Ah - I should perhaps have said slightly more; there's a difficult trade-off on Slashdot between trying to write a post that will meet the criticisms of intelligent people while also making it short enough that they actually read it, and in pursuit of a balance I chose not to address censorship.
Very briefly, I'm not talking about censorship. I have no problem with anyone's opinions being voiced or their theories being aired. What I argue for is simply the recognition that the fact that everyone should be free to express their views does not mean that everyone's views should be taken to have equal weight. We are blessed as a civilisation to have access to the views and thoughts and ideas of real experts - people who have dedicated their life to a particular discipline. They are not always right, and occasionally the best idea will come from the unlikeliest quarter - but I believe that we can learn a lot more if we respect the expertise and learning that certain people possess, and accept that it means that when their views are in conflict with those of a nameless blogger it is likely that it is because the latter is wrong.
From my experience the internet does indeed create greater access to knowledge and facts, therefore making things like research much easier and making it unnecessary to remember trivial details that can easily be re-found. I think there is, though, a negative side to this abundance of information: a false equivalence among the different sources of information. How many times do you hear internet-users - and particularly, I would say, those who have grown up with the internet - stating as fact things they read in a blog, or an article from some unheard-of digital publication, and using that information to attempt to refute statements from a far more authoritative source? How often - here on Slashdot, for example - have you seen people refuse to believe something where another poster has cited a credible offline source, but accepting any link, no matter where from, as proof? How often do you see Wikipedia articles with footnotes that reference a page with no citations and no reputation as though the mere existence of a link somehow confirmed the point's veracity?
It's very easy, and in my experience very common, to treat the internet as a single source of knowledge, every fact that flows from which is equally credible and deserving of equal respect; this is perhaps helped by the anti-hierarchical bent of many internet users and online communities. This, I think, is something very strongly to be resisted. Hierarchy should be welcomed, provided it is won on merit. As an example, the authors who write the works of reference (offline) on a subject are selected because of their eminence and learning, and their writing is criticised by other respected experts in journals and other books. When we pretend that that filter is without value and that everyone's contribution is equally informative we put ourselves in the paradoxical position of having our learning hampered by an overabundance of information.
I was going to continue and give further examples and explanation but I don't want this to become overly lengthy and obscure my point: we should embrace the value of the internet - but we need also to be honest about its limitations. The online community is at present hostile to the idea of expert editorial control on online resources. They should not be (within reason). The internet can remove hierarchy and equalise everyone - but is that always desirable?
I don't know whether it's the same in the US, but over here (the UK) most businesses have a fax machine. Certainly everywhere I've worked has, and when I had trouble with my mobile phone and had to send a document to their HQ I just went to their nearest retail store and they faxed it for me. They're so cheap that if having a fax machine saves one employee one hour to get or send a document then it's already practically paid for itself.
I suspect though that there will be difficulty in succeeding in a civil or criminal claim on facts such as these. I know very little of American law, but in Britain there are three real possibilities in these circumstances: an action for misrepresentation, an action for deceit, or a criminal prosecution for fraud. The difficulty with all of them is that there must at least have been something said or done that was misleading - it is not enough that the particular person was misled. A person is normally entitled to assume that when a person signs a contract, absent any duress or undue influence, he understands everything in it - if he does not understand something he should either seek professional legal advice or ask the other party what they mean. Something simply being complicated is not therefore enough to make it misleading - it must have been a clause that a person who had been reasonably prudent, in the sense that they could reasonably have thought that it was so clear as to require no further action when in fact it meant something different. The article makes it sound like the right was mentioned in the contract he signed and was not deceptively phrased; the fact that he did not read it is unfortunate but ultimately his fault.
What makes his case all the weaker is that this sort of clause is one that is in fact very common in stock-option contracts and contracts for people such as company directors. If you are just starting up a company you don't want a large proportion of it potentially to disappear in the pockets of people who leave after a year, especially since, if they leave acrimoniously, they are not necessarily going to be people you want turning up at your AGM. Buyback clauses like this one - or much more restrictive ones that don't allow anyone to take shares with them when they leave, no matter how long they have worked for the company - are therefore pretty common. The expert quoted in the article seems to have confused the idea of a vested option and of an exercised option. It would be bizarre to speak of a vested option that can be taken back at will - that would indeed, as the expert says, seem to render meaningless the word 'vested'. But there is no contradiction in saying that an option has vested and has been exercised but that the shares were subject to a right to repurchase, which is what happened. Given that the only suggestion made in the article of any misleading conduct is this expert's statement and he seems to have been speaking under a slight misapprehension of the facts I don't see that anything deceptive has occurred at all.
I'm sorry, perhaps I wasn't sufficiently clear; I was referring to professional orchestral music. I mentioned that in the first line of my comment and adverted to the difference between traditional and "pop" music in my follow-ups but I should perhaps have been more explicit.
I think there's something else lurking in that comparison. When you look at it, people who are really good with music have been doing it since they were small children. In my school district, if you wanted to join orchestra, you had to make the decision in 4th grade. Band or choir didn't start until middle school in 6th grade. Even then, the folks who joined jazz band when that opened up had been playing music before they joined regular band in 6th grade anyway.
Along those same lines, I've been programming since I was very little, too. I have an intuitive understanding of how programs work that at times simply flabbergasts people I'm working with. I have some shortcomings, too, because of the informal nature of being self-taught.
Perhaps being a professional programmer should be like being a professional musician. Most can't just start when they get to college. You have to be dedicated to it from an early age.
But why? How often do you do something that actually requires absolutely outstanding levels of skill, rather than just average levels, or good levels? I remember when I was working in programming - and I was by no means a virtuoso programmer - a lot of my time was spent making small changes that took no great skill but did take a lot of time. Could a brilliant programmer have done them better and faster? Yes, of course; but not much better because it was so basic, and it would have been a tremendous waste to get an A+ programmer to do C- work.
If you want to be a professional musician (or a number of other, generally similar, careers) you have to start early. That's not because you can't get to be very, very good if you start at 40, though. It's because there's not much money in professional music so if you want to make a decent living you have to be right up at the top in the elite. To recycle an analogy I made use of in another comment, music is like if the only tech jobs were at Google and there was no demand for anyone of less than stratospheric talent.
In programming, unlike in music, though, there are plenty of jobs that don't require very much skill. There's no money in playing scales, but there's a fair bit to be made writing simple code to solve simple problems. And just like practising music makes you better at playing music, practising programming makes you better at programming. The guy who starts programming at 10 is probably always going to be better than the guy who starts at 20, but who cares? There's plenty of simple work that needs to be done (and the expert programmers don't want to work for small companies doing boring, routine work), and in 10 years time he'll be a lot better.
