Yes, they DO want inventions, The incentive they give is your monthly paycheck, and all the gadgets and supplies you use to play around and come up with new things. Most folks cannot easily support what it takes to produce a new invention in many fields. Patent application costs alone are quite high, what with patent attorney fees and such. Also, in addition to the purely legalese payment of $1 or so, companies often make a great deal of ballyhoo internally when a significant invention is done.
And yes, the terms I described to in my original comment are usually negotiable -- maybe. I used to always list the ideas for books that I wanted to write.
I was never an inventor myself, but my father was, and he felt pretty satisfied by the recognition he got from his company for the inventions he did, even if they did not make him personally a lot of money.
I am retired now, but I never worked anywhere but that the company, as part of its conditions of employment, did not lay claim to any and all inventions that the employee might create during the term of employment. The employee is typically forced to agree to sell any patents arising to the company for a nominal fee, usually $1. I am not saying this is good or bad, but when you join the company, it is kind of hard to not know that signing on the bottom line agrees to this practice.
About 10 years ago a brand-new high school and surrounding campus were carved out of the hills of eastern San Jose, CA. A big ballyhoo came issuing forth from the powers that were that every kid in the shiny new school would be issued with a shiny new laptop computer. It came to pass within 3-4 months of those being issued that so many of the laptops had been broken, lost, stolen, or sold that the grand experiment failed.
Beware spending all that shiny money on shiny baubles.
I very much doubt that whether these are like computers or not is an issue at all. The goal is to let the kids do things interesting in the furtherance of their education. Writing software is typically not a part of that.
I suspect most of the readers of/. were not around in the 70s. IIRC, there were indeed laws passed at the Federal level to switch to metric units everywhere. But when the costs were calculated there was not the will to follow through. Yes, there were instances of highway signs converted to metric (and to dual imperial/metric), but not enough, and I guess the feds did not put enough teeth in the law to make it happen. Memory is hazy, but I think the timing on the proposed switchover being introduced was around the time of the great oil crisis in the 70s, and that may have had to do something with the end result. The federal government of the time certainly used their energy back then to force every state to adopt a 55 mph speed limit, want it or not, by threatening to withhold federal highway funds. Maybe they used up all their energy on that and metrification took a back seat.
And, I grew up in Texas, was out of the public schools by 1960, and I assure you teaching the metric units in elementary school did not happen then. When we got to high school and started taking more serious science, we had to learn metric system as part of the science classes.
Although I have known about the metric units for more than 50 years and should be comfortable with them, I now live in a metric country and I still find myself doing some mental arithmetic converting metric units back to the old familiar, particularly metres to feet and hectares to acres. I know I should not to that, but I do. And then there is currency differences where the rates change all the time. At least metric and imperial conversion factors don't change.
Another ignorant comment. I am retired. I saved. I also get Social Security. It is not enough to live on. Most of my acquaintances have done the same. You are being fed a line of guff from somewhere. Stop believing it.
I have read the bill. I have watched numerous videos of MPs speaking about the bill. I have read many comments about the bill, most of which were tangential in one way or another. I still do not know what internet behavior is being targeted by the bill. What is the definition of "sharing" that is being used? From the things that the MPs are saying, they seem to only understand the notion of BitTorrent where many suppliers provide content in small pieces to make up the whole. Simply downloading a copyrighted file does not seem to be covered, yet in my view that is and always has been an illegal use of copyrighted material.
Given the original posting, there is incorrect information. The bill just passed by the NZ parliament does not institute section 92A. It replaces all the myriad paragraphs of section 92 with a myriad of paragraphs numbered 122. 92 is done away with.
I am an American living in NZ. The NZ Parliament frequently does business "under urgency". It is one of the more striking characteristics I have noted that is different from past experience. The normal process for enacting legislation is cumbersome and tedious and slow. The Government knows that and uses the "urgency" provisions to get around that, too often, I think. In this case, the Parliament was sitting "under urgency" to consider legislation to create the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority, a new agency to ride roughshod over the Christchurch locals in the name of "recovery". While they were at it, they tossed in this internet-related bill to pass also. Pretty cheeky if you ask me.
Oh yes. Benefits that an employee receives are given a value and will be taxed if they exceed certain numbers that are relative to all employees. I never received enough benefits for this to be a serious issue for me. About the only time it bit me even a little was that I often took advantage of purchasing subsidized life insurance through the company, and if the subsidy was big enough I got hit up for taxes on it. The amount was reported in the W2 as I recall. (I am retired now, and it was a few years ago that I am remembering.)
I spent my entire working career in the US, paying usually both federal and state taxes. Just like everyone else, I did not like paying taxes, but I never felt that the tax rates were too high or punitive. The only times it got me were when I failed to plan ahead.
