Since Slim owns CompUSA, maybe he's creating new customers.
Since Slim controls Telmex, Telcel, and America Movil, and since telecoms tend to have big IT needs, maybe he's creating new workers.
Or, maybe, given his history of philanthropy (including offers to match donations to certain charities in Mexico dollar for dollar without limit in 2006), his interest aren't as narrowly selfish.
There is one thing that doctypes can't to that my beloved syntactic suger can: Inspire more web developers to code to standards. If someone, while they are learning can just say version=5 rather than having to fetch the DTD and figure out WTF does it do, we might have a more responsible web.
There is no more requirement to fetch the DTD now than there would be if the declaration were simplified. If there is any problem at all, it would be that introductory tutorial material available implies that such a requirement exists, but even that doesn't seem to be true from any of the introductory HTML, web development, etc., material that I've seen.
Granted, I don't know how much it would help, but I think making writing to standards easier is never a bad thing.
What you suggest doesn't make it any easier to write to standards, except perhaps in that it reduces the number of characters that you type in a standards-compliant HTML document by a few.
The problem with your post is that you fail to note an important distinction, which I highlight, in your own first sentence:
Your linked "facts" notwithstanding, coffee should be brewed at a temperature higher than McDonalds was accused of serving (180-190 F)
Yeah, it should. Many food items should be prepared at a higher temperature than they should be served at; a number even involve boiling at some point in the preparation process. That doesn't mean they should be served boiling.
If I'm writing a browser, it's pretty trivial to download a copy of a dtd and implement that as standards compliant mode. If a new version comes out, well, it won't be version 5 anymore anyway, it'll be 5.01 or something. At least let the browser do the work of remembering where the doctypes are
Browsers are allowed to do that. There is no requirement that user agents use the system identifier (URI) at all to locate a DTD, and there is no requirement that if they use the URI, they treat it as anything other than an identifier. They can use either the public or system identifier, and use any system mapping that to a particular archive of specifications that they want. Clearly, using the URI as a URL (which it is) and fetching the DTD from the specified location is one way browsers can get the referenced specification, but its not the only way they can.
We can still have doctypes optionally, but the version thing is much much cleaner.
How is it "cleaner"? Both the public identifiers and the URIs for DOCTYPES are simply identifiers. They allow the user agent to do whatever it wants to find the associated specification. They also allow the user agent to not try to remember where they are, and instead be told the location specifically. Nothing that versions support is not supported by the existing DOCTYPE declaration.
Is XSL:FO suitable for describing on-screen layout?
Yes.
I certainly wouldn't want web pages to end up being like PDFs, with a page-based layout.
Well, neither would I, but then again, people that want total control in the hands of a graphic designer usually seem to want something like that. OTOH, XSL:FO was designed to handle use cases where you have multiple pages (as would be the case for paged media, either print or slideshow) or where a document is laid out on a single page whose size is known only to the renderer (as would be typical in a web browser). Quoting from part of the XSL 1.1 spec discussing pages in FOs:
When pages are used with a User Agent such as a Web browser, it is common that the each document has only one page. The viewport used to view the page determines the size of the page. When pages are placed on non-interactive media, such as sheets of paper, pages correspond to one or more of the surfaces of the paper. The size of the paper determines the size of the page.
Its just that its apparently a lot more work to implement than CSS, and so its mostly only been implemented in print (or at least print-like, e.g., PDF generation) applications, rather than browsers, where (the complaints registered here, aside), CSS does well-enough for most uses. Early on, there were some proof-of-concept limited-functionality XSL:FO browsers, but FO support hasn't (yet, at least) made it into mainstream browsers, and AFAICT those early efforts were all abandoned.
I am saying there should be a way to tell the browser to disable ALL styling so that there are no margins, no spacing, no default font family, size or weight.
No, there shouldn't.
Now, if you want to say it should be possible to replace, on a per-page basis, all the defaults, sure, there should. IIRC, there is, but I don't do a whole lot of work with CSS, and when I do, I'm not usually interested in nuking the users defaults, so its not something I particularly am concerned about and I could be mistaken.
But there is no good reason at all for a capability to nuke any user-agent default that you aren't explicitly providing a new value for.
Right now, when making a web app, I have to create PHP scripts that generate SQL queries, crunch the data, and then output HTML and possibly client-side Javascript.