I'm sure you're right regarding the level of ability needed to get in to Google or the like being exceedingly high - I remember having a look at one of their tests once and not having a clue how to even begin to understand it, let alone solve it. But my point is that the vast majority of programmers don't work at Google, or anywhere nearly so demanding - if they did then I would absolutely accept your point. The difficulty, I think, with the analogy the author tries to draw between college-level or college-graduate programmers and musicians of orchestral ability is that in music, to draw a similar analogy, Google is all there is. There's little money in being a professional (non-pop) musician even at the highest levels, and effectively none at a lower level, so to be a professional musician you have to be the best of the best. I know a number of people who are at the very bottom of the ladder, struggling to make it as professional orchestral musicians, and the level of ability they have with their instruments is far greater than the technical ability of any programmer I have met. That's not to cast an aspersion on programmers - it's simply that the industry is so competitive that anyone who gets in at the bottom is already among the elite.
The same can't be said of programmers. I used to be a professional programmer - I'm not any longer. I was reasonable but not amazing, and I was the best of the department everywhere I worked. Simply put, if you're reasonably bright, and have a reasonable grasp of the basics, there are plenty of jobs that need doing that don't require an incredible grasp of C++ - or even a particularly good one. You can start as a junior programmer doing bog-standard, simple work (that gets reviewed by someone else) and get better over time. We hired a fair few graduates like that. None of them were great programmers when they arrived, but now, years later, they're apparently pretty good. (I don't know if you work as a programmer yourself, but I find that when I look at thedailywtf I see a fair few things that I've done at some point myself - as, to judge from the comments, have a lot of people. That code's awful, but it's being written by professionals, and the only thing that meant I was no longer writing code like that was experience I got on-the-job)
There's a massive gap between the great programmers, and the merely good, and the mediocre. As you say that difference is, indeed, night and day. But there are plenty of mediocre programmers who still make a living from it. And since a big part of why a lot of the great programmers are great is the experience they got as hobbyists when they were at school, there's no reason why someone who comes to the profession later can't go from mediocre to great by getting that experience at work. Of course, in that time the guy who was already great has got even better, but great is still pretty darn good.
I'm not sure that I really agree with the Professor's foundational analogy between studying programming and playing orchestral music. I'll explain why.
The students who played in the university orchestra back when I was at university were phenomenally good. Many of them played professionally or intended to. That is where the analogy with computer programming becomes strained. There is no room, in professional music, for someone who is not very good, or just learning, or who lacks experience. The musicians who play in orchestras at anything approaching a high level have a degree of musical ability that I find absolutely astounding; the difference between a very good hobbyist musician and a professional or semi-professional is like night and day. That ability is normally the result of spending 30 hours or more a week, every week, practising or learning under the tuition of an excellent player for 15 or more years. And the competition is such that that is effectively the minimum level of ability required to play in a good orchestra. Many of the musicians will be far better and far more experienced than that.
In contrast, programming is a career in which a person can grow on-the-job not only from "excellent" to "phenomenal" but from "not particularly good, but promising", to "good", and then on to "excellent" and "phenomenal" after another 10 or 20 years. There are plenty of roles for people who can code slowly but proficiently, especially if they have the potential to get better. Comparing those students to others in a far more competitive area just is not helpful - one could equally compare computer science students with lawyers being sponsored through college by White-Shoe firms. Of course the computer scientists will, on average, be less developed, less well-rounded, even less competent. But it's not a useful comparison.
I don't know what approach the Professor's university takes but I did not, when I was studying, encounter a sink-or-swim approach to computer science coding. That approach, it seems to me, crops up when the expectation is that computer scientists, on completing the course, will have a level of competence beyond what is reasonable - an expectation that is encouraged by making unreasonable comparisons. On the other hand there were, as the Professor notes, a good number of people dropping out or changing course. I would ascribe that, rather than to a course that makes unreasonable demands, to a factor that he notes - computer science is not taught at schools. It is one of a number of courses that students choose without really knowing what it will involve. I suspect that in all those subjects there is a high initial drop-out rate as students realise that the course is not what they had expected, or is not for them, or simply that a particular aspect is more interesting and that they would prefer to specialise in, for example, mathematics.
Surely there's scope for specialisation? Computers may be designed to be easy to use but they remain enormously complicated. Combine that with the ingenuity of virus-writers and I don't think it's particularly unreasonable to say that a person can be a very competent accountant but not know enough about computers to avoid all the malware. It seems to me that it's similar to hiring a lawyer rather than just expecting every employee to know the law. If you're just operating a small business the law in that area is fairly simple and well defined, but a prudent business will still have a lawyer on retainer to check through contracts and do due diligence from time to time because a worker, no matter how competent, can't be good at everything. Just like there's a difference between expecting employees to have some basic awareness of the law and expecting them to make the correct legal decision every time - and serious consequences if they get it wrong just once - there's a big difference between expecting employees to be sufficiently computer-literate to avoid the majority of viruses and expecting them to avoid, or eliminate, every single one - and it only takes one to compromise the machine and the network.
An interesting post, although with one or two slight innaccuracies.
Super injunctions are not new - they've existed for a long time. What's changed is that since the European Convention on Human Rights guarantees respect for "private and family life" they're easier to get now. The issuing of them is subject to constraints laid down in the Human Rights Act and by the European Courts that mean that the impact on freedom of speech must be considered before there's any thought of granting one. They are likely to be granted where the judge is convinced that the disclosure would not add to a debate of general importance and where it would have an adverse impact on people wholly innocent, such as children. I don't particularly disagree with the judge's conclusion here, which seems to be that naming a footballer with a family who's had an affair would titillate the tabloid press while harming his children, and that they shouldn't have to suffer for his wrong.
Second, there's no right to privacy in the UK. Not yet, anyway. I know that might sound odd in the light of what I just wrote, but it's true; there's no law against breach of privacy that would apply if you, for example, took photographs of someone in compromising circumstances. The legal restraint comes only when you decide to publish that information - the action will be for the tort of disclosure of confidential information (possibly more properly called disclosure of private information nowadays).
You're right about prior restraint, although it's come as a bit of a shock - it used to be the case that the courts would not apply prior restraint as long as the publisher stated that he would defend the claim if it came to court. Quite what's changed isn't really clear (I would speculate that it's the influence of the ECHR and the need for respect for privacy). Obviously there are some circumstances where prior restraint would be granted in any case in the form of an injunction or a superinjunction - the identities of persons whose lives would be in danger if it was disclosed is one notable example. But I would prefer a retreat to the prior position in which those were the exception. I hope that that is what will happen now that the Government, provoked by a raft of cases that mostly weren't about superinjunctions at all, has decided to stick its oar in.
Regarding your final paragraph, it's difficult to imagine a scenario where a person would happen to come across information that is the subject of an injunction of which they have no knowledge, but which if they divulged it would make them liable in damages. The action would again be for wrongful disclosure of private information, but if someone has come across the information on Twitter it is unlikely still to be private! As long as commenters aren't rooting through drawers and publishing what they find, as opposed to simply repeating whatever appears in their feed, I don't see how they could be exposed to any liability other than as a result of violating an injunction. Of course if they know they are breaching the injunction they are liable in contempt of court.
"Infinitely" more important is a very strong classification indeed. If free speech truly is infinitely more important than another right then it must be an absolute right; that is, it could never be permissible to put a restriction on what a person can say no matter how trivial the desired speech or how serious the consequences. With respect, that is a difficult position to defend. There are some occasions where the value of the speech is negligible while the consequences are enormous - in some cases death. Stating that freedom of speech must always prevail is a retreat to formalism.
