I also have some personal experience in this, in that my company has jumped on the outsourcing bandwagon. My comment wasn't meant as India-bashing but rather referenced it since it 1) is the most common location for outsourcing (for now) and 2) is where my own company is outsourcing.
You're referring to a specific instance; I'm referring to a bigger picture. It's not just a group of programmers. Entire call centers, programming departments, support centers, quality assurance and other divisions are being moved, leaving little on the home front beyond executive management and sales.
The quality suffers as a result. Compaq's home computer division has long been disdained for the outsourced crap that it was, and that in the U.S. They didn't just up and haul to Bangalore; Compaq went to some call center company and gave on tech support, for example, has long been disdained them a bunch of scripts to read through. The call center companies neither screen nor judge their employees on technical abilities but rather on the number of calls they can get through per hour, every hour.
Outsourcing reduces communication between departments. Support should be able to contact Engineering, who should have a direct link to QA, all of whom need to be in touch with Sales because Sales inevitably overstates the abilities of software. And this is just an example in a computer-related firm.
Outsourcing is bad for morale. Everyone watches with trepidation as one department is outsourced and realises his or her department could be next. Of course, some don't want to see it. Most do, however, and as morale sinks, so does productivity, and as a result, gives management even more incentive to consider further outsourcing, something that can only affect the company negatively in the long run.
I was certainly not thrilled when my company first outsourced QA to Bangalore. I was rather pleased, however, when I saw that the Bangalore QA department actually hunted for -- and found -- many bugs. But they still lacked the direct contact to the Engineers and both the solutions and resolution times for these bugs -- when they came -- reflected this.
You write off salary and insurance -- these are basic concepts to long-term commitments. I'm a lot less willing to go to my company's competitor if my company has been taking care of me. They haven't and they know it, but they've judged the risk of losing me to be less than the cost of providing those things which would guarantee my staying loyal based on my position and not my specific work. I'm the only employee in all of Europe, Western Asia and Africa who understands and can work with Eastern Asian languages, Unicode and how our software works with them. When I leave they're screwed, despite a Japanese office. They don't see that because they only pay attention to the quarterly returns and general position numbers. My manager sees it as does his, but once it gets to senior management, it's lost, and nothing any other manager sees can change this. the bottom line is the quarterly result.
Companies are paying too much attention to "investor return" and ignoring the fact that most "investors" are only longer-term arbitrageurs. They're buying and selling stock over months, weeks, days... even a matter of hours. They're not investors who care about the long-term viability of a company. They're there for a quick buck. they won't support a companys attempts to remain viable over the long term -- to become a blue chip.
We've seen many of these short-term companies sell off, sell out and screw everyone left holding the Old Maid card already. So why do companies keep doing this? Their officers have loads of stock options and so need to do everything possible to keep the price up at the end of each quarter when they themselves cash out.
Most outsourcing is done through intermediaries and the outsourced workers themselevs are classified as "contractors". These people realise the disposable nature of their positions and are themselves worried about their jobs disappearing to even cheaper countries such as the Philippines. There is no job security and no loyalty to the company. There is no incentive to work harder or find ways to help the company. There is only the desire to get as much out of the employer as possible, in the shortest time possible, and to find a new employer while still being paid by the old one.
Considering this, can the short-term financial gains really offset the long-term benefits a loyal and motivated workforce provide?
The only thing on that page remotely similar to a "contest" is getting people to send in "the most outrageous" 419 spams. What are the criteria? What makes one more "outrageous" than another?
Here's a contest: how fast can the New York Consumer Protection Board's mail server be taken down? I figure if just 50 of us rewrite a few procmail rules, we're bound to win both contests. There's no limit on the number of entries.
Come on! This is New York! The Consumer Protection Board should be publicising links to 419eater.com. There's even a Scammer Baiting Hints and Tips page. If just a small percentage of the NYC population started trolling these scammers, the Nigerian crap would be over. Is anyone worried about being $rtbl'd by them?