You aren't forced to use PHP or SQL in a web app, those are choices. They may have compelling reasons behind them in any particular web app, but certainly the fact that something is going to be a web app doesn't, in and of itself, mean it requires either (you could use Erlang with the Erlang Yaws webserver and Mnesia database, instead of PHP+Web server+SQL db, for instance, and reduce the number of different technologies and languages.) HTML is only forced in that a distributed application that doesn't use HTML (or maybe XML+CSS) over HTTP isn't, pretty much by definition, a "web" app, though there are certainly tons of other choices for a distributed application. Same thing with client-side JavaScript, essentially.
I'd say creating a standardized VM that displays Postscript and uses a Java or.NET-type language
Both the CLR and the JVM exist already, so its not a matter of creating a VM. Getting people to use them, and to choose one, are the issues.
Building a Postscript interpreter for either shouldn't be a particular problem (ISTR seeing them for Java). Of course, there are existing other distributed application frameworks that include layout, db interaction, etc., all under one hood without using HTML+JavaScript on the client end (REBOL is built for this as a primary use, and there are distribution frameworks for lots of languages that also have layout engines available.) Even with them, many people still prefer to use SQL-based RDBMSs for backend storage, though native storage is sometimes used.
In fact, CSS is junk and should be replaced with something that is actually useful to graphic designers.
Um, why?
CSS is useful if you want hypertext with a designer-controlled basic appearance that is still useful to people with special needs and preferences. If you want precise layout over which the designer has complete control, what you want isn't hypertext rendered in a way dependent on the user-agent, the users fonts, etc. What you want is something like PDF or a graphics file format.
OTOH, XSL:FO already exists and has more power than CSS; support of that in browsers would provide considerably more control than CSS allows. And there's no reason that browsers couldn't support XHTML+CSS as well as XML (including, but not limited to, XHTML) transformed into XSL:FO through XSLT. In any case, there is no reason to "junk" CSS.
Of course if you use XSLT and a "real layout language", XSL:FO or otherwise, there's not a whole lot of reason to use XHTML as the base language for most content, since if you are using XSLT, you can start with whatever flavor of XML is most appropriate to your particular content. (X)HTML+CSS is mostly useful for piggybacking on the user agents default presentation with selected variations. People may be "forced" to do ground-up design in it because they face constraints which prevent using formats like that provide better layout-consistency guarantees or they want to avoid external dependencies beyond the browser, and because few browsers support anything besides CSS, but if you have something more than CSS available in the browser, there isn't a whole lot of reason to use (X)HTML in the first place most of the time.
IBM can sue, sure. Who's going to show up in court? The lawyers from a Chinese company? Why would they? There is no jurisdiction.
The US Federal Courts will, I'm sure, be immensely sympathetic to the argument that they have no jurisdiction over Shentech, Inc. of 1513 132nd St., Flushing, NY 11356.
I think the main problem is we can't really come up with an open source scheduling system that's compelely new and innovative because you need compatibility with people outside your organization.
Do you?
I've used various combined email/scheduling systems in different jobs over the years, and not once used anything more advanced than the e-mail portion with people outside of the organization. Yes, most systems support this, but I don't think use of it is so widespread that a truly innovative system that was far superior within the organization would be entirely without a market simply because it didn't automatically interface with users outside of the organization.
(And, of course, there is no reason a system that provides innovative internal features can't also support fallback to dull, boring, common formats and functionality for interfacing with external clients using more primitive software.)
Why bother ranking sites when bookmarking the results would achieve the same result (as well as be independent of a login).
What's not clear from the link is whether the promotion is used when you search for the same exact set of keywords, or whether it affects the any searches using any of the terms in the search that matched the particular page. Of course, either does a different thing than a bookmark, though they are something similar to the many web-based bookmark systems.
What's particularly odd is that the direct link works, but there is no link to this experiment on Google's main experimental search features page, so it doesn't seem to be possible to activate the feature.
Back on topic: Why not allow a "standard search" or "community-moderated search" toggle switch?
Google has a form of community-moderated (or perhaps -enhanced) search in the form of Google Co-op Topics. Its not so much a toggle switch as optional drill-down categories, though.
The article is saying that consistently telling a child that they are 'smart' will lead them to be stupid.
Well, no, its saying that equating good performance with "smart" and bad performance with "stupid", whether it is attributing success to "smart" or failure to "stupid" (which is, accurately or not, perceived to be innate) will lead a child to perform more poorly than they would if their success or failure was credited by parents, etc., to good or bad effort (which is, accurately, perceived to be a choice.)
You are conflating performance with intelligence which is exactly the problem the article highlights.