There is, I think, a larger question: why do we value free speech? What is its purpose? Why is it so important? I would suggest that the importance of free speech comes from the need to be able to debate issues of public importance; to identify hypocrisy or untruth; to allow a free dissemination of information that is valuable to society. There are no doubt other reasons as well.
The question that is then invited is whether or not it advances any of the aims of free speech to allow the publication of the name of an individual involved in these sort of proceedings. There is no harm to public debate - the person's name isn't an issue, the underlying principles are. There is no allegation of misfeasance or dishonesty or the withholding of valuable information. I struggle to see any interest that the public has in knowing the name of this person. On the other hand, there is a significant interest in keeping it private: disclosing her identity is likely to lead to threats, intimidation or potentially even violence from people who disagree with her decisions. Where the reasons for the primacy of free speech do not apply and there is, in fact, a significant danger in allowing the disclosure, the "archaic" approach would in fact be to prefer freedom of speech no matter the circumstances - a legal formalism that is long outdated.
I'm not sure what you mean when you bring up libel and "public discours[e] laws" - this has nothing to do with libel and I have never heard a body of law referred to as "public discourse" law. I haven't read the judgment but I suspect this was claimed under the tort of disclosure of confidential information. I do not follow your logic in saying that this tort is a remnant of the class system - but I am not a legal historian and would be interested in your reasoning.
You cite a lot of authorities, but no actual evidence. I can find countless examples of patents harming innovation, going right back to Watt using patents to stifle competition on steam engines (using very similar tactics to modern patent trolls). What examples can you cite where patents have actually encouraged innovation? The only examples that come to mind for me are where the existence of the patent has forced people to work around the patent (e.g. Marching Cubes) and come up with better approaches than the original.
I'm not sure I really understand your objection to citing authorities rather than "evidence", or indeed the distinction you are drawing. Any evaluation of the positive or negative impact of patent legislation must be based on some combination of research, economic models, and theoretical discussion. I find the suggestion that a few examples provided by a normal Slashdotter like me would be more convincing than a consensus of recognised experts who provide reasoned analysis a little odd.
That said, I will try to answer your post. The difficulty with trying to provide examples of the success of patents in encouraging innovation is that the idea of an example, by its very nature, requires a small-scale, case-by-case approach. This is, however, at odds with the justification for patents. The rationale behind patent law starts from the fact that innovation is desirable for society, but that since intangible, intellectual goods cannot be controlled in the same way as physical goods, it is difficult to extract value from them; in economic terms they lack appropriability. Patents attempt to provide that appropriability on the basis that companies will be encouraged to invest money in research and development if they can enjoy monopoly profits over the inventions that result from this. It is important to note that what this is not saying is that a monopoly is justified on an individual, case-by-case basis; instead the grant of a monopoly over the specific innovations is justified by the incentive effect that it has on the industry as a whole.
With respect, the difficult in reconciling the arguments made by the original poster and you comes from the fact that you are adopting as a starting point to your analysis a different position to that taken by IP analysts. The position you take, I think, is essentially ex post facto; starting from the fact of invention you ask why patents are justified. In contrast the argument justifying patents starts ex ante from the position that inventions are desirable, and research and development are required in order to lead to invention, so there is a need to incentivize research and development. This is then the function of patents. The difficulty in reconciling these analyses is illustrated well, I think, by your reply to the child post, where you say "all that I see is an example of patents protecting profits, not encouraging innovation". You are of course correct: the patents are protecting profits, which is undesirable as it reduces competition and increases prices for consumers. This is recognised by those justifying patent laws; the argument is simply that from an ex ante position the laws remain desirable. Who would invest hundreds of millions of dollars in research that might not lead anywhere if when they were successful other companies who did not have R&D costs to defray could copy their invention and sell it for the marginal cost of production? Without patents there would be no monopoly on these products - but a substantial number of these products would not exist. If it is accepted - as it is by the majority of modern economists - that innovation increases consumer welfare more than a decrease in the price of existing goods then a time-limited monopoly is justified if it leads to new inventions.
Can you provide any proof for the claim that patents "completely fail at their primary goal of fostering innovation"?
Schumpeter thought that patents encouraged innovation (Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy), Kenneth Arrow thinks they encourage innovation (e.g. 'Allocation of Resources for Invention'), the WTO thinks they encourage innovation (e.g. TRIPs), the FTC thinks they encourage innovation ('To Promote Innovation: The Proper Balance of Competition and Patent Law and Policy'), the US Courts think they encourage innovation (e.g. CSU, L.L.C. v. Xerox Corp.), the European Commission thinks they encourage innovation (e.g. DG Comp Guidelines on the application of article 82; Microsoft Decision (2004)), and the European Courts think that they encourage innovation (e.g. Magill;IMS Health;Microsoft).
Now I'm not saying that an anonymous poster on Slashdot can't be right when all those people and organisations are wrong, but you have to provide a little more evidence to back up your assertions.
I would wager that quite a lot of people who drink-drive do it because they think of drink-driving in the same way that you do in this comment - that drink-driving is what happens when you are so drunk that you are unable to perform basic functions - and therefore don't consider what they are doing to be drink-driving. It only takes a small amount of alcohol for a person's reactions and judgement to be greatly reduced, with potentially fatal consequences if they then drive a car. They can therefore be unfit to drive well before they are unable to use an app.
That seems to me a little like arguing that the real loss from not buying CDs is that you don't get a handy portable mirror. Yes that is a benefit that you miss out on - but only one person in a million cares about it. As a reason to advocate FLAC it's a little low on mass-market appeal.
And frankly, what would be the big difference if you had ripped to 320kB Vorbis files (or the equivalent) at the start? You're never going more than one transcode away from the source file so the quality loss would be minimal (I suspect imperceptible to 99.9% of people), you save a lot of hard disk space and you don't have to transcode the files before you put them on your MP3 player (or at least that would be possible now, when MP3 players have enough space for more than one or two tracks at high-bitrate!).
Isn't the bigger problem with that that it makes life much more difficult for the user (longer download time, time spent transcoding everything they want to put on their MP3 player instead of just copying) for a marginal benefit that only occurs in an already rare scenario? It's a lot of hassle to go to in order to enjoy very slightly increased quality if you ever either buy an incredibly high-quality sound system or migrate to an MP3 player that can't play your MP3s, neither of which are ever likely to happen for the majority of users.
I'm not sure I agree - the postings concerned the school, and I would say that that was enough to justify them taking disciplinary action. But that's not the main point here.
The main point is, I think, this: would you prefer a world where the recourse of schools on encountering this sort of conduct is a civil suit? A student who defames his teacher or his school may well incur civil liability. Depending on what he says and who he says it to damages could range from nothing, to fairly low (as, I suspect, they would be here) to enormous. In any case he would end up paying hefty court fees and costs.
