Okay, so they were selling and profiting off of someone else's IP
Since I assume you are spreading the "intellectual property" lie and not talking about the Internet Protocol, allow me to say this: there is no such thing as intellectual property. Copyrights, patents, trademarks, and trade secrets are not even in the same category of law as property rights. Property rights do not expire the way copyrights and patents do. You do not have to actively defend your property to retain your property rights, the way you do with trademarks. Copyrights, patents, trademarks and trade secrets are not terribly similar to each other.
So let's start calling this what it is: selling at a profit movies that someone else holds a copyright on, without the permission of the copyright holder. Sorry if that description lacks the shock value that yours did, but at least it is honest.
I doubt that more than 5% of the American even knows what BitTorrent is, let alone TPB. Most people will never even know this action by ICE took place.
Since both my alma mater and my current institution have migrated to Google, and both are covered by FERPA and other privacy laws, I am inclined to say that that argument is bogus. However, I have a separate issue with outsourcing student email: third parties get to set the rules for student conduct without any action by the university itself.
Typically universities have acceptable computer policies and at those institutions that run their own mail servers, such policies usually govern email. Students and faculty can demand changes to university policy if the policy does not properly align with the academic mission of the institution. Students and faculty have essentially no power over the terms of use that Google or Microsoft or any other third party email service imposes on them. It is easy to say, "Well, it is not like Google is going to demand something outrageous!" but there is really nothing preventing Google from doing so (if you do not think they have done so already). Google does not have the best interests of academia in mind when it sets its policies, nor is there any reason for Google to care about academic needs.
Indeed, that is exactly what happened at my alma mater. First they blamed the Squirrelmail front end, then they bought a black box solution from Mirapoint, and when the Mirapoint solution proved too expensive they just went with Google.
What crack have you been smoking? Here, from the GPLv3:
You may convey verbatim copies of the Program's source code as you receive it, in any medium...
Additionally, the license allows non-verbatim copies to be redistributed, under specific and easy to meet conditions that are intended to prevent the sort of underhanded tricks that companies like TiVO try to pull. There are some licenses, like that BSD license, that are even more permissive.
So instead of being an anti-free-software troll, why not go ahead and read the licenses, or at least cite the specific licenses that you were referring to?
Legally, there is nothing they can do -- they are prohibited from using their devices in the manner they wish to use them. If people are willing to break the law, then they can go ahead and do so, but a future where people are all criminals just because they are trying to run free software is a pretty dark future.
I do not think that privacy is the chief concern when it comes to personal devices on school networks. More likely there is a support contract getting in the way; my high school (in NYC) had a bunch of desktops that could not be connected to the school's network because of a support contract stipulation. Internal emails are probably easy to forward or otherwise export from the schools' computers, and the security is probably very poor (when I was in school, the only think separating the teachers' network from the students' was the IP address assigned to the computer -- and anyone could manually set the IP address, which is how we defeated the censorship firewall).
I'm guessing that something's missing from the story here...
They were probably near capacity before the tablets were deployed. NYC has a lot of schools and a lot of teachers and administrators checking their email. The fact that tablets are involved is secondary; if 2000 additional desktops had been deployed, the systems would probably have been overwhelmed as well. My guess is that the email system was deployed years ago, possibly by a consulting firm that is now out of business, and that some poor IT guy has been trying to keep everything together on a shoestring budget all this time. The tablet deployment probably occurred without anyone actually consulting the IT staff to see if the system could handle the extra load, and probably by the same group of decision makers who ignored IT's requests for additional servers prior to the deployment.
Get ready for followup headlines a few months or years from now:
NYC drops $600 million on new email system
Consulting firm under investigation for defrauding NYC public school system in email debacle
Should public schools have email systems?
This is a pretty standard situation in New York City: lots and lots of money is spent, with poor planning, sweetheart deals with incompetent firms, and then a bunch of fallout.
Most think they could have done their job better and the organization could be more successful if it was more about transparency and whistleblowing and less about Assange and satisfying his ego.
How is it about Assange satisfying his ego? Those allegations only seemed to arise after Wikileaks began to piss off the US government. Around the same time Assange was falsely accused of rape. Around the same time anyone with any connection to Wikileaks was being detained at the US border.