Even today, being retired and living in a different country, I don't mind paying US taxes. What I don't like is the tortuous complexity of the US tax system, with all the different types of income and different exclusions and deductions. It approaches the insane.
When I was a teenager (1950s), I went to the city library and sat and read Encyclopaedia Britannica for hours. It's amazing what little nooks and crannies of knowledge and the world one can encounter that way.
My credentials: I hold a PhD in Quantum Chemistry. Did a turn as Asst. Prof. of CS at a large US university. Enjoyed a 30+ year career in computing, doing processor architecture, language design, compiler and OS development, scientific computing, etailing, and voice response applications. Many times I was asked by young students "What should I take to really succeed?" My answer was "Learn to write English. Remember the legacy that a scientist or engineer leaves behind is whatever he writes." When I was teaching many times I heard students confess they were taking CS mainly because it had limited requirements to write, which they did not want to have to do. That attitude apparently continues to influence the choices made by current practitioners. (note the "ick!" above) When I acquire a new software package to find the documentation is replete with confusion of "your" with "you're" and other language gaffes, I note the fact and wonder whether the software itself was written with any more care and attention to detail and correctness than was the documentation. As for the math discussion, I always found the math more arising from the problem domain than ever from the programming. I do, however, remember a lost weekend where I was feverishly compensating for the fact that I had inherited a deployed system which had a built-in O(n^2) initialization algorithm that ran when the system was restarted at midnight every day and finally n had gotten big enough that the initialization was going to take all day itself.
Amen. I am not in the corporate world, being retired. But I am frequently the recipient of jokes and cute pictures and such which include long lists of email addresses of who knows who. And nested deeply through the 3 or 4 times the stuff was forwarded.
I feel very strongly that one should not willy-nilly expose email addresses in that way, so I carefully delete all that from any email that I forward on.
Frequently I will forward one of these to my friends and family, many of whom do not know each other. I then use BCC all the time so those friends are not seeing the emails of those they do not know.
And, very few of my correspondents do the same.
I never had to face this issue myself. When I ended my teaching career in 1974, laptops had not quite yet been invented. We were debating more the merits of allowing portable tape recorders to be used to record lectures. I recorded a few my own lectures, just so I would know in detail what I actually said. Intent and reality did not always match 100%, of course.
At that time handheld calculators were already a fact, but there was no debate about their use yet because they were so expensive that only the more affluent students had them. Certainly lowly assistant professors could not afford them. I still used my trusty slide rule to compute grade averages.
And as to the question posed by the OP, I am somewhat aghast at the idea of giving a 4-year old his own computer, particularly if it is attached to the internet. And if it is a portable, it will be soon reduced to rubble.
A child that young who can navigate the web on his own would be rare, I think. My stepdaughter gave her old Mac to her 4 year-old with some simple colorful and flashy games for him, but no attachment to the internet, and most of the time no keyboard. He loved it!
At that age, most children will enjoy watching the same video over and over again, and seldom pay much attention. Same for the computer.
Yes, leaving a 5 year-old child at home alone is a criminal offence just about everywhere, I think. If you get caught, you are in for some serious jail time -- and losing your child to boot. And this has nothing to do with computers.
When I saw the headline for this posting I wondered what the Coast Guard was doing suing a copyright lawyer. Acronyms are becoming more and more overloaded as time goes by.
I had to live with this kind of environment for most of my career. Frustrating in the extreme.
I recall a big meeting held in the development department of the company I worked for in the mid-90's, the meeting being a post-mortem review of a recent product release. In the midst of a somewhat heated discussion about process, one of the senior development directors said: "But we don't have TIME to do it right!". Yessir, 'nuff said.
Back in the day, if you were writing scientific/engineering applications in Fortran and/or business applications in COBOL, you might have seen the 4 letters PERL arranged in that order, but you would have been highly unlikely to feel a need to learn about it. If you knew about it at all, you knew that it was a tool for systems administrators, not for "real" programmers.
I finally got to do some PERL coding in the last 5 years I worked, when I ran up against doing server-side coding for web apps. I did a fair amount of PERL coding during that period, but I cannot say I really "learned" it. Fortunately I had a genuine PERL guru sitting at the desk across from mine at the time. PERL is much too complicated, though with enough energy one can make that complication do some brilliant things.
PERL seems like SNOBOL, a language in which almost any string of characters represents a legal language construct. I remember once in the early 70's I was doing some assembly-level coding and I accidentally fed an assembly-language source file into the SNOBOL interpreter. I don't know what SNOBOL thought the thing might do, but it compiled OK!
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Yes, they DO want inventions, The incentive they give is your monthly paycheck, and all the gadgets and supplies you use to play around and come up with new things. Most folks cannot easily support what it takes to produce a new invention in many fields. Patent application costs alone are quite high, what with patent attorney fees and such. Also, in addition to the purely legalese payment of $1 or so, companies often make a great deal of ballyhoo internally when a significant invention is done.
