Instead of just complaining, why don't these guys review the machines as-delivered, with the bloatware in place? That would give the potential consumer an idea of what there up against.
The real point isn't piracy, it's that the band and the record company lost the sale! They had a customer ready to give them money and they failed to get it. At that point whether he pirated it or did without is irrelevant. Talking about piracy just made it more dramatic.
You should re-read the article. Caplan didn't say knowing how to play the piano is worthless, he said "Unless you love music from the bottom of your heart, a career in music is folly." Chua wasn't just encouraging her daughters to practice an hour a day, she was emotionally abusing them in order to force them to put in the huge amount of work necessary to become a professional musician.
A longer treatment of these issues that's still relevant today is "A Note on Distributed Computing" by Ann Wollrath, Geoff Wyant, Jim Waldo and Samuel C. Kendall:
http://labs.oracle.com/techrep/1994/abstract-29.html
They also have substantially fewer carbs--which is Taubes' point. By reducing your caloric intake you also reduced your carbohydrate intake, and so you don't know which was responsible for your weight loss.
I wrote (in assembler) a terminal-based football simulation based on what I remembered of a program I had played on an ASR-33 terminal during a tour of Bell Labs with a friend's father a year or two before. I was 15 or so.
Of course, most users have never even heard of VPNs. Does anyone offer easy-to-use VPN services to end users? If not, is that a potential business opportunity? (Not that I have a clue on how to make money at it. I can't imagine getting users to pay.)
Isn't part of the problem that the current wifi encryption standards require client authentication in order to get encryption, but don't normally provide any authentication of the AP. In other words, in order to get a WPA2 encrypted connection I have to provide at least a passphrase (which is a barrier in a public setting), yet I have no assurance that I'm connected to a trusted access point, as opposed to a rogue AP.
Maybe what's needed is something more like HTTPS, where by default the client doesn't need to authenticate, but the certificate provides some assurance that you're connected to the correct site.
Are you saying the original open source Sipdroid (http://code.google.com/p/sipdroid/) is adware? If so, why don't you remove the ad code and publish a clean version? You can, it's open source.
Or are you talking about the many clones that re-sell it in the Market--which they can do because it's open source?
Because the JCP process that Sun agreed to says they are obligated to. Obviously they can renege, but Apache is pointing out that if they do, the JCP is a sham, in which Apache will refuse to participate.
Saying that the solution is for server admins to do something misses the point. Even if you're right, as a user I have no way to get a random server's config changed. Therefore I want the option to configure my client so that I don't run into the issue.
Brave New Work doesn't assume genetic determinism at all. All the manipulations to produce the different castes are environmental, either prenatal (exposing the fetus to radiation, chemicals, etc.) or as the result of behavioral conditioning.
The question about Diaspora is about their requiring assignment of the copyright. That is, the project requires contributors to give away their ownership of what they wrote, so that the project owns it and can re-license at will.
In practice, they are, unless they can pick up and leave, taking their assets with them. (Any Greeks thinking about doing this, I suggest you do it soon.) It may not be fair, but the last paragraph of the article lays out the choices pretty well. They're all bad, and the people of Greece will feel the pain either way.
I think his theory of an implicit patent grant by virtue of GPL2 licensing sounds like a stretch and would need to be tested in court. If the FSF thought it were true there would have been no need for GPL3.
Sun/Oracle's Java implementation was released under the GPLv2, which doesn't include a patent license. I don't know if they included any patent license with the open source release. Even if they did, it doesn't help Google, because Android doesn't use the Sun/Oracle code, so it wouldn't benefit from any patent license that goes with it. Android is based on the Apache Harmony libraries on top of Google's own Dalvik VM. (Most of the Android code is Apache-licensed.) That code was all developed independent of Sun's Java and the implementation might infringe their patents, even though it doesn't use their code.
The last third of the linked page is devoted to giving credit to work that they built upon, including MIT's Open Blocks, Scratch and Logo, as well as GNU Kawa.
Bret wrote: "I think it was bad for us to stray from Internet standards and conventions by having an robots.txt that was open and a separate agreement with additional restrictions."
You don't have an "agreement" at all. An agreement requires that two parties actually, um, agree. You've published a statement where you assert certain rights and imply that you will sue anyone who accesses data on your site in a way you don't like. You may get away with that, regardless of the legal merits of your position, because you have more money for lawyers than most people you're likely to sue. But don't try to dignify what you're doing by calling it an "agreement". It's like an extortionist telling me that we have an agreement that he won't break my windows if I pay him protection money.
If we don't invest enough why are per pupil expenditures highest in poor quality urban districts? Perhaps the "investment" isn't being well-spent--which I believe is Philip's real point in the OP.