Funny how before the US government leaks, everyone thought Wikileaks was about transparency, and then afterwards everyone suddenly began talking about Assange and his ego.
Nothing weird about that. When governments are working for the benefit of the top 1%, it is natural for them to be more afraid of the 99% of their citizens who are getting the short end of the stick. It is a perverse version of "governments should fear their people."
I never understood why so many people believe this.
Perhaps you lack points of comparison? Perhaps you just have different preferences? Perhaps you use some super-awesome brand of condoms (if so, I am going to demand that you tell me which)?
For me, wearing a condom during sex is like putting seran wrap on my tongue while I am eating.
why would you want to produce a boatload of HIV antibodies after your years of promiscuous sexual activity are over?
Older people have sex too, and they are not strictly monogamous. HIV infections can also be dormant for long periods time, so a person who was promiscuous 10 years ago may find themselves presenting symptoms of HIV infection.
Unfortunately, the best ways to prevent HIV infection are not within the realm of what can reasonably be expected. People tend to have sex, to not be monogamous, and prefer not to discuss previous sexual partners. Condoms are highly effective but not perfect, and condoms substantially reduce the pleasure men feel while having sex (and I even know some women who do not like the feeling of a condom).
The reality is that a vaccine or cure for HIV is needed in order for the disease to be eradicated. There is no other way to solve this problem. You will never be able to convince millions (let alone billions) people to be monogamous and to wait until marriage.
Why would it be too good to be true? We now have decades of research on HIV, large amounts of funding for HIV research, and a very real and widely accepted public need. At one time, people would have said that the current treatments for HIV infection sounded too good to be true as well.
Yeah, because work done from my house is something I should not be compensated for. Obviously it is the fault of those evil unions that want people to be paid when they are woken up in the middle of the night to fix computers.
Sure, if there were nobody willing to work late hours at no pay. Except that those people do exist, they curry favor with management, and when budgets are tight it is people with your sentiments and convictions that are laid off.
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Okay, so they were selling and profiting off of someone else's IP
Since I assume you are spreading the "intellectual property" lie and not talking about the Internet Protocol, allow me to say this: there is no such thing as intellectual property. Copyrights, patents, trademarks, and trade secrets are not even in the same category of law as property rights. Property rights do not expire the way copyrights and patents do. You do not have to actively defend your property to retain your property rights, the way you do with trademarks. Copyrights, patents, trademarks and trade secrets are not terribly similar to each other.
So let's start calling this what it is: selling at a profit movies that someone else holds a copyright on, without the permission of the copyright holder. Sorry if that description lacks the shock value that yours did, but at least it is honest.
I doubt that more than 5% of the American even knows what BitTorrent is, let alone TPB. Most people will never even know this action by ICE took place.
They were profiting off of the work of other people
Hm...profiting off the work of other people is a bad thing...I think I see where you are going with this:
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/index.htm
Since both my alma mater and my current institution have migrated to Google, and both are covered by FERPA and other privacy laws, I am inclined to say that that argument is bogus. However, I have a separate issue with outsourcing student email: third parties get to set the rules for student conduct without any action by the university itself.
Typically universities have acceptable computer policies and at those institutions that run their own mail servers, such policies usually govern email. Students and faculty can demand changes to university policy if the policy does not properly align with the academic mission of the institution. Students and faculty have essentially no power over the terms of use that Google or Microsoft or any other third party email service imposes on them. It is easy to say, "Well, it is not like Google is going to demand something outrageous!" but there is really nothing preventing Google from doing so (if you do not think they have done so already). Google does not have the best interests of academia in mind when it sets its policies, nor is there any reason for Google to care about academic needs.
facebook also gives me an email address
When did this start happening? Does it actually interoperate with other email services?
Indeed, that is exactly what happened at my alma mater. First they blamed the Squirrelmail front end, then they bought a black box solution from Mirapoint, and when the Mirapoint solution proved too expensive they just went with Google.
You may convey verbatim copies of the Program's source code as you receive it, in any medium...
Additionally, the license allows non-verbatim copies to be redistributed, under specific and easy to meet conditions that are intended to prevent the sort of underhanded tricks that companies like TiVO try to pull. There are some licenses, like that BSD license, that are even more permissive.
