The Bill of Rights says otherwise, but it is a completely seperate document that was written a decade later
The Bill of Rights was written 2 years after the Constitution, and ratified with about the same difference. It is, 100%, a part of the Constitution (as are the other 17 amendments).
For instance, the War Powers Act of 1917 allows the government to throw you in jail indefinitely without a trial
The War Powers Act has also been amended and changed in the years since it first appeared. Most of the "President can throw you in Jail for anything because Lincoln never ended the war!" types of things simply aren't true -- in the 60s and 70s there was a big stink in Congress about all the laws and Executive orders that had built up over the years without ever having ended officially.
Any crazy law you hear about having to do with Emergency Orders, Lincoln, WW2, or the War Powers Act is most assuredly NOT still in effect. They are all officially expired as of about 25 years ago, the news just hasn't caught up to the conspiracy guys yet...
For all the bullshit that is spouted about these corporate marketing restrictions existing to "foster innovation", the truth is anywhere outside the US you're pretty likely to come across a TV that takes PAL/NTSC/SECAM, a region-free DVD player, a Macrovision-free VCR, and a multi-mode cell phone with global roaming (not to forget the dirt-cheap HDTV flat widescreen TVs we are told are "prohibitively expensive")...
calling this a 'groundbreaking case' it's clear they intend to use this as a precedent
This is not a precedent in any way -- the ISP pled guilty under a plea bargain. It would only be a precedent if this was a judgement based on evidence presented to the court -- the only thing the court saw in this case was motions and a guilty plea.
I can only assume that the NYSAG used some nice arm-twisting threats with a sentencing recommendation in exchange for not burying this poor ISP with 10 years worth of bankruptcy-inducing legal procedures. If the ISP were larger, I'm sure they'd have fewer qualms about defending their common carrier status...
We don't blame restaurants for not giving free food to the starving masses, why do you blame drug companies for not giving free medicine to the diseased masses
because restaurants don't have legally enforced monopolies on food.
If you could buy AIDS medicines for $2 at Wendy's, I doubt people would be getting upset at the drug companies. They'd be raising money to buy it from Wendy's at wholesale...
If someone needs more expensive treatment, a hostpital isn't obligated, nor should it be, to pay to save someone's life
This is very much incorrect. if you walk into an emergency room and say "I need to see a doctor" it doesn't matter how much money it costs to treat you, there in no hospital in the US that can legally turn you away. Doctors and hospitals can and will be fucked to all hell by the DA (and lawsuits from surviving relatives) if they refuse treatment to anyone.
I can only assume Dan is planning on compiling a high-tech spam list with the email addresses from all the flames he gets.
Somehow I doubt the slashdot crowd is going to be overly sympathetic to the stated goal of, essentially, figuring out the LEAST you can do in terms of contribution for what you've taken.
While you may be totally legally clear by just returning all the network side of your app to GPL, I think the moral idea is that if you are clearly benefitting from "borrowed" code, you should be loaning out your own code at more than the bare minimum required so that others can benefit.
The other (comprimise) way of doing this would be neither to give back the chess game nor just your network patches, but something in-between. Develop a generalized gaming network protocol based on OpenSSH that could be used by other game developers for backgammon and checkers, so that while you may be selling your closed-source chess game, you make it easier for others to create similarly polished (and compatible!) games (GPLed or not).
As the AC reply has pointed out, the millions wasn't spent on a logo alone, but on the complete corporate identity system.
That said -- yes, hundreds of thousands of dollars of time WAS spent on the logo alone. They went through I believe at least a few thousand different designs and permutations over the course of two years or so before the final was reached.
I understand that you think "creating a logo" means typing the company name in to a program, picking pretty colors and a kewl font, and calling it a day. That's exactly what my first post was about -- it is nothing like that at all, it is a rigorous process with many steps (assuming you want it to be successful).
AC also pointed out the forward-pointing arrow between the "e" and the "x" in FedEx, which is a fantastic design point that you don't appreciate consciously but is not insignificant. many of those kinds of decisions go into a decent logo.
This is one of the goals to creating a logo - to have people remember what it looks like
Not really, the goal is to have it associated in your mind with positive attributes and the company.
Remembering off the top of your head what FedEx's logo looks like is nowehere near as important to them as for you to see their logo and think "FedEx -- fast, forward-moving, modern, large, dependable, reliable, professional, international". You don't have to remember the Nike Swoosh to see it and think "Fast, agile, dynamic, energetic".
