As Thomas Jefferson wisely explained, "If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself. But the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it."
First, copyright doesn't protect ideas, so Jefferson's argument (not an explanation) is at best tangential to it, and second, that's an argument that a certain category of things should not be the subject of property rights, not that they are not, and third, what is and is not a legal property right is controlled by the laws at the time, which Jefferson is, for the current situation, hardly a good source to look to.
I think the point was that whenever regulations on corps are proposed, the corps cry "Fascism!" and decry all regulation. . The irony is that they are more than happy to use--and in some cases, abuse--whatever regulations are in place to further their own profits.
No, even that understates it. Most regulations that affect industry are developed by the regulated industry, and serve as barriers to entry that protect the incumbents in the industry. When businesses (and their advocates) oppose "regulation" as a general ill, they are mostly doing it to fight regulations originating outside the industry from outside to serve an interest other than that of the industry.
How is it the "free market" when copyright law (i.e. the court) is used, backed up by the police power of the government, to enforce the restrictions?
Copyright is a legal property right. "Free markets" generally rely on government not regulating beyond the enforcement of property rights. Using law to enforce property rights isn't inconsistent with free markets, indeed, its pretty much government doing the one the thing "free market" advocates generally argue should be government's role.
As a side note I have always found it ironic that those on the left are so quick to support expanded government powers and involvement in the economy without realizing that it is precisely those powers and involvement, co-opted by the corporations (which is inevitable)
Its not inevitable. In fact, plenty of people (IME, they tend to either be one the left or libertarian areas of the political map, though they aren't a majority in either case) oppose the use of government power to create corporations in the first place.
No more, and no less, than other laws which create legal property rights are. The "imaginary property" charge against IP isn't so much wrong as it is misleading in that it implies that any other legal property interest is any less a creation of government.
OK, hit the brakes for a moment. You actually believe what they say without ANY evidence to back it up?
Whether I believe Google's published policy or not is rather immaterial to the criticism I presented in GP of GGP's analogy comparing Google's notice to a burglar announcing intent to rob your house.
So I congratulate you for, like GGP, posting something completely irrelevant to the material it is posted in "response" to.
Well, fine, but if a burglar puts a notice on his balaclava that he's going to rob my house I still reserve the right to prevent that from happening, polite notice or not.
That's a fine attitude, I suppose, but not at all relevant, since its not even remotely a good analogy to Google with regard to datamining public DNS records to uncover personal information, since that's not what their notice says they are doing with the data.
The one thing that strikes me as silly about the "what if Google datamines our DNS requests" concern is that those people assume their ISPs aren't already doing so.
The especially odd part about the complaint is that Google has an upfront, posted policy about what they are doing as far as retaining your DNS requests, which I've never seen from an ISP.
I strongly suspect that even if the infrastructure behind the phone system completely changes (as it has once before with the transition from analog to digital) the end user interfaces and therefore the numbering system will stay the same. Anything else would require massive forklift upgrades for all phone network customers and I can't see that being popular.
I'm not sure that's true; already, there are applications like computer-based internet telephony apps (rather than just POTS gear connected to a box that routes over VoIP), and GVoice that change different parts of "end user interface" for those who adopt them, without requiring what I think you mean by "massive forklift upgrades" of the overall userbase. Even if traditional phone numbers stay in the background, an internet/telephone infrastructure merger might move them further in the background, as smarter phone interfaces become more common -- especially if something that does for phone numbers what DNS does for IP addresses is introduced (which would be transparent to anyone not using it, and still provide access by phone number.)
Except the fact that the Japanese manufacturers *did* create viable hybrids (the original Insight and the Prius) out of it.
No, they didn't create viable hybrids out of "it" GM's electric car program that included the EV1.
They did have their own electric programs, which (like GMs) were designed to minimally comply with the ZEV mandate while fighting it, but, in addition, were more forward looking and realized that, whether that particular mandate was defeated or not, there were signs that there was likely to be a market in the near future (whether driven by oil prices, consumer environmental preferences, regulation, or some combination) for fuel-efficient, very-low-emissions vehicles, and also put efforts into creating viable hybrids.