While in some cases schools acting over matters that take place outside school hours will result in punishment for conduct that otherwise would go unpunished in many cases it allows for a disciplinary system that doesn't involve the civil or criminal courts, doesn't impose large fines or costs orders and doesn't expose the student to the coercive powers of the state, like contempt orders, injunctions or imprisonment. That surely is a good thing?
There's a difference, surely, between calling someone a Nazi, which has no connection to their job and is (as you said) pretty far-fetched, and calling a teacher a pedophile? Writing on Facebook that a teacher is a pedophile creates the very real chance that someone could see that allegation and take it seriously (obviously this depends on the exact context that is was written in); all it takes is one parent who sees the posting on their son or daughter's facebook and is worried enough to think that their might possibly be some substance in it and school policy will see the teacher suspended and investigated by the police.
Moreover, what is there that could actually be objectionable about this? A kid accuses his teacher of being a pedophile to get back at him, that accusation makes its way to the teacher, doubtless through the accusations being continued at school, and the kid gets suspended. More succinctly: a student knowingly breaks the rules and gets punished. As you said, the fact that it's "on a computer" doesn't make a difference (although I suspect the "on Facebook" part does, since it allows the accusation to be broadcast to hundreds of students, akin to putting up a sign in the common room) - it's a breach of the school rules, it's a breach that the child knew or should have known was serious and it had sufficiently serious consequences that the teacher found out about it. I know when I was at school I would have expected to be suspended if had called my teachers pedophiles - this is hardly a shock or an unfairness.
It really isn't a threat to anyone. Unless students were previously labouring under the misapprehension that they were free to tell people that their teacher was a paedophile because he had told them off this changes nothing. Everyone was aware of this rule anyway, and no-one had any trouble following it because it is absolutely common sense: you can't accuse people of serious sexual offences in order to get back at them.
What I think you have to bear in mind is that this wasn't the start of the investigation - I don't believe for a moment that it was a random Facebook raid by the teacher in question. This will almost certainly have been the end of the teacher's investigation after the allegations had been communicated to parents or to other children and had then come to the teacher's attention in the form of either harassment from students or concern from parents. At that point - where the teacher is either being harassed at work due to the allegations or has had his ability to act as a teacher called into question - there can be no doubt that an action in liable would lie. As I read US law (as I posted above I'm a law student in the UK not the US and have no in-depth knowledge of the US system) this would be a candidate for punitive damages. The question then, for all the people who say that the school acted unreasonably by using its internal disciplinary process when the Facebook posting was made outside school, becomes whether you would prefer that they had sued the student and forced him to pay substantial damages and hefty legal costs.
This sort of behaviour is wrong. What's more the student must have known it was wrong. The fact that it came to the teacher's attention shows that it had the potential to cause serious harm even if in this case it didn't - all it takes is one student or parent to take it seriously and school policy will normally require that the police be called and the teacher be suspended. I can see no problem with imposing serious punishment where students have knowingly, deliberately and maliciously broken the rules.
I'm not a US lawyer, I'm a law student in the UK. That said I'm not sure that you're quite right about libel law.
First, it looks like US law matches English law in not requiring proof of damage for certain allegations (known as allegations actionable per se). One of these is allegations of criminal conduct punishable by imprisonment. Second (and this is only relevant if for some reason the first point I made doesn't apply), I think you might be overstating the requirements by saying "extreme emotional distress". In general in order to be actionable psychological injury doesn't have to be "extreme", it just has to be medically recognised. There is also (at least in the UK) plenty of case law in support of the proposition that harassment or bullying at work as a result of a tortious act is sufficient to constitute actionable harm. I suspect that the reason the student's Facebook account was being checked anyway was that the harassment was not confined to cyberspace.
In any case I think the question of whether there was any legally recognised harm is rather beside the point. I was responding to the GP's claims, which suggested that this was a novel incursion on freedom of speech. Whether or not in this particular case they could prove enough harm to support a civil action is irrelevant to the fact that maliciously accusing people of serious criminal conduct is generally neither protected nor tolerated by the law.
This isn't a free speech issue and it isn't a threat to posters on Slashdot. It's a centuries-old rule being enforced in a way that accords entirely with common sense: making false allegations of extremely serious crimes can completely destroy a person's career and life, especially when it's an allegation of pedophilia against a teacher. Teachers have been murdered or committed suicide over exactly these sorts of allegations. The ability to spread malicious falsehoods about people is not a protected category of free speech; it is in fact a type of speech that has been prohibited for centuries.
I really can't imagine it will surprise anyone to find that they are not allowed maliciously to claim that their coworkers are guilty of exceptionally serious criminal conduct. Not only has it been in every employment manual I've ever had it's also actionable at law without any employment manual being necessary. And even if it were not, does anyone seriously expect to be able to claim that their boss is a pedophile? The idea is ridiculous.
Legal precedent with a profound and rippling effect? This is a violation of a school's code of conduct, it will almost certainly be settled out of court and even if it goes to court it will be decided at the lowest level and create absolutely no precedent with no effect whatsoever. Even if it did go to the supreme court the only way the ruling could be in any way surprising would be if they did not hold a person responsible for malicious defamation.
I'm not sure that it's really a big loss that these are not available on Kindle. I've tried using a textbook on mine and it just isn't particularly useful; flicking from page to page looking at quick bits of information just isn't the use-case that the Kindle works well for. There's no way I could justify paying the price of a textbook to get one on Kindle.
On the other hand, the ability to search is quite handy and the weight of the Kindle is a massive advantage. This is actually one scenario where the user might benefit if they could come up with unbreakable DRM, as it would mean publishers could bundle an ebook copy of a textbook with a print copy, or sell the ebook copy very cheaply to owners of the print copy. Although in fact for some textbooks they could probably sell the ebook very cheaply anyway since, due to the drawbacks of textbook use on an e-reader, it's only really going to be useful to people who have the paper version as well.
I'm not going to claim that this was his fault. If Sony do decide to implement serial keys for their games it will be a dark day for console gaming and it will have been their decision.
That said, something like this was absolutely foreseeable when he decided to publish his work. Anyone seeing the description - a break in the PS3's security that couldn't be fixed - knew instantly that they weren't going to leave it alone and not respond, and that anything they did to try to remove the vulnerability would be more invasive and more annoying and more consumer unfriendly. You say he's a "hacker hero". Maybe he's a hero among hackers, but hackers make up only a very, very small portion of PS3 users and are the only ones - well, other than pirates - who will get any advantage from this hack. Average users won't get any advantage at all. They won't want to root their PS3 or install pirated games; they just want to buy a game at the store and use it like they always did. It was absolutely foreseeable when he released this that it was going to inconvenience those people. So while, as I said, I don't think he's to blame, I do think it was a bit of a dick move to play to the hacker crowd without thinking about the inconvenience and irritation that would be the inevitable result for average gamers. I've seen other hackers say "I've cracked the system, I've broken all the security, and I'll find a way to make homebrew possible - but I'm not going to put the hack itself on the internet because people will use it to pirate and it'll end up hurting the users". That would have been a much more decent thing to do.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah - I should perhaps have said slightly more; there's a difficult trade-off on Slashdot between trying to write a post that will meet the criticisms of intelligent people while also making it short enough that they actually read it, and in pursuit of a balance I chose not to address censorship.