Basically if you are right about the money spent I believe it was a waste
You're not alone in this view -- which is a major reason (no I'm not eggagerating) of why Linux won't succeed in the consumer market. It looks unprofessional, it looks like a hobby, a toy, and totally unreliable. The logos are amateur scribblings of penguins that are badly rendered and put through cheap photoshop and gimp filters. For all the hundreds of window managers and desktops, not one of them looks professional and coherent. They all look like gee-whiz 3-d graduate student projects, not like finished products.
Basically if you are right about the money spent I believe it was a waste
Fedex saves several hundred thousand a year just from how much more efficient it is for them to print their paper forms after the redesign.
If you think design is only about Times versus Helvetica, though, I suppose you'd be right...
This is great fun watching slashdot folks talk about graphics. About as entertaining as listening to a bunch of graphic designers debate cobol versus Java, and just as accurate (see, the null pointer variable is creating an overflow into your read-only memory, dude!).
First: Its absolutely idiotic to demand the logo be created in Linux. I mean, I know there are a lot of k3w1 linux kids out there who just love to get down with the gimp, but lets face reality here: if your goal is to have a good, professional logo that reflects well on the companies and community, dont set artificial limitations on the toolset. If you want some half-assed gimp graphic ("Look, your logo's on fire!") then by all means eliminate from consideration anyone who knows what they are doing.
Second: Please, dear god, everyone stop talking about specs.
Having Petreley say "Four colors or less often works quite well" is as annoying to a designer as saying "Try to keep the buffer overflows to a minimum" would be to a programmer. If anyone is planning on using Hexachrome for their logo design (or more than 4 spots), I'd love to know about it so I can be sure to never, ever work on a project with you ("what do you mean my business card will cost $10,000 to print?")
For those of you who can't figure out the issue between eps and TIFF, don't sweat it but please stop suggesting that you can just resample a TIFF to make it fit at any size. You can't. Yes, you can put a TIFF in an eps (hell, you could put the entire encyclopedia brittanica in an eps -- its just a wrapper format, like quicktime), no it won't make it scale any better. We'll just assume that when they ask for an eps that they are really asking for some vector graphic file in an eps format.
For future Consideration:
The kinds of things that might actually get you a good logo are never mentioned, presumably because they don't know the questions to ask (consider someone telling you to write a program for them, telling how many lines the source should be, what compiler to use, and never telling you what its for!).
What is wrong/disliked about the current logo? It does look very MS-office-ish (similar to the intelocking puzzle pieces) but is that the only thing they didn't like? Do they want something that conveys cooperation, cutting edge technology, stability, or what? These are all very different concepts, with different ways of representing them. If you focus on making an identity that highlights cooperation, you're making a trade-off against a feeling of speed and cuttin-edge tech. So which do they prefer? Damned if I know, they just want it at 640x480.
We seem to go through these same messages every time an article on GUI, logos, etc comes up here -- its fine if programmers don't want to know about how that stuff works, but its more than just a "pretty picture". Fedex did not spend millions of dollars redesigning their logo in the 90s because they wanted it to be "prettier". Having a window manager with "more colors" does not enhace the GUI.
Focus on what you are actually trying to do, and what you want to communicate -- not what color it should be (here's a design hint: if it matters what color your logo is, your logo IS BROKEN)
In a typical identity project, this would be an iterative process -- you'd bring one design for "cooperaton", one for "high-tech", etc -- and discuss with the client which they prefer, why, and then go back and incorporate the feedback. This is a one-shot deal, equivelent to programming an application without ever talking to the user, without having a beta test, and just dropping off an executable, never to be seen again. Sounds like a project I'm sure most programmers would LOVE to work on, right?:)
No it doesn't, this is a seemingly logical argument that really doesn't hold up at all when you think about it.
The british had "bigger guns" than the revolutionary army but we still won. The US had bigger guns than the vietnamese but we still lost, and so on.
The simple fact is that its pretty impossible to control a population through military force alone. you can DEFEAT them in a military sense, but then you have to live with them on a day-to-day basis and if they don't want to let you do that, you're in for a long life of painful terrorism -- never knowing if the barber is going to slash your throat or cut your hair. Being an occupying force isn't easy, and doesn't hinge on superior firepower...
Paperbacks sell FAAAAR more copies, so even though the production cost isn't much different, you can charge a lot less for paperback.
