best sabotage is to be inreplaceable at the moment when you leave... for example if you're the only person around who knows very deep details about an unique framework.
That's a horrible strategy. First off, if you can't be replaced, you can't be promoted. Secondly, if you get hit by a bus, you've just screwed over all the people you liked who you worked with, not just the ones you didn't like.
And lastly, no matter how smart you are, there's somebody out there who's smarter. If it becomes apparant that you're acting like this, you're a liability, and you're practically gauranteeing you'll be terminated the instant they find a consultant who can fix the mess.
I know of a contractor once who looked up from his desk and saw his boss from the contracting company going into the office of his boss at the client. Ordinarily this guy would have stopped by to say hello first, but he didn't. The contractor assumed, correctly it turns out, that he was going to be fired. He immediately started erasing entire systems.
Now, that company handles things very differently. If you're going to be fired, somebody will come get you and escort you to a conference room. There will be a security guard with them. While you're in that conference room, somebody will be locking your accounts. If you're a contractor, they won't call your boss to come in; they'll talk to him over the phone.
Fortunately everything was backed up. But think what would have happened had this dork gotten two weeks of notice? He could very well have started by corrupting all the backups, and set up his erasing to be automatic and take out EVERYTHING.
Now imagine you're the IT policy maker who allowed that to happen, and the shareholders are looking for who to sue.
We have one position where two people in a row resigned by standing up in the middle of a meeting and yelling "well then you can find somebody else to do this job" and walking out.
I think they've gone through three more people since then, although none of them have quit the company; we're a great company, it's just a particularly sucky position.
The first guy's wife still works here. I'm told they offered her the position, and she started laughing.
One more thing; if you resign with notice and they do allow you to continue working with privileged access, be extra sure to require documentation of all change requests, print that documentation out so it can't disappear after the fact, and document EVERYTHING you do double-carefully. Things break, and you'll be the first suspect.
You should be doing all of that anyway, but redouble your efforts.
Had they decided to get rid of you, they would likely not have given you two weeks' notice and let you continue your privileged level of access.
In the future, examine what happens with co-workers. If your company routinely gives workers a certain amount of notice upon termination, then give that same level of notice. Box up anything that might be controversial (CD-ROMs, books, hardware manuals) for which you can't prove ownership and take it home BEFORE you resign. When the day comes to turn in your resignation, make sure you've already made a copy of any personal data you intend to preserve; don't count on having even one second of access to even the least-secure systems. It's entirely possible that you'll be escorted from the building immediately.
If your new employer routinely waits until 5pm to tell an employee he's fired, and escorts him from the building the moment he's fired, then that's what you should do when you resign; box up your stuff, and when you're ready to go, walk into your manager's office and hand him your resignation letter.
If they're one of those crapholes that calls somebody at home and says "don't bother coming in ever again", then box all your crap up and take it home a day or two before you're going to quit, take all your vacation time, and then once you start your new job call them and say "oh, by the way, I quit." That way your insurance never has a gap.
Remember that if you list them as a previous employer and you go on a job interview, all they can tell your prospective employer is that you worked there when you said you did, and that your title was what you said it was. If you list someone as a REFERENCE, however, that person can say whatever he wants. So don't.
Also keep in mind differences in the law if your employer is not located in the US. I once worked for an Indian tribe, and we were not subject to US laws. We were free, for instance, to confirm previous employment for a terminated employee by saying "yes, he worked here, his title was systems operator, and we fired him because he was stealing crap out of the storeroom and downloading porn." I'm pretty sure he didn't get that job.
The reason this argument holds at all ("can't give money to an organization that prohibits free speech") is that you can imagine a situation where a government would sell, for instance, public land to some company to take care of it, with the government giving that company money because the government doesn't want to establish a beauracracy to take care of it. In this case, the government can, in effect, restrict speech by choosing a company which restricts speech.
But it's legal for any private company to restrict speech, even if it receives some sources of government money. If you think your employer can't restrict free speech, run into the CEO's office and start yelling the f-word at him for a free lesson.:)
If the government doesn't require you to restrict speech in order to receive the money, it's not a government restriction of speech. The restriction of speech is incidental to the expenditure of tax dollars. If you restrict the tax money to the university because you don't like their policy on one aspect of speech, you are tacitly approving all the policies of every university to which you continue to give money. The law generally doesn't side with you on this kind of cherry-picking; you can create a liability for the government this way.
In other words, cut Marquette off over this, and somebody else could come along and sue you because some tiny State college in Oklahoma did the same thing and you didn't cut them off.
No, as all of those have specific requirements not involving the actual person to determine eligibility. There was no law passed specifically involving me (or anyone else). There's nothing in the law that sponsors people or organizations which restrict free speech.
In Marquette's case, there were laws specifically passed giving money to Marquette. There, there is direct sponsorship.
Ah, but if you use a law specifically directed at Marquette as the basis for punishing them, wouldn't that make it a Bill of Attainder, and thus unConstitutional?
I mean hell, D20 still has rules to let players roll their stats randomly. That's the ultimate anachronism.
Random character generators for Gurps abound on the web, because of the demand. People ask about random generation on the Hero Games forums, and get pointed to existing sites. Most other point-based systems include a section on random generation.
At the same time, d20 games include point-based character generation, and the official RPGA campaigns use it as the preferred method.
Are you arguing that a system is inferior based on the fact that it provides more features than another system?
In any event, superiority/inferiority isn't what we're discussing here; it's popularity. It's telling that you can't stick to that argument; it's because you know you're losing.
As for not needing classes; Gurps had to add templates because they discovered that classes were EASIER. If you define "do just fine" as "sell a tiny percentage of the marketplace", then yes, they "do just fine". But we aren't arguing whether or not a system is usable. We're arguing what's more popular, and why that's so.
You tell me why City of Heroes banged their heads against the point-based wall for months, before discovering that classes and levels were EASIER and switching to that. Nobody's arguing that classes and levels are "better" here in any specific terms except easier and more popular. You want to say they're less realistic? Fine, I agree with you. So what? The most "realistic" systems on the market are all made by Greg Porter, and you could probably fit every single book he's ever sold into the back of a smallish U-Haul. Why? Because his beautiful, remarkable, ground-breaking systems, including the ever-awesome CORPS, are harder to use than a simple d20 class-and-level-based system.
If he released d20 Timelords tomorrow it'd outsell every other product he's ever produced combined, except maybe 3G3.
Speaking of Porter, the d20 edition of Macho Women with Guns sells really well. I wonder how its sales compare with the previous editions? Mongoose certainly appears to have a lot more money these days than BTRC.
WotC is the Microsoft of the RPG industry. D&D has survived as-is for analogous reasons to Windows. Levels have no mre to do with D&D's survival than wallpapers have to do with Windows'.
Ok. Then explain why Palladium had a 7% share of the market in 2003 with their level-based games, and Steve Jackson had somewhere between 3% and 1%, but Mongoose (who makes level-based games) had 5%. They had significantly more sales than Steve Jackson, whose company is far more well-known than Mongoose and has had books in mainstream retailers since long before Mongoose existed.
Explain why gaming properties such as Prime Directive fail with a house-built system, fail again with Gurps, and then suddenly start getting traction when they switch to d20.
Look, I love Gurps. I love skill-based, point-based systems. I have more Hero Games stuff than anything else, and Gurps is a very close second. Hero and Gurps combined are the majority of my very extensive collection. Nevertheless, level-based systems dominate every gaming market. They're easy. It's easy to say "well, WotC Hasbro TSR blah blah blah", but it leaves out the fact that skill and point-based systems have been around for every bit as long as Dungeons and Dragons, yet they've never been able to dominate the market the way class and level-based systems have.
Name a major games publisher that doesn't produce a d20 product. If we define "major" low enough, I can think of one. They get a whole 1% of the market.
There is a reason for this, and it's not that Wizards of the Coast sprung fully-formed from the head of Zeus with a 43% share.
While there's nothing that prevents them from doing this, I think it's arguable that the Constitution might prevent the government from giving them more money.
Wouldn't that argument also be applicable to your Pell Grant? Medicare? Social Security?
See, making your game more boring and work-like isn't a selling point. People play games to escape their boring lives, not collapse them into two dimensions.
Levels have survived because they're simple. That's why 30 years of RPG design experience have resulted in d20 games outselling everything else in the pen-and-paper world, and it's why all the most successful MMORPGs still have levels; even the ones created by fans of point-based, skill-based systems.
He's not saying Marquette can't speak ill of the government. He's saying Marquette cannot be discriminatory of other free speech.
And I'm saying they don't sign away their property and contract rights just because they accept money from the government, any more than you'd sign away YOUR rights just for accepting money from the government.
Taking a grant from the government does not automatically mean you sign away all your rights. Or do you feel that, for instance, the First Amendment doesn't apply to Social Security recipients? Or that any student who got a Pell Grant is forever forbidden to speak ill of the government?
The article's point isn't that it's not right to "fight the good fight". The point is that if you're going to do that, you should fight *A* good fight.
I wrote to the EFF about a legal problem I was having in 1998. Still awaiting their response.
without copyright you'd still have the right to copy GPL software.
No, actually, without copyright you've have basic contract law, and wouldn't be able to install any software on your PC that wasn't provided by the manufacturer or his licensees. The fact that copyright law has undergone some bad changes in the last 30 years doesn't negate the fact that the basic concept was a darn good one.
...then don't build a GPL house. Likewise, no one is forcing you to build web services with GPL code.
Congratulations; you have delineated succintly the approach that nearly every business in the world will be forced to take if the change we're discussing in fact occurs.
But if there WERE such things, then visitors should be allowed to copy the blueprints.
There is a stretch between "should be" and "...or they can sue me".
Maybe one of my modifications is hiding a gun safe, and I don't WANT to tell you where it is. Maybe one is installing mirrors in the ceiling of my bedroom, a stripper pole, handcuff rings on the wall, and a cubbyhole for storing a RealDoll, and I don't WANT to tell you all that.
Who says you have the right to pry into my personal modifications to my personal house just because I used a GPL blueprint to build it for my own personal use and not distribution?
If the.xxx domain is created, it will most likely serve no purpose whatsoever, except to be a new income stream for domain registrars.
If it were to be enforced and thus useful, however, it would instead require international enforcement of the lowest (in terms of freedom) common denominator of anti-free-speech laws. In other words, every participating country would be ensuring that the "community standards" of, say, Singapore, Saudi Arabia, and China were enforced on the web sites of, say, Sweden, France, the UK, Canada, the US, etc.
How dare the Bush administration take a stand against something so clearly progressive. *snort*
No, this is like saying if you come over to my house you can ask me for the blueprints and build a house just like mine which you can paint any color you like (and modify it in other ways).
No, it's like saying that the guy who built my house for me can force me to give you those blueprints, and the blueprints of any rooms I added myself, under penalty of civil action.
You can ASK me all you want; I don't have to say yes.
The question is are the users the web site administrator or the web site visitors. I think the argument could be made the users are the web site visitors, so they should have access to the code. They are operating the program, just that they are using a longer wire then your keyboard wire.
This is about like saying that if you come over to visit me in my house, you have the right to paint it.
I would think that if the floating ice had rocks in or on it, it'd actually LOWER the water level when it melts, because the rocks would cause increased displacement due to the air trapped in the ice, which would rise above the water once the ice melted.
Slashdot Mirror
best sabotage is to be inreplaceable at the moment when you leave... for example if you're the only person around who knows very deep details about an unique framework.
That's a horrible strategy. First off, if you can't be replaced, you can't be promoted. Secondly, if you get hit by a bus, you've just screwed over all the people you liked who you worked with, not just the ones you didn't like.
And lastly, no matter how smart you are, there's somebody out there who's smarter. If it becomes apparant that you're acting like this, you're a liability, and you're practically gauranteeing you'll be terminated the instant they find a consultant who can fix the mess.
I know of a contractor once who looked up from his desk and saw his boss from the contracting company going into the office of his boss at the client. Ordinarily this guy would have stopped by to say hello first, but he didn't. The contractor assumed, correctly it turns out, that he was going to be fired. He immediately started erasing entire systems.
Now, that company handles things very differently. If you're going to be fired, somebody will come get you and escort you to a conference room. There will be a security guard with them. While you're in that conference room, somebody will be locking your accounts. If you're a contractor, they won't call your boss to come in; they'll talk to him over the phone.
Fortunately everything was backed up. But think what would have happened had this dork gotten two weeks of notice? He could very well have started by corrupting all the backups, and set up his erasing to be automatic and take out EVERYTHING.
Now imagine you're the IT policy maker who allowed that to happen, and the shareholders are looking for who to sue.
We have one position where two people in a row resigned by standing up in the middle of a meeting and yelling "well then you can find somebody else to do this job" and walking out.
I think they've gone through three more people since then, although none of them have quit the company; we're a great company, it's just a particularly sucky position.
The first guy's wife still works here. I'm told they offered her the position, and she started laughing.
One more thing; if you resign with notice and they do allow you to continue working with privileged access, be extra sure to require documentation of all change requests, print that documentation out so it can't disappear after the fact, and document EVERYTHING you do double-carefully. Things break, and you'll be the first suspect.
You should be doing all of that anyway, but redouble your efforts.
Had they decided to get rid of you, they would likely not have given you two weeks' notice and let you continue your privileged level of access.
In the future, examine what happens with co-workers. If your company routinely gives workers a certain amount of notice upon termination, then give that same level of notice. Box up anything that might be controversial (CD-ROMs, books, hardware manuals) for which you can't prove ownership and take it home BEFORE you resign. When the day comes to turn in your resignation, make sure you've already made a copy of any personal data you intend to preserve; don't count on having even one second of access to even the least-secure systems. It's entirely possible that you'll be escorted from the building immediately.
If your new employer routinely waits until 5pm to tell an employee he's fired, and escorts him from the building the moment he's fired, then that's what you should do when you resign; box up your stuff, and when you're ready to go, walk into your manager's office and hand him your resignation letter.
If they're one of those crapholes that calls somebody at home and says "don't bother coming in ever again", then box all your crap up and take it home a day or two before you're going to quit, take all your vacation time, and then once you start your new job call them and say "oh, by the way, I quit." That way your insurance never has a gap.
Remember that if you list them as a previous employer and you go on a job interview, all they can tell your prospective employer is that you worked there when you said you did, and that your title was what you said it was. If you list someone as a REFERENCE, however, that person can say whatever he wants. So don't.
Also keep in mind differences in the law if your employer is not located in the US. I once worked for an Indian tribe, and we were not subject to US laws. We were free, for instance, to confirm previous employment for a terminated employee by saying "yes, he worked here, his title was systems operator, and we fired him because he was stealing crap out of the storeroom and downloading porn." I'm pretty sure he didn't get that job.
The reason this argument holds at all ("can't give money to an organization that prohibits free speech") is that you can imagine a situation where a government would sell, for instance, public land to some company to take care of it, with the government giving that company money because the government doesn't want to establish a beauracracy to take care of it. In this case, the government can, in effect, restrict speech by choosing a company which restricts speech.
:)
But it's legal for any private company to restrict speech, even if it receives some sources of government money. If you think your employer can't restrict free speech, run into the CEO's office and start yelling the f-word at him for a free lesson.
If the government doesn't require you to restrict speech in order to receive the money, it's not a government restriction of speech. The restriction of speech is incidental to the expenditure of tax dollars. If you restrict the tax money to the university because you don't like their policy on one aspect of speech, you are tacitly approving all the policies of every university to which you continue to give money. The law generally doesn't side with you on this kind of cherry-picking; you can create a liability for the government this way.
In other words, cut Marquette off over this, and somebody else could come along and sue you because some tiny State college in Oklahoma did the same thing and you didn't cut them off.
No, as all of those have specific requirements not involving the actual person to determine eligibility. There was no law passed specifically involving me (or anyone else). There's nothing in the law that sponsors people or organizations which restrict free speech.
In Marquette's case, there were laws specifically passed giving money to Marquette. There, there is direct sponsorship.
Ah, but if you use a law specifically directed at Marquette as the basis for punishing them, wouldn't that make it a Bill of Attainder, and thus unConstitutional?
I mean hell, D20 still has rules to let players roll their stats randomly. That's the ultimate anachronism.
Random character generators for Gurps abound on the web, because of the demand. People ask about random generation on the Hero Games forums, and get pointed to existing sites. Most other point-based systems include a section on random generation.
At the same time, d20 games include point-based character generation, and the official RPGA campaigns use it as the preferred method.
Are you arguing that a system is inferior based on the fact that it provides more features than another system?
In any event, superiority/inferiority isn't what we're discussing here; it's popularity. It's telling that you can't stick to that argument; it's because you know you're losing.
As for not needing classes; Gurps had to add templates because they discovered that classes were EASIER. If you define "do just fine" as "sell a tiny percentage of the marketplace", then yes, they "do just fine". But we aren't arguing whether or not a system is usable. We're arguing what's more popular, and why that's so.
You tell me why City of Heroes banged their heads against the point-based wall for months, before discovering that classes and levels were EASIER and switching to that. Nobody's arguing that classes and levels are "better" here in any specific terms except easier and more popular. You want to say they're less realistic? Fine, I agree with you. So what? The most "realistic" systems on the market are all made by Greg Porter, and you could probably fit every single book he's ever sold into the back of a smallish U-Haul. Why? Because his beautiful, remarkable, ground-breaking systems, including the ever-awesome CORPS, are harder to use than a simple d20 class-and-level-based system.
If he released d20 Timelords tomorrow it'd outsell every other product he's ever produced combined, except maybe 3G3.
Speaking of Porter, the d20 edition of Macho Women with Guns sells really well. I wonder how its sales compare with the previous editions? Mongoose certainly appears to have a lot more money these days than BTRC.
WotC is the Microsoft of the RPG industry. D&D has survived as-is for analogous reasons to Windows. Levels have no mre to do with D&D's survival than wallpapers have to do with Windows'.
Ok. Then explain why Palladium had a 7% share of the market in 2003 with their level-based games, and Steve Jackson had somewhere between 3% and 1%, but Mongoose (who makes level-based games) had 5%. They had significantly more sales than Steve Jackson, whose company is far more well-known than Mongoose and has had books in mainstream retailers since long before Mongoose existed.
Explain why gaming properties such as Prime Directive fail with a house-built system, fail again with Gurps, and then suddenly start getting traction when they switch to d20.
Look, I love Gurps. I love skill-based, point-based systems. I have more Hero Games stuff than anything else, and Gurps is a very close second. Hero and Gurps combined are the majority of my very extensive collection. Nevertheless, level-based systems dominate every gaming market. They're easy. It's easy to say "well, WotC Hasbro TSR blah blah blah", but it leaves out the fact that skill and point-based systems have been around for every bit as long as Dungeons and Dragons, yet they've never been able to dominate the market the way class and level-based systems have.
Name a major games publisher that doesn't produce a d20 product. If we define "major" low enough, I can think of one. They get a whole 1% of the market.
There is a reason for this, and it's not that Wizards of the Coast sprung fully-formed from the head of Zeus with a 43% share.
While there's nothing that prevents them from doing this, I think it's arguable that the Constitution might prevent the government from giving them more money.
Wouldn't that argument also be applicable to your Pell Grant? Medicare? Social Security?
Now, let's be fair; he may not have been incorrect when he said Enron set the bar for business ethics.
See, making your game more boring and work-like isn't a selling point. People play games to escape their boring lives, not collapse them into two dimensions.
Levels have survived because they're simple. That's why 30 years of RPG design experience have resulted in d20 games outselling everything else in the pen-and-paper world, and it's why all the most successful MMORPGs still have levels; even the ones created by fans of point-based, skill-based systems.
He's not saying Marquette can't speak ill of the government. He's saying Marquette cannot be discriminatory of other free speech.
And I'm saying they don't sign away their property and contract rights just because they accept money from the government, any more than you'd sign away YOUR rights just for accepting money from the government.
Taking a grant from the government does not automatically mean you sign away all your rights. Or do you feel that, for instance, the First Amendment doesn't apply to Social Security recipients? Or that any student who got a Pell Grant is forever forbidden to speak ill of the government?
The article's point isn't that it's not right to "fight the good fight". The point is that if you're going to do that, you should fight *A* good fight.
I wrote to the EFF about a legal problem I was having in 1998. Still awaiting their response.
It's "most", but nowhere near "all", and I know that Oklahoma recently dropped theirs.
In many states, there are metropolitan areas that require them, but the state as a whole does not.
without copyright you'd still have the right to copy GPL software.
No, actually, without copyright you've have basic contract law, and wouldn't be able to install any software on your PC that wasn't provided by the manufacturer or his licensees. The fact that copyright law has undergone some bad changes in the last 30 years doesn't negate the fact that the basic concept was a darn good one.
...then don't build a GPL house. Likewise, no one is forcing you to build web services with GPL code.
Congratulations; you have delineated succintly the approach that nearly every business in the world will be forced to take if the change we're discussing in fact occurs.
It'll be great for BSD, though.
I don't believe in copyright as I don't see how anyone can use Congress and the courts to enforce income on non-continuing work.
So, you violate the GPL, too? It's an implementation of, and enforced by, copyright law.
But if there WERE such things, then visitors should be allowed to copy the blueprints.
There is a stretch between "should be" and "...or they can sue me".
Maybe one of my modifications is hiding a gun safe, and I don't WANT to tell you where it is. Maybe one is installing mirrors in the ceiling of my bedroom, a stripper pole, handcuff rings on the wall, and a cubbyhole for storing a RealDoll, and I don't WANT to tell you all that.
Who says you have the right to pry into my personal modifications to my personal house just because I used a GPL blueprint to build it for my own personal use and not distribution?
If the .xxx domain is created, it will most likely serve no purpose whatsoever, except to be a new income stream for domain registrars.
If it were to be enforced and thus useful, however, it would instead require international enforcement of the lowest (in terms of freedom) common denominator of anti-free-speech laws. In other words, every participating country would be ensuring that the "community standards" of, say, Singapore, Saudi Arabia, and China were enforced on the web sites of, say, Sweden, France, the UK, Canada, the US, etc.
How dare the Bush administration take a stand against something so clearly progressive. *snort*
No, this is like saying if you come over to my house you can ask me for the blueprints and build a house just like mine which you can paint any color you like (and modify it in other ways).
No, it's like saying that the guy who built my house for me can force me to give you those blueprints, and the blueprints of any rooms I added myself, under penalty of civil action.
You can ASK me all you want; I don't have to say yes.
The question is are the users the web site administrator or the web site visitors. I think the argument could be made the users are the web site visitors, so they should have access to the code. They are operating the program, just that they are using a longer wire then your keyboard wire.
This is about like saying that if you come over to visit me in my house, you have the right to paint it.
Actually, there was an announcement, but they used their qubit to crack your ssh key in five seconds and deleted it from your email.
I would think that if the floating ice had rocks in or on it, it'd actually LOWER the water level when it melts, because the rocks would cause increased displacement due to the air trapped in the ice, which would rise above the water once the ice melted.