Very briefly, I'm not talking about censorship. I have no problem with anyone's opinions being voiced or their theories being aired. What I argue for is simply the recognition that the fact that everyone should be free to express their views does not mean that everyone's views should be taken to have equal weight. We are blessed as a civilisation to have access to the views and thoughts and ideas of real experts - people who have dedicated their life to a particular discipline. They are not always right, and occasionally the best idea will come from the unlikeliest quarter - but I believe that we can learn a lot more if we respect the expertise and learning that certain people possess, and accept that it means that when their views are in conflict with those of a nameless blogger it is likely that it is because the latter is wrong.
From my experience the internet does indeed create greater access to knowledge and facts, therefore making things like research much easier and making it unnecessary to remember trivial details that can easily be re-found. I think there is, though, a negative side to this abundance of information: a false equivalence among the different sources of information. How many times do you hear internet-users - and particularly, I would say, those who have grown up with the internet - stating as fact things they read in a blog, or an article from some unheard-of digital publication, and using that information to attempt to refute statements from a far more authoritative source? How often - here on Slashdot, for example - have you seen people refuse to believe something where another poster has cited a credible offline source, but accepting any link, no matter where from, as proof? How often do you see Wikipedia articles with footnotes that reference a page with no citations and no reputation as though the mere existence of a link somehow confirmed the point's veracity?
It's very easy, and in my experience very common, to treat the internet as a single source of knowledge, every fact that flows from which is equally credible and deserving of equal respect; this is perhaps helped by the anti-hierarchical bent of many internet users and online communities. This, I think, is something very strongly to be resisted. Hierarchy should be welcomed, provided it is won on merit. As an example, the authors who write the works of reference (offline) on a subject are selected because of their eminence and learning, and their writing is criticised by other respected experts in journals and other books. When we pretend that that filter is without value and that everyone's contribution is equally informative we put ourselves in the paradoxical position of having our learning hampered by an overabundance of information.
I was going to continue and give further examples and explanation but I don't want this to become overly lengthy and obscure my point: we should embrace the value of the internet - but we need also to be honest about its limitations. The online community is at present hostile to the idea of expert editorial control on online resources. They should not be (within reason). The internet can remove hierarchy and equalise everyone - but is that always desirable?
I don't know whether it's the same in the US, but over here (the UK) most businesses have a fax machine. Certainly everywhere I've worked has, and when I had trouble with my mobile phone and had to send a document to their HQ I just went to their nearest retail store and they faxed it for me. They're so cheap that if having a fax machine saves one employee one hour to get or send a document then it's already practically paid for itself.
I suspect though that there will be difficulty in succeeding in a civil or criminal claim on facts such as these.
I know very little of American law, but in Britain there are three real possibilities in these circumstances: an action for misrepresentation, an action for deceit, or a criminal prosecution for fraud. The difficulty with all of them is that there must at least have been something said or done that was misleading - it is not enough that the particular person was misled. A person is normally entitled to assume that when a person signs a contract, absent any duress or undue influence, he understands everything in it - if he does not understand something he should either seek professional legal advice or ask the other party what they mean. Something simply being complicated is not therefore enough to make it misleading - it must have been a clause that a person who had been reasonably prudent, in the sense that they could reasonably have thought that it was so clear as to require no further action when in fact it meant something different. The article makes it sound like the right was mentioned in the contract he signed and was not deceptively phrased; the fact that he did not read it is unfortunate but ultimately his fault.
What makes his case all the weaker is that this sort of clause is one that is in fact very common in stock-option contracts and contracts for people such as company directors. If you are just starting up a company you don't want a large proportion of it potentially to disappear in the pockets of people who leave after a year, especially since, if they leave acrimoniously, they are not necessarily going to be people you want turning up at your AGM. Buyback clauses like this one - or much more restrictive ones that don't allow anyone to take shares with them when they leave, no matter how long they have worked for the company - are therefore pretty common. The expert quoted in the article seems to have confused the idea of a vested option and of an exercised option. It would be bizarre to speak of a vested option that can be taken back at will - that would indeed, as the expert says, seem to render meaningless the word 'vested'. But there is no contradiction in saying that an option has vested and has been exercised but that the shares were subject to a right to repurchase, which is what happened. Given that the only suggestion made in the article of any misleading conduct is this expert's statement and he seems to have been speaking under a slight misapprehension of the facts I don't see that anything deceptive has occurred at all.
I'm sorry, perhaps I wasn't sufficiently clear; I was referring to professional orchestral music. I mentioned that in the first line of my comment and adverted to the difference between traditional and "pop" music in my follow-ups but I should perhaps have been more explicit.
I think there's something else lurking in that comparison. When you look at it, people who are really good with music have been doing it since they were small children. In my school district, if you wanted to join orchestra, you had to make the decision in 4th grade. Band or choir didn't start until middle school in 6th grade. Even then, the folks who joined jazz band when that opened up had been playing music before they joined regular band in 6th grade anyway.
Along those same lines, I've been programming since I was very little, too. I have an intuitive understanding of how programs work that at times simply flabbergasts people I'm working with. I have some shortcomings, too, because of the informal nature of being self-taught.
Perhaps being a professional programmer should be like being a professional musician. Most can't just start when they get to college. You have to be dedicated to it from an early age.
But why? How often do you do something that actually requires absolutely outstanding levels of skill, rather than just average levels, or good levels? I remember when I was working in programming - and I was by no means a virtuoso programmer - a lot of my time was spent making small changes that took no great skill but did take a lot of time. Could a brilliant programmer have done them better and faster? Yes, of course; but not much better because it was so basic, and it would have been a tremendous waste to get an A+ programmer to do C- work.
If you want to be a professional musician (or a number of other, generally similar, careers) you have to start early. That's not because you can't get to be very, very good if you start at 40, though. It's because there's not much money in professional music so if you want to make a decent living you have to be right up at the top in the elite. To recycle an analogy I made use of in another comment, music is like if the only tech jobs were at Google and there was no demand for anyone of less than stratospheric talent.
In programming, unlike in music, though, there are plenty of jobs that don't require very much skill. There's no money in playing scales, but there's a fair bit to be made writing simple code to solve simple problems. And just like practising music makes you better at playing music, practising programming makes you better at programming. The guy who starts programming at 10 is probably always going to be better than the guy who starts at 20, but who cares? There's plenty of simple work that needs to be done (and the expert programmers don't want to work for small companies doing boring, routine work), and in 10 years time he'll be a lot better.
I'm sure you're right regarding the level of ability needed to get in to Google or the like being exceedingly high - I remember having a look at one of their tests once and not having a clue how to even begin to understand it, let alone solve it. But my point is that the vast majority of programmers don't work at Google, or anywhere nearly so demanding - if they did then I would absolutely accept your point. The difficulty, I think, with the analogy the author tries to draw between college-level or college-graduate programmers and musicians of orchestral ability is that in music, to draw a similar analogy, Google is all there is. There's little money in being a professional (non-pop) musician even at the highest levels, and effectively none at a lower level, so to be a professional musician you have to be the best of the best. I know a number of people who are at the very bottom of the ladder, struggling to make it as professional orchestral musicians, and the level of ability they have with their instruments is far greater than the technical ability of any programmer I have met. That's not to cast an aspersion on programmers - it's simply that the industry is so competitive that anyone who gets in at the bottom is already among the elite.
