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Before you make any moves, you're going to first want to gather together your employment contracts and take them to a lawyer along with a description of what you want to do. Non-compete clauses are one concern, but some are not enforceable since they would prevent a person from earning a living. Even without a non-compete clause, you could be hit with a lawsuit based on the inevitable disclosure doctrine, where a company can argue that their trade secrets would inevitably be compromised by the new employment. Finally, there could be wording in the contract that says that anything developed while you work for them belongs to them. If that's a concern, you need to make sure that any serious work on the new project doesn't start until after you terminate the old. A lawyer can help you deal with these issues in such a way as to keep your new company from being shut down.

Once you know what your options are, you need to make a plan. Who is going to be available? What's your new target market? When will your product be available? When will it be profitable? And how are you going to live in the meantime? You're going to want answers to all those questions before you make any moves you can't take back.

Good luck.

While I share your respect for the Founders' vision, the system of copyright we have now is founded in British common law, and in fact harks back to 1662. Copyrights originally carried for 27 years, and currently go for over 100 years. Thomas Jefferson considered 14 years and he was reluctant about even that and was swayed (or more likely, conceded to get a more important concession) by James Madison. Patents originated further back in ancient Greece, around 500BC and originally carried for 1 year but now extend to up to 20 years. Both have been extended to include things not then invented that are far beyond the original scope.

Should every modern presentation of the dramatic arts credit the contribution of Aeschylus? Should each modern electronic inventor credit Julius Edgar Lilienfeld? Maybe. But should some portion of the profits go to them? Probably not. Each was standing on the shoulders of prior giants after all, as are we all, and neither (being dead) would benefit from the cash.

Innovation happens in a climate that encourages or requires it. Perhaps the defining characteristic of Men is that we take the inventions of others and improve them. Each inventor and creator owes a debt to the culture and climate that fostered him or her. That debt is fulfilled when their creation becomes the property of all in the commons from whence a new generation of creator draws from the well and adds their contribution, to profit from for a limited time but ultimately to become part of the common pool again.

The current climate encourages neither business nor innovation. This is a lawyer's paradise where they can make claims of infringements for forgotten claims decades - no, even a whole century - from a prior claim of invention and need prevail only one time in a dozen to reap ridiculous wealth. In the mean time their suits and The duration is being stretched beyond imagining, supported and extended by the wealth of those who support and exploit the inventions of others without inventing, creating, or building anything (NPE). The Crazy Years are truly upon us. I believe there was once a popular author whose histrionic vision included such a period that ended in "the year they hanged the lawyers".

Copyrights and patents have become monsters that must be slain.

Grandparent is actually correct: As you note, first sale applies. However, there is nothing stopping you from making some other agreement. In the case of movie rentals, the peculiar economics of movie production often makes this a preferable arrangement.

If you are a rental place, buying movies at retail makes it very expensive to build up a large collection, particularly obscure stuff that will take ages to recoup the initial investment, or the bursty demand for new, popular, releases. Instead, you can establish a revenue sharing agreement with the studio, who will furnish you with as many copies of a given title as you need at the cost of pressing, which is trivial, and then share the revenue from each rental.

http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/118972449/abstract?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0
http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=16851899
http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=258

That's not the only way of doing formal proofs. For a trivial example, if you want to prove that two polynomials of degree n are the same, another approach is to evaluate the polynomials at n+1 different points and see if you get the same answers. This is an essentially numerical proof.

IIRC, I read about this in A=B. Or maybe it was somewhere else. But A=B (which can be downloaded for free) is well worth a read anyway.

http://slashdot.org/~farber
exists so we have a few happy chef-cooks here as well :-)

I'm going to try to come to the defense of that last one there. His Slashdot user page links to: http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~farber/ which claims he is

David Farber, Professor Emeritus

Web Page at CMU:
http://www.epp.cmu.edu/httpdocs/people/bios/farber.html

I don't think he selected that name because he's a happy chef cook nor because he is squatting.

Also, is it so wrong for me to select the UID Ferrari because I'm a Ferrari owner and enthusiast? I would hope CmdrTaco would side with the users if Ferrari & Farber ever wanted to start spamming us with threads about their latest cars and pans.

