Personally, I think the broadband penetration number ("our rank has fallen to #22") is a bit of a red herring because the US is far less densely populated than most other countries and thus perfect broadband penetration is not feasible.
Lower population density may mean that universal broadband access isn't as profitable for commercial vendors as it might be otherwise (ditto with access to electricity, running water, telephone service, mail, etc.), but it certainly does not mean it is not feasible.
Describing common features of existing blanket licensing schemes and proposals that explain how such schemes address the issue the GGP raise is not the same as endorsing such schemes, either in general or in terms of the specific features that address the issue raised.
So basically, his undivulged details include making it mandatory for all internet access subscribers to pay into this through an added fee on the internet provider bill. This will require even more messy details, since internet subscriptions are not on a per-person basis
That's okay, it probably won't end up as a per-person charge; based on the presumption that a certain portion of internet traffic is distribution of music covered by the blanket license, it'll be a per-megabit charge, so that heavy users of shared music (by the assumption that such use is a constant portion of internet traffic, again) will pay more of the charge.
ISP's that opt out, and their users, of course, will be subject to the RIAA looking for evidence of music traversing their networks, and, if the RIAA gets their way, even more drastic penalties than are available under current law.
Interest that has been eroding since the advent of Linux...
And Windows NT and its spawn, both of which have squeezed traditional Unix markets. Is OpenSolaris trying to compete with Linux by being open, or is it trying to compete with Windows the way Linux has shown works? Hard to say. In any case, your argument that the GPL is the only reason Solaris is doing this requires one to accept that Linux would not have succeeded with any other open source licensing arrangement, or at least not with out substantively similar to the GPL. That's a point on which there can be endless debate, but no real resolution, since neither side can be proven correct.
Voluntary payments don't work, so here's a voluntary payment scheme?
The voluntary thing he says doesn't work is when the choice is the consumers.
The voluntary thing he says does work is when the choice is made between the content owner and a set of middle-men (ISP operators, etc.) -- middle-men who control, often, regional monopolies or near-monopolies -- where there is no meaningful consumer choice.
Of course, highlighting this fact is probably something Griffin would prefer to avoid.
Under blanket licensing, how do I reward artists with good music preferentially to those who suck?
Most blanket licensing schemes I've heard of, either in use or proposed, have some tracking of overall usage (how that is measured depends on the particular scheme) that controls the distribution of the licensing fees, in whole or in part.
Wouldn't it be wiser to spend that effort working on a project that makes C# more open source friendly [mono-project.com], rather than simply rewriting any/all projects that use it?
There's not a whole lot of open source projects in C# (or for the.NET platform more generally) that don't have comparable open source projects that aren't targetted to.NET, but to more open source platforms (either because they are more platform agnostic or because they target a specific platform whose principal implementation is more open source friendly than.NET.)
Given that, its not all that surprising that people interested in both the subject matter and open source ideals for platforms as well as applications might want to participate in non-C# projects, and (taking advantage of the nature of open source) take the interesting bits from C#-based projects and port them over to those non-C# projects. That's certainly less trouble than both participating in the C# application project and participating in the Mono project, especially for someone who is interested and skilled in the application domain but, despite interest in platform openness, isn't particularly interested in platform development.
And there is another issue too: Who is going to write these open source textbooks?
If the unversities find it more attractive than commercial textbooks, they will create incentives (or outright requirements) for their faculty to author or contribute to open textbooks, just as they do for other publications that benefit the university (some of which may create marketable IP, but many of which benefit the university only by, in aggregate, increasing the prestige of the institution.)
Why? It's simply the milder form of "I couldn't [possibly] care less [about anythign else than I do about the issue at hand]."; that is, "I could [in theory] care less [about something else than I do about the issue at hand, but in fact I do not]."
Re: established use in English of "he" for singular, indeterminant gender.
This was true once.
Its still the dominant usage now (second only to the much-hated-by-prescriptivists-but-long-established singular "they" for the same case), despite the fact that some people push any one of a wide variety of linguistic innovations to solve something that isn't considered a problem by most English speakers and for which, where it is perceived as problem, there has been a well-established, popular solution for centuries.
If you don't like it, complain to your local linguist, who will be very happy to point out that languages are defined by usage
Indeed. And actual usage frustrates those who have sought to destroy generic "he" much as it has those prescriptivists who have fought for centuries to eradicate the popular singular "they".
