Re:How can a disc detect anything about the player
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Play DVDs On Linux
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Gee, nasty. It'd probably take me like 10 whole minutes to find the little piece of paper that tells me how to change the region on my Apex and change to region 1 for the movie. It would annoy me to no end and probably cause me to return the movie to the store and tell them it's defective and ask for my money back. I wonder if enough people will do that to make the stores complain to Hollywood?
I wonder if they'll design it to get some of the really big primary greenhouse gases...
like water vapor.
How can a disc detect anything about the player?
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Play DVDs On Linux
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· Score: 1
A disc is a storage medium containing data files, not a computer or analytical device. The player plays the data files. How the heck is a disc supposed to be able to do any sort of "detect" on the player and make any sort of determination on whether or not it wants to play?
Ya know, I remember being forced to learn the multiplication tables as a child and hating it. I had a perfectly good calculator and a perfectly good computer at home (and given that we're talking about 1979 or so that's actually saying something) and I saw no reason to waste my time memorizing something that I could get an answer to from a machine any time I might need it. My teachers told me I had to be able to do everything in my head or on paper because I wouldn't always have a calculator. I managed to refrain from telling them they're nuts because it stuck me as impolte, but I knew that if computers suddenly vanished from the earth I would probably not be around any more either.
And you know, looking back on it with 20+ years' perspective, I realize now that I was right. It was dumb to try to force me to memorize the multiplication tables. All it did was make me miserable, and I never learned them in school anyway. The answers eventually sunk into my head in daily life, but not for some years after my school tried to force them down my throat.
Moreover, I'm sure many of the kids who did submit and memorized all their multiplication tables like good do-bees are now among the many millions of people who professionally ask "would you like fries with that" and can't figure out correct change even with a computerized cash register to help them. People who can't add or subtract or multiply don't have the problem because they got to use a calculator in school - they have the problem because they don't think about anything.
"They made me do it in school and now they don't and everybody sucks because of it" isn't good logic. The school made me write with big uncomfortable pencils on cheap paper and didn't let me use a pen or bring my own decent paper. I remember what school was like 20 years ago... so I applaud my aunt and uncle for providing computers and word processing software to my kindergarden age cousins.
You know, your remarks both are offensive and show that you didn't pay attention.
What I said was, I was able to blow the client's socks off partially because I looked a good 10 years older than I actually was. So, I didn't change how they think of younger people, because I didn't tell them I was younger.
Calling me a liar is really rude and shows why you have to make your posts anonymously.
When I was 19 years old I was a technology consultant for a software developer. Three times a week I would fly to New York and spend the day teaching and installing my employer's product. My client was a major financial institution, and used the product I was installing and teaching about to manage legal compliance for funds of about $200 billion.
I was readily accepted, and the client absolutely loved my work and told my boss so very vocally. The primary reason for this was that I was able to act professional and remain calm and talk intelligently off the cuff in front of a group of people, and I knew my technology very well. The secondary reason was that I looked about 10 years older than I was.
On the other hand I was earning half of what my 30-ish coworkers (who did the same work) were making, and the boss told me bluntly that he wasn't going to pay me more because I was too young. Age discrimination is only illegal here if you're being discriminated against for being old.
I later had a job as director of systems administration at a consulting agency. I got glowing reviews and did a great job with a strong positve (and quite measurable) impact on the company's bottom line. Ultimately I became severely underpaid there too, and when I went and complained that I was making half of my market value, I was told that they knew that but they weren't going to pay me what I'm worth because I was too young and my older coworkers would resent it. I left.
The point of these stories is that a young person can do a great job and know all the right information and have all the right skills, but ultimately what often happens is a person in a position of power resents them because of their age and consequently steps on their career progress. And the only thing you can do about it if they're your boss is find a better job.
I'm sorry but there's no polite way to say this: that's one of the dumbest things I've ever heard.
The whole basis of your argument is that if we use the algorythm too often, we're giving too much incentive to hackers to break it. That's stupid. If the algorythm is sufficiently breakable that we can realistically believe it may be broken anytime soon, we shouldn't use it at all because it's obviously not safe enough.