The pilot was not found guilty for the flight manouevres themselves. He was acquitted because the cables weren't on his map, because the jet's altitude-gauging equipment malfunctioned and because an optical illusion made him think he was flying higher than he was. These are all things every pilot understands: if it ain't on the map, it doesn't exist, and there are land formations that cause optical illusions of height and distance. Sadly, the cable car was on the Italian military air map but not on the one from the Pentagon.
What he was nailed for was the disappearance of a videotape filmed by his navigator.
In this case, there would most definitely have been a show trial in Italy, although the appeals would probably have eventually, quietly resulted in acquittal. Probably. However, under NATO rules, the U.S. already had jurisdiction by treaty.
That depends on whether the U.S. wanted to try him first for committing the crime on American soil.
Imagine that Joe Cracker is an American who hacks BritBank from his home in Wisconsin. He's committed a crime in two countries. Britain wants him and files for extradition. The US DOJ wants another headline-grabbing case. Realistically, DOJ would probably try Joe in US courts and upon conviction, send him over for trial in the UK on the condition that he be returned to the US to serve his US jail term, after which he'd be shipped to the British prison if they wanted.
It changes a little if Joe Cracker is a British citizen. The US may be more willing to let the British courts have him and simply deport him, saving the troublesome extradition hearings.
Consider a much more realistic and historical case: Gary Lauck, prime producer and shipper of neo-Nazi material to Europe. He's an American citizen who shipped the stuff to, among other countries, Germany, where it's illegal. Germany filed for extradition and the U.S. steadfastly refused on the grounds he had broken no U.S. law. He couldn't be nailed for the content due to First Amendment and he couldn't be nailed on Postal charges because, while illegal in the recipient country, there was nothing fraudulent or illegal about his shipping the materials in general.
Germany finally did get hold of him when he went to Denmark. Seem El Fuhrerito forgot about the EU and that if Germany had a warrant that Denmark would honour it. The U.S. didn't fight this, but only because the entire process took place after Lauck had voluntarily left U.S. soil.
In 1984, the World Court ordered the U.S. to respect Nicaragua's borders and to halt the mining of its harbors by the CIA. In 1986, the World Court found our country guilty of violations
of international law through its support of the Contras and ordered the payment of reparation to Nicaragua. Needless to say, we ignored both of those rulings.
Now, we must affirm that the United States will not cede its sovereignty to an institution which claims to have the power to override the United States legal system and to pass judgment on our
foreign policy actions. We must refuse to allow our soldiers and Government officials to be exposed to trial for promoting the national
security interests of the United States and deny the international court's self-declared right to investigate, prosecute, convict, and punish U.S. citizens for supposed crimes committed on American soil which is arguably unconstitutional.
[Emphasis mine]
The U.S. steadfastly refuses to play by its own rules, much less anyone else's.
Various forms of space art have already explored the concepts and while they haven't used them specifically advertise, they already use reflectivity and the blackness of space outside the atmosphere so that the works can be seen.
It wasn't a redirect. They used Pusher Robots for/. referrals to push us off their server and then Bumping Robots to bump us over to goatse (R.I.P.), protecting themselves from the Terrible Secret of Slashdotting.
While Red Hat may have ended desktop support, Novell/SuSE won't. Why? Because they need an edge. Novell need a reason to attract the big customers and they've already been saddled with SuSE's win in Munich. While Novell's networking and file system have survived by the skin of its teeth, they don't have much more to offer in the way of enterprise OS solutions
It's in Novell's best interest to not only work on the desktop but also to keep the development community's support so that they can sell a back-end solution and have a workable front-end solution to go along with it.
Novell is perched on the ultimate irony here, taking customer after customer from Microsoft with better software, systems and solutions. But they need a desktop which can provide the standard desktop tasks. They won't be able to do this alone. While Novell can't invest as much time and money in Linux as IBM can, they're also not a stupid company and must realise they need us more than we want them.
While I have no problem in moving to debian and Mandrake as the primary "Free Software" home and desktop platforms, SuSE is still our friend, and the best fiend to KDE/K_app. Working with Novell's oversight shouldn't yet scare anyone away.
In other words, like many religious folk, the Linux-loving crunchies in the open-source movement are a) convinced of their own righteousness, and b) sure the whole world, including judges, will agree.