Publishers make a bit more profit per hardcover book sold, but honestly any author knows that the only way to make a living is to get books into paperback...
Microsoft's Media Player can ONLY display videos in primary mode. Same for RealPlayer
Yes, by default all video apps use overlays to offload the processing. But if you TURN OFF YOUR VIDEO ACCELERATION (display properties > settings > advanced > troubleshooting > hardware acceleration and set it to "none") you can take all the screen shots you want. Real (and I think QT) even has an option in the player itself to disable advanced video drawing modes to increase compatibility.
A lot of DVD players won't work at all with overlays disabled but any WMP, Real, QT stuff will play just fine. And most of the DVD players I've seen do have a built-in screen grab function.
I'll tell you: if it'll be even better if they don't make the player display the video file on the primary surface.
Um, turn off your video accelleration and you can take all the screenshots you want. Primary surface has nothing to do with wanting to keep you from screenshots, it's just a lot faster...
There's a dozen states involved here, so the federal government can only drop THEIR part of the suit. The states still individually have the ability to keep it going...
And have you seen the salaries for those atheletes? If I was making that much money, I wouldn't be complaining
really? I mean $150,000 is decent money but it's not going to set you up for life, especially if you only go pro for a few years.
Not many athletes make those $500 million dollar paydays -- Jordan could buy a team if he wanted, no doubt, but your second-round draft pick will never see that kind of cash...
Couldn't an attacker (euphamism for plantiff's attorney, seemed appropriate with all of the security talk these days) argue that the instruction was overly vague?
Well they could, but it probably wouldn't be terribly effective. As technical as lawyers are portrayed, in reality judges and juries are pretty unforgiving of people who fail the "reasonable person" standard. If a resonable person would understand that the contract said such-and-such, then that's the standard you'll be held to (even in some cases where it turns out the contract wasn't even valid, it was the belief of both parties that it WAS valid that made a contract).
Recent cases have, in fact, been leaning the other way -- people getting out of contracts because they were too complicated and impossible to understand, because you cannot enter into a legally binding agreement voluntarily if you don't understand it. There has to be a "meeting of the minds" and if the contract is so complex as to be impossible to understand, you can't possibly agree to it...
Funny that with such a high number of athletes that are black, you have to search long and hard to find a head coach or team owner who's black. That's the kind of racism people generally talk about in sports -- its okay for them to PLAY well, we just don't want them up in the clubhouse...
Look, we understand as employees that what you're saying is true, that you have to cover your own ass. What bugs me is the terms of service kind of legalese that is so over the top that it is literally offensive.
Why not write an employee handbook like Borland used to do software licenses? They used plain language, and explained WHY they had limitations in place, not just a bunch of legal jargon. It is no less legal because it's written in plain English.
You say yourself, "we think someone is keeping a gun in his desk, we want to be able to check it. If someone is harassing people from our email system, we want to be able to verify it. What I don't want, however, is the creation of a police state (be it on paper or otherwise)". That sounds great -- why not just flesh that out as a policy statement?
You really don't have to say "The party in the first part abrogates all claims and reservations for privacy and security of his person, belongings, personal space, and equipment". That's how lawyers write, but you can actually have a legally binding agreement that says "We pay for office equipment and have liability for your actions at work, so you need to know that we do have the right to check your computer or desk. We don't want to do it, but you know as well as we that there's always some nutball with porn on his hard drive, and we don't want to lay you off because we've gone bankrupt from a sexual harassment lawsuit".
Sincerity like that can buy you a LOT of goodwill.
Second-rate cases based on flawed legal theory, but impressive nonetheless
Puhleeze, that's about a thousand federal circuit and appeals court cases, not some rogue hillbilly judge who doesn't know the law. It may well be that they are ALL coincidentally based on "flawed legal theory", but until you find a higher-ranking judge on appeal with a theory more to your liking that IS THE LAW.
As far as I know the US Supreme Court has not seen fit to examine such fine legal arguments as "well, the flag has fringe on it, therefore this is a court of admiralty!" (duh, does that mean if I wear a Harvard sweatshirt that i can't possibly have gone to Yale?)
That's what happens to sovereign Citizens in court who haven't done their homework
What homework would that be? I'd love to hear about a single so-called "soveriegn citizen" who has ever been legally challenged and found by a court to NOT be under the jurisdiction of the US court system despite living within the geographic boundaries of the US (because of course you don't have to be a citizen of a country to be bound by their laws).