Also, by only encrypting "a small proportion of our data", you effectively take everything important and hang a neon sign on it saying "This is the valuable stuff that we are afraid you might want to steal!" It's a big pointer to potential hackers to tell them what to look for. Why else do you think sites using SecureID get so many hack attempts? Applying abnormally high security to something (such as encrypting it when nothing else is encrypted) makes it just scream that it's a target.
I joined the ACLU a couple of years ago by giving them my $20. For this they gave me a t-shirt. Okay, I might have said "no thank you", and told them to keep the money, and I didn't even really like the t-shirt, but I decided it was a good thing to advertise that I think civil liberties are important so I wore it a few times.
Then the mail started.
Every week I'd receive a dozen or more pieces of mail... only one or so from ACLU, but many from liberal political organizations begging me for money.
I approved of most of these organizations. I would have cheerfully given almost all of them money. However, I didn't have any money.
Dozens, hundreds, perhaps even thousands of letters arrived over the next two years. In the end, I'm sure that while I gave $20 to ACLU, it ended up costing liberal political organizations in general far more than $20 to mail me all these fund raising solicitations. So, I felt that my contribution was a net negative for causes I approve of.
And no, I don't believe I was given the option not to have my address sold (or shared, whatever).
On this week in 1986, the steely eyed rocket scientists from Von Braun's vaunted Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama threw caution to the frigid January wind, pushing hard to light Challenger's candles, even though they knew the score.
NASA didn't know anything. Read Edward Tufte's books (I don't remember which one his section on the challenger is in, but he did cover the topic) and you'll see that NASA had no idea what they were dealing with.
They had all the information in front of them, and they didn't see what it meant because they hadn't graphed it properly. If they had just done a simple graph of burn-through vs. temperature on the tests of the boosters, they would have known quite well that there was an approximately 100% chance of an explosion. What kind of scientist collects all the numbers and examines them in random order and doesn't graph them?
NASA engineers are so detailed and precise that they crashed a Mars lander because one team was using metric and the other was using imperial units and they didn't bother to tell each other. Is it any wonder, knowing that, that the Challenger exploded?
I once had an employer (a consulting agency that did a lot of database processing) that decided they wanted to be rid of me but apparently realized firing me would piss off my coworkers because I was singlehandedly holding the network together. This lead to an interesting couple of weeks before they finally just gave up and fired me.
First they fired my assistant, which pissed me off immensely but didn't make me leave. Then they tried making vague implications to all my coworkers that I was psychotic, which merely got them laughed at. Then they tried to convince me that I was psychotic, which was surreal to say the least, but I wasn't buying it.
Then they accused me of falsifying my timecard, but I produced a log in which I had documented for each day not only how long I had worked but what I had done and why I had overtime every single day. They never admitted they had made up the accusation, but they stopped trying to use it as an excuse to get rid of me.
Then they accused me of doing poor quality work, so I produced memos from all the department heads saying what I wonderful job I was doing and how grateful they were that I had helped them to so substantially increase productivity in their departments.
Then they turned off my account on the server, which meant that as a systems administrator I couldn't do any work, and hoped I'd just *assume* I had been fired and leave. So I officially asked (in writing) if the disconnection of my account was intended to indicate that I was fired, which resulted in my boss throwing a screaming fit at me loud enough to send the whole staff running to the phones to call their headhunters, but no firing.
So I inquired politely what they would like me to do on company time, and was told to sit at my desk and do nothing, do not touch the server, do not do any work, do not read anything, do not talk to anyone. That got *awfully* boring quickly, so I wrote a memo to my boss in which I ever so politely pointed out that as he had rendered me unable to do any work, I was not creating any value for the company, and if he would like me to be able to do something to contribute I would need access to the server. Within an hour he fired me for "insubordination" for "ordering" him to give me access to the server. They gave me enough severance to buy a new suit and pay a few months rent, but it didn't matter because right after I put my resume out Harvard phoned to hire me for a contract job without an interview. (Always nice to have a job negotiation begin with "you're hired, can you start today", don't you think?)