And yes, the terms I described to in my original comment are usually negotiable -- maybe. I used to always list the ideas for books that I wanted to write.
I was never an inventor myself, but my father was, and he felt pretty satisfied by the recognition he got from his company for the inventions he did, even if they did not make him personally a lot of money.
I am retired now, but I never worked anywhere but that the company, as part of its conditions of employment, did not lay claim to any and all inventions that the employee might create during the term of employment. The employee is typically forced to agree to sell any patents arising to the company for a nominal fee, usually $1. I am not saying this is good or bad, but when you join the company, it is kind of hard to not know that signing on the bottom line agrees to this practice.
About 10 years ago a brand-new high school and surrounding campus were carved out of the hills of eastern San Jose, CA. A big ballyhoo came issuing forth from the powers that were that every kid in the shiny new school would be issued with a shiny new laptop computer. It came to pass within 3-4 months of those being issued that so many of the laptops had been broken, lost, stolen, or sold that the grand experiment failed.
Beware spending all that shiny money on shiny baubles.
I very much doubt that whether these are like computers or not is an issue at all. The goal is to let the kids do things interesting in the furtherance of their education. Writing software is typically not a part of that.
I suspect most of the readers of /. were not around in the 70s. IIRC, there were indeed laws passed at the Federal level to switch to metric units everywhere. But when the costs were calculated there was not the will to follow through. Yes, there were instances of highway signs converted to metric (and to dual imperial/metric), but not enough, and I guess the feds did not put enough teeth in the law to make it happen. Memory is hazy, but I think the timing on the proposed switchover being introduced was around the time of the great oil crisis in the 70s, and that may have had to do something with the end result. The federal government of the time certainly used their energy back then to force every state to adopt a 55 mph speed limit, want it or not, by threatening to withhold federal highway funds. Maybe they used up all their energy on that and metrification took a back seat.
And, I grew up in Texas, was out of the public schools by 1960, and I assure you teaching the metric units in elementary school did not happen then. When we got to high school and started taking more serious science, we had to learn metric system as part of the science classes.
Although I have known about the metric units for more than 50 years and should be comfortable with them, I now live in a metric country and I still find myself doing some mental arithmetic converting metric units back to the old familiar, particularly metres to feet and hectares to acres. I know I should not to that, but I do. And then there is currency differences where the rates change all the time. At least metric and imperial conversion factors don't change.
If that is what it is in Newton, what is it in Boston? or in Braintree? or in Cambridge? or in Washington?
Another ignorant comment. I am retired. I saved. I also get Social Security. It is not enough to live on. Most of my acquaintances have done the same. You are being fed a line of guff from somewhere. Stop believing it.
Nothing in this thresd, until now, has talked about paying MORE taxes. The premise is that one should not mind paying a fair share.
Spoken from a position of true ignorance. What a crock!
I have read the bill. I have watched numerous videos of MPs speaking about the bill. I have read many comments about the bill, most of which were tangential in one way or another. I still do not know what internet behavior is being targeted by the bill. What is the definition of "sharing" that is being used? From the things that the MPs are saying, they seem to only understand the notion of BitTorrent where many suppliers provide content in small pieces to make up the whole. Simply downloading a copyrighted file does not seem to be covered, yet in my view that is and always has been an illegal use of copyrighted material.
Given the original posting, there is incorrect information. The bill just passed by the NZ parliament does not institute section 92A. It replaces all the myriad paragraphs of section 92 with a myriad of paragraphs numbered 122. 92 is done away with.
I am an American living in NZ. The NZ Parliament frequently does business "under urgency". It is one of the more striking characteristics I have noted that is different from past experience. The normal process for enacting legislation is cumbersome and tedious and slow. The Government knows that and uses the "urgency" provisions to get around that, too often, I think. In this case, the Parliament was sitting "under urgency" to consider legislation to create the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority, a new agency to ride roughshod over the Christchurch locals in the name of "recovery". While they were at it, they tossed in this internet-related bill to pass also. Pretty cheeky if you ask me.
TFA says "a real woman will communicate with you"
Nope, TFA clearly says they employ real women to interact with the client based on the profile of the "girlfriend".
Oh yes. Benefits that an employee receives are given a value and will be taxed if they exceed certain numbers that are relative to all employees. I never received enough benefits for this to be a serious issue for me. About the only time it bit me even a little was that I often took advantage of purchasing subsidized life insurance through the company, and if the subsidy was big enough I got hit up for taxes on it. The amount was reported in the W2 as I recall. (I am retired now, and it was a few years ago that I am remembering.)