It takes longer to learn and research, and one is likely to find oneself challenged on various obscure fine points
Would that be "obscure fine points" such as the crystal clear regulations of what constitutes an US citizen, and who laws apply to? (hint: laws apply to EVERYONE, citizen or not -- whether you volunteer to recognize them or not!)
http://www.militia-watchdog.org/suss2.htm#sovere ig n
How many times do judges have to say "Petitioner's arguments are no more than stale tax protester contentions long dismissed summarily by this court and all other courts which have heard such contentions." before you guys stop spending $39.95 for TOP-SECRET INFORMATION on how the SUPER-WEALTHY avoid paying taxes!!! Call now, only REALLY SMART PEOPLE (like yo!) can do this!
Re:I know I'll be modded down, but bear with me he
on
Warez and Abandonware
·
· Score: 3
. By saying "we recognize that you used to have a right to your copyright but aren't still using it", you're saying that anyone anywhere can determine which property rights are valid and which aren't and which should be respected and which shouldn't
Okay, let's review here -- Copyright expires. It currently expires after 75 years for these sorts of things (video games, but terms are different depending on the exact circumstances).
So we already have a situation where we "take away" what someone else owns, we just wait 75 years. The abandonware folks are saying the period of time should be shorter for software since it disappears so quickly (and loses commercial value equally as fast).
No one is suggesting we man the barricades to burn the companies to the ground, just that we reevaluate whether the current situation really addresses the reality of the monopoly copyright grants (the same reason folks are suggesting we think about making computer patents expire quicker as well!)...
---------------------------------------------
Re:Ancient games should not be copyright released
on
Warez and Abandonware
·
· Score: 2
Look at what happened to Doom.
What happened to Doom? Last I heard they made a sequel (Doom 2!), and there's a multi-million dollar movie in production. If that's the "bad scenario", sign me up!...
Slashdot Mirror
The Bill of Rights says otherwise, but it is a completely seperate document that was written a decade later
The Bill of Rights was written 2 years after the Constitution, and ratified with about the same difference. It is, 100%, a part of the Constitution (as are the other 17 amendments).
For instance, the War Powers Act of 1917 allows the government to throw you in jail indefinitely without a trial
The War Powers Act has also been amended and changed in the years since it first appeared. Most of the "President can throw you in Jail for anything because Lincoln never ended the war!" types of things simply aren't true -- in the 60s and 70s there was a big stink in Congress about all the laws and Executive orders that had built up over the years without ever having ended officially.
Any crazy law you hear about having to do with Emergency Orders, Lincoln, WW2, or the War Powers Act is most assuredly NOT still in effect. They are all officially expired as of about 25 years ago, the news just hasn't caught up to the conspiracy guys yet...
---------------------------------------------
Sorry, the consumer looses again.
No, the American consumer loses again.
For all the bullshit that is spouted about these corporate marketing restrictions existing to "foster innovation", the truth is anywhere outside the US you're pretty likely to come across a TV that takes PAL/NTSC/SECAM, a region-free DVD player, a Macrovision-free VCR, and a multi-mode cell phone with global roaming (not to forget the dirt-cheap HDTV flat widescreen TVs we are told are "prohibitively expensive")...
---------------------------------------------
Holy jamoley!
I sure hope you're right! Bring on the ladies...
(nmerriam@ARTboy.org)
---------------------------------------------
calling this a 'groundbreaking case' it's clear they intend to use this as a precedent
This is not a precedent in any way -- the ISP pled guilty under a plea bargain. It would only be a precedent if this was a judgement based on evidence presented to the court -- the only thing the court saw in this case was motions and a guilty plea.
I can only assume that the NYSAG used some nice arm-twisting threats with a sentencing recommendation in exchange for not burying this poor ISP with 10 years worth of bankruptcy-inducing legal procedures. If the ISP were larger, I'm sure they'd have fewer qualms about defending their common carrier status...
---------------------------------------------
We don't blame restaurants for not giving free food to the starving masses, why do you blame drug companies for not giving free medicine to the diseased masses
because restaurants don't have legally enforced monopolies on food.
If you could buy AIDS medicines for $2 at Wendy's, I doubt people would be getting upset at the drug companies. They'd be raising money to buy it from Wendy's at wholesale...