I shouldn't even bother, but click here and "edumacate" yourself.

The Sherman act makes it a felony to commit antitrust violations.

I'm certain yourself, being 8, wouldn't understand how to operate a dictionary. It is hard, but I'm certain when you make it to grade 4 or 5 the teacher will re-explain them to you. As an adult, I'll link and quote it for you so you can understand.

Corporation: an invisible, intangible, artificial creation of the law existing as a voluntary chartered association of individuals that has most of the rights and duties of natural persons but with perpetual existence and limited liability

I do suggest being a bit less petulant in the future, as I can assure you, when you hit double-digit years it won't work nearly as well for you as it did today.

The Real Deal on the Current Economic Crisis

So who is to blame? There's plenty of blame to go around, and it doesn't fasten only on one party or even mainly on what Washington did or didn't do. As The Economist magazine noted recently, the problem is one of "layered irresponsibility ... with hard-working home owners and billionaire villains each playing a role." Here's a partial list of those alleged to be at fault:

The Federal Reserve, which slashed interest rates after the dot-com bubble burst, making credit cheap.

Home buyers, who took advantage of easy credit to bid up the prices of homes excessively.

Congress, which continues to support a mortgage tax deduction that gives consumers a tax incentive to buy more expensive houses.

Real estate agents, most of whom work for the sellers rather than the buyers and who earned higher commissions from selling more expensive homes.

The Clinton administration, which pushed for less stringent credit and downpayment requirements for working- and middle-class families.

Mortgage brokers, who offered less-credit-worthy home buyers subprime, adjustable rate loans with low initial payments, but exploding interest rates.

Former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, who in 2004, near the peak of the housing bubble, encouraged Americans to take out adjustable rate mortgages.

Wall Street firms, who paid too little attention to the quality of the risky loans that they bundled into Mortgage Backed Securities (MBS), and issued bonds using those securities as collateral.

The Bush administration, which failed to provide needed government oversight of the increasingly dicey mortgage-backed securities market.

An obscure accounting rule called mark-to-market, which can have the paradoxical result of making assets be worth less on paper than they are in reality during times of panic.

Collective delusion, or a belief on the part of all parties that home prices would keep rising forever, no matter how high or how fast they had already gone up.

The U.S. economy is enormously complicated. Screwing it up takes a great deal of cooperation. Claiming that a single piece of legislation was responsible for (or could have averted) is just political grandstanding. We have no advice to offer on how best to solve the financial crisis. But these sorts of partisan caricatures can only make the task more difficult.

The Real Deal on the Current Economic Crisis

So who is to blame? There's plenty of blame to go around, and it doesn't fasten only on one party or even mainly on what Washington did or didn't do. As The Economist magazine noted recently, the problem is one of "layered irresponsibility ... with hard-working home owners and billionaire villains each playing a role." Here's a partial list of those alleged to be at fault:

The Federal Reserve, which slashed interest rates after the dot-com bubble burst, making credit cheap.

Home buyers, who took advantage of easy credit to bid up the prices of homes excessively.

Congress, which continues to support a mortgage tax deduction that gives consumers a tax incentive to buy more expensive houses.

Real estate agents, most of whom work for the sellers rather than the buyers and who earned higher commissions from selling more expensive homes.

The Clinton administration, which pushed for less stringent credit and downpayment requirements for working- and middle-class families.

Mortgage brokers, who offered less-credit-worthy home buyers subprime, adjustable rate loans with low initial payments, but exploding interest rates.

Former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, who in 2004, near the peak of the housing bubble, encouraged Americans to take out adjustable rate mortgages.

Wall Street firms, who paid too little attention to the quality of the risky loans that they bundled into Mortgage Backed Securities (MBS), and issued bonds using those securities as collateral.

The Bush administration, which failed to provide needed government oversight of the increasingly dicey mortgage-backed securities market.

An obscure accounting rule called mark-to-market, which can have the paradoxical result of making assets be worth less on paper than they are in reality during times of panic.

Collective delusion, or a belief on the part of all parties that home prices would keep rising forever, no matter how high or how fast they had already gone up.