I spent my entire working career in the US, paying usually both federal and state taxes. Just like everyone else, I did not like paying taxes, but I never felt that the tax rates were too high or punitive. The only times it got me were when I failed to plan ahead.
Even today, being retired and living in a different country, I don't mind paying US taxes. What I don't like is the tortuous complexity of the US tax system, with all the different types of income and different exclusions and deductions. It approaches the insane.
When I was a teenager (1950s), I went to the city library and sat and read Encyclopaedia Britannica for hours. It's amazing what little nooks and crannies of knowledge and the world one can encounter that way.
My credentials: I hold a PhD in Quantum Chemistry. Did a turn as Asst. Prof. of CS at a large US university. Enjoyed a 30+ year career in computing, doing processor architecture, language design, compiler and OS development, scientific computing, etailing, and voice response applications.
Many times I was asked by young students "What should I take to really succeed?" My answer was "Learn to write English. Remember the legacy that a scientist or engineer leaves behind is whatever he writes."
When I was teaching many times I heard students confess they were taking CS mainly because it had limited requirements to write, which they did not want to have to do.
That attitude apparently continues to influence the choices made by current practitioners. (note the "ick!" above) When I acquire a new software package to find the documentation is replete with confusion of "your" with "you're" and other language gaffes, I note the fact and wonder whether the software itself was written with any more care and attention to detail and correctness than was the documentation.
As for the math discussion, I always found the math more arising from the problem domain than ever from the programming. I do, however, remember a lost weekend where I was feverishly compensating for the fact that I had inherited a deployed system which had a built-in O(n^2) initialization algorithm that ran when the system was restarted at midnight every day and finally n had gotten big enough that the initialization was going to take all day itself.
Amen. I am not in the corporate world, being retired. But I am frequently the recipient of jokes and cute pictures and such which include long lists of email addresses of who knows who. And nested deeply through the 3 or 4 times the stuff was forwarded.
I feel very strongly that one should not willy-nilly expose email addresses in that way, so I carefully delete all that from any email that I forward on.
Frequently I will forward one of these to my friends and family, many of whom do not know each other. I then use BCC all the time so those friends are not seeing the emails of those they do not know.
And, very few of my correspondents do the same.
It's not always about how much you have. It's also about how you use what you've got.
I never had to face this issue myself. When I ended my teaching career in 1974, laptops had not quite yet been invented. We were debating more the merits of allowing portable tape recorders to be used to record lectures. I recorded a few my own lectures, just so I would know in detail what I actually said. Intent and reality did not always match 100%, of course.
At that time handheld calculators were already a fact, but there was no debate about their use yet because they were so expensive that only the more affluent students had them. Certainly lowly assistant professors could not afford them. I still used my trusty slide rule to compute grade averages.
And as to the question posed by the OP, I am somewhat aghast at the idea of giving a 4-year old his own computer, particularly if it is attached to the internet. And if it is a portable, it will be soon reduced to rubble.
A child that young who can navigate the web on his own would be rare, I think. My stepdaughter gave her old Mac to her 4 year-old with some simple colorful and flashy games for him, but no attachment to the internet, and most of the time no keyboard. He loved it!
At that age, most children will enjoy watching the same video over and over again, and seldom pay much attention. Same for the computer.
Yes, leaving a 5 year-old child at home alone is a criminal offence just about everywhere, I think. If you get caught, you are in for some serious jail time -- and losing your child to boot. And this has nothing to do with computers.
When I saw the headline for this posting I wondered what the Coast Guard was doing suing a copyright lawyer. Acronyms are becoming more and more overloaded as time goes by.
I had to live with this kind of environment for most of my career. Frustrating in the extreme.
I recall a big meeting held in the development department of the company I worked for in the mid-90's, the meeting being a post-mortem review of a recent product release. In the midst of a somewhat heated discussion about process, one of the senior development directors said: "But we don't have TIME to do it right!". Yessir, 'nuff said.
Back in the day, if you were writing scientific/engineering applications in Fortran and/or business applications in COBOL, you might have seen the 4 letters PERL arranged in that order, but you would have been highly unlikely to feel a need to learn about it. If you knew about it at all, you knew that it was a tool for systems administrators, not for "real" programmers.
I finally got to do some PERL coding in the last 5 years I worked, when I ran up against doing server-side coding for web apps. I did a fair amount of PERL coding during that period, but I cannot say I really "learned" it. Fortunately I had a genuine PERL guru sitting at the desk across from mine at the time. PERL is much too complicated, though with enough energy one can make that complication do some brilliant things.
PERL seems like SNOBOL, a language in which almost any string of characters represents a legal language construct. I remember once in the early 70's I was doing some assembly-level coding and I accidentally fed an assembly-language source file into the SNOBOL interpreter. I don't know what SNOBOL thought the thing might do, but it compiled OK!