---------------------------------------------
If someone needs more expensive treatment, a hostpital isn't obligated, nor should it be, to pay to save someone's life
This is very much incorrect. if you walk into an emergency room and say "I need to see a doctor" it doesn't matter how much money it costs to treat you, there in no hospital in the US that can legally turn you away. Doctors and hospitals can and will be fucked to all hell by the DA (and lawsuits from surviving relatives) if they refuse treatment to anyone.
---------------------------------------------
I can only assume Dan is planning on compiling a high-tech spam list with the email addresses from all the flames he gets.
Somehow I doubt the slashdot crowd is going to be overly sympathetic to the stated goal of, essentially, figuring out the LEAST you can do in terms of contribution for what you've taken.
While you may be totally legally clear by just returning all the network side of your app to GPL, I think the moral idea is that if you are clearly benefitting from "borrowed" code, you should be loaning out your own code at more than the bare minimum required so that others can benefit.
The other (comprimise) way of doing this would be neither to give back the chess game nor just your network patches, but something in-between. Develop a generalized gaming network protocol based on OpenSSH that could be used by other game developers for backgammon and checkers, so that while you may be selling your closed-source chess game, you make it easier for others to create similarly polished (and compatible!) games (GPLed or not).
---------------------------------------------
As the AC reply has pointed out, the millions wasn't spent on a logo alone, but on the complete corporate identity system.
That said -- yes, hundreds of thousands of dollars of time WAS spent on the logo alone. They went through I believe at least a few thousand different designs and permutations over the course of two years or so before the final was reached.
I understand that you think "creating a logo" means typing the company name in to a program, picking pretty colors and a kewl font, and calling it a day. That's exactly what my first post was about -- it is nothing like that at all, it is a rigorous process with many steps (assuming you want it to be successful).
AC also pointed out the forward-pointing arrow between the "e" and the "x" in FedEx, which is a fantastic design point that you don't appreciate consciously but is not insignificant. many of those kinds of decisions go into a decent logo.
This is one of the goals to creating a logo - to have people remember what it looks like
Not really, the goal is to have it associated in your mind with positive attributes and the company.
Remembering off the top of your head what FedEx's logo looks like is nowehere near as important to them as for you to see their logo and think "FedEx -- fast, forward-moving, modern, large, dependable, reliable, professional, international". You don't have to remember the Nike Swoosh to see it and think "Fast, agile, dynamic, energetic".
Basically if you are right about the money spent I believe it was a waste
You're not alone in this view -- which is a major reason (no I'm not eggagerating) of why Linux won't succeed in the consumer market. It looks unprofessional, it looks like a hobby, a toy, and totally unreliable. The logos are amateur scribblings of penguins that are badly rendered and put through cheap photoshop and gimp filters. For all the hundreds of window managers and desktops, not one of them looks professional and coherent. They all look like gee-whiz 3-d graduate student projects, not like finished products.
Basically if you are right about the money spent I believe it was a waste
Fedex saves several hundred thousand a year just from how much more efficient it is for them to print their paper forms after the redesign.
If you think design is only about Times versus Helvetica, though, I suppose you'd be right...
---------------------------------------------
This is great fun watching slashdot folks talk about graphics. About as entertaining as listening to a bunch of graphic designers debate cobol versus Java, and just as accurate (see, the null pointer variable is creating an overflow into your read-only memory, dude!).
:)
First: Its absolutely idiotic to demand the logo be created in Linux. I mean, I know there are a lot of k3w1 linux kids out there who just love to get down with the gimp, but lets face reality here: if your goal is to have a good, professional logo that reflects well on the companies and community, dont set artificial limitations on the toolset. If you want some half-assed gimp graphic ("Look, your logo's on fire!") then by all means eliminate from consideration anyone who knows what they are doing.
Second: Please, dear god, everyone stop talking about specs.
Having Petreley say "Four colors or less often works quite well" is as annoying to a designer as saying "Try to keep the buffer overflows to a minimum" would be to a programmer. If anyone is planning on using Hexachrome for their logo design (or more than 4 spots), I'd love to know about it so I can be sure to never, ever work on a project with you ("what do you mean my business card will cost $10,000 to print?")
For those of you who can't figure out the issue between eps and TIFF, don't sweat it but please stop suggesting that you can just resample a TIFF to make it fit at any size. You can't. Yes, you can put a TIFF in an eps (hell, you could put the entire encyclopedia brittanica in an eps -- its just a wrapper format, like quicktime), no it won't make it scale any better. We'll just assume that when they ask for an eps that they are really asking for some vector graphic file in an eps format.