Linux will turn out not to be the savior everyone thinks. Customers will begin to realize that IBM...doesn't "give" you "free" Linux--unless you pay through the nose for hardware and services. Someone might notice that it's been 10 years since Linus Torvalds created Linux and there's still not a decent desktop version that an ordinary person can use. Someone also might notice that Red Hat's...sales aren't growing very much, and that the company only shows a profit when it fiddles the numbers around into an "adjusted" basis, not when it follows GAAP rules.
This is the same Dan Lyons who attacked Michael Moore's film on the basis that the bank doesn't provide the gun on the spot, something which Moore himself has been able to back up.
If you really know him, tell him to give me a holler. I'm available through the E-Mail listed here as well as the address I gave Forbes (along with my real name). He can do an easy search on the text since what I posted here is my Letter to the Editor verbatim.
Hence my letter to the editor at Forbes, with the headline "One-sided outrage?":
Where's Mr Lyons' outrage at the Gestapo-like tactics of Micrsoft's and the BSA's software license enforcement? The city of Virginia Beach had to waste the time of 50 employees and ended up paying $129,000 for software they'd already paid for but couldn't match up the paperwork. Microsoft tries for force its resellers to act as their licensing police and turn in their customers who may or may not be fully compliant.
Closed-source software licenses boil down to "You have no rights to source code, no rights to fix or modify the software in any way, no rights to use the software in any way the licensor doesn't approve of and no rights to incorporate it in any other works. You have no recourse if the software doesn't work and you have no right of first sale."
In contrast, the GPL boils down to: "Here's the source code. You can use it if you want but then you must make it and your derivatives based on it available to the public. If you don't agree to these terms, you can write the entire code yourself."
Another firm has been caught stealing software and violating licensing terms but in this case, enforcing the software license is somehow bad. Comrade, indeed. I should just ignore some company stealing and using my code as their own.
IBM and Oracle, among others, understand how to work on and with Linux. They sell proprietary software which runs on Linux and many other platforms. In order to keep their source code closed, they write much of their own interface code rather than incorporating the work of others which would then force them to open their own under the licensing agreements. At the same time, IBM has more than 100 programmers actively writing open source code for Linux. One division of IBM can't use the work of another division because of the licensing concerns, and IBM has no problem with this. Lyons does, somehow.
Cisco paid $500 million for Linksys. Which part of the sale gives them the right to ignore all previous contractual obligations? The phrase is "due diligence", and Forbes has had quite a bit to say about this in the past (e.g., http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2000/1030/6612184s1.h tml).
That Forbes sees fit to publish this sort of irresponsible, Microsoft party-line FUD is the reason I let my subscription lapse a few years ago.
The one thing McBride does explain well (most likely after a lot of prompting from his lawyers) is a reason for not presenting the offending lines: by publicly exposing these "trade secret" lines, he removes the secrecy. This is correct. It's also flawed, as explained in the Halloween IX document, which repeatedly hammers home the point that the code was available for educational review and is thus not a secret.
McBride probably believes this point though, and he has to, otherwise his case falls apart and he opens the company -- and himself personally -- to all sorts of abuse and contempt charges.
He spouts the same McDonald's crap as seen in Halloween IX, but strangely enough, no "protestor" mentioned that the only McD use of SCO is in the cash registers, which have less power than my non-hacked, Palm023.1 Palm III handheld, which I use more than my iPAQ. This is OpenServer, which was once Microsoft Xenix. McDonald's is not using SCO in their datacenters, just in their cash registers.
McBride throws out the "high-scalability" buzzwords and is never correctly challenged by these "protestors", most of whom by their questions and responses appear to be anti-globalisationalists waiting for the next G-8 summit. Great questions from them included:
"Have you ever read the GNU Public License?"
[Answer: (13:30) "Sure", followed by change of subject due to cop.]
"...Do you hope that the Linux kernel is completely free of any violations whatsoever?"
[Answer: (16:22) "Sure", followed by change of subject due to another "protestor's" question.