The U.S. economy is enormously complicated. Screwing it up takes a great deal of cooperation. Claiming that a single piece of legislation was responsible for (or could have averted) is just political grandstanding. We have no advice to offer on how best to solve the financial crisis. But these sorts of partisan caricatures can only make the task more difficult.

Just get rid of it.

There is no labor shortage to begin with in the first place:

http://www.cs.ucdavis.edu/~matloff/itaa.real.html

http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/85/essay.html

http://www.upenn.edu/researchatpenn/article.php?708&bus

http://techtoil.org/wiki/doku.php?id=articles:shortage_myth

Several of those are phrases, not individual words. However, Inuit languages don't really have a large number of independent words for snow, either; their polysynthetic structure makes it possible to form an unlimited number of words relating to snow from a handful of elements. This article by the linguist Geoffrey K. Pullum has more details.

unison is like rsync, but _mirrors_ changes on both sides, so you could create a star-type file distribution network based on a single backup location. So, anytime people drop a picture into their 'public pictures' folder, it will eventually get synced to everyone's 'public pictures' folders. uses rsync under the covers so is efficient. Good documentation; didn't take too long for me to get it set up right on a mixed windows/linux/mac environment. http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/

Have you actually listened to the "recent interview" about Spain? Here's the mp3 and transcript if you want to.
mp3 transcript
Please listen and let me know if you stand by your statement. To me it sounds like he's having trouble understanding what the interviewer is asking so he's just giving a boilerplate "I'm willing to talk with our allies but I'll stand up to my enemies." Very generic, and so it appears very FUD-ish to state that he thinks Spain is not an ally.

Have you actually listened to the "recent interview" about Spain? Here's the mp3 and transcript if you want to.
mp3 transcript
Please listen and let me know if you stand by your statement. To me it sounds like he's having trouble understanding what the interviewer is asking so he's just giving a boilerplate "I'm willing to talk with our allies but I'll stand up to my enemies." Very generic, and so it appears very FUD-ish to state that he thinks Spain is not an ally.

don't forget the egronomic keyboard for Pirates:

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=610

arr.

You know what's sad? I submitted this a week ago, with the article debunking it. Here are two articles that expose this software as bogus:

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=574
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=575

Basically, it relies on human-supplied ratings and THOSE rely on exact URLs! So you can add a #whatever to the end of the URL and goof the "scanner" up.

Finally, there's no reason to talk about "spin" when you can talk about whether they're telling lies or not. Don't get me wrong, part of what's wrong with the news is that they present two politicians spinning in opposite directions and tell the viewers to make up their minds. But this is only because they can't focus on objective facts.

If a politician says "the moon is made of green cheese," they shouldn't be repeating that nonsensical allegation at all. They should be telling us that that politician is crazy and supplying the facts that show they're wrong.

But too many focus on "bias" and leave people unable to see the forest for the trees.

You know what's sad? I submitted this a week ago, with the article debunking it. Here are two articles that expose this software as bogus:

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=574
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=575

Basically, it relies on human-supplied ratings and THOSE rely on exact URLs! So you can add a #whatever to the end of the URL and goof the "scanner" up.

Finally, there's no reason to talk about "spin" when you can talk about whether they're telling lies or not. Don't get me wrong, part of what's wrong with the news is that they present two politicians spinning in opposite directions and tell the viewers to make up their minds. But this is only because they can't focus on objective facts.

If a politician says "the moon is made of green cheese," they shouldn't be repeating that nonsensical allegation at all. They should be telling us that that politician is crazy and supplying the facts that show they're wrong.

But too many focus on "bias" and leave people unable to see the forest for the trees.

According to Language Log, this program does nothing at all: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=575

The problem is that most laws currently on the books are unjust. So no, I don't want them enforced better. The state says that you don't own your own body, or any of your so-called "property". I don't want better enforcement of those rules, I want much worse enforcement.

If we're talking about changing the system, why not better *laws*. Hoping that bad laws will be weakly enforced is fraught with danger. Consider the case of the guy who was convicted of committing oral sodomy (i.e. cunnilingus) with his wife. It's a stupid law and rarely enforced but so long as it's on the books, it can be. Why not just get rid of the stupid law?