As I was walking out the door I heard the scream of the alarm indicating the server's UPS shutting the server down due to overload because the boss had plugged a laser printer into it. (The manual specifically said not to do that...) I thought it fitting that the server I had built, which had never once gone down while I worked there, died as I walked out the door. I heard from former co-workers that a month later the boss had a nervous breakdown and had to give up computing forever and became a waiter in a coffee bar.
HP won't get too far with charging for stuff that's free now (like printer drivers) because it will annoy the hell out of users. The thing about printers is, it's hard to capture and keep market dominance, because "incompatibility" isn't an issue - I have little to fear about paper from my Epson printer being incompatible with your eyes which are used to HP printouts.
Sony has tried highly proprietary music formats before... and you see how prevalent the MiniDisc became. (It's actually a cute little technology and I know audiophiles who say nice things about it, but it's too expensive because it's proprietary...)
InitZero writes:
I take great pride in my ability to do my job well. When I put together a server, I will stand behind the work I've done. I'm responsible for
several mission-critical databases. If I have an hour of downtime between 18:00 and 01:00, there is a good chance that my newspaper will
miss publishing. We haven't missed a single newspaper in 124 years.
We won't miss a day on my shift. My systems will not be what causes us to break a 124-year 'uptime'.
Something else I thought of: If you are so vital to the company that if you're not available when something goes wrong the company will fail to be able to do business... you are too vital. Nobody should be irreplacable. What if you have a heart attack and die tonight at 10, and at 11 they need you? It's the company's responsibility to themselves to have redundancy.
InitZero writes:
I see a pager as a warranty. If you're not willing to be on-call 24/7 to stand behind your work, I'm not sure I want you working for me or with
me.
That may be reasonable for you in your organization, but my experience has been that most IT professionals in most organizations, when put on call, are abused terribly by idiots who don't know when the person should or should not be paged. I used to get paged EVERY SINGLE DAY and told "the printer is broken" and it *never* was and *no* amount of user education would take care of the problem. The staff knew that if they paged me I had to jump and make everything better for them, so they never bothered to think about anything, they just made me think for them. This has been true not only of myself but of many acquaintences and in many companies.
There is no excuse for a company expecting its workers to be "on call" and not paying them anything for it. Being on call is stressful and disruptive and the employee should expect to be compensated.
I have had employers who put me on call and given me a pager and it was invariably a nightmare, worse than you would imagine, worse than you'd believe. I did a writeup about it once and everyone thought it was made up as a joke.
There are two reasonable ways a company can deal with 24/7 service needs:
Raise the salaries of every person on call (by at least 10k-20k), plus pay them generously for each and every time they're paged - even if it's frivilous. I'm talking the moment that pager goes off the person gets a few hundred bucks, plus at least $100 an hour for any time past the first hour. Since you're seriously disrupting the person's life, you should damn well be compensating them handsomely for it.
Hire staff to staff the help desk 24/7 and nobody is ever on call and nobody carries a pager or cell phone for the company.
That's it. Nothing else will prevent serious abuse of the people.
Now, as for how you should react if the company demands to put you on call anyway:
Make sure you have Caller ID on every phone at home, so you can be "not home" during calls from the office when desired.
If you don't have a cell phone, refuse utterly to accept one because you're worried about the radiation giving you cancer. If you do have one, refuse utterly to give them the number on the basis that then you'd have to pay for the calls and your bill doesn't show who the incoming calls are from. (Sprint PCS and Voicestream both have this failing in their billing, among others.) If they push the issue, demand that they have to pay your *entire* cell phone bill because you can't separate your calls from theirs, and make sure you have a cell phone with Caller ID so you can (confidentially) just not answer calls from the office. Alternatively, make them pay for a whole new unit. I had one employer give up on trying to put me on call just because it galled them that I was going to make them pay for a new pager even though I already had one, because I wouldn't give them my pager number. (It did go as far as them threatening to fire me and me saying "go ahead" before they backed down.)
You're forgetful. You leave your pager on your desk all the time because you're not used to carrying it and it's uncomfortable sitting down with it on your belt. "Oops!"