Authors' and Readers' Rights
on
Ask Neil Gaiman
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Neil,
Comics can be hard to find. They're a lot harder to find in non-target countries -- countries where the primary language is something other than English. So are TV shows that I would love to watch, but can't receive and even if I could, only overdubbed. But that's straying from the point, that being, that there was only one way I could see Sandman or Neverwhere or Pratchett's Wyrd Sisters: downloading.
They were great. And I've since bought Neverwhere and Wyrd Sisters when I was able to. But I didn't buy them first, and I didn't have to. I could probably find The Wolves in the Walls on USENET and download it tomorrow if I were so inclined.
I won't use Amazon for privacy reasons and getting bookstores here to order English books can be a tortuous process. Had I not downloaded, I might never have known known the films even existed. I also couldn't have read Sandman.
Regardless of whether or not I later bought the works, did I steal from you when I downloaded the Neverwhere series? I'm interested in your answer, not your publishers', whose opinions are terribly clear.
Does it change anything if you know that I've bought an awful lot of your books, from Hitchhiker's Companion to Smoke & Mirrors? Does it change anything that I may have bought the works only after having seen them, making you somewhat a virtual busker?
Waiting until the end of time, if necessary, for a Neverwhere sequel,
And you've never actually worked as a server there. There are about 10,000 guests in each tent, being served by about 50-80 women who have to carry up to a dozen freshly-filled 1-liter mugs (Maßkruüge), each weighing in at 2.2kg. Calm down and wait your turn. Maybe if you tried tipping more than the 12 cents to round it up to the next full euro you'd get better service.
This advice on Oktoberfest bears repeating:
Put your butt on a bench and they'll bring you a beer. You will NOT be served at Oktoberfest unless you are seated. Everyone will let you sit down for the two or three minutes necessary to order a beer if you ask nicely and tell them that's what you're doing.
Tourists go to the HB (Hofbräuhaus); the best beer is Augustiner.
To be sure to get faster service, fuller beer steins and better food, tip 15% or more. The women work HARD (and if you had to listen to the "Hey, Baby" song 3 times an hour, 13 hours a day for 2 1/2 weeks straight, you'd understand).
I don't need a mug that tells the staff I need another beer; I need one that tells me I don't!
Larry Ellison begged the world to break Oracle. They spent millions buying up the backs of every business magazine and full pages in serious and financial newspapers claiming it was "unbreakable". They specifically said that no hacker could get into it. Real hackers and crackers have always said they do it for the challenge. What better way to provide a challenge than to spend tens of millions in order to yell, "C'mon, you weenies! I dare you!"
Microsoft also got hit a lot harder every time they claimed some semblance of security. They've learned their lesson, albeit slowly. Now they only claim to be working on improving security, considerably different than Larry's claims.
Who was connected at the time IPs were handed out? The Chinese? How were Chinese relations at the time? Doesn't everything in China still go through central firewalls? Can't they keep expanding NAT at more local levels?
Mainly the U.S. - - No. - - Less than stellar. - - Yes. - - Yes.
You've never tried to get a cab when it's raining. Or on New Years' Eve, when you have to pay them at least a $20 pick-up fee just to get them to let you in the cab.
Maybe you're confusing Manhattan with Queens and Brooklyn and all those "black cabs" -- Cadillacs and Ford LTDs with no meters: you have to haggle and agree on the price in advance or get totally screwed when you arrive. Similar to London, these "unlicensed" cabs can't be hailed on the streets in Manhattan; they can only be called on the phone or booked in advance. With all the foot cops and the yellow cab drivers ready to nail 'em, they're rarely dumb enough to try it. But they never stop honking their horns at you on the other side of the bridges.
this should make frantic arm waving to get their attention a thing of the past
It's been decades since the London fog was so bad that you would need GPS to flag down a cab. They can see you on the streets. You're the tourist dressed wearing the Princess Di T-shirt with an overpriced camera around your neck jumping and waving frantically.
A GPS signal might help them find you when you can't tell them where you are, which, for most non-Londoners (and many residents), is quite common, but it ain't about to replace flagging down the cab that you can see driving down the street.
Parody of trademarks as well as copyrighted material is normally protected, but there are cases where it is not. This article describes threee cases where the pardy was found unprotected. The most relevant of the three is Mutual of Omaha Insurance Co. v. Novak, 231 U.S.P.Q. 963 (D. Neb. 1986). Now 1986 came long before a load of the IP-silliness.