The same can't be said of programmers. I used to be a professional programmer - I'm not any longer. I was reasonable but not amazing, and I was the best of the department everywhere I worked. Simply put, if you're reasonably bright, and have a reasonable grasp of the basics, there are plenty of jobs that need doing that don't require an incredible grasp of C++ - or even a particularly good one. You can start as a junior programmer doing bog-standard, simple work (that gets reviewed by someone else) and get better over time. We hired a fair few graduates like that. None of them were great programmers when they arrived, but now, years later, they're apparently pretty good. (I don't know if you work as a programmer yourself, but I find that when I look at thedailywtf I see a fair few things that I've done at some point myself - as, to judge from the comments, have a lot of people. That code's awful, but it's being written by professionals, and the only thing that meant I was no longer writing code like that was experience I got on-the-job)
There's a massive gap between the great programmers, and the merely good, and the mediocre. As you say that difference is, indeed, night and day. But there are plenty of mediocre programmers who still make a living from it. And since a big part of why a lot of the great programmers are great is the experience they got as hobbyists when they were at school, there's no reason why someone who comes to the profession later can't go from mediocre to great by getting that experience at work. Of course, in that time the guy who was already great has got even better, but great is still pretty darn good.
True, but I'm afraid I don't quite see your point. Care to elaborate?
I'm not sure that I really agree with the Professor's foundational analogy between studying programming and playing orchestral music. I'll explain why.
The students who played in the university orchestra back when I was at university were phenomenally good. Many of them played professionally or intended to. That is where the analogy with computer programming becomes strained. There is no room, in professional music, for someone who is not very good, or just learning, or who lacks experience. The musicians who play in orchestras at anything approaching a high level have a degree of musical ability that I find absolutely astounding; the difference between a very good hobbyist musician and a professional or semi-professional is like night and day. That ability is normally the result of spending 30 hours or more a week, every week, practising or learning under the tuition of an excellent player for 15 or more years. And the competition is such that that is effectively the minimum level of ability required to play in a good orchestra. Many of the musicians will be far better and far more experienced than that.
In contrast, programming is a career in which a person can grow on-the-job not only from "excellent" to "phenomenal" but from "not particularly good, but promising", to "good", and then on to "excellent" and "phenomenal" after another 10 or 20 years. There are plenty of roles for people who can code slowly but proficiently, especially if they have the potential to get better. Comparing those students to others in a far more competitive area just is not helpful - one could equally compare computer science students with lawyers being sponsored through college by White-Shoe firms. Of course the computer scientists will, on average, be less developed, less well-rounded, even less competent. But it's not a useful comparison.
I don't know what approach the Professor's university takes but I did not, when I was studying, encounter a sink-or-swim approach to computer science coding. That approach, it seems to me, crops up when the expectation is that computer scientists, on completing the course, will have a level of competence beyond what is reasonable - an expectation that is encouraged by making unreasonable comparisons. On the other hand there were, as the Professor notes, a good number of people dropping out or changing course. I would ascribe that, rather than to a course that makes unreasonable demands, to a factor that he notes - computer science is not taught at schools. It is one of a number of courses that students choose without really knowing what it will involve. I suspect that in all those subjects there is a high initial drop-out rate as students realise that the course is not what they had expected, or is not for them, or simply that a particular aspect is more interesting and that they would prefer to specialise in, for example, mathematics.
Will they not also, though, work out the difference between a company with sensible rules and one with pointless and needlessly intrusive ones?
Surely there's scope for specialisation? Computers may be designed to be easy to use but they remain enormously complicated. Combine that with the ingenuity of virus-writers and I don't think it's particularly unreasonable to say that a person can be a very competent accountant but not know enough about computers to avoid all the malware.
It seems to me that it's similar to hiring a lawyer rather than just expecting every employee to know the law. If you're just operating a small business the law in that area is fairly simple and well defined, but a prudent business will still have a lawyer on retainer to check through contracts and do due diligence from time to time because a worker, no matter how competent, can't be good at everything. Just like there's a difference between expecting employees to have some basic awareness of the law and expecting them to make the correct legal decision every time - and serious consequences if they get it wrong just once - there's a big difference between expecting employees to be sufficiently computer-literate to avoid the majority of viruses and expecting them to avoid, or eliminate, every single one - and it only takes one to compromise the machine and the network.
An interesting post, although with one or two slight innaccuracies.
Super injunctions are not new - they've existed for a long time. What's changed is that since the European Convention on Human Rights guarantees respect for "private and family life" they're easier to get now. The issuing of them is subject to constraints laid down in the Human Rights Act and by the European Courts that mean that the impact on freedom of speech must be considered before there's any thought of granting one. They are likely to be granted where the judge is convinced that the disclosure would not add to a debate of general importance and where it would have an adverse impact on people wholly innocent, such as children. I don't particularly disagree with the judge's conclusion here, which seems to be that naming a footballer with a family who's had an affair would titillate the tabloid press while harming his children, and that they shouldn't have to suffer for his wrong.
Second, there's no right to privacy in the UK. Not yet, anyway. I know that might sound odd in the light of what I just wrote, but it's true; there's no law against breach of privacy that would apply if you, for example, took photographs of someone in compromising circumstances. The legal restraint comes only when you decide to publish that information - the action will be for the tort of disclosure of confidential information (possibly more properly called disclosure of private information nowadays).
You're right about prior restraint, although it's come as a bit of a shock - it used to be the case that the courts would not apply prior restraint as long as the publisher stated that he would defend the claim if it came to court. Quite what's changed isn't really clear (I would speculate that it's the influence of the ECHR and the need for respect for privacy). Obviously there are some circumstances where prior restraint would be granted in any case in the form of an injunction or a superinjunction - the identities of persons whose lives would be in danger if it was disclosed is one notable example. But I would prefer a retreat to the prior position in which those were the exception. I hope that that is what will happen now that the Government, provoked by a raft of cases that mostly weren't about superinjunctions at all, has decided to stick its oar in.
Regarding your final paragraph, it's difficult to imagine a scenario where a person would happen to come across information that is the subject of an injunction of which they have no knowledge, but which if they divulged it would make them liable in damages. The action would again be for wrongful disclosure of private information, but if someone has come across the information on Twitter it is unlikely still to be private! As long as commenters aren't rooting through drawers and publishing what they find, as opposed to simply repeating whatever appears in their feed, I don't see how they could be exposed to any liability other than as a result of violating an injunction.
Of course if they know they are breaching the injunction they are liable in contempt of court.