One technology involves enabling users to gain instant access to a laptop's e-mail, browser and other basic functionality -- without booting Windows at all.
Uh, my laptop already uses technology that allows this, and it allows more than "basic functionality". This stunning new technology is called "Linux".
Is the Olympic Committee going to step up and make sure future governments who host the Olympics don't get to prevent the athletes from protecting themselves?
A more useful idea would be to be proactive: make local health factors like air pollution a critical consideration in selecting a site.
Whether we like it or not, the world needs telemarketers,
Only in the sense that, absent enforced rules prohibiting them, they will spring up because someone can make more profit, at a social cost, through them; i.e., in exactly the same way that the world "needs" muggers and pickpockets.
The basic question in this part of the ruling was whether it was wrong to try to get an employee to sign an agreement that waived rights the law specifically said could not be waived.
Actually, no.
The basic question was whether a broad waiver of "any and all" claims constituted an attempt to get the employee to waive rights that the law specifically said could not be waived. The Court of Appeal said it did, the Supreme Court said it did not. Neither position seems to me, based on reading the decision and the , to be anything close to "nutty". (From a policy perspective, I prefer the result of the Court of Appeal's reading, though I think the Supreme Court's decision was probably the better one, legally.)
Despite what the Chron article says, I wouldn't hold my breath on the Federal Courts issue. Non-competes are pretty standard across a range of industries, and I suspect that the federal courts aren't going to be as quick to void the concept as many here believe. The 9th Circuit would probably uphold it, but any other circuit (and SCOTUS, for that matter) would probably quash this.
The Chronicle article says that federal courts would follow this in application of California law. Since its a bedrock principle of American jurisprudence that the State Supreme Court is the final authority on state law, and that when federal courts must apply state law they must follow that authority, except insofar as the state law is preempted by federal law, its not really all that out there.
And, ironically -- given your characterization of the 9th Circuit as likely to be uniquely friendly to this decision -- one of the arguments raised by Andersen against what ended up being the ruling of the Court here was that the 9th Circuit had in a number of cases ruled that the restriction in California law applied more narrowly.
Maybe. But when people start enforcing my "rights" by telling me what I am not allowed to do, I start to worry that their concept of individual rights might be a wee bit shaky.
Granting, arguendo, that you may be justified in that position with regard to that case, the issue is not, as suggested upthread, with "wacky" judges, but with the legislature, since the provision making void any contract provision that restrains pursuit of a lawful profession is not something the court invented out of the air, but one which is in black and white in the statute law.
I really don't know, I'm just curious. Let's say we entered into a contract for you to remodel some of my house. At the end, there was a clause stating that you got to enslave me for a period of 10 years.
Does that mean the rest of the contract is null and void? Or does it mean just that clause is?
It depends on how the contract is structured. If that was the only payment for the remodeling, the entire contract would most likely be void since, without the void provision, there would be no mutual consideration, and therefore the minimum requirements for a contract would not be met.
But since Russia is in a very bad economic and population situation, they probably won't go investing in drilling it unless they have major longterm plans to sell it for higher prices than the OPEC countries sell for or use the oil to build better roadways throughout Russia.
Or, being in a bad economic situation, it could sell (or lease) exploration and extraction rights to multinational corporations that would do the actual investing, and use the lease payments to help prop up its weak economy.
A "non-compete" agreement is a legal agreement where you agree to just declare guilt in a trial.
Um, no. I think you are thinking of a "no contest" plea (also known as nolo contendere.) A "Non-compete" clause or agreement is a common alternate term for "non-competition" clause agreement (neither of which is a legal term of art, just common language.)
In the former case (getting a job in California), it likely winds up in Federal court due to diversity of citizenship, and the court notes that as a matter of public policy, such contracts are unenforceable in California.
But why would California law be applied? The contract was executed outside of California and pertained to acts performed (presumably) primarily outside of California; the fact that a party later became a citizen of California may allow federal diversity jurisdiction, but doesn't seem to retroactively apply California law to the contract.
And anyone who has ever worked in California is surprised by this because...?