The guts of the case: a guy made a "political statement" and did a "Mutant of Omaha" design, offering "Nuclear Holocaust Insurance" (it was the Cold War, kiddies, and Reagan was in the White House).
In addition, the creator parodied the MoO Indian head trademark and was selling these designs on T-shirts, caps and coffee mugs. The District Court for the District of Nebraska found in favour of MoO, and the Eighth Circuit affirmed.
If there is nothing for sale, First Amendment arguments have a much stronger considerations. Even pure political messages don't carry enough weight. But parody is not a guarantee of protection, despite a long tradition of it in American society.
Jeez... it took all of a minute searching through the forum (linked in the story) to find it. And it turned out to be an AOhelLer who managed to post it correctly, rather than an IMG SRC= tag back to the original.
They don't.. With a market cap of $5.1B and operating losses of $8M in Q4 2002 (and $45M in Q3), they're not in the best of condition. However, they have cash of about $4.4B, and their market cap and position is large enough to be able to get banks to deal.
It would take a couple days and many pages to write up the details about why this could happen. Expect that they won't take Universal lock, stock and all the debt -- this will be done in a nasty way which screws a lot of creditors. Universal may be split into the more profitable bits and left with the debt-ridden bits, which would then be spun off and left to file Chapter 11 and later dissolved.
Just 'cause they're "cool" and not MS doesn't make Apple stupid in business. They've survived this long...
Slashdot Mirror
You're referring to a specific instance; I'm referring to a bigger picture. It's not just a group of programmers. Entire call centers, programming departments, support centers, quality assurance and other divisions are being moved, leaving little on the home front beyond executive management and sales.
The quality suffers as a result. Compaq's home computer division has long been disdained for the outsourced crap that it was, and that in the U.S. They didn't just up and haul to Bangalore; Compaq went to some call center company and gave on tech support, for example, has long been disdained them a bunch of scripts to read through. The call center companies neither screen nor judge their employees on technical abilities but rather on the number of calls they can get through per hour, every hour.
Outsourcing reduces communication between departments. Support should be able to contact Engineering, who should have a direct link to QA, all of whom need to be in touch with Sales because Sales inevitably overstates the abilities of software. And this is just an example in a computer-related firm.
Outsourcing is bad for morale. Everyone watches with trepidation as one department is outsourced and realises his or her department could be next. Of course, some don't want to see it. Most do, however, and as morale sinks, so does productivity, and as a result, gives management even more incentive to consider further outsourcing, something that can only affect the company negatively in the long run.
I was certainly not thrilled when my company first outsourced QA to Bangalore. I was rather pleased, however, when I saw that the Bangalore QA department actually hunted for -- and found -- many bugs. But they still lacked the direct contact to the Engineers and both the solutions and resolution times for these bugs -- when they came -- reflected this.
You write off salary and insurance -- these are basic concepts to long-term commitments. I'm a lot less willing to go to my company's competitor if my company has been taking care of me. They haven't and they know it, but they've judged the risk of losing me to be less than the cost of providing those things which would guarantee my staying loyal based on my position and not my specific work. I'm the only employee in all of Europe, Western Asia and Africa who understands and can work with Eastern Asian languages, Unicode and how our software works with them. When I leave they're screwed, despite a Japanese office. They don't see that because they only pay attention to the quarterly returns and general position numbers. My manager sees it as does his, but once it gets to senior management, it's lost, and nothing any other manager sees can change this. the bottom line is the quarterly result.
Companies are paying too much attention to "investor return" and ignoring the fact that most "investors" are only longer-term arbitrageurs. They're buying and selling stock over months, weeks, days... even a matter of hours. They're not investors who care about the long-term viability of a company. They're there for a quick buck. they won't support a companys attempts to remain viable over the long term -- to become a blue chip.
We've seen many of these short-term companies sell off, sell out and screw everyone left holding the Old Maid card already. So why do companies keep doing this? Their officers have loads of stock options and so need to do everything possible to keep the price up at the end of each quarter when they themselves cash out.