So all the talk about increased scores and grades is just innuendo?
Grades and scores (other than scores specifically on intelligence tests) are measures of performance. While intelligence is one factor in performance, there are others (e.g., motivation and effort) that are important.
A central point of the article is that conflating intelligence with performance leads to poor performance, so it misses the point badly to conflate intelligence with performance in trying to interpret the article.
1) Intelligence is not a fixed, immutable property. 2) People who believe it IS fixed and immutable tend to avoid intellectual challenges. 3) People who avoid intellectual challenges learn less, and more slowly than people who seek them out.
#1 is subtly incorrect. The point of the article is not the intelligence, per se, is, in fact, mutable (there is considerable evidence that it is sensitive to environmental factors that inhibit full performance, but that's not the subject of the article.) Rather, its that performance is mutable, and that the combination of the belief that intelligence is immutable with the belief that poor performance is a result of poor intelligence (leading to the conclusion that poor performance cannot be corrected) leads to the lack of motivation and failure to perform well, whereas instilling the belief that poor performance is a result of insufficient effort rather than intelligence producs greater motivation and performance.
Or, more briefly, that focussing attention on the factors that are changeable that contribute to poor performance rather than the ones that are not changeable makes people more likely to improve their performance rather than give up.
yet the American educational system ignores the so-called "gifted", or just piles on more homework instead of making things challenging.
There is no "American educational system" worth talking about, certainly not one about which generalizations like this are useful. There are many state, federal district, and territorial educational systems run under different sets of policies and practices, each of which is further broken down into smaller districts that have their own policies and practices, and how gifted children are treated varies from school district (and even school) to school, and even teacher to teacher.
Certainly, there are programs within school systems in the US that provide more challenging material, more independence, and higher performance expectations (not just greater quantities of material) to gifted children. There are, no doubt, places within American schools systems that fail to do this. But certainly it is not the case that that failure is universal.
Would this not fall under the category of "works created for public use"?
If its not a government work or one that has fallen out of copyright by action of time, the only way it is public domain is if the copyright holder has explicitly dedicated it to the public domain (that's what makes it "created for public use"). At least for works created relatively recently.
The context and absence of notice might allow an infringer to claim "innocent infringement" in mitigation of damages, but doesn't provide a license to infringe.
IIRC, the lack of copyright notice means that the first move of the copyright owner can not be to sue you, they must first notify you of the violation and give you a chance to fix it.
This is incorrect. The lack of copyright registration prevents most suits, but the registration must only be filed before suing, not before the infringement occurs. The presence of the notice is an bar to most defenses of innocent infringement to mitigate damages, but the absence of the notice has no bearing on whether or not the copyright holder can sue. This has been the law in effect since March 1, 1989. (see 17 USC Sec. 401 and Pub.L. 100-568.)
So the worst case is that the copyright owner makes your company change the code at some point in the future.
No, the worst that could happen is that the company and particular employees are found guilty both of criminal (as any willful infringement for commercial gain is criminal, see 17 USC Sec. 506) and civil copyright infringement, fined, ordered to pay damages, forced to turn over and have destroyed all copies of the infringing program, and specific people involved imprisoned.
If you put the recommended comment in, your company will know (i) its not your fault and (ii) you were heads-up enough to look into the issue a little further when you noticed it.
Or they'll know you were aware of a situation that exposed the company to risk, and failed to notify the appropriate people to make a decision about managing that risk.
If you don't make a fuss, the only person that could get in potential trouble if it turned out to be rotten would be the guy who wrote it.
Actually, the company could be in potential trouble, and depending how critical the code is (and whether the one example is an isolated case or part of a pervasive trend), everyone who depends on the company for their livelihood could be negatively impacted.
Even the comments were the same. It's obvious that a developer at our company found some useful code on the web and copied it. The original author didn't attach any particular license to the code. It's just 200 lines of code the author posted in a forum. Is it legitimate to use source code that's publicly available but doesn't fall under any particular license?
If it is not specifically dedicated to the public domain, or licensed to you, then its just a copyright-protected work for which you have no specific permissions, and to which you have no rights to copy, make derivative works of, etc., other than whatever minimal rights are available under fair use and other generally-applicable exceptions to the exclusive rights of copyright.
Should he lose his right to practice his profession?
Practicing law is not a right. It is a privilege, one that includes several subsidiary public privileges, and which is contingent upon ethical behavior. And gratuitously and without just cause accusing other members of the profession of distributing pornography to children, among the other things Thompson is charged with, is clearly far out of the bounds of the ethical requirements that go with that privilege.