Its a potential surprise to some people because, in the absence of ultra-clear guidance from the California Supreme Court, some courts interpreting California law in employment cases, notably the federal courts in CA and the Ninth Circuit, have applied the prohibition on contracts which restrain the practice of a profession more narrowly (for the most part, the state courts seem to have ruled consistently with the broad interpretation of "restrain" that the Supreme Court followed in this case.)
Another nutty ruling.. if you willingly sign a contract that contained a non-complete clause, that's your issue with the company you should fight for.
But wacky judges just says these are no good.
So it is "wacky" for a judge to see a law that's been on the books for 136 years that says "Except as provided in this chapter, every contract by which anyone is restrained from engaging in a lawful profession, trade, or business of any kind is to that extent void" (Ca. Bus. & Prof. Code 16600, as cited in the ruling) and conclude that it invalidates contracts which would restrain someone from engaging in a specific lawful profession, trade, or business, and which don't fall into one of the specified exceptions included in the same chapter of the law?
That seems to me a strange idea of what is "wacky".
What needs to happen is a bunch of people, preferably businesses, with similar interests should hire programmers and developers to work together with a common goal in mind... and that goal shouldn't be to "sell software" either. It should be to build the tool that works the way they need it to work. They can give that tool to other people in their fields so they can read and write their files and grow on from there.
The reason businesses generally don't do this is that having their existing and potential future competitors have to pay separately to develope or purchase software that the business already has for themselves is a competitive advantage to business. Commonality means its more likely that businesses are forced to compete by narrowing profit margins, which is exactly what most businesses want to avoid.
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Lower population density may mean that universal broadband access isn't as profitable for commercial vendors as it might be otherwise (ditto with access to electricity, running water, telephone service, mail, etc.), but it certainly does not mean it is not feasible.
Describing common features of existing blanket licensing schemes and proposals that explain how such schemes address the issue the GGP raise is not the same as endorsing such schemes, either in general or in terms of the specific features that address the issue raised.
Description is not prescription.
That's okay, it probably won't end up as a per-person charge; based on the presumption that a certain portion of internet traffic is distribution of music covered by the blanket license, it'll be a per-megabit charge, so that heavy users of shared music (by the assumption that such use is a constant portion of internet traffic, again) will pay more of the charge.
ISP's that opt out, and their users, of course, will be subject to the RIAA looking for evidence of music traversing their networks, and, if the RIAA gets their way, even more drastic penalties than are available under current law.
And Windows NT and its spawn, both of which have squeezed traditional Unix markets. Is OpenSolaris trying to compete with Linux by being open, or is it trying to compete with Windows the way Linux has shown works? Hard to say. In any case, your argument that the GPL is the only reason Solaris is doing this requires one to accept that Linux would not have succeeded with any other open source licensing arrangement, or at least not with out substantively similar to the GPL. That's a point on which there can be endless debate, but no real resolution, since neither side can be proven correct.
The voluntary thing he says doesn't work is when the choice is the consumers.
The voluntary thing he says does work is when the choice is made between the content owner and a set of middle-men (ISP operators, etc.) -- middle-men who control, often, regional monopolies or near-monopolies -- where there is no meaningful consumer choice.
Of course, highlighting this fact is probably something Griffin would prefer to avoid.
Most blanket licensing schemes I've heard of, either in use or proposed, have some tracking of overall usage (how that is measured depends on the particular scheme) that controls the distribution of the licensing fees, in whole or in part.
Which has nothing to do with being open source friendly, which is the issue under discussion.
There's not a whole lot of open source projects in C# (or for the .NET platform more generally) that don't have comparable open source projects that aren't targetted to .NET, but to more open source platforms (either because they are more platform agnostic or because they target a specific platform whose principal implementation is more open source friendly than .NET.)
Given that, its not all that surprising that people interested in both the subject matter and open source ideals for platforms as well as applications might want to participate in non-C# projects, and (taking advantage of the nature of open source) take the interesting bits from C#-based projects and port them over to those non-C# projects. That's certainly less trouble than both participating in the C# application project and participating in the Mono project, especially for someone who is interested and skilled in the application domain but, despite interest in platform openness, isn't particularly interested in platform development.
If the unversities find it more attractive than commercial textbooks, they will create incentives (or outright requirements) for their faculty to author or contribute to open textbooks, just as they do for other publications that benefit the university (some of which may create marketable IP, but many of which benefit the university only by, in aggregate, increasing the prestige of the institution.)