The American companies didn't, and after the ZEV mandate was gone mostly just jumped on the hydrogen fuel cell PR bandwagon (the Japanese companies also did this, but not to the exclusion of other efforts).
The main difference between the Japanese companies and the American companies is that the American companies have been much more narrow in their approaches, which probably produces better short-term results in most cases (which means may make it something their investors generally prefer), but also increases the risk of catastrophic failure to be positioned for market changes.
GM's mistake wasn't killing the EV1, it was discontinuing the entire program after the EV1 phase was complete.
That was not a "mistake". The purpose of the "EV1 phase", as you call it, was to construct a demonstration designed to "prove" (or, at least, to create the impression) that the ZEV mandate in California could not practically be met, as part of GM's efforts to have that mandate altered. Once the mandate was altered, the overall purpose for which that program that the "EV1 phase" was part of had served its purpose, so naturally both the "EV1 phase" and the entire program were terminated.
Your mistake is thinking that the program was aimed at creating viable, production electric cars. It was a political maneuver that acheived its political aim, and then was terminated.
I disagree, it's not an easier problem. It is, however, a much more interesting problem to solve, especially to skilled hackers.
Whether or not its an easier problem to solve, overall, its an easier problem for the kind of people who actually write code to define concretely, and validate solutions to, since the skill set needed to do that with that problem is closely related to the skill set of programmers. This is important, because to successfully solve a problem (or, in the case of problems that progres can be made by degrees, to produce a series of improvements in a problem area) requires the ability to concretely define what it means to address the problem, and the ability to validate that something actually meets that definition.
One of the things about the open source community is that, by its nature, its heavily weighted in favor of coders. Concretely defining requirements for a "fun, usable desktop environment" takes human factors engineering skills that are almost completely orthogonal to programming (and you still need programmers to write the code.) Consequently, I think that the "faster kernel" problem is a lot easier problem for the open source community to solve, even if its not an easier problem in some kind of general sense.
But in general all the systems that I've thought about buying I've turned down for being to locked down, or to expensive.
The bookstores linked to each device may be DRM-laden, but most will read ebooks loaded from other sources that are DRM-free, and there are plenty of DRM-free ebooks in formats usable on reader devices available from publishers over the web rather than the through the bookstores linked to the readers.
There are now four or five e-book readers, each with their own incompatible "ecosystem". ntil that settles down, don't get one. Most of them are going to fail, and you'll lose your content.
Well, if you mean the linked bookstores, sure, that's a risk. Of course, all of them will read at least oneof the common formats (e.g., Mobi, ePub), and many ebook publishers sell multi-format e-Books on the web which you can download and use with any compatible device (even the ones that aren't dedicated readers.)
When might we see eBook readers which allow inclusion of text-specific fonts?
We already see them: for instance, readers that support PDFs exist--including the Nook and the Kindle DX. The non-PDF eBook formats that are popular for use on readers, while they may support specifying fonts, generally don't (much like HTML) require it, and default to whatever default font is set on the device.
As the same document in these formats can be viewed on different types of readers (e-paper vs. small LCD vs. larger LCD computer monitor) and readability of different fonts varies on different device types, and to an extent by reader, that's actually a very sensible way to make widely-usable content.
You are discounting the ubiquity of both Flash and Java.
ActionScript is an ECMAScript implementation, so Flash isn't really an alternative to JavaScript in the browser so much as an alternative JavaScript environment in the browser.
Java is an alternative, but its a very different class of language (and, since its usually not implemented in the browser but via an external plug-in with its own start-up time, has implementation-based issues as well as language-based issues.)
JavaScript is the only common (as in, cross-browser) browser-embedded language available for client-side programming on the web, and the only (browser-embedded or not) dynamic scripting language that is widely available for that purpose.
So, yes, its the best available tool in its broad class from the perspective of a web developer trying to reach a wide audience, but only because there aren't any other tools available.