"Infinitely" more important is a very strong classification indeed. If free speech truly is infinitely more important than another right then it must be an absolute right; that is, it could never be permissible to put a restriction on what a person can say no matter how trivial the desired speech or how serious the consequences. With respect, that is a difficult position to defend. There are some occasions where the value of the speech is negligible while the consequences are enormous - in some cases death. Stating that freedom of speech must always prevail is a retreat to formalism.
There is, I think, a larger question: why do we value free speech? What is its purpose? Why is it so important? I would suggest that the importance of free speech comes from the need to be able to debate issues of public importance; to identify hypocrisy or untruth; to allow a free dissemination of information that is valuable to society. There are no doubt other reasons as well.
The question that is then invited is whether or not it advances any of the aims of free speech to allow the publication of the name of an individual involved in these sort of proceedings. There is no harm to public debate - the person's name isn't an issue, the underlying principles are. There is no allegation of misfeasance or dishonesty or the withholding of valuable information. I struggle to see any interest that the public has in knowing the name of this person. On the other hand, there is a significant interest in keeping it private: disclosing her identity is likely to lead to threats, intimidation or potentially even violence from people who disagree with her decisions. Where the reasons for the primacy of free speech do not apply and there is, in fact, a significant danger in allowing the disclosure, the "archaic" approach would in fact be to prefer freedom of speech no matter the circumstances - a legal formalism that is long outdated.
I'm not sure what you mean when you bring up libel and "public discours[e] laws" - this has nothing to do with libel and I have never heard a body of law referred to as "public discourse" law. I haven't read the judgment but I suspect this was claimed under the tort of disclosure of confidential information. I do not follow your logic in saying that this tort is a remnant of the class system - but I am not a legal historian and would be interested in your reasoning.
You cite a lot of authorities, but no actual evidence. I can find countless examples of patents harming innovation, going right back to Watt using patents to stifle competition on steam engines (using very similar tactics to modern patent trolls). What examples can you cite where patents have actually encouraged innovation? The only examples that come to mind for me are where the existence of the patent has forced people to work around the patent (e.g. Marching Cubes) and come up with better approaches than the original.
I'm not sure I really understand your objection to citing authorities rather than "evidence", or indeed the distinction you are drawing. Any evaluation of the positive or negative impact of patent legislation must be based on some combination of research, economic models, and theoretical discussion. I find the suggestion that a few examples provided by a normal Slashdotter like me would be more convincing than a consensus of recognised experts who provide reasoned analysis a little odd.
That said, I will try to answer your post.
The difficulty with trying to provide examples of the success of patents in encouraging innovation is that the idea of an example, by its very nature, requires a small-scale, case-by-case approach. This is, however, at odds with the justification for patents. The rationale behind patent law starts from the fact that innovation is desirable for society, but that since intangible, intellectual goods cannot be controlled in the same way as physical goods, it is difficult to extract value from them; in economic terms they lack appropriability. Patents attempt to provide that appropriability on the basis that companies will be encouraged to invest money in research and development if they can enjoy monopoly profits over the inventions that result from this. It is important to note that what this is not saying is that a monopoly is justified on an individual, case-by-case basis; instead the grant of a monopoly over the specific innovations is justified by the incentive effect that it has on the industry as a whole.
With respect, the difficult in reconciling the arguments made by the original poster and you comes from the fact that you are adopting as a starting point to your analysis a different position to that taken by IP analysts. The position you take, I think, is essentially ex post facto; starting from the fact of invention you ask why patents are justified. In contrast the argument justifying patents starts ex ante from the position that inventions are desirable, and research and development are required in order to lead to invention, so there is a need to incentivize research and development. This is then the function of patents. The difficulty in reconciling these analyses is illustrated well, I think, by your reply to the child post, where you say "all that I see is an example of patents protecting profits, not encouraging innovation". You are of course correct: the patents are protecting profits, which is undesirable as it reduces competition and increases prices for consumers. This is recognised by those justifying patent laws; the argument is simply that from an ex ante position the laws remain desirable. Who would invest hundreds of millions of dollars in research that might not lead anywhere if when they were successful other companies who did not have R&D costs to defray could copy their invention and sell it for the marginal cost of production? Without patents there would be no monopoly on these products - but a substantial number of these products would not exist. If it is accepted - as it is by the majority of modern economists - that innovation increases consumer welfare more than a decrease in the price of existing goods then a time-limited monopoly is justified if it leads to new inventions.
Can you provide any proof for the claim that patents "completely fail at their primary goal of fostering innovation"?
Schumpeter thought that patents encouraged innovation (Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy), Kenneth Arrow thinks they encourage innovation (e.g. 'Allocation of Resources for Invention'), the WTO thinks they encourage innovation (e.g. TRIPs), the FTC thinks they encourage innovation ('To Promote Innovation: The Proper Balance of Competition and Patent Law and Policy'), the US Courts think they encourage innovation (e.g. CSU, L.L.C. v. Xerox Corp.), the European Commission thinks they encourage innovation (e.g. DG Comp Guidelines on the application of article 82; Microsoft Decision (2004)), and the European Courts think that they encourage innovation (e.g. Magill;IMS Health;Microsoft).
Now I'm not saying that an anonymous poster on Slashdot can't be right when all those people and organisations are wrong, but you have to provide a little more evidence to back up your assertions.
I would wager that quite a lot of people who drink-drive do it because they think of drink-driving in the same way that you do in this comment - that drink-driving is what happens when you are so drunk that you are unable to perform basic functions - and therefore don't consider what they are doing to be drink-driving. It only takes a small amount of alcohol for a person's reactions and judgement to be greatly reduced, with potentially fatal consequences if they then drive a car. They can therefore be unfit to drive well before they are unable to use an app.
That seems to me a little like arguing that the real loss from not buying CDs is that you don't get a handy portable mirror. Yes that is a benefit that you miss out on - but only one person in a million cares about it. As a reason to advocate FLAC it's a little low on mass-market appeal.
And frankly, what would be the big difference if you had ripped to 320kB Vorbis files (or the equivalent) at the start? You're never going more than one transcode away from the source file so the quality loss would be minimal (I suspect imperceptible to 99.9% of people), you save a lot of hard disk space and you don't have to transcode the files before you put them on your MP3 player (or at least that would be possible now, when MP3 players have enough space for more than one or two tracks at high-bitrate!).
Isn't the bigger problem with that that it makes life much more difficult for the user (longer download time, time spent transcoding everything they want to put on their MP3 player instead of just copying) for a marginal benefit that only occurs in an already rare scenario? It's a lot of hassle to go to in order to enjoy very slightly increased quality if you ever either buy an incredibly high-quality sound system or migrate to an MP3 player that can't play your MP3s, neither of which are ever likely to happen for the majority of users.
I'm not sure I agree - the postings concerned the school, and I would say that that was enough to justify them taking disciplinary action. But that's not the main point here.
The main point is, I think, this: would you prefer a world where the recourse of schools on encountering this sort of conduct is a civil suit? A student who defames his teacher or his school may well incur civil liability. Depending on what he says and who he says it to damages could range from nothing, to fairly low (as, I suspect, they would be here) to enormous. In any case he would end up paying hefty court fees and costs.