Turn your pager off whenever you're out of the office and aren't willing to deal with being paged, such as during dinner, sex, etc. If they complain, tell them you're sorry but the pager didn't go off, it must have been out of range. If they demand to know where you were, get very angry because they have no right to scrutinize your private life. Believe me, if you don't get into the habit of turning it off when you're unwilling to deal with it, you will have no private life and you will go around hungry all the time.
When the pager battery dies, don't notice. When they bring it to your attention, make them provide new batteries. If they don't, go battery shopping on company time and expense the new batteries. I had one employer give up and take the pager back over this.
Every few months you will accidentally drop the pager/cell-phone in the toilet. "Darn, it fell off the clip again." Or, something heavy will fall on it and break the screen / it will get dropped / the baby tossed it out the car window and you didn't notice. Insist that it has to be replaced with the most expensive brand, because it's vital that they be able to page you with the actual problem description and the most expensive Motorola pager is obviously going to have better reception than brand X, right?
Mention at work that you've taken up jogging or hiking. If the pager goes off and you answer it but not right away, you were out hiking/jogging and you couldn't get to a phone quickly.
Think about it: We all know censorware doesn't work. It's only a matter of time before every state gets successfully sued over it. It will also drive a lot of legitimate users trying to do perfectly innocent things absolutely nuts. Think of the publicity.
Not to mention, of course, that we'd finally just get it over with. They're going to keep trying to do this until they do it. Maybe it's time we should let them do it and let it fail.
> but the best part of WAP is it works with
> existing networks.
This is obviously some interesting new usage of the word "best" I wasn't previously aware of.
WAP allows the carrier to use outdated technology to provide poor quality service. So, you can retrieve a WAP deck (WAP pages come in decks, like hypercard, which may be internally interlinked) and it can take 30 or more seconds to connect and then retrieve the deck. Then you hit a link that points outside of the deck, and guess what? Another 30 seconds to connect and retrieve the next deck.
I would much prefer a technology that requires the carrier to provide decent quality service.
If you feel that it really is a unique invention and is patentable, regardless of whether you believe it morally should be patented or not, it sounds like you've painted yourself into a corner and you have to sign or they could fire you or worse, sue you over it.
On the other hand, if you feel that it is not a unique new patentable invention and that there is prior art, you may wish to refuse to sign on the grounds that by signing the patent application you would be knowingly making a false declaration (that you believe it is a unique new patentable invention) to a federal government office (the patent office) and could consequently be jailed for perjury. The company might fire you, but you might be able to sue them over it. They would argue that you refused to give them rights to your invention per your contract, you would argue that there was no invention.
Bluntly, you got yourself into this situation when you signed the patent agreement. Having been through itellectual property disputes with past employers (one of them took some software I had developed at home with my personal computer and demanded I give them the source code so they could sell it after they found me using the binary on my machine in the office - I had wanted to release it under GPL but now nobody has it) I advise that in the future, if you don't want to get stuck in this sort of situation, don't sign those agreements.
I have not signed any intellectual property or nondisclosure agreements with my present employer, and I did tell my manager I did not want to sign an NDA provided by a client. (They produced a less restrictive NDA and I signed it.)
I think that's BS. If everybody takes the attitude of "gee, if I tell them they're wrong they might disagree with me and then they won't listen to me any more," we turn into a society of yes-men.
The thing to do is very simple. Place the screens so they face away from windows, put a sign on the door that indicates that the internet is in use inside, and that's it. If kids come in and see stuff, it's their parents' problem for letting them go in.
I recently had the pleasure of having a guest lecturer from Nokia in my workplace. He offered an interesting perspective on this topic.
Cell phone manufacturers hate the fact that they can produce nice GSM products that work anywhere in the world, but then they have to turn around and come up with CDMA and TDMA versions for the various wacky US cellular systems. They don't like the R&D costs to make the US versions of the equipment, they don't like the manufacturing costs of having to manufacture multiple versions of the equipment, and they don't like the long delays in being able to bring innovative technology to the US market. Also, some of the US cellular systems are so bad that they can't make some features available here, or if they do they work poorly. (For example, the long lag time it takes to retrieve a WAP/WML document over TDMA, as opposed to the short lag on GSM.)