So instead of being an anti-free-software troll, why not go ahead and read the licenses, or at least cite the specific licenses that you were referring to?
Legally, there is nothing they can do -- they are prohibited from using their devices in the manner they wish to use them. If people are willing to break the law, then they can go ahead and do so, but a future where people are all criminals just because they are trying to run free software is a pretty dark future.
I do not think that privacy is the chief concern when it comes to personal devices on school networks. More likely there is a support contract getting in the way; my high school (in NYC) had a bunch of desktops that could not be connected to the school's network because of a support contract stipulation. Internal emails are probably easy to forward or otherwise export from the schools' computers, and the security is probably very poor (when I was in school, the only think separating the teachers' network from the students' was the IP address assigned to the computer -- and anyone could manually set the IP address, which is how we defeated the censorship firewall).
I'm guessing that something's missing from the story here...
They were probably near capacity before the tablets were deployed. NYC has a lot of schools and a lot of teachers and administrators checking their email. The fact that tablets are involved is secondary; if 2000 additional desktops had been deployed, the systems would probably have been overwhelmed as well. My guess is that the email system was deployed years ago, possibly by a consulting firm that is now out of business, and that some poor IT guy has been trying to keep everything together on a shoestring budget all this time. The tablet deployment probably occurred without anyone actually consulting the IT staff to see if the system could handle the extra load, and probably by the same group of decision makers who ignored IT's requests for additional servers prior to the deployment.
This is a pretty standard situation in New York City: lots and lots of money is spent, with poor planning, sweetheart deals with incompetent firms, and then a bunch of fallout.
Most think they could have done their job better and the organization could be more successful if it was more about transparency and whistleblowing and less about Assange and satisfying his ego.
How is it about Assange satisfying his ego? Those allegations only seemed to arise after Wikileaks began to piss off the US government. Around the same time Assange was falsely accused of rape. Around the same time anyone with any connection to Wikileaks was being detained at the US border.
Funny how before the US government leaks, everyone thought Wikileaks was about transparency, and then afterwards everyone suddenly began talking about Assange and his ego.
Nothing weird about that. When governments are working for the benefit of the top 1%, it is natural for them to be more afraid of the 99% of their citizens who are getting the short end of the stick. It is a perverse version of "governments should fear their people."
Sounds something like...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaffing_and_winnowing
I never understood why so many people believe this.
Perhaps you lack points of comparison? Perhaps you just have different preferences? Perhaps you use some super-awesome brand of condoms (if so, I am going to demand that you tell me which)?
For me, wearing a condom during sex is like putting seran wrap on my tongue while I am eating.
People were downloading music long before Naptster...
why would you want to produce a boatload of HIV antibodies after your years of promiscuous sexual activity are over?
Older people have sex too, and they are not strictly monogamous. HIV infections can also be dormant for long periods time, so a person who was promiscuous 10 years ago may find themselves presenting symptoms of HIV infection.
Unfortunately, the best ways to prevent HIV infection are not within the realm of what can reasonably be expected. People tend to have sex, to not be monogamous, and prefer not to discuss previous sexual partners. Condoms are highly effective but not perfect, and condoms substantially reduce the pleasure men feel while having sex (and I even know some women who do not like the feeling of a condom).
The reality is that a vaccine or cure for HIV is needed in order for the disease to be eradicated. There is no other way to solve this problem. You will never be able to convince millions (let alone billions) people to be monogamous and to wait until marriage.
Why would it be too good to be true? We now have decades of research on HIV, large amounts of funding for HIV research, and a very real and widely accepted public need. At one time, people would have said that the current treatments for HIV infection sounded too good to be true as well.
This would not be the first time we developed a vaccine against a deadly disease.
Yeah, because work done from my house is something I should not be compensated for. Obviously it is the fault of those evil unions that want people to be paid when they are woken up in the middle of the night to fix computers.
Sure, if there were nobody willing to work late hours at no pay. Except that those people do exist, they curry favor with management, and when budgets are tight it is people with your sentiments and convictions that are laid off.
Welcome to the world of non-unionized labor.
I should apologize, I had not seen what you were replying to so I misunderstood your post.
Kids today with your 7-digit UIDs and your lack of education on the history of the FBI:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO