Does the amount they (will?) pay you even offset the time you spent on the case? Put another way, would you have made more or less money if you could have done photography instead of the legal work for those two years?
That's not the right comparison. The question is, "Is the total net loss you would have incurred going with an attorney less than the judgment minus your opportunity cost of doing photography instead of legal work for two years?"
When you are sued, you pay: one way or another. You're either doing it yourself (opportunity cost) or hiring an attorney. Given what you save by doing it yourself, and if you think an attorney could get you a judgment for more, hire him. Of course, the answer is almost always "hire an attorney" since you will likely lose when you represent yourself.
When you're an individual getting bullied by a company, the point is not to win as much money as you can--the point is to lose as little as you can.
Great post! Just observing the parents that I know, it sometimes seems like they grow some kind of reality-denial gene as soon as they give birth.
Their view: "TV goes off at 9:00--don't need you learning any swear words!" Reality: Billy's learning how to swear like a sailor from the kids at school.
Their view: "My 7 year old is going to have to wait until he's a teenager to play violent games!!" Reality: Johnny's over at his buddy's house every day after school playing Vice City.
Their view: "My daughter decided she's waiting until she gets married!!" Reality: Suzy is getting triple-penetrated in her dorm room, and the movie will be on the net in about an hour.
I've never heard more denial of reality than I do when talking to parents about their kids.
These were posted a while back buy some Slashdotter, and I thought they were awesome:
1. Every law automatically sunsets 10 years after it is passed, without exceptions. This means if it's important enough to be considered pertinent, you still have to keep passing it over and over to prove it.
2. Every law must be read aloud, IN FULL, to an open lawmaking session, before it can be passed. This prevents those 1000 page laws that contain millions of lines of loopholes and exceptions that no legislator could possibly read before signing off on.
If we enacted just these two rules (applying the sunset 10 years from today to all existing laws), we could fix a lot of what's wrong with the country today.
Oh? And how would you feel if a security expert was to go and find all of the security flaws of your house, and then offer to sell them to the highest bidder, as is essentially being done here?
I would feel like properly securing my house, for starters.
This word is used whenever the person selling you something that he claims in better in some nebulous way that he can't quite describe in detail. The speaker is almost certainly hiding the fact that either 1. there is nothing actually better about the "enhanced" thing, or 2. the "enhanced" thing is actually worse in some way.
The next time someone tells you something is "enhanced" ask him exactly HOW it's better. Details!
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children."
With respect to this being censorship -- well whether it is or not depends on whether the content is the deciding issue. If you break into my house and steal my diary, and a judge orders you not to print my diary, it's not censorship, because the issue here is ownership. If you anonymously mail the diary to my local paper, I can get an injunction against their publishing it.
Whether or not something is "censorship" has nothing to do with the content. Censorship is simply the act of erasing something that is deemed objectionable by someone else. It doesn't matter what the "thing" is, who is erasing it, or who "someone else" is.
You might argue that some kind of censorship, such as your diary example, is justifiable, but it is still censorship.
If the consumer was responsible for covering the cost him/herself they would be forced to price shop for different drugs and costs would drop dramatically.
I agree in general, but my reply was based on the grandparent poster's specific case:
"He was a fairly critical part of our sales team, a person who, if he disappeared, would certainly leave ripples in the water for the rest of us to deal with."
The mistake was providing someone no incentive to stay once they became a critical part of a team.
Java programmers are a dime a dozen - supply exceeds demand. People who *both* understand things at the transistor level, and can architect complex systems from scratch are in short supply. In your 50's, guess what - that's you! You've had the time to get experiences it's not possible to match in a few years out of school. The 50's and 60's are the peak of your career, and the peak of your earning potential as well.
Look at the salaries offered for "10+ years experience" programming positions. Pathetic. If people with these kinds of skills were truly in demand, they would be commanding salaries commensurate with the amount of experience they brought. Most "experienced" programming jobs out there barely scratch six figures, with no advancement and raises that barely keep up with inflation.
After 8 years doing kernel and application programming, I pretty much topped out my earning potential. I'm finishing up my MBA now and am not looking back. I would have loved to keep doing what I loved, but not for what a zero-experience entry-level investment banking analyst makes.
So, did he get that XXX dollars at the other company? Because if he did, then I wouldn't call what he did a mistake. Sounds like the mistake was made by your company's management.
4. justin_saunders asks: Many people consider you to be one of the best programmers in the game/graphics scene, based on your ability to keep pushing the limits of current PC hardware.
I was wondering what measures you use to gauge the skill of a programmer, and who, if anyone, you look up to and consider to be a "great" programmer.
John Carmack Answers: Like most things, it is difficult to come up with a single weighted sum of the value of a programmer. I prefer to evaluate multiple axis independently.
Programming is really just the mundane aspect of expressing a solution to a problem. There are talents that are specifically related to actually coding, but the real issue is being able to grasp problems and devise solutions that are detailed enough to actually be coded.
Being able to clearly keep a lot of aspects of a complex system visualized is valuable.
Having a good feel for time and storage that is flexible enough to work over a range of ten orders of magnitude is valuable.
Experience is valuable.
Knowing the literature is valuable.
Being able to integrate methods and knowledge from different fields is valuable.
Being consistent is valuable.
Being creative is valuable.
Focus is extremely important. Being able to maintain focus for the length of a project gets harder and harder as schedules grow longer, but it is critical to doing great work. (Side note - every time "focus" is mentioned now, I think of Vernor Vinge's "A Deepness in the Sky", currently my favorite SF novel)
I certainly respect the abilities of my primary competitors. Back in the DOOM days, Ken Silverman was extremely impressive, and today Tim Sweeny is producing much of value.
With the technology edge that we have in the USA, and the capacity to actually reduce our CO2 footprint, we should be SELLING credits, not buying them.
I've noticed that "common courtesy" is almost always defined by people who want to use it to tell other people what to do (or what not to do).
1: "Hay, don't use naughty words around my kid!" 2: "I'll swear whenever I want. Don't like it? Don't listen!" 1: "Well, not swearing in front of kids is 'common courtesy'. GOCHA!"
The controversial part is the fact that even though I am not in law enforcement, I somehow now have a legal obligation to do their job for them.
The scary part is that the general population, who are unskilled in determining what is and is not a crime, has a legal obligation to "turn other people in".
They would, however, be able to see where I'm going and even follow me if they so chose, and they could collect fingerprints and possibly DNA by checking items that I've touched along the way.
If an average person is able to do those things, why should I object to the fact that the police have the ability to do it as well (though pretty obviously not the resources)?
There is a BIG difference between watching/following a person and checking things out along the way, and watching EVERY person simultaneously, loading that data into a database, cross-referencing with employment, credit, banking, political and demographic data, and employing software algorithms to find "suspects" for further scrutiny.
If you don't see the difference, you should probably read more about life in totalitarian regimes.
Again, if your only problem is that they're not Americans, they can be easily made Americans with the stroke of a legislative pen, or by allowing them to go the legal way. But that's not really your problem with them.
But your problem really is that they were born on one side of the dotted line, and you were born on the other, and that PURELY because of this, you should have the opportunity to succeed and they should not. You should have the safety net of welfare and Medicare, god forbid something happens to you, but they should not. You think of America as some kind of exclusive, gated, golf course community where only the privileged few can get through the gate, and I think of it as a place where anyone who wants to work and get their hands dirty should have the opportunity to do so, regardless of what side of the line in the desert they were born.
I know lots of illegal immigrants. They vary in level of education and job skills, but all of them, like MY Irish ancestors, want to put down roots here, work hard, and enjoy the opportunities of this country. Unfortunately, UNLIKE my Irish ancestors, there is virtually no legal way they can do this these days. I would bet that many, if not most "illegals" would love to immigrate the legal way, if there was one.
OK, so I'll pose to you the same question I posed to the other guy: The problem is, they're "illegal." So, if they were all sent a form tomorrow saying "Sign this, and you're legally here" and they all did, you'd be fine with their existence (because they're now legal)?
So, let me get this straight: Your ONE AND ONLY problem with them is their legal status.
So, hypothetically, if they were all sent a form tomorrow saying "Sign this, and you're legally here" and they all did, you'd be fine with their existence (because they're now legal)?
Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Why don't you quit couching your obvious racism and nationalism with that "defend the borders against invasion" rhetoric, and just admit you only want your tax dollars to be spent educating fair-skinned people of European descent? So they crossed an imaginary line in the desert without getting some papers signed and stamped. You act like this is the most heinous of crimes ever committed anywhere in the history of the world.
Then there is the law that says a baby born in the US is automatically a citizen who can have its parents in the US to care for it.
Admittedly, I don't know your background, but something tells me that you're also a Citizen simply because you happened to have been born here. And unless you're Native American, all of your ancestors probably at one point crossed that precious border of yours, and had an easier time doing it than modern immigrants have.
Everyone knows that there will be further terrorist attacks on the U. S.
I love how this "fact" is just thrown out there and accepted as true, without giving a time frame. It's technically true, but utterly meaningless. Sure, somewhere between now and infinity years from now, there will be a "further terrorist attack". Great, I better prepare!
By casually using this talking point, you're promoting the irrational fear that you argue that you are trying to avoid.
The important questions, which get glossed over by things like the above declarative talking point, are "What is the likelihood of an attack within the next N, N+1, N+2... years?" and "What is the expected severity/method of such an attack, should it occur?" and "What is the likelihood that any given person will be affected?"
Slashdot Mirror
Does the amount they (will?) pay you even offset the time you spent on the case? Put another way, would you have made more or less money if you could have done photography instead of the legal work for those two years?
That's not the right comparison. The question is, "Is the total net loss you would have incurred going with an attorney less than the judgment minus your opportunity cost of doing photography instead of legal work for two years?"
When you are sued, you pay: one way or another. You're either doing it yourself (opportunity cost) or hiring an attorney. Given what you save by doing it yourself, and if you think an attorney could get you a judgment for more, hire him. Of course, the answer is almost always "hire an attorney" since you will likely lose when you represent yourself.
When you're an individual getting bullied by a company, the point is not to win as much money as you can--the point is to lose as little as you can.
Great post! Just observing the parents that I know, it sometimes seems like they grow some kind of reality-denial gene as soon as they give birth.
Their view: "TV goes off at 9:00--don't need you learning any swear words!"
Reality: Billy's learning how to swear like a sailor from the kids at school.
Their view: "My 7 year old is going to have to wait until he's a teenager to play violent games!!"
Reality: Johnny's over at his buddy's house every day after school playing Vice City.
Their view: "My daughter decided she's waiting until she gets married!!"
Reality: Suzy is getting triple-penetrated in her dorm room, and the movie will be on the net in about an hour.
I've never heard more denial of reality than I do when talking to parents about their kids.
These were posted a while back buy some Slashdotter, and I thought they were awesome:
1. Every law automatically sunsets 10 years after it is passed, without exceptions. This means if it's important enough to be considered pertinent, you still have to keep passing it over and over to prove it.
2. Every law must be read aloud, IN FULL, to an open lawmaking session, before it can be passed. This prevents those 1000 page laws that contain millions of lines of loopholes and exceptions that no legislator could possibly read before signing off on.
If we enacted just these two rules (applying the sunset 10 years from today to all existing laws), we could fix a lot of what's wrong with the country today.
Oh? And how would you feel if a security expert was to go and find all of the security flaws of your house, and then offer to sell them to the highest bidder, as is essentially being done here?
I would feel like properly securing my house, for starters.
Never, ever, trust the word "enhanced."
This word is used whenever the person selling you something that he claims in better in some nebulous way that he can't quite describe in detail. The speaker is almost certainly hiding the fact that either 1. there is nothing actually better about the "enhanced" thing, or 2. the "enhanced" thing is actually worse in some way.
The next time someone tells you something is "enhanced" ask him exactly HOW it's better. Details!
Especially if the "average" Internet user is a compromised zombie-box unknowingly spewing out 100,000 emails a minute.
If ISPs started charging for bandwidth, people might see a cost to having no security on their PC.
But, is it traditional to call a computer, a "rig"?
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children."
-Dwight D. Eisenhower
With respect to this being censorship -- well whether it is or not depends on whether the content is the deciding issue. If you break into my house and steal my diary, and a judge orders you not to print my diary, it's not censorship, because the issue here is ownership. If you anonymously mail the diary to my local paper, I can get an injunction against their publishing it.
Whether or not something is "censorship" has nothing to do with the content. Censorship is simply the act of erasing something that is deemed objectionable by someone else. It doesn't matter what the "thing" is, who is erasing it, or who "someone else" is.
You might argue that some kind of censorship, such as your diary example, is justifiable, but it is still censorship.
I think the vast majority of people, people who don't simply have $4,200 laying around, would prefer the $350 treatment.
If the consumer was responsible for covering the cost him/herself they would be forced to price shop for different drugs and costs would drop dramatically.
Try price shopping with a hemorrhaging liver.
I agree in general, but my reply was based on the grandparent poster's specific case:
"He was a fairly critical part of our sales team, a person who, if he disappeared, would certainly leave ripples in the water for the rest of us to deal with."
The mistake was providing someone no incentive to stay once they became a critical part of a team.
Java programmers are a dime a dozen - supply exceeds demand. People who *both* understand things at the transistor level, and can architect complex systems from scratch are in short supply. In your 50's, guess what - that's you! You've had the time to get experiences it's not possible to match in a few years out of school. The 50's and 60's are the peak of your career, and the peak of your earning potential as well.
Look at the salaries offered for "10+ years experience" programming positions. Pathetic. If people with these kinds of skills were truly in demand, they would be commanding salaries commensurate with the amount of experience they brought. Most "experienced" programming jobs out there barely scratch six figures, with no advancement and raises that barely keep up with inflation.
After 8 years doing kernel and application programming, I pretty much topped out my earning potential. I'm finishing up my MBA now and am not looking back. I would have loved to keep doing what I loved, but not for what a zero-experience entry-level investment banking analyst makes.
So, did he get that XXX dollars at the other company? Because if he did, then I wouldn't call what he did a mistake. Sounds like the mistake was made by your company's management.
This was asked before in a Slashdot interview of John Carmack (id Software lead programmer). Question 4:
4. justin_saunders asks:
Many people consider you to be one of the best programmers in the game/graphics scene, based on your ability to keep pushing the limits of current PC hardware.
I was wondering what measures you use to gauge the skill of a programmer, and who, if anyone, you look up to and consider to be a "great" programmer.
John Carmack Answers:
Like most things, it is difficult to come up with a single weighted sum of the value of a programmer. I prefer to evaluate multiple axis independently.
Programming is really just the mundane aspect of expressing a solution to a problem. There are talents that are specifically related to actually coding, but the real issue is being able to grasp problems and devise solutions that are detailed enough to actually be coded.
Being able to clearly keep a lot of aspects of a complex system visualized is valuable.
Having a good feel for time and storage that is flexible enough to work over a range of ten orders of magnitude is valuable.
Experience is valuable.
Knowing the literature is valuable.
Being able to integrate methods and knowledge from different fields is valuable.
Being consistent is valuable.
Being creative is valuable.
Focus is extremely important. Being able to maintain focus for the length of a project gets harder and harder as schedules grow longer, but it is critical to doing great work. (Side note - every time "focus" is mentioned now, I think of Vernor Vinge's "A Deepness in the Sky", currently my favorite SF novel)
I certainly respect the abilities of my primary competitors. Back in the DOOM days, Ken Silverman was extremely impressive, and today Tim Sweeny is producing much of value.
With the technology edge that we have in the USA, and the capacity to actually reduce our CO2 footprint, we should be SELLING credits, not buying them.
So where's the Howard family's web site?
I've noticed that "common courtesy" is almost always defined by people who want to use it to tell other people what to do (or what not to do).
1: "Hay, don't use naughty words around my kid!"
2: "I'll swear whenever I want. Don't like it? Don't listen!"
1: "Well, not swearing in front of kids is 'common courtesy'. GOCHA!"
The controversial part is the fact that even though I am not in law enforcement, I somehow now have a legal obligation to do their job for them.
The scary part is that the general population, who are unskilled in determining what is and is not a crime, has a legal obligation to "turn other people in".
They would, however, be able to see where I'm going and even follow me if they so chose, and they could collect fingerprints and possibly DNA by checking items that I've touched along the way.
If an average person is able to do those things, why should I object to the fact that the police have the ability to do it as well (though pretty obviously not the resources)?
There is a BIG difference between watching/following a person and checking things out along the way, and watching EVERY person simultaneously, loading that data into a database, cross-referencing with employment, credit, banking, political and demographic data, and employing software algorithms to find "suspects" for further scrutiny.
If you don't see the difference, you should probably read more about life in totalitarian regimes.
Again, if your only problem is that they're not Americans, they can be easily made Americans with the stroke of a legislative pen, or by allowing them to go the legal way. But that's not really your problem with them.
But your problem really is that they were born on one side of the dotted line, and you were born on the other, and that PURELY because of this, you should have the opportunity to succeed and they should not. You should have the safety net of welfare and Medicare, god forbid something happens to you, but they should not. You think of America as some kind of exclusive, gated, golf course community where only the privileged few can get through the gate, and I think of it as a place where anyone who wants to work and get their hands dirty should have the opportunity to do so, regardless of what side of the line in the desert they were born.
I know lots of illegal immigrants. They vary in level of education and job skills, but all of them, like MY Irish ancestors, want to put down roots here, work hard, and enjoy the opportunities of this country. Unfortunately, UNLIKE my Irish ancestors, there is virtually no legal way they can do this these days. I would bet that many, if not most "illegals" would love to immigrate the legal way, if there was one.
OK, so I'll pose to you the same question I posed to the other guy: The problem is, they're "illegal." So, if they were all sent a form tomorrow saying "Sign this, and you're legally here" and they all did, you'd be fine with their existence (because they're now legal)?
So, let me get this straight: Your ONE AND ONLY problem with them is their legal status.
So, hypothetically, if they were all sent a form tomorrow saying "Sign this, and you're legally here" and they all did, you'd be fine with their existence (because they're now legal)?
Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Why don't you quit couching your obvious racism and nationalism with that "defend the borders against invasion" rhetoric, and just admit you only want your tax dollars to be spent educating fair-skinned people of European descent? So they crossed an imaginary line in the desert without getting some papers signed and stamped. You act like this is the most heinous of crimes ever committed anywhere in the history of the world.
Then there is the law that says a baby born in the US is automatically a citizen who can have its parents in the US to care for it.
Admittedly, I don't know your background, but something tells me that you're also a Citizen simply because you happened to have been born here. And unless you're Native American, all of your ancestors probably at one point crossed that precious border of yours, and had an easier time doing it than modern immigrants have.
Everyone knows that there will be further terrorist attacks on the U. S.
I love how this "fact" is just thrown out there and accepted as true, without giving a time frame. It's technically true, but utterly meaningless. Sure, somewhere between now and infinity years from now, there will be a "further terrorist attack". Great, I better prepare!
By casually using this talking point, you're promoting the irrational fear that you argue that you are trying to avoid.
The important questions, which get glossed over by things like the above declarative talking point, are "What is the likelihood of an attack within the next N, N+1, N+2... years?" and "What is the expected severity/method of such an attack, should it occur?" and "What is the likelihood that any given person will be affected?"
Even if terrorists pulled off a 9/11 once every year or destroyed one shopping mall a week, your chances of actually dying in a terrorist attack are utterly miniscule. A rational person, when confronted with such numbers, should not be afraid.