Personally, I think that the best way forward for Linux on the desktop would be to take GNUstep to the next level. [...] After 10 years, I don't think that either KDE or GNOME have really done all that much for Linux on the desktop...
Purely technical solutions to marketing and promotional problems rarely work, so its unsurprising that GNOME and KDE have done much for Linux on the desktop, since their marketing and promotional efforts are pretty minor. Of course, switch technical approaches to focus on GNUstep has the same problem.
And, most importantly, the ability of the OpenStep API to produce a world class desktop--best in the world in fact--is proven.
That the Mac OS X desktop is "best in the world" is a subjective statement on a matter of taste, not a "fact".
In terms of facts, on the marketing and promotional end where Linux has been unsuccessful, Mac OS X has been more successful, though far from as successful as Microsoft Windows.
The man pages are more for learning (you can troubleshoot with them too, but diagnostic info in them are going to be lacking, just like trying to rely on the Windows Help files to fix a busted Exchange connector).
Man pages are more, IMO, for refreshing than learning. If you know what you want to do and want to learn how to do it, man pages aren't a great tool, because they are organized in a way which is useful for people who already know the command to use to acheive their goal, not for beginners.
So, it seems like the $millions is not the cost of running SETI@home, but the cost of doing things like construction to house the network, out-of-date equipment, repairs, etc. I mean, really, it's his fault they need a building?
It seems very doubtful that this is all Niesluchowski's fault; more likely, it's mostly the fault of an insufficient IT buidget.
Given Niesluchowski's position, if the needs weren't brought to the attention of the board when it considered the IT budget, that may still be his fault.
I doubt most organization's ethics rules would cover this - Particularly since he had the authority to determine how he wanted to configure each machine
That remains in doubt. The tech supervisor at issue probably had that authority assuming no specific instruction was received from above, but the more detailed news articles on the case relate that the district position is that this came to the attention of a prior administrator, who provided specific direction to remove the software, following which the tech supervisor reported that he had complied with that directive. If that is true, after that point he arguably did not have the authority to configure the machines with that particular software without requesting and securing a change in directives from the administrator or that administrator's successor.
Of course, that's more an issue of direct insubordination than "ethics rules" at that point.
I will further defend this guy for having school-owned hardware at his house - Schools and local governments rarely have proper procedures in place for EOL'ing older computers.
Local governments, including school districts, generally have (often from higher authority, such as the state) laws and regulations which must be followed in disposing of computers (which include procedures to assure that confidential information which may have been stored on them isn't compromised.) The responsibility for assuring that policies and procedures exist that meet those requirements generally lies with the person with lead authority over IT for the local government at issue, which appears, in the case at issue in this thread, to also be the person at the center of the whole controversy.
So its not clear to me that he can get out of responsibility for the computers at his house because the district didn't have a process for dealing with EOL computers, because establishing such a process would appear to be part of his job.
Personally, the fact that they let him resign makes me wonder about the truth of the issue.
He resigned "in lieu of termination" after getting a termination notice. Its not at all unlikely that there are civil service rules applicable to the case that, while allowing "administrative leave", prohibit firing without a notice period to allow for appeals within the civil service system. Of course, if he chooses to resign after the notice but before the required notice period has expired, the issue becomes moot.
Given the facts as stated - Generally abusing the hell out of his authority, outright failing to do his job, and stealing from the school - I find it mind-boggling that they wouldn't have him arrested and fired for cause
They initiated the process of getting him fired for cause (that's what the "termination notice" is), and also the process of getting him arrested (that's what the police investigation is.)
He made the first irrelevant by quitting after the termination notice, and the second process hasn't yet come to a conclusion.
However, in the meager amount of facts presented, it was said that he had gotten permission from a previous supervisor.
His wife says that in TFA. In the more complete, newspaper-sourced story, the district says that a the problems had come to the previous administrator, who had ordered the software removed, and that the tech supervisor who is now under investigation claimed, at the time, to have removed it as directed. Now, as far as I know there is no public concrete evidence of who is telling the truth here, but its worth noting that the wife could be telling the truth as she knows it and the district could be telling the truth, the only thing required for that to be true is for the tech supervisor to have lied to his wife to make himself look persecuted when the trouble started coming down, and for her to trust him. And how hard is that to believe?