So, given that the phone manufacturers would find it much less expensive and much better for marketing to be able to just use GSM everywhere, I expect that they will push hard for some GSM variant to become the global standard. (Which is to say, I think they will push hard for 3G to be implemented, and using primarily GSM-based technology.)
With my GSM phone, which cost only $70 and is smaller than a Motorola Star-Tac, I can send and receive email and make conference calls, and that's without WAP. It has, in the year and a half I have been on the GSM system, worked beautifully everywhere I happen to have traveled to. The sound quality is always superb, unless I find a spot that's a poor coverage area and it cuts out entirely. Why would I want anything else?
Slashdot Mirror
Gee, nasty. It'd probably take me like 10 whole minutes to find the little piece of paper that tells me how to change the region on my Apex and change to region 1 for the movie. It would annoy me to no end and probably cause me to return the movie to the store and tell them it's defective and ask for my money back. I wonder if enough people will do that to make the stores complain to Hollywood?
like water vapor.
A disc is a storage medium containing data files, not a computer or analytical device. The player plays the data files. How the heck is a disc supposed to be able to do any sort of "detect" on the player and make any sort of determination on whether or not it wants to play?
And you know, looking back on it with 20+ years' perspective, I realize now that I was right. It was dumb to try to force me to memorize the multiplication tables. All it did was make me miserable, and I never learned them in school anyway. The answers eventually sunk into my head in daily life, but not for some years after my school tried to force them down my throat.
Moreover, I'm sure many of the kids who did submit and memorized all their multiplication tables like good do-bees are now among the many millions of people who professionally ask "would you like fries with that" and can't figure out correct change even with a computerized cash register to help them. People who can't add or subtract or multiply don't have the problem because they got to use a calculator in school - they have the problem because they don't think about anything.
"They made me do it in school and now they don't and everybody sucks because of it" isn't good logic. The school made me write with big uncomfortable pencils on cheap paper and didn't let me use a pen or bring my own decent paper. I remember what school was like 20 years ago... so I applaud my aunt and uncle for providing computers and word processing software to my kindergarden age cousins.
What I said was, I was able to blow the client's socks off partially because I looked a good 10 years older than I actually was. So, I didn't change how they think of younger people, because I didn't tell them I was younger.
Calling me a liar is really rude and shows why you have to make your posts anonymously.
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought Katherine Harris was W's campaign manager, at least in Florida.
I was readily accepted, and the client absolutely loved my work and told my boss so very vocally. The primary reason for this was that I was able to act professional and remain calm and talk intelligently off the cuff in front of a group of people, and I knew my technology very well. The secondary reason was that I looked about 10 years older than I was.
On the other hand I was earning half of what my 30-ish coworkers (who did the same work) were making, and the boss told me bluntly that he wasn't going to pay me more because I was too young. Age discrimination is only illegal here if you're being discriminated against for being old.
I later had a job as director of systems administration at a consulting agency. I got glowing reviews and did a great job with a strong positve (and quite measurable) impact on the company's bottom line. Ultimately I became severely underpaid there too, and when I went and complained that I was making half of my market value, I was told that they knew that but they weren't going to pay me what I'm worth because I was too young and my older coworkers would resent it. I left.
The point of these stories is that a young person can do a great job and know all the right information and have all the right skills, but ultimately what often happens is a person in a position of power resents them because of their age and consequently steps on their career progress. And the only thing you can do about it if they're your boss is find a better job.
The original law you're thinking about is The Communications Act of 1930.
The whole basis of your argument is that if we use the algorythm too often, we're giving too much incentive to hackers to break it. That's stupid. If the algorythm is sufficiently breakable that we can realistically believe it may be broken anytime soon, we shouldn't use it at all because it's obviously not safe enough.