While in some cases schools acting over matters that take place outside school hours will result in punishment for conduct that otherwise would go unpunished in many cases it allows for a disciplinary system that doesn't involve the civil or criminal courts, doesn't impose large fines or costs orders and doesn't expose the student to the coercive powers of the state, like contempt orders, injunctions or imprisonment. That surely is a good thing?
There's a difference, surely, between calling someone a Nazi, which has no connection to their job and is (as you said) pretty far-fetched, and calling a teacher a pedophile? Writing on Facebook that a teacher is a pedophile creates the very real chance that someone could see that allegation and take it seriously (obviously this depends on the exact context that is was written in); all it takes is one parent who sees the posting on their son or daughter's facebook and is worried enough to think that their might possibly be some substance in it and school policy will see the teacher suspended and investigated by the police.
Moreover, what is there that could actually be objectionable about this? A kid accuses his teacher of being a pedophile to get back at him, that accusation makes its way to the teacher, doubtless through the accusations being continued at school, and the kid gets suspended. More succinctly: a student knowingly breaks the rules and gets punished. As you said, the fact that it's "on a computer" doesn't make a difference (although I suspect the "on Facebook" part does, since it allows the accusation to be broadcast to hundreds of students, akin to putting up a sign in the common room) - it's a breach of the school rules, it's a breach that the child knew or should have known was serious and it had sufficiently serious consequences that the teacher found out about it. I know when I was at school I would have expected to be suspended if had called my teachers pedophiles - this is hardly a shock or an unfairness.
It really isn't a threat to anyone. Unless students were previously labouring under the misapprehension that they were free to tell people that their teacher was a paedophile because he had told them off this changes nothing. Everyone was aware of this rule anyway, and no-one had any trouble following it because it is absolutely common sense: you can't accuse people of serious sexual offences in order to get back at them.
What I think you have to bear in mind is that this wasn't the start of the investigation - I don't believe for a moment that it was a random Facebook raid by the teacher in question. This will almost certainly have been the end of the teacher's investigation after the allegations had been communicated to parents or to other children and had then come to the teacher's attention in the form of either harassment from students or concern from parents. At that point - where the teacher is either being harassed at work due to the allegations or has had his ability to act as a teacher called into question - there can be no doubt that an action in liable would lie. As I read US law (as I posted above I'm a law student in the UK not the US and have no in-depth knowledge of the US system) this would be a candidate for punitive damages. The question then, for all the people who say that the school acted unreasonably by using its internal disciplinary process when the Facebook posting was made outside school, becomes whether you would prefer that they had sued the student and forced him to pay substantial damages and hefty legal costs.
This sort of behaviour is wrong. What's more the student must have known it was wrong. The fact that it came to the teacher's attention shows that it had the potential to cause serious harm even if in this case it didn't - all it takes is one student or parent to take it seriously and school policy will normally require that the police be called and the teacher be suspended. I can see no problem with imposing serious punishment where students have knowingly, deliberately and maliciously broken the rules.
I'm not a US lawyer, I'm a law student in the UK. That said I'm not sure that you're quite right about libel law.
First, it looks like US law matches English law in not requiring proof of damage for certain allegations (known as allegations actionable per se). One of these is allegations of criminal conduct punishable by imprisonment.
Second (and this is only relevant if for some reason the first point I made doesn't apply), I think you might be overstating the requirements by saying "extreme emotional distress". In general in order to be actionable psychological injury doesn't have to be "extreme", it just has to be medically recognised. There is also (at least in the UK) plenty of case law in support of the proposition that harassment or bullying at work as a result of a tortious act is sufficient to constitute actionable harm. I suspect that the reason the student's Facebook account was being checked anyway was that the harassment was not confined to cyberspace.
In any case I think the question of whether there was any legally recognised harm is rather beside the point. I was responding to the GP's claims, which suggested that this was a novel incursion on freedom of speech. Whether or not in this particular case they could prove enough harm to support a civil action is irrelevant to the fact that maliciously accusing people of serious criminal conduct is generally neither protected nor tolerated by the law.
This isn't a free speech issue and it isn't a threat to posters on Slashdot. It's a centuries-old rule being enforced in a way that accords entirely with common sense: making false allegations of extremely serious crimes can completely destroy a person's career and life, especially when it's an allegation of pedophilia against a teacher. Teachers have been murdered or committed suicide over exactly these sorts of allegations. The ability to spread malicious falsehoods about people is not a protected category of free speech; it is in fact a type of speech that has been prohibited for centuries.
I really can't imagine it will surprise anyone to find that they are not allowed maliciously to claim that their coworkers are guilty of exceptionally serious criminal conduct. Not only has it been in every employment manual I've ever had it's also actionable at law without any employment manual being necessary. And even if it were not, does anyone seriously expect to be able to claim that their boss is a pedophile? The idea is ridiculous.
Legal precedent with a profound and rippling effect? This is a violation of a school's code of conduct, it will almost certainly be settled out of court and even if it goes to court it will be decided at the lowest level and create absolutely no precedent with no effect whatsoever. Even if it did go to the supreme court the only way the ruling could be in any way surprising would be if they did not hold a person responsible for malicious defamation.
I'm not sure that it's really a big loss that these are not available on Kindle. I've tried using a textbook on mine and it just isn't particularly useful; flicking from page to page looking at quick bits of information just isn't the use-case that the Kindle works well for. There's no way I could justify paying the price of a textbook to get one on Kindle.
On the other hand, the ability to search is quite handy and the weight of the Kindle is a massive advantage. This is actually one scenario where the user might benefit if they could come up with unbreakable DRM, as it would mean publishers could bundle an ebook copy of a textbook with a print copy, or sell the ebook copy very cheaply to owners of the print copy. Although in fact for some textbooks they could probably sell the ebook very cheaply anyway since, due to the drawbacks of textbook use on an e-reader, it's only really going to be useful to people who have the paper version as well.
I'm not going to claim that this was his fault. If Sony do decide to implement serial keys for their games it will be a dark day for console gaming and it will have been their decision.
That said, something like this was absolutely foreseeable when he decided to publish his work. Anyone seeing the description - a break in the PS3's security that couldn't be fixed - knew instantly that they weren't going to leave it alone and not respond, and that anything they did to try to remove the vulnerability would be more invasive and more annoying and more consumer unfriendly.
You say he's a "hacker hero". Maybe he's a hero among hackers, but hackers make up only a very, very small portion of PS3 users and are the only ones - well, other than pirates - who will get any advantage from this hack. Average users won't get any advantage at all. They won't want to root their PS3 or install pirated games; they just want to buy a game at the store and use it like they always did. It was absolutely foreseeable when he released this that it was going to inconvenience those people. So while, as I said, I don't think he's to blame, I do think it was a bit of a dick move to play to the hacker crowd without thinking about the inconvenience and irritation that would be the inevitable result for average gamers. I've seen other hackers say "I've cracked the system, I've broken all the security, and I'll find a way to make homebrew possible - but I'm not going to put the hack itself on the internet because people will use it to pirate and it'll end up hurting the users". That would have been a much more decent thing to do.