Why is everything called cloud these days? Yet another du jour buzzword. Is this really justified here?
Sure, as one of the main uses of a 48-core processor, I would expect, is to be able to dynamically provision slices of it as different logical machines, which is what cloud computing is. So calling this a "cloud" processor makes as much sense as calling two different subsets of the Atom line "Netbook" and "Nettop" processors, after the kind of use for which they are intended.
If you read the article in the Arizona Central Newpaper(http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/2009/11/30/20091130searchforaliens1202.html) the bizarre thing is that though they found a bunch of the school district's PC's at his home, they sound more peeved about SETI.
That couldn't, possibly, be the newspaper selecting what quotes to use because SETI is "more colorful", while garden variety misappropriation of government resources for personal uses is something we've all seen hundreds of times.
Which would also explain why the TV news article from TFA -- as typical for TV news organizations being even more brief than the newspaper articles -- focusses solely on the SETI aspect, and ignores the theft (and porn) issues entirely (and even, in discussing the SETI issue, neglects to mention the district's statement that the problem had come to the attention of a previous administrator who ordered the software removed, and received assurances from the tech supervisor at the center of this controversy that it had been removed.)
As is often, it seems that there may be more behind the scenes than before.
Garden variety focus on the unusual (to the intended audience) features of a case by a sensationalistic news organization seems to be the simplest explanation.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, it is.
First, copyright doesn't protect ideas, so Jefferson's argument (not an explanation) is at best tangential to it, and second, that's an argument that a certain category of things should not be the subject of property rights, not that they are not, and third, what is and is not a legal property right is controlled by the laws at the time, which Jefferson is, for the current situation, hardly a good source to look to.
No, even that understates it. Most regulations that affect industry are developed by the regulated industry, and serve as barriers to entry that protect the incumbents in the industry. When businesses (and their advocates) oppose "regulation" as a general ill, they are mostly doing it to fight regulations originating outside the industry from outside to serve an interest other than that of the industry.
Copyright is a legal property right. "Free markets" generally rely on government not regulating beyond the enforcement of property rights. Using law to enforce property rights isn't inconsistent with free markets, indeed, its pretty much government doing the one the thing "free market" advocates generally argue should be government's role.
Its not inevitable. In fact, plenty of people (IME, they tend to either be one the left or libertarian areas of the political map, though they aren't a majority in either case) oppose the use of government power to create corporations in the first place.
No more, and no less, than other laws which create legal property rights are. The "imaginary property" charge against IP isn't so much wrong as it is misleading in that it implies that any other legal property interest is any less a creation of government.
Whether I believe Google's published policy or not is rather immaterial to the criticism I presented in GP of GGP's analogy comparing Google's notice to a burglar announcing intent to rob your house.
So I congratulate you for, like GGP, posting something completely irrelevant to the material it is posted in "response" to.
That's a fine attitude, I suppose, but not at all relevant, since its not even remotely a good analogy to Google with regard to datamining public DNS records to uncover personal information, since that's not what their notice says they are doing with the data.
The especially odd part about the complaint is that Google has an upfront, posted policy about what they are doing as far as retaining your DNS requests, which I've never seen from an ISP.
I'm not sure that's true; already, there are applications like computer-based internet telephony apps (rather than just POTS gear connected to a box that routes over VoIP), and GVoice that change different parts of "end user interface" for those who adopt them, without requiring what I think you mean by "massive forklift upgrades" of the overall userbase. Even if traditional phone numbers stay in the background, an internet/telephone infrastructure merger might move them further in the background, as smarter phone interfaces become more common -- especially if something that does for phone numbers what DNS does for IP addresses is introduced (which would be transparent to anyone not using it, and still provide access by phone number.)
No, they didn't create viable hybrids out of "it" GM's electric car program that included the EV1.