For future Consideration:
The kinds of things that might actually get you a good logo are never mentioned, presumably because they don't know the questions to ask (consider someone telling you to write a program for them, telling how many lines the source should be, what compiler to use, and never telling you what its for!).
What is wrong/disliked about the current logo? It does look very MS-office-ish (similar to the intelocking puzzle pieces) but is that the only thing they didn't like? Do they want something that conveys cooperation, cutting edge technology, stability, or what? These are all very different concepts, with different ways of representing them. If you focus on making an identity that highlights cooperation, you're making a trade-off against a feeling of speed and cuttin-edge tech. So which do they prefer? Damned if I know, they just want it at 640x480.
We seem to go through these same messages every time an article on GUI, logos, etc comes up here -- its fine if programmers don't want to know about how that stuff works, but its more than just a "pretty picture". Fedex did not spend millions of dollars redesigning their logo in the 90s because they wanted it to be "prettier". Having a window manager with "more colors" does not enhace the GUI.
Focus on what you are actually trying to do, and what you want to communicate -- not what color it should be (here's a design hint: if it matters what color your logo is, your logo IS BROKEN)
In a typical identity project, this would be an iterative process -- you'd bring one design for "cooperaton", one for "high-tech", etc -- and discuss with the client which they prefer, why, and then go back and incorporate the feedback. This is a one-shot deal, equivelent to programming an application without ever talking to the user, without having a beta test, and just dropping off an executable, never to be seen again. Sounds like a project I'm sure most programmers would LOVE to work on, right?
---------------------------------------------
It comes down to the bigger guns
No it doesn't, this is a seemingly logical argument that really doesn't hold up at all when you think about it.
The british had "bigger guns" than the revolutionary army but we still won. The US had bigger guns than the vietnamese but we still lost, and so on.
The simple fact is that its pretty impossible to control a population through military force alone. you can DEFEAT them in a military sense, but then you have to live with them on a day-to-day basis and if they don't want to let you do that, you're in for a long life of painful terrorism -- never knowing if the barber is going to slash your throat or cut your hair. Being an occupying force isn't easy, and doesn't hinge on superior firepower...
---------------------------------------------
Paperbacks sell FAAAAR more copies, so even though the production cost isn't much different, you can charge a lot less for paperback.
Publishers make a bit more profit per hardcover book sold, but honestly any author knows that the only way to make a living is to get books into paperback...
---------------------------------------------
Microsoft's Media Player can ONLY display videos in primary mode. Same for RealPlayer
Yes, by default all video apps use overlays to offload the processing. But if you TURN OFF YOUR VIDEO ACCELERATION (display properties > settings > advanced > troubleshooting > hardware acceleration and set it to "none") you can take all the screen shots you want. Real (and I think QT) even has an option in the player itself to disable advanced video drawing modes to increase compatibility.
A lot of DVD players won't work at all with overlays disabled but any WMP, Real, QT stuff will play just fine. And most of the DVD players I've seen do have a built-in screen grab function.
---------------------------------------------
I'll tell you: if it'll be even better if they don't make the player display the video file on the primary surface.
Um, turn off your video accelleration and you can take all the screenshots you want. Primary surface has nothing to do with wanting to keep you from screenshots, it's just a lot faster...
---------------------------------------------
There's a dozen states involved here, so the federal government can only drop THEIR part of the suit. The states still individually have the ability to keep it going...
---------------------------------------------
This project ranks right up there with all the tivo hacking going on in my eyes.
When did CmdrTaco get the Tivo implanted in his eyes?...
---------------------------------------------
They certainly can, and should.
The only point I was making was that most pro athletes don't make obscene amounts of money, just the very top performers...
---------------------------------------------
And have you seen the salaries for those atheletes? If I was making that much money, I wouldn't be complaining
really? I mean $150,000 is decent money but it's not going to set you up for life, especially if you only go pro for a few years.
Not many athletes make those $500 million dollar paydays -- Jordan could buy a team if he wanted, no doubt, but your second-round draft pick will never see that kind of cash...
---------------------------------------------
Couldn't an attacker (euphamism for plantiff's attorney, seemed appropriate with all of the security talk these days) argue that the instruction was overly vague?
Well they could, but it probably wouldn't be terribly effective. As technical as lawyers are portrayed, in reality judges and juries are pretty unforgiving of people who fail the "reasonable person" standard. If a resonable person would understand that the contract said such-and-such, then that's the standard you'll be held to (even in some cases where it turns out the contract wasn't even valid, it was the belief of both parties that it WAS valid that made a contract).