Considering this, can the short-term financial gains really offset the long-term benefits a loyal and motivated workforce provide?
Here's a contest: how fast can the New York Consumer Protection Board's mail server be taken down? I figure if just 50 of us rewrite a few procmail rules, we're bound to win both contests. There's no limit on the number of entries.
Come on! This is New York! The Consumer Protection Board should be publicising links to 419eater.com. There's even a Scammer Baiting Hints and Tips page. If just a small percentage of the NYC population started trolling these scammers, the Nigerian crap would be over. Is anyone worried about being $rtbl'd by them?
What he was nailed for was the disappearance of a videotape filmed by his navigator.
In this case, there would most definitely have been a show trial in Italy, although the appeals would probably have eventually, quietly resulted in acquittal. Probably. However, under NATO rules, the U.S. already had jurisdiction by treaty.
Imagine that Joe Cracker is an American who hacks BritBank from his home in Wisconsin. He's committed a crime in two countries. Britain wants him and files for extradition. The US DOJ wants another headline-grabbing case. Realistically, DOJ would probably try Joe in US courts and upon conviction, send him over for trial in the UK on the condition that he be returned to the US to serve his US jail term, after which he'd be shipped to the British prison if they wanted.
It changes a little if Joe Cracker is a British citizen. The US may be more willing to let the British courts have him and simply deport him, saving the troublesome extradition hearings.
Consider a much more realistic and historical case: Gary Lauck, prime producer and shipper of neo-Nazi material to Europe. He's an American citizen who shipped the stuff to, among other countries, Germany, where it's illegal. Germany filed for extradition and the U.S. steadfastly refused on the grounds he had broken no U.S. law. He couldn't be nailed for the content due to First Amendment and he couldn't be nailed on Postal charges because, while illegal in the recipient country, there was nothing fraudulent or illegal about his shipping the materials in general.
Germany finally did get hold of him when he went to Denmark. Seem El Fuhrerito forgot about the EU and that if Germany had a warrant that Denmark would honour it. The U.S. didn't fight this, but only because the entire process took place after Lauck had voluntarily left U.S. soil.
woof.
The US wouldn't accept it.
The U.S. steadfastly refuses to play by its own rules, much less anyone else's.woof.
Various forms of space art have already explored the concepts and while they haven't used them specifically advertise, they already use reflectivity and the blackness of space outside the atmosphere so that the works can be seen.
It wasn't a redirect. They used Pusher Robots for /. referrals to push us off their server and then Bumping Robots to bump us over to goatse (R.I.P.), protecting themselves from the Terrible Secret of Slashdotting.
PAK CHOOIE UNF!
It's in Novell's best interest to not only work on the desktop but also to keep the development community's support so that they can sell a back-end solution and have a workable front-end solution to go along with it.
Novell is perched on the ultimate irony here, taking customer after customer from Microsoft with better software, systems and solutions. But they need a desktop which can provide the standard desktop tasks. They won't be able to do this alone. While Novell can't invest as much time and money in Linux as IBM can, they're also not a stupid company and must realise they need us more than we want them.
While I have no problem in moving to debian and Mandrake as the primary "Free Software" home and desktop platforms, SuSE is still our friend, and the best fiend to KDE/K_app. Working with Novell's oversight shouldn't yet scare anyone away.
woof.
If you really know him, tell him to give me a holler. I'm available through the E-Mail listed here as well as the address I gave Forbes (along with my real name). He can do an easy search on the text since what I posted here is my Letter to the Editor verbatim.
woof.
McBride probably believes this point though, and he has to, otherwise his case falls apart and he opens the company -- and himself personally -- to all sorts of abuse and contempt charges.
He spouts the same McDonald's crap as seen in Halloween IX, but strangely enough, no "protestor" mentioned that the only McD use of SCO is in the cash registers, which have less power than my non-hacked, Palm023.1 Palm III handheld, which I use more than my iPAQ. This is OpenServer, which was once Microsoft Xenix. McDonald's is not using SCO in their datacenters, just in their cash registers.