They did have their own electric programs, which (like GMs) were designed to minimally comply with the ZEV mandate while fighting it, but, in addition, were more forward looking and realized that, whether that particular mandate was defeated or not, there were signs that there was likely to be a market in the near future (whether driven by oil prices, consumer environmental preferences, regulation, or some combination) for fuel-efficient, very-low-emissions vehicles, and also put efforts into creating viable hybrids.
The American companies didn't, and after the ZEV mandate was gone mostly just jumped on the hydrogen fuel cell PR bandwagon (the Japanese companies also did this, but not to the exclusion of other efforts).
The main difference between the Japanese companies and the American companies is that the American companies have been much more narrow in their approaches, which probably produces better short-term results in most cases (which means may make it something their investors generally prefer), but also increases the risk of catastrophic failure to be positioned for market changes.
That was not a "mistake". The purpose of the "EV1 phase", as you call it, was to construct a demonstration designed to "prove" (or, at least, to create the impression) that the ZEV mandate in California could not practically be met, as part of GM's efforts to have that mandate altered. Once the mandate was altered, the overall purpose for which that program that the "EV1 phase" was part of had served its purpose, so naturally both the "EV1 phase" and the entire program were terminated.
Your mistake is thinking that the program was aimed at creating viable, production electric cars. It was a political maneuver that acheived its political aim, and then was terminated.
Whether or not its an easier problem to solve, overall, its an easier problem for the kind of people who actually write code to define concretely, and validate solutions to, since the skill set needed to do that with that problem is closely related to the skill set of programmers. This is important, because to successfully solve a problem (or, in the case of problems that progres can be made by degrees, to produce a series of improvements in a problem area) requires the ability to concretely define what it means to address the problem, and the ability to validate that something actually meets that definition.
One of the things about the open source community is that, by its nature, its heavily weighted in favor of coders. Concretely defining requirements for a "fun, usable desktop environment" takes human factors engineering skills that are almost completely orthogonal to programming (and you still need programmers to write the code.) Consequently, I think that the "faster kernel" problem is a lot easier problem for the open source community to solve, even if its not an easier problem in some kind of general sense.
Actually, that's a mass change of how phones (not just cell) are going to work, since the FCC is planning a switch from PSTN to all-VoIP.
The bookstores linked to each device may be DRM-laden, but most will read ebooks loaded from other sources that are DRM-free, and there are plenty of DRM-free ebooks in formats usable on reader devices available from publishers over the web rather than the through the bookstores linked to the readers.
Well, if you mean the linked bookstores, sure, that's a risk. Of course, all of them will read at least oneof the common formats (e.g., Mobi, ePub), and many ebook publishers sell multi-format e-Books on the web which you can download and use with any compatible device (even the ones that aren't dedicated readers.)
We already see them: for instance, readers that support PDFs exist--including the Nook and the Kindle DX. The non-PDF eBook formats that are popular for use on readers, while they may support specifying fonts, generally don't (much like HTML) require it, and default to whatever default font is set on the device.
As the same document in these formats can be viewed on different types of readers (e-paper vs. small LCD vs. larger LCD computer monitor) and readability of different fonts varies on different device types, and to an extent by reader, that's actually a very sensible way to make widely-usable content.
ActionScript is an ECMAScript implementation, so Flash isn't really an alternative to JavaScript in the browser so much as an alternative JavaScript environment in the browser.
Java is an alternative, but its a very different class of language (and, since its usually not implemented in the browser but via an external plug-in with its own start-up time, has implementation-based issues as well as language-based issues.)
JavaScript is the only common (as in, cross-browser) browser-embedded language available for client-side programming on the web, and the only (browser-embedded or not) dynamic scripting language that is widely available for that purpose.
So, yes, its the best available tool in its broad class from the perspective of a web developer trying to reach a wide audience, but only because there aren't any other tools available.
Purely technical solutions to marketing and promotional problems rarely work, so its unsurprising that GNOME and KDE have done much for Linux on the desktop, since their marketing and promotional efforts are pretty minor. Of course, switch technical approaches to focus on GNUstep has the same problem.