Anyhow, he'll no doubt get a job as a public spokesman for the same causes he's always championed, which seems to be as much of his "profession" now as the actual practice of law. There's no ethical requirement for being a public propagandist, so he'll have no problem there.
Actually it is "the" means to the goal for the OLPC group, not "a" means to the goal.
Actually, its one of many means pursued by the OLPC project, though its an essential prerequisite to the others.
Your original post replied to somebody else who asked why Negreponte would be angry if other laptops than his made it into childrens hands. The answer is, he wouldn't be angry if that were the result
I suspect he would if those laptops did not support the educational mission of the OLPC project. Its conceivable that that mission could be advanced as well by some other hypothetical laptop other than the XO -- particularly if it had a similar array of ancillary support (classroom servers, mission-oriented software stack, the satellite uplinks available from and satellite time donated exclusively to support the OLPC project, etc.) to that of the OLPC project. OTOH, its also quite arguable that no actual alternative project exists which provides these things.
he has said numerous times that he would consider the project a success if that happened.
He has said numerous times that he would consider the project a success if the educational mission was met using different hardware, which is not the same thing as simply different hardware getting into the hands of students.
Your response inferred otherwise, but it wasn't clear what your point was
You say that the point wasn't clear, but yet you correctly inferred it. Are you saying everyone else here is less intelligent than you are?
"Intellectual property" is a fiction in the US, as the Constitution makes plain. You have a "limited time monopoly", not "ownership".
A life estate (or an estate for a term of years) is both a "limited time monopoly" and "ownership". Likewise, a many kinds of stock options have a limited lifespan but are owned. A copyright is no different, and no less owned.
The thing "owned" is not the work, but specific rights relating to the work. But that's all ownership ever relates to; a specific set of rights relating to something. Ownership is a social convention, not a natural relationship between a person and a physical object.
Intellectual property is no more -- and no less -- a fiction than every other kind of real, tangible personal, and intangible personal property.
Slashdot Mirror
Since Slim controls Telmex, Telcel, and America Movil, and since telecoms tend to have big IT needs, maybe he's creating new workers.
Or, maybe, given his history of philanthropy (including offers to match donations to certain charities in Mexico dollar for dollar without limit in 2006), his interest aren't as narrowly selfish.
Carlos Slim is not Mexico, in much the same way as Bill Gates is not the United States.
There is no more requirement to fetch the DTD now than there would be if the declaration were simplified. If there is any problem at all, it would be that introductory tutorial material available implies that such a requirement exists, but even that doesn't seem to be true from any of the introductory HTML, web development, etc., material that I've seen.
What you suggest doesn't make it any easier to write to standards, except perhaps in that it reduces the number of characters that you type in a standards-compliant HTML document by a few.
Yeah, it should. Many food items should be prepared at a higher temperature than they should be served at; a number even involve boiling at some point in the preparation process. That doesn't mean they should be served boiling.
Browsers are allowed to do that. There is no requirement that user agents use the system identifier (URI) at all to locate a DTD, and there is no requirement that if they use the URI, they treat it as anything other than an identifier. They can use either the public or system identifier, and use any system mapping that to a particular archive of specifications that they want. Clearly, using the URI as a URL (which it is) and fetching the DTD from the specified location is one way browsers can get the referenced specification, but its not the only way they can.
How is it "cleaner"? Both the public identifiers and the URIs for DOCTYPES are simply identifiers. They allow the user agent to do whatever it wants to find the associated specification. They also allow the user agent to not try to remember where they are, and instead be told the location specifically. Nothing that versions support is not supported by the existing DOCTYPE declaration.
Yes.
Well, neither would I, but then again, people that want total control in the hands of a graphic designer usually seem to want something like that. OTOH, XSL:FO was designed to handle use cases where you have multiple pages (as would be the case for paged media, either print or slideshow) or where a document is laid out on a single page whose size is known only to the renderer (as would be typical in a web browser). Quoting from part of the XSL 1.1 spec discussing pages in FOs:
Its just that its apparently a lot more work to implement than CSS, and so its mostly only been implemented in print (or at least print-like, e.g., PDF generation) applications, rather than browsers, where (the complaints registered here, aside), CSS does well-enough for most uses. Early on, there were some proof-of-concept limited-functionality XSL:FO browsers, but FO support hasn't (yet, at least) made it into mainstream browsers, and AFAICT those early efforts were all abandoned.
No, there shouldn't.
Now, if you want to say it should be possible to replace, on a per-page basis, all the defaults, sure, there should. IIRC, there is, but I don't do a whole lot of work with CSS, and when I do, I'm not usually interested in nuking the users defaults, so its not something I particularly am concerned about and I could be mistaken.
But there is no good reason at all for a capability to nuke any user-agent default that you aren't explicitly providing a new value for.
You aren't forced to use PHP or SQL in a web app, those are choices. They may have compelling reasons behind them in any particular web app, but certainly the fact that something is going to be a web app doesn't, in and of itself, mean it requires either (you could use Erlang with the Erlang Yaws webserver and Mnesia database, instead of PHP+Web server+SQL db, for instance, and reduce the number of different technologies and languages.) HTML is only forced in that a distributed application that doesn't use HTML (or maybe XML+CSS) over HTTP isn't, pretty much by definition, a "web" app, though there are certainly tons of other choices for a distributed application. Same thing with client-side JavaScript, essentially.
Both the CLR and the JVM exist already, so its not a matter of creating a VM. Getting people to use them, and to choose one, are the issues.
Building a Postscript interpreter for either shouldn't be a particular problem (ISTR seeing them for Java). Of course, there are existing other distributed application frameworks that include layout, db interaction, etc., all under one hood without using HTML+JavaScript on the client end (REBOL is built for this as a primary use, and there are distribution frameworks for lots of languages that also have layout engines available.) Even with them, many people still prefer to use SQL-based RDBMSs for backend storage, though native storage is sometimes used.
Um, why?
CSS is useful if you want hypertext with a designer-controlled basic appearance that is still useful to people with special needs and preferences. If you want precise layout over which the designer has complete control, what you want isn't hypertext rendered in a way dependent on the user-agent, the users fonts, etc. What you want is something like PDF or a graphics file format.
OTOH, XSL:FO already exists and has more power than CSS; support of that in browsers would provide considerably more control than CSS allows. And there's no reason that browsers couldn't support XHTML+CSS as well as XML (including, but not limited to, XHTML) transformed into XSL:FO through XSLT. In any case, there is no reason to "junk" CSS.
Of course if you use XSLT and a "real layout language", XSL:FO or otherwise, there's not a whole lot of reason to use XHTML as the base language for most content, since if you are using XSLT, you can start with whatever flavor of XML is most appropriate to your particular content. (X)HTML+CSS is mostly useful for piggybacking on the user agents default presentation with selected variations. People may be "forced" to do ground-up design in it because they face constraints which prevent using formats like that provide better layout-consistency guarantees or they want to avoid external dependencies beyond the browser, and because few browsers support anything besides CSS, but if you have something more than CSS available in the browser, there isn't a whole lot of reason to use (X)HTML in the first place most of the time.
The US Federal Courts will, I'm sure, be immensely sympathetic to the argument that they have no jurisdiction over Shentech, Inc. of 1513 132nd St., Flushing, NY 11356.
Do you?
I've used various combined email/scheduling systems in different jobs over the years, and not once used anything more advanced than the e-mail portion with people outside of the organization. Yes, most systems support this, but I don't think use of it is so widespread that a truly innovative system that was far superior within the organization would be entirely without a market simply because it didn't automatically interface with users outside of the organization.
(And, of course, there is no reason a system that provides innovative internal features can't also support fallback to dull, boring, common formats and functionality for interfacing with external clients using more primitive software.)
Only if you are trying to influence other people who search while they are logged into your Google Account.
The easiest way to do that would seem to be with a Google Customized Search Engine.
Well, no, its saying that equating good performance with "smart" and bad performance with "stupid", whether it is attributing success to "smart" or failure to "stupid" (which is, accurately or not, perceived to be innate) will lead a child to perform more poorly than they would if their success or failure was credited by parents, etc., to good or bad effort (which is, accurately, perceived to be a choice.)
You are conflating performance with intelligence which is exactly the problem the article highlights.
Grades and scores (other than scores specifically on intelligence tests) are measures of performance. While intelligence is one factor in performance, there are others (e.g., motivation and effort) that are important.
A central point of the article is that conflating intelligence with performance leads to poor performance, so it misses the point badly to conflate intelligence with performance in trying to interpret the article.