If 100% enforcement of a law would result in injustice, then the law should be changed.

It's fewer ffs.

Oh really?

It's fewer ffs.

Oh really?

Hydroelectric power requires destroying ecosystems? All of the time? News to me.

Hydroelectric does destroy ecosystems, but they don't have to. The Three Gorges Dam in China will flood a lot of land. And to build it the Chinese are forcibly relocating millions of people. With the forests drowned, the rotting trees will produce methane, a greenhouse gas more than 20 tymes more potent than CO2. On top of that studies have shown that dams don't bring all the benefits they were sold as providing. The Epupa Damin Namibia is a good case study on this. The Tucuruí Dam in the Brazilian Amazon shows some things that can go wrong. In the US the Colorado River is an excellent case on the effects of dams. Whereas the river used to empty out into the Gulf of California or Sea of Cortez the water no longer reaches there. Instead dams were built along it to supply water to Nevada and Southern California, desert areas. Unfortunately lakes created by the dams, such as Lake Powell, allow more water to evaporate than what would without those dams. Larger surface areas allow more evaporation.

Sometime ago there was an article posted on /. about a different method of harnessing the power of rivers. Instead of constructing dams something like egg beaters on a boom would be lowered into the river, which would then spin driving a generator. I wonder what's happening with that.

Falcon

We've had 9 Presidents leave office (4 assassinations, 4 natural deaths, 1 abdicated) out of 43 people. That's over a 20% chance just to begin with.

Actuarial tables give McCain a 1 in 3 chance of dying in the next 8 years, though I don't believe that adjusted for things like the treatment he received as a POW or all the plane crashes he survived, both in training and the time he was shot down.

McCain's thousands pages of medical records didn't get much scrutiny, either. They gave a few friendly journalists a few hours to go over them. I don't know about you, but 100 pages/hour is a pretty good clip for me reading a story, let alone medical records. There's no way they could have read them all, so we just don't know.

It was ironic that Karl Rove attacked Obama over the mere idea that he might choose an inexperienced VP for "political" reasons. There's a great table about Rove contradicting himself here, as well as a link to the video.

A recent Language Log post about it

http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/

Uses SSH (secure)
Cross Platform (we back up our Macs to a Linux server with it)
GPL
Darn easy to set up and maintain (one app on the client and server, create a config file on the client, setup server backup folder for client data and that's about it)

The cross-platform for starters. Maybe? I don't think there's such an application.

Unison might fit the bill, but I'm not sure about the FTP part (it does work over ssh, I think).

The thumb drive req might be another problem, because I was about to suggest writing a Python or Perl script to do this (relatively easy). Most Linux distros have Python and Perl, but OS X and Windows I think you'd have to pre-install them. And Perl doesn't ship with an FTP client lib, I don't think.

It's all too common in China, where people often resort to machine translation, and don't have a fluent English speaker nearby to check copy. See here and here.

It's all too common in China, where people often resort to machine translation, and don't have a fluent English speaker nearby to check copy. See here and here.

Nice murder strawman! Do you always compare IP law violations to physical assault (or, as many do here, in not quite as blatant a strawman, the theft of physical goods)?

If you would use your software to download a book by a US author published in the US between the years 1923-1951, I daresay that even you wouldn't know if you were in violation or not. I know that I wouldn't (and expecting me to pay $150/hr to find out is not reasonable in my eyes). Your average grandmother paying to download MP3 files from the allofmp3.com site, which claimed to have a valid license (which almost certainly was only valid for Russians), is unlikely to understand that she is violating her local IP laws.

Ignoring your murder strawman, I find it strange that you start your post admitting that you yourself shouldn't be arguing about IP law with NYCL, and continue to assume that laymen much less concerned with this subject would be able to discern whether they are in violation in many cases, your example being the use of P2P software.

If you would download a book by a US author published in the US between the years 1923-1951, I daresay that even you wouldn't know if you were in violation or not. I know that I wouldn't (and expecting me to pay $150/hr to find out is not reasonable in my eyes).

