178 karma · joined June 16, 2022
Corporations aren't the only ones making movies, btw. And the whole "but my rights" talk when it's about a person who could've just taken a different street makes me laugh, nothing else. Is that really how you think about your day to day life, or is it just a post-facto rationalization?
Why not instead be considerate and respectful for others' work by not ruining it? Road workers don't always have perfect boundaries and yet I hope you don't just go step into their paint while reciting your constitutional rights. This is the same thing without the paint.
You said it yourself... How would you analyze the data if it's encrypted?
Individual schools in Portugal (as well as where I live, and in the US) are buying books on the market, and the books are competing on it - just writing a textbook doesn't guarantee any school will buy it, it's a risk - and that's great because it means the writers have to make good books and there's a lot of choice and many different styles and price levels.
That's very different from "textbooks paid for by public money" as if the state funded its creation and thus owned the copyright while de-risking it for the authors - meaning paid their salary. EU occasionally provides funding to authors and they're explicit about the writers owning their copyright, because the point is to support their independence. So suggesting moving a work into public domain just because a public school bought it is... weird. Why books and not other education equipment, e.g. chemistry/physics/electronics sets? What about educational software?
Imagine a school bought a book you wrote about programming/whatever you do (the school where I went did that a lot with many different books from small-time authors that were used as textbooks during lessons), should it suddenly become public domain just because some of the money someone spent on it came from taxes? I think that's very broken.
Public schools aren't the only ones buying textbooks anyways. There's a very healthy market of private schools, and I know of textbooks catered specifically to them, some of them even funded by them, that are then also bought by public schools. There's also homeschooling, alternative non-public non-profit schools, etc. Sometimes people buy textbooks by themselves, e.g. adults who want to (re-)learn, parents who think the books provided by school are inadequate, children who destroyed the copy they received at school...
That textbooks are "paid for by public money" is reductio ad absurdum. The system is much more complex. However, I think that the state/EU (or US) should also fund textbooks and put them into the public domain, as long as using them isn't mandatory - that's a great idea and it never hurts to have one more option.
That's because it's a lucrative market you can take with much less negotiation than individual small companies. Every company does that, only few are dealing with the government on the level of Microsoft/Google though.
> I had to buy a nspire calculator for example, since teachers received commissions for the damn things (while in obligatory school).
That sucks, but this is about schools buying Gmail for students' school managed inboxes on the school domain, not about students being forced to use Gmail. This is just like internal company email for example. Students still have their own personal inboxes at whatever service they please.
> The sheer market manipulation these companies do is obscene, there really isn't competition
If there isn't competition, then it's not market manipulation, it's just that they're the only market.
> and our kids aren't offered the high quality and respectful services they deserve
Gmail (and Outlook365) is the highest quality service currently on the market, and since the school is paying for the inbox, Google is not reading the data for ads. You can go for smaller companies with worse offers and much less software included in the subscribtion... But I don't think that's going to be a benefit to the students.
> Thing cost my parents 200 bucks, and the only thing it was used for, was rendering some fancy parabolas.
Again, that sucks, but this is not about parents paying Gmail.
Pupils' personal email inbox is their own stuff and completely out of the question. We're talking about school-managed inboxes with addresses ending with the school's domain.
You can't rely on students having their own inboxes anyways. They will claim they forgot the password, it doesn't work, they are not getting teacher's messages, etc etc. You need a place where you can deliver critical information and be sure it arrived, and have a way of proving it was/wasn't read, a way of restoring lost access (without losing the messages), a way of proving that access is possible and happened, a way of recovering deleted messages...
> Schools classically self hosted their network services
Back when encryption wasn't even needed, hackers were a curiosity and deliverability wasn't a concern. This is never coming back. School is a very important part of people's lives (parents, children, teachers, other staff), deliverability and security must be perfect.
Schools also manage loads of very private data. As a parent, I don't want the school admin to touch it with a 10-meter pole, I want them to use a managed service that they can't screw up even if they tried very hard (and sometimes school admins look at data themselves - the less opportunity they have the better).
> It is a good opportunity to mentor future sysadmins too.
The point is to have working email that everyone can rely on, not to groom kids/teachers to become sysadmins. It's better for everyone if the school admin focuses on solving things no one else can solve (e.g. handing out the free computers and installing Linux on them) rather than wasting time tinkering with email hosting for public money.
I don't think banning private jets solves the problem - there's much bigger fish to fry, orders of magnitude (container shipping). This is like trying to move an ocean with a bucket.
Anyways, I think the idea of private jets being replaced by luxury airliners is good, I just don't think this sort of rule ("ban private jets") is going to work well and result in a better world.
For example, it's notoriously hard to separate business and personal jet usage - the common scheme is having an Air Operator company manage your jet (provide maintenance, airport operations, crew, supply, etc) and provide it to other clients of the Air Operator when you're not using it. You're the nominal owner of the jet, but it's leased to the Air Operator and you have a contract that specifies how much usage of your jet is free. Thus every flight is a business flight - because the Air Operator is using it for the business of transporting people, sometimes the owner.
Regulators have given up and just treat business and personal usage the same (from owner perspective, there are differences in pilot licensing and crew/ops requirements).
> spray paint
Sure, but the point here is to not lose the records too, which someone could trivially change if they own the Postgres DB. When I have a shared record of a container and somebody repaints its SN, at least I know I lost it, and I can also easily claim that I did not forge the records too because they signed the record with their wallet.
BTW this isn't even about any lawyers and EULAs, there's simply no legal way how a company like Tesla or Mercedes could take responsibility for a crash, so IMHO Tesla is at least nice enough to spell it out, unlike Mercedes.