Keith Watson keith.watson@kewill.com wrote:
Hmm.. don't we pay for general education via our taxes?
If this were a normal tax, paid for the general good of the country, it would fund all the materials for education, wouldn't it? Or are we just using taxes to redistribute intellectual property?
However, you can rightly argue that what we pay for is just the infrastructure (buildings, personnel, books, etc.) not the actual ideas.
What do you pay the contact teaching personnel for, if not ideas? Just to be minions policing the process?
Mind you, another thought, aren't the ideas taught in the public domain anyway?
Are they? The syllabus has a copyright on it, as do all the books that are used for teaching, as far as I've seen. No patents, but you can't patent maths here yet. If ideas are property, is public property any less property?
And that's the last I'll say as this is completely off topic for this list.
Yes, computing and discussion of ideas should be kept far apart ;-)
Any more follow up by email off-list...