Why? It's simply the milder form of "I couldn't [possibly] care less [about anythign else than I do about the issue at hand]."; that is, "I could [in theory] care less [about something else than I do about the issue at hand, but in fact I do not]."
Re: established use in English of "he" for singular, indeterminant gender.
Its still the dominant usage now (second only to the much-hated-by-prescriptivists-but-long-established singular "they" for the same case), despite the fact that some people push any one of a wide variety of linguistic innovations to solve something that isn't considered a problem by most English speakers and for which, where it is perceived as problem, there has been a well-established, popular solution for centuries.
Indeed. And actual usage frustrates those who have sought to destroy generic "he" much as it has those prescriptivists who have fought for centuries to eradicate the popular singular "they".
Uh, my laptop already uses technology that allows this, and it allows more than "basic functionality". This stunning new technology is called "Linux".
Its already jumping back up because of the conflict in Georgia.
A more useful idea would be to be proactive: make local health factors like air pollution a critical consideration in selecting a site.
Only in the sense that, absent enforced rules prohibiting them, they will spring up because someone can make more profit, at a social cost, through them; i.e., in exactly the same way that the world "needs" muggers and pickpockets.
Actually, no.
The basic question was whether a broad waiver of "any and all" claims constituted an attempt to get the employee to waive rights that the law specifically said could not be waived. The Court of Appeal said it did, the Supreme Court said it did not. Neither position seems to me, based on reading the decision and the , to be anything close to "nutty". (From a policy perspective, I prefer the result of the Court of Appeal's reading, though I think the Supreme Court's decision was probably the better one, legally.)
The Chronicle article says that federal courts would follow this in application of California law. Since its a bedrock principle of American jurisprudence that the State Supreme Court is the final authority on state law, and that when federal courts must apply state law they must follow that authority, except insofar as the state law is preempted by federal law, its not really all that out there.
And, ironically -- given your characterization of the 9th Circuit as likely to be uniquely friendly to this decision -- one of the arguments raised by Andersen against what ended up being the ruling of the Court here was that the 9th Circuit had in a number of cases ruled that the restriction in California law applied more narrowly.
Granting, arguendo, that you may be justified in that position with regard to that case, the issue is not, as suggested upthread, with "wacky" judges, but with the legislature, since the provision making void any contract provision that restrains pursuit of a lawful profession is not something the court invented out of the air, but one which is in black and white in the statute law.
It depends on how the contract is structured. If that was the only payment for the remodeling, the entire contract would most likely be void since, without the void provision, there would be no mutual consideration, and therefore the minimum requirements for a contract would not be met.
Or, being in a bad economic situation, it could sell (or lease) exploration and extraction rights to multinational corporations that would do the actual investing, and use the lease payments to help prop up its weak economy.
Um, no. I think you are thinking of a "no contest" plea (also known as nolo contendere.) A "Non-compete" clause or agreement is a common alternate term for "non-competition" clause agreement (neither of which is a legal term of art, just common language.)
But why would California law be applied? The contract was executed outside of California and pertained to acts performed (presumably) primarily outside of California; the fact that a party later became a citizen of California may allow federal diversity jurisdiction, but doesn't seem to retroactively apply California law to the contract.
Its a potential surprise to some people because, in the absence of ultra-clear guidance from the California Supreme Court, some courts interpreting California law in employment cases, notably the federal courts in CA and the Ninth Circuit, have applied the prohibition on contracts which restrain the practice of a profession more narrowly (for the most part, the state courts seem to have ruled consistently with the broad interpretation of "restrain" that the Supreme Court followed in this case.)
So it is "wacky" for a judge to see a law that's been on the books for 136 years that says "Except as provided in this chapter, every contract by which anyone is restrained from engaging in a lawful profession, trade, or business of any kind is to that extent void" (Ca. Bus. & Prof. Code 16600, as cited in the ruling) and conclude that it invalidates contracts which would restrain someone from engaging in a specific lawful profession, trade, or business, and which don't fall into one of the specified exceptions included in the same chapter of the law?
That seems to me a strange idea of what is "wacky".
The reason businesses generally don't do this is that having their existing and potential future competitors have to pay separately to develope or purchase software that the business already has for themselves is a competitive advantage to business. Commonality means its more likely that businesses are forced to compete by narrowing profit margins, which is exactly what most businesses want to avoid.