#1 is subtly incorrect. The point of the article is not the intelligence, per se, is, in fact, mutable (there is considerable evidence that it is sensitive to environmental factors that inhibit full performance, but that's not the subject of the article.) Rather, its that performance is mutable, and that the combination of the belief that intelligence is immutable with the belief that poor performance is a result of poor intelligence (leading to the conclusion that poor performance cannot be corrected) leads to the lack of motivation and failure to perform well, whereas instilling the belief that poor performance is a result of insufficient effort rather than intelligence producs greater motivation and performance.
Or, more briefly, that focussing attention on the factors that are changeable that contribute to poor performance rather than the ones that are not changeable makes people more likely to improve their performance rather than give up.
There is no "American educational system" worth talking about, certainly not one about which generalizations like this are useful. There are many state, federal district, and territorial educational systems run under different sets of policies and practices, each of which is further broken down into smaller districts that have their own policies and practices, and how gifted children are treated varies from school district (and even school) to school, and even teacher to teacher.
Certainly, there are programs within school systems in the US that provide more challenging material, more independence, and higher performance expectations (not just greater quantities of material) to gifted children. There are, no doubt, places within American schools systems that fail to do this. But certainly it is not the case that that failure is universal.
If its not a government work or one that has fallen out of copyright by action of time, the only way it is public domain is if the copyright holder has explicitly dedicated it to the public domain (that's what makes it "created for public use"). At least for works created relatively recently.
The context and absence of notice might allow an infringer to claim "innocent infringement" in mitigation of damages, but doesn't provide a license to infringe.
This is incorrect. The lack of copyright registration prevents most suits, but the registration must only be filed before suing, not before the infringement occurs. The presence of the notice is an bar to most defenses of innocent infringement to mitigate damages, but the absence of the notice has no bearing on whether or not the copyright holder can sue. This has been the law in effect since March 1, 1989. (see 17 USC Sec. 401 and Pub.L. 100-568.)
No, the worst that could happen is that the company and particular employees are found guilty both of criminal (as any willful infringement for commercial gain is criminal, see 17 USC Sec. 506) and civil copyright infringement, fined, ordered to pay damages, forced to turn over and have destroyed all copies of the infringing program, and specific people involved imprisoned.
Or they'll know you were aware of a situation that exposed the company to risk, and failed to notify the appropriate people to make a decision about managing that risk.
Actually, the company could be in potential trouble, and depending how critical the code is (and whether the one example is an isolated case or part of a pervasive trend), everyone who depends on the company for their livelihood could be negatively impacted.
If it is not specifically dedicated to the public domain, or licensed to you, then its just a copyright-protected work for which you have no specific permissions, and to which you have no rights to copy, make derivative works of, etc., other than whatever minimal rights are available under fair use and other generally-applicable exceptions to the exclusive rights of copyright.
Practicing law is not a right. It is a privilege, one that includes several subsidiary public privileges, and which is contingent upon ethical behavior. And gratuitously and without just cause accusing other members of the profession of distributing pornography to children, among the other things Thompson is charged with, is clearly far out of the bounds of the ethical requirements that go with that privilege.
Anyhow, he'll no doubt get a job as a public spokesman for the same causes he's always championed, which seems to be as much of his "profession" now as the actual practice of law. There's no ethical requirement for being a public propagandist, so he'll have no problem there.
Actually, its one of many means pursued by the OLPC project, though its an essential prerequisite to the others.
I suspect he would if those laptops did not support the educational mission of the OLPC project. Its conceivable that that mission could be advanced as well by some other hypothetical laptop other than the XO -- particularly if it had a similar array of ancillary support (classroom servers, mission-oriented software stack, the satellite uplinks available from and satellite time donated exclusively to support the OLPC project, etc.) to that of the OLPC project. OTOH, its also quite arguable that no actual alternative project exists which provides these things.
He has said numerous times that he would consider the project a success if the educational mission was met using different hardware, which is not the same thing as simply different hardware getting into the hands of students.
You say that the point wasn't clear, but yet you correctly inferred it. Are you saying everyone else here is less intelligent than you are?
A life estate (or an estate for a term of years) is both a "limited time monopoly" and "ownership". Likewise, a many kinds of stock options have a limited lifespan but are owned. A copyright is no different, and no less owned.
The thing "owned" is not the work, but specific rights relating to the work. But that's all ownership ever relates to; a specific set of rights relating to something. Ownership is a social convention, not a natural relationship between a person and a physical object.
Intellectual property is no more -- and no less -- a fiction than every other kind of real, tangible personal, and intangible personal property.