Also, by only encrypting "a small proportion of our data", you effectively take everything important and hang a neon sign on it saying "This is the valuable stuff that we are afraid you might want to steal!" It's a big pointer to potential hackers to tell them what to look for. Why else do you think sites using SecureID get so many hack attempts? Applying abnormally high security to something (such as encrypting it when nothing else is encrypted) makes it just scream that it's a target.
Then the mail started.
Every week I'd receive a dozen or more pieces of mail... only one or so from ACLU, but many from liberal political organizations begging me for money.
I approved of most of these organizations. I would have cheerfully given almost all of them money. However, I didn't have any money.
Dozens, hundreds, perhaps even thousands of letters arrived over the next two years. In the end, I'm sure that while I gave $20 to ACLU, it ended up costing liberal political organizations in general far more than $20 to mail me all these fund raising solicitations. So, I felt that my contribution was a net negative for causes I approve of.
And no, I don't believe I was given the option not to have my address sold (or shared, whatever).
NASA didn't know anything. Read Edward Tufte's books (I don't remember which one his section on the challenger is in, but he did cover the topic) and you'll see that NASA had no idea what they were dealing with.
They had all the information in front of them, and they didn't see what it meant because they hadn't graphed it properly. If they had just done a simple graph of burn-through vs. temperature on the tests of the boosters, they would have known quite well that there was an approximately 100% chance of an explosion. What kind of scientist collects all the numbers and examines them in random order and doesn't graph them?
NASA engineers are so detailed and precise that they crashed a Mars lander because one team was using metric and the other was using imperial units and they didn't bother to tell each other. Is it any wonder, knowing that, that the Challenger exploded?
First they fired my assistant, which pissed me off immensely but didn't make me leave. Then they tried making vague implications to all my coworkers that I was psychotic, which merely got them laughed at. Then they tried to convince me that I was psychotic, which was surreal to say the least, but I wasn't buying it.
Then they accused me of falsifying my timecard, but I produced a log in which I had documented for each day not only how long I had worked but what I had done and why I had overtime every single day. They never admitted they had made up the accusation, but they stopped trying to use it as an excuse to get rid of me.
Then they accused me of doing poor quality work, so I produced memos from all the department heads saying what I wonderful job I was doing and how grateful they were that I had helped them to so substantially increase productivity in their departments.
Then they turned off my account on the server, which meant that as a systems administrator I couldn't do any work, and hoped I'd just *assume* I had been fired and leave. So I officially asked (in writing) if the disconnection of my account was intended to indicate that I was fired, which resulted in my boss throwing a screaming fit at me loud enough to send the whole staff running to the phones to call their headhunters, but no firing.
So I inquired politely what they would like me to do on company time, and was told to sit at my desk and do nothing, do not touch the server, do not do any work, do not read anything, do not talk to anyone. That got *awfully* boring quickly, so I wrote a memo to my boss in which I ever so politely pointed out that as he had rendered me unable to do any work, I was not creating any value for the company, and if he would like me to be able to do something to contribute I would need access to the server. Within an hour he fired me for "insubordination" for "ordering" him to give me access to the server. They gave me enough severance to buy a new suit and pay a few months rent, but it didn't matter because right after I put my resume out Harvard phoned to hire me for a contract job without an interview. (Always nice to have a job negotiation begin with "you're hired, can you start today", don't you think?)
As I was walking out the door I heard the scream of the alarm indicating the server's UPS shutting the server down due to overload because the boss had plugged a laser printer into it. (The manual specifically said not to do that...) I thought it fitting that the server I had built, which had never once gone down while I worked there, died as I walked out the door. I heard from former co-workers that a month later the boss had a nervous breakdown and had to give up computing forever and became a waiter in a coffee bar.
Sun doesn't own Javascript: Netscape created it.
HP won't get too far with charging for stuff that's free now (like printer drivers) because it will annoy the hell out of users. The thing about printers is, it's hard to capture and keep market dominance, because "incompatibility" isn't an issue - I have little to fear about paper from my Epson printer being incompatible with your eyes which are used to HP printouts.
Sony has tried highly proprietary music formats before... and you see how prevalent the MiniDisc became. (It's actually a cute little technology and I know audiophiles who say nice things about it, but it's too expensive because it's proprietary...)