Check out Language Log. They do not only have even funnier examples, but also try to analyze the source of the error, as well as translation problems in other languages. The latest installment in the series of Chinese-English mistranslations is The Sichuan's hair blood is prosperous, or check the whole category: Lost in Translation.

They also collect "Cupertinos", errors introduced by spelling checkers, or have you ever heard of US presidential candidates Barrack Abeam and John moccasin? It's a great log for anyone interested in language.

Check out Language Log. They do not only have even funnier examples, but also try to analyze the source of the error, as well as translation problems in other languages. The latest installment in the series of Chinese-English mistranslations is The Sichuan's hair blood is prosperous, or check the whole category: Lost in Translation.

They also collect "Cupertinos", errors introduced by spelling checkers, or have you ever heard of US presidential candidates Barrack Abeam and John moccasin? It's a great log for anyone interested in language.

Check out Language Log. They do not only have even funnier examples, but also try to analyze the source of the error, as well as translation problems in other languages. The latest installment in the series of Chinese-English mistranslations is The Sichuan's hair blood is prosperous, or check the whole category: Lost in Translation.

They also collect "Cupertinos", errors introduced by spelling checkers, or have you ever heard of US presidential candidates Barrack Abeam and John moccasin? It's a great log for anyone interested in language.

Just let him be... keep arguing and soon you will be like this guy

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/llog/duty_calls.png

You just got bit by what's being called "Muphry's Law. Briefly, it says that any time you write a criticism of someone's spelling or grammar, what you write will inevitably contain a spelling or grammatical error.

The law has had other names, but people seem to like the idea of giving it a name that's a mispelling of the famous Murphy's Law.

(And note my two mispellings in this post. ;-)

I honestly like, do not recall like the last time I like, saw someone use 'like' in that long standing improper way in like text, it's always like, been for me, like only something a person like, verbalizes.

Because spoken language is somehow a debased and corrupted version of the purity that is written text. But seriously, slashdot postings are much closer to standard spoken English than standard formal written English, and discourse hedging "like" is apparently a part of our good CmdrTaco's dialect. Sorry if it's not a part of your dialect (or not a part of your be-pedestal'd orthographic dialect), but that's no reason to hate on someone for using "like" this way.

Check out this posting on Language Log to learn a little about the various innovative uses of "like", some of which are over 50 years old. Is 50 years some kind of threshold? Both "online" and "ergonomics" are first attested from about that long ago, and I'd guess you don't have any huge objections to them.

A more complete listing of Language Log's postings on "like" can be found here, if you're interested.

Other note: you called out "as like", not just "like" itself. Putting both unintended specificity and "like" aside, would you have had any objections if the statement had been "on Slashdot, we're seeing them as 6% of our page traffic now"?

I honestly like, do not recall like the last time I like, saw someone use 'like' in that long standing improper way in like text, it's always like, been for me, like only something a person like, verbalizes.

Because spoken language is somehow a debased and corrupted version of the purity that is written text. But seriously, slashdot postings are much closer to standard spoken English than standard formal written English, and discourse hedging "like" is apparently a part of our good CmdrTaco's dialect. Sorry if it's not a part of your dialect (or not a part of your be-pedestal'd orthographic dialect), but that's no reason to hate on someone for using "like" this way.

Check out this posting on Language Log to learn a little about the various innovative uses of "like", some of which are over 50 years old. Is 50 years some kind of threshold? Both "online" and "ergonomics" are first attested from about that long ago, and I'd guess you don't have any huge objections to them.

A more complete listing of Language Log's postings on "like" can be found here, if you're interested.

Other note: you called out "as like", not just "like" itself. Putting both unintended specificity and "like" aside, would you have had any objections if the statement had been "on Slashdot, we're seeing them as 6% of our page traffic now"?

http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=1993

How many economic disasters must occur due to speculative greed before the lesson is learned?

Here's an idea: you're a member of an oil cartel. Project that due to "demand" that oil will rise to $170 a barrel. Now watch your reserves gain 20% in value just because you said so.

When you can count something, you use "fewer". When you measure instead of count, you use "less".

http://sourceforge.net/projects/ebla
http://acl.ldc.upenn.edu/W/W03/W03-0607.pdf

Of course, then you have GPUs. The just released AMD 4850/4870 has 480 stream processors that work in parallel.

