up number" and are increasingly treated just an abstraction of a unique reference to an item (we skip the artificial intermediary of calling the reference a 'number').
Nonetheless, until that point it is a distortion of the market to negligible public benefit. Tesla are funded by venture capital, the entire point of which is that they are taking the high risk that Tesla will fail to make electric vehicles economic, and that instead it'll be the company that comes along and learns from all of Tesla's mistakes that will be successful. If the public bails out the venture, then the primary beneficiaries are the VCs that have effectively had their risk underwritten by the taxpayer (nationalising the risk, privatising the reward). The public gains comparatively little -- it really doesn't matter whether it's Tesla's roll of the dice that wins or the next VC-backed company after them; and the limitation of liability ensures there is a greater upside reward than downside risk so there will be a next VC-backed company rolling the dice on green or electric vehicles. (I've already heard of a few other up-and-coming "green" car ventures.)
Then take it up with your MP or Representative. In a democratic society, you do not get to choose which laws you feel like respecting today. (A conservationist down the road from you might be very utilitarian about your carbon footprint, and feel "no ethical duty" to refrain from bludgeoning you to death with a meat-axe... you probably don't want him rationalising which laws he should be excused from either.)
That's not actually true. To use a facetious example, what industry does World of Warcraft make more more efficient? (Except maybe "extracting money from geeks".) Even if it were true, it's substantially irrelevant as the same argument can be applied to almost every industry except mining and agriculture. Everything from vocational training, to automatic knitting machines, to heavy goods vehicles are purchased to allow some other industry or activity to be more efficient, rather than for their own sake. Pre-trained bricklayers make construction more efficient; knitting machines make clothes production more efficient than [properly paid] manual labourers; lorries make the movement of goods more efficient than horses and carts. This does not mean that most lorries on the road must be custom jobs.
Again this is not true. First, we've recently seen quite how problematic economic knock-on effects can be. Secondly, if the rise of free software were to cause the end of proprietary software sales, then this could make it significantly harder to source new "commidity-to-be" software: the first customer either has to pay full development costs, or build a coalition to cover the development costs before work begins (damned hard if you want to do anything remotely new) -- no longer can you go to an enterprising bunch of developers who figure they can make enough money selling it to others afterwards that your sale price is not just a fraction of the cost, but a discounted fraction because you're their pilot customer. (In proprietary markets, of course, these enterprising bunches are constantly coming to you.)
However, in many areas it turns out you can compete with free (as in beer). A trivial example: XPadder (a free tool that lets you use a gamepad on games that only allow keyboard and mouse input) has ceased development and its site is up for sale. It's commercial competitors, though from all accounts no more capable, live on, making their owners happy profits. No doubt the commercial competitors will gain even more market share now xpadder effectively has a big "in liquidation" sign up. By driving profits to zero, free (as in beer or speech) projects can end up being the first thing they drive out of business themselves -- an economic black hole that pinches itself off.
Being mean to computer programmers and IT staff isn't as politically or socially shock-inducing as being mean to firemen or miners (outside of California, anyway). I wouldn't be overly surprised if the result went the other way. That said, it sounds like a terrible employer to work for -- so if the network or the computer on your desk fails and you can't clock in, you're personally out of pocket? There's not (yet) such a shortage of good employers, so just vote with your feet.
Tell that to the taxpayers who have just bailed out Wall Street...
Sure, but Google reckons that in the global economy, that makes them world-betas. (say it aloud). I'm here all week...
Some courts have upheld EULAs in the past. In some cases they have even upheld shrinkwrap EULAs that you cannot see until after you have accepted them (where a 'reasonable person' would have expected the clause to be present in the contract). I am not a lawyer, but I strongly suspect the parent poster isn't either and you should think twice about taking his "EULAs are bogus" advice.
Australia uses a system of preferential voting (in the UK I believe it is referred to as "single transferrable vote"), but still effectively has a two-party system between Labor and the Liberal/National coalition (theoretically separate parties but in practice they've been coalesced for decades). Other parties, such as the Democrats and Family First, still find it quite tough to break through. Partly this is because the biggest two parties always always campaign against each other -- in a sense this gives them free publicity from their opponents' adverts, while the minor parties are completely ignored. So frankly most voters don't have much of a clue who the minor parties are or what they stand for.
Hmm, I'm not so sure. I've always thought the Turing Test isn't so much a test of artificial intelligence as of natural gullability. Given the alarming number of people who can't tell their bank from a Nigerian scammer*, why does anyone think the Turing test is valuable?
* although these days I suppose it does seem more like picking one bunch of villains from another. "Dear Ben Bernanke, if you just send us $700bn we can fix your banking system for you..."
The summary is also misleading when it says "they have failed to consider 21st Century protocol support". BT no doubt have considered it; they are apparently well aware of the routers that would need patching; but at the moment IPv6 does not have enough market share for the benefit to justify the operational cost of patching and re-testing the equipment at fault; in a few years time it probably will. (It's not as if BT will have to rip out the entire network and start again, just fix those last few recalcitrant devices that are stopping them from saying "we support IPv6 now".)