I have had employers who put me on call and given me a pager and it was invariably a nightmare, worse than you would imagine, worse than you'd believe. I did a writeup about it once and everyone thought it was made up as a joke.
There are two reasonable ways a company can deal with 24/7 service needs:
- Raise the salaries of every person on call (by at least 10k-20k), plus pay them generously for each and every time they're paged - even if it's frivilous. I'm talking the moment that pager goes off the person gets a few hundred bucks, plus at least $100 an hour for any time past the first hour. Since you're seriously disrupting the person's life, you should damn well be compensating them handsomely for it.
- Hire staff to staff the help desk 24/7 and nobody is ever on call and nobody carries a pager or cell phone for the company.
That's it. Nothing else will prevent serious abuse of the people.Now, as for how you should react if the company demands to put you on call anyway:
Not to mention, of course, that we'd finally just get it over with. They're going to keep trying to do this until they do it. Maybe it's time we should let them do it and let it fail.
Heck, if they knew what they were doing in the first place, they would have realized it's impossible and not bothered.
East German communist RAM?
> existing networks.
This is obviously some interesting new usage of the word "best" I wasn't previously aware of.
WAP allows the carrier to use outdated technology to provide poor quality service. So, you can retrieve a WAP deck (WAP pages come in decks, like hypercard, which may be internally interlinked) and it can take 30 or more seconds to connect and then retrieve the deck. Then you hit a link that points outside of the deck, and guess what? Another 30 seconds to connect and retrieve the next deck.
I would much prefer a technology that requires the carrier to provide decent quality service.
On the other hand, if you feel that it is not a unique new patentable invention and that there is prior art, you may wish to refuse to sign on the grounds that by signing the patent application you would be knowingly making a false declaration (that you believe it is a unique new patentable invention) to a federal government office (the patent office) and could consequently be jailed for perjury. The company might fire you, but you might be able to sue them over it. They would argue that you refused to give them rights to your invention per your contract, you would argue that there was no invention.
Bluntly, you got yourself into this situation when you signed the patent agreement. Having been through itellectual property disputes with past employers (one of them took some software I had developed at home with my personal computer and demanded I give them the source code so they could sell it after they found me using the binary on my machine in the office - I had wanted to release it under GPL but now nobody has it) I advise that in the future, if you don't want to get stuck in this sort of situation, don't sign those agreements.
I have not signed any intellectual property or nondisclosure agreements with my present employer, and I did tell my manager I did not want to sign an NDA provided by a client. (They produced a less restrictive NDA and I signed it.)
Loyalty.
Honor.
Respect.
Generosity.
Friendship.
Otherwise, I'd want one.
The thing to do is very simple. Place the screens so they face away from windows, put a sign on the door that indicates that the internet is in use inside, and that's it. If kids come in and see stuff, it's their parents' problem for letting them go in.
Cell phone manufacturers hate the fact that they can produce nice GSM products that work anywhere in the world, but then they have to turn around and come up with CDMA and TDMA versions for the various wacky US cellular systems. They don't like the R&D costs to make the US versions of the equipment, they don't like the manufacturing costs of having to manufacture multiple versions of the equipment, and they don't like the long delays in being able to bring innovative technology to the US market. Also, some of the US cellular systems are so bad that they can't make some features available here, or if they do they work poorly. (For example, the long lag time it takes to retrieve a WAP/WML document over TDMA, as opposed to the short lag on GSM.)
So, given that the phone manufacturers would find it much less expensive and much better for marketing to be able to just use GSM everywhere, I expect that they will push hard for some GSM variant to become the global standard. (Which is to say, I think they will push hard for 3G to be implemented, and using primarily GSM-based technology.)
With my GSM phone, which cost only $70 and is smaller than a Motorola Star-Tac, I can send and receive email and make conference calls, and that's without WAP. It has, in the year and a half I have been on the GSM system, worked beautifully everywhere I happen to have traveled to. The sound quality is always superb, unless I find a spot that's a poor coverage area and it cuts out entirely. Why would I want anything else?
-Tom