McBride throws out the "high-scalability" buzzwords and is never correctly challenged by these "protestors", most of whom by their questions and responses appear to be anti-globalisationalists waiting for the next G-8 summit. Great questions from them included:
Not much to see here. Move along...The Courts
UNIX
Software
Businesses
Operating Systems
News
Thank you sir! May I have another?
Comics can be hard to find. They're a lot harder to find in non-target countries -- countries where the primary language is something other than English. So are TV shows that I would love to watch, but can't receive and even if I could, only overdubbed. But that's straying from the point, that being, that there was only one way I could see Sandman or Neverwhere or Pratchett's Wyrd Sisters: downloading.
They were great. And I've since bought Neverwhere and Wyrd Sisters when I was able to. But I didn't buy them first, and I didn't have to. I could probably find The Wolves in the Walls on USENET and download it tomorrow if I were so inclined.
I won't use Amazon for privacy reasons and getting bookstores here to order English books can be a tortuous process. Had I not downloaded, I might never have known known the films even existed. I also couldn't have read Sandman.
Regardless of whether or not I later bought the works, did I steal from you when I downloaded the Neverwhere series? I'm interested in your answer, not your publishers', whose opinions are terribly clear.
Does it change anything if you know that I've bought an awful lot of your books, from Hitchhiker's Companion to Smoke & Mirrors? Does it change anything that I may have bought the works only after having seen them, making you somewhat a virtual busker?
Waiting until the end of time, if necessary, for a Neverwhere sequel,
This advice on Oktoberfest bears repeating:
I don't need a mug that tells the staff I need another beer; I need one that tells me I don't!woof.
Microsoft also got hit a lot harder every time they claimed some semblance of security. They've learned their lesson, albeit slowly. Now they only claim to be working on improving security, considerably different than Larry's claims.
woof.
The Chinese?
How were Chinese relations at the time?
Doesn't everything in China still go through central firewalls?
Can't they keep expanding NAT at more local levels?
see here before modding as Troll.
Damned lameness filter always ruinging a good joke.
Maybe you're confusing Manhattan with Queens and Brooklyn and all those "black cabs" -- Cadillacs and Ford LTDs with no meters: you have to haggle and agree on the price in advance or get totally screwed when you arrive. Similar to London, these "unlicensed" cabs can't be hailed on the streets in Manhattan; they can only be called on the phone or booked in advance. With all the foot cops and the yellow cab drivers ready to nail 'em, they're rarely dumb enough to try it. But they never stop honking their horns at you on the other side of the bridges.
It's been decades since the London fog was so bad that you would need GPS to flag down a cab. They can see you on the streets. You're the tourist dressed wearing the Princess Di T-shirt with an overpriced camera around your neck jumping and waving frantically.
A GPS signal might help them find you when you can't tell them where you are, which, for most non-Londoners (and many residents), is quite common, but it ain't about to replace flagging down the cab that you can see driving down the street.
As soon as you say "embedded" anything, Kevin Warwick (a.k.a. Captain Cyborg) shows up. I just can't take any more media whores.
The guts of the case: a guy made a "political statement" and did a "Mutant of Omaha" design, offering "Nuclear Holocaust Insurance" (it was the Cold War, kiddies, and Reagan was in the White House).
In addition, the creator parodied the MoO Indian head trademark and was selling these designs on T-shirts, caps and coffee mugs. The District Court for the District of Nebraska found in favour of MoO, and the Eighth Circuit affirmed.
If there is nothing for sale, First Amendment arguments have a much stronger considerations. Even pure political messages don't carry enough weight. But parody is not a guarantee of protection, despite a long tradition of it in American society.
woof.
Jeez... it took all of a minute searching through the forum (linked in the story) to find it. And it turned out to be an AOhelLer who managed to post it correctly, rather than an IMG SRC= tag back to the original.
It would take a couple days and many pages to write up the details about why this could happen. Expect that they won't take Universal lock, stock and all the debt -- this will be done in a nasty way which screws a lot of creditors. Universal may be split into the more profitable bits and left with the debt-ridden bits, which would then be spun off and left to file Chapter 11 and later dissolved.
Just 'cause they're "cool" and not MS doesn't make Apple stupid in business. They've survived this long...