That the Mac OS X desktop is "best in the world" is a subjective statement on a matter of taste, not a "fact".
In terms of facts, on the marketing and promotional end where Linux has been unsuccessful, Mac OS X has been more successful, though far from as successful as Microsoft Windows.
Man pages are more, IMO, for refreshing than learning. If you know what you want to do and want to learn how to do it, man pages aren't a great tool, because they are organized in a way which is useful for people who already know the command to use to acheive their goal, not for beginners.
Given Niesluchowski's position, if the needs weren't brought to the attention of the board when it considered the IT budget, that may still be his fault.
Most sites will eventually disappear.
Most sites that you will be using 10 years from now probably don't exist.
So, while most existing sites won't upgrade to it, at some point in the future most sites will probably be using either HTML5 or something later.
That remains in doubt. The tech supervisor at issue probably had that authority assuming no specific instruction was received from above, but the more detailed news articles on the case relate that the district position is that this came to the attention of a prior administrator, who provided specific direction to remove the software, following which the tech supervisor reported that he had complied with that directive. If that is true, after that point he arguably did not have the authority to configure the machines with that particular software without requesting and securing a change in directives from the administrator or that administrator's successor.
Of course, that's more an issue of direct insubordination than "ethics rules" at that point.
Local governments, including school districts, generally have (often from higher authority, such as the state) laws and regulations which must be followed in disposing of computers (which include procedures to assure that confidential information which may have been stored on them isn't compromised.) The responsibility for assuring that policies and procedures exist that meet those requirements generally lies with the person with lead authority over IT for the local government at issue, which appears, in the case at issue in this thread, to also be the person at the center of the whole controversy.
So its not clear to me that he can get out of responsibility for the computers at his house because the district didn't have a process for dealing with EOL computers, because establishing such a process would appear to be part of his job.
He resigned "in lieu of termination" after getting a termination notice. Its not at all unlikely that there are civil service rules applicable to the case that, while allowing "administrative leave", prohibit firing without a notice period to allow for appeals within the civil service system. Of course, if he chooses to resign after the notice but before the required notice period has expired, the issue becomes moot.
They initiated the process of getting him fired for cause (that's what the "termination notice" is), and also the process of getting him arrested (that's what the police investigation is.)
He made the first irrelevant by quitting after the termination notice, and the second process hasn't yet come to a conclusion.
His wife says that in TFA. In the more complete, newspaper-sourced story, the district says that a the problems had come to the previous administrator, who had ordered the software removed, and that the tech supervisor who is now under investigation claimed, at the time, to have removed it as directed. Now, as far as I know there is no public concrete evidence of who is telling the truth here, but its worth noting that the wife could be telling the truth as she knows it and the district could be telling the truth, the only thing required for that to be true is for the tech supervisor to have lied to his wife to make himself look persecuted when the trouble started coming down, and for her to trust him. And how hard is that to believe?
Sure, as one of the main uses of a 48-core processor, I would expect, is to be able to dynamically provision slices of it as different logical machines, which is what cloud computing is. So calling this a "cloud" processor makes as much sense as calling two different subsets of the Atom line "Netbook" and "Nettop" processors, after the kind of use for which they are intended.
Jaguars are also found in the American southwest.
That couldn't, possibly, be the newspaper selecting what quotes to use because SETI is "more colorful", while garden variety misappropriation of government resources for personal uses is something we've all seen hundreds of times.
Which would also explain why the TV news article from TFA -- as typical for TV news organizations being even more brief than the newspaper articles -- focusses solely on the SETI aspect, and ignores the theft (and porn) issues entirely (and even, in discussing the SETI issue, neglects to mention the district's statement that the problem had come to the attention of a previous administrator who ordered the software removed, and received assurances from the tech supervisor at the center of this controversy that it had been removed.)
Garden variety focus on the unusual (to the intended audience) features of a case by a sensationalistic news organization seems to be the simplest explanation.