I remember reading something similar to this: http://www.seas.upenn.edu/~palsetia/cit595s07/projects07/Final_Paper_Nina_Baron.pdf but I can't seem to find it. It was about how modern CPUs and GPUs will soon be able to model brains (not necessarily of humans) due to their increasing parallelism.

I, for one, welcome our green-thing-in-space-in-a-/.-post overlords

my sister wants a grammar checker

If you've got files on your computer that you only read, never write, and those files are getting corrupted, then it sounds like you have a problem with your filesystem, or a problem with your hardware. You need to find and fix the problem with the filesystem or hardware, not apply band-aids to PDF files if the problem has nothing to do with the PDF format per se.

Another possibility would be that you're using buggy software that is supposed to open PDF files in read-only mode, but actually corrupts them. If so, then you need to identify what the software is that's doing it, so you can remove that software from your computer.

For diagnosis, and also recovery, one thing you could try would be using the Unison file synchronizer to synchronize your files with a hard disk on another computer. If the files aren't changing, it will run extremely fast. If you notice mysterious changes to files right after a blackout or an electrical storm, then you can guess that's why. If you notice mysterious changes right after you use a particular application, ditto. Unison has a -fastcheck option on Windows, which you should read about; you'd probably want to run most of the time with it, and maybe once a week without it.

I'm fond of pointing out a clear contemporary example of a law waiting to be broken, and the moral reasoning behind it. These are laws that do not serve justice, and a summary of the history behind the principled opposition to them. Marting Luther King Junior's letter from a Birmingham jail.

Thanks for woefully misrepresenting the nature of Penn's "wait and see" suggestion regarding Vista SP1. Penn's IT org gives that advice regarding virtually every major OS update published by any vendor. In fact, Mac OS 10.5 is was also "wait and see"'d on first release for the exact same reasons. http://www.upenn.edu/computing/provider/docs/originalmacos105provider.html

Was the episode called "The Frozen Sound"? Originally Aired 7/30/1955 -- A Summary:

THE FROZEN SOUND Voices from 2000 years ago and wire taps without wires confront research scientists. and/or Enemy espionage obtains a record of a physicist's top-secret conversation with the Secretary of Defense in a completely sealed room. The secret of the leak lies in a bottle of ant poison containing a mysterious crystal -- a crystal with the power to record entire conversations! Marshall Thompson, Marilyn Erskin, Ray Collins, Michael Fox.

Here's another TV listing.

'Translation: crystallizing materials (cooling molten metals, cooling glasses, drying out of sugars and salts, all sorts of things you can picture remaining from an ancient environment) can leave traces of acoustic vibrations that were passing through them when they were cooling in their crystal structure. Meaning that we could potentially recover them. I don't know how widely applicable this technique is, but it certainly seems possible.'

Interestingly, recovery of sounds 'recorded' by various accidental mechanisms (e.g. in the grooves of a clay pot) has been the subject of semi-serious speculation, a well-known hoax, several SF stories, an episode of the X-files, and even some published but highly dubious research:

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002875.html

In 1863, nearly 15 years before Thomas Alva Edison created the first phonograph, an inventor named Leon Scott is said to have visited the White House. If historical anecdotes are accurate, he made a tracing of President Lincoln's voice with his newly invented "phonautograph," a machine that scratched sound vibrations onto a soot-blackened sheet of paper wrapped around a drum.

The cylinder on which a paper record of Lincoln's voice was apparently made has never been found.

Why remote into your company computer from home? That's just backwards. You should use SSH/VNC to remote into your home computer from work. Then you have access to your personal stuff at work without any personal stuff residing on your work computer or passing unencrypted through your IT department. If you're actually trying to work on stuff from home (they've got you by the balls don't they?) then use said USB drive to transfer whatever files you need back and forth (or send them over your SSH connection before you leave the office). I recommend Unison or perhaps GIT distributed version control to keep whatever project you're working on synchronized. You can even use edna to stream your home music collection to you (again, tunnel through SSH for secret listening). Worked great for me the last time I had a shitty office job.