Recent cases have, in fact, been leaning the other way -- people getting out of contracts because they were too complicated and impossible to understand, because you cannot enter into a legally binding agreement voluntarily if you don't understand it. There has to be a "meeting of the minds" and if the contract is so complex as to be impossible to understand, you can't possibly agree to it...
---------------------------------------------
Funny that with such a high number of athletes that are black, you have to search long and hard to find a head coach or team owner who's black. That's the kind of racism people generally talk about in sports -- its okay for them to PLAY well, we just don't want them up in the clubhouse...
---------------------------------------------
Look, we understand as employees that what you're saying is true, that you have to cover your own ass. What bugs me is the terms of service kind of legalese that is so over the top that it is literally offensive.
Why not write an employee handbook like Borland used to do software licenses? They used plain language, and explained WHY they had limitations in place, not just a bunch of legal jargon. It is no less legal because it's written in plain English.
You say yourself, "we think someone is keeping a gun in his desk, we want to be able to check it. If someone is harassing people from our email system, we want to be able to verify it. What I don't want, however, is the creation of a police state (be it on paper or otherwise)". That sounds great -- why not just flesh that out as a policy statement?
You really don't have to say "The party in the first part abrogates all claims and reservations for privacy and security of his person, belongings, personal space, and equipment". That's how lawyers write, but you can actually have a legally binding agreement that says "We pay for office equipment and have liability for your actions at work, so you need to know that we do have the right to check your computer or desk. We don't want to do it, but you know as well as we that there's always some nutball with porn on his hard drive, and we don't want to lay you off because we've gone bankrupt from a sexual harassment lawsuit".
Sincerity like that can buy you a LOT of goodwill.
---------------------------------------------
Second-rate cases based on flawed legal theory, but impressive nonetheless
Puhleeze, that's about a thousand federal circuit and appeals court cases, not some rogue hillbilly judge who doesn't know the law. It may well be that they are ALL coincidentally based on "flawed legal theory", but until you find a higher-ranking judge on appeal with a theory more to your liking that IS THE LAW.
As far as I know the US Supreme Court has not seen fit to examine such fine legal arguments as "well, the flag has fringe on it, therefore this is a court of admiralty!" (duh, does that mean if I wear a Harvard sweatshirt that i can't possibly have gone to Yale?)
That's what happens to sovereign Citizens in court who haven't done their homework
What homework would that be? I'd love to hear about a single so-called "soveriegn citizen" who has ever been legally challenged and found by a court to NOT be under the jurisdiction of the US court system despite living within the geographic boundaries of the US (because of course you don't have to be a citizen of a country to be bound by their laws).
It takes longer to learn and research, and one is likely to find oneself challenged on various obscure fine points
Would that be "obscure fine points" such as the crystal clear regulations of what constitutes an US citizen, and who laws apply to? (hint: laws apply to EVERYONE, citizen or not -- whether you volunteer to recognize them or not!)
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Oh, great, another Sovereign Citizen.
e ig n
http://www.militia-watchdog.org/suss2.htm#sover
How many times do judges have to say "Petitioner's arguments are no more than stale tax protester contentions long dismissed summarily by this court and all other courts which have heard such contentions." before you guys stop spending $39.95 for TOP-SECRET INFORMATION on how the SUPER-WEALTHY avoid paying taxes!!! Call now, only REALLY SMART PEOPLE (like yo!) can do this!
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(i forget)
tyr's day...
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. By saying "we recognize that you used to have a right to your copyright but aren't still using it", you're saying that anyone anywhere can determine which property rights are valid and which aren't and which should be respected and which shouldn't
Okay, let's review here -- Copyright expires. It currently expires after 75 years for these sorts of things (video games, but terms are different depending on the exact circumstances).
So we already have a situation where we "take away" what someone else owns, we just wait 75 years. The abandonware folks are saying the period of time should be shorter for software since it disappears so quickly (and loses commercial value equally as fast).
No one is suggesting we man the barricades to burn the companies to the ground, just that we reevaluate whether the current situation really addresses the reality of the monopoly copyright grants (the same reason folks are suggesting we think about making computer patents expire quicker as well!)...
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Look at what happened to Doom.
What happened to Doom? Last I heard they made a sequel (Doom 2!), and there's a multi-million dollar movie in production. If that's the "bad scenario", sign me up!...
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