On the other hand, undergrads usually don't sign such agreements.
True... although they do often have to sign something signalling their compliance with the Acceptable Use / Intellectual Property policies of their university. Though, to be fair, I've never heard of a school sneaking something like this in...
What can you realistically say to not sign it. I've signed them in industries I don't care about, but what about when I see one in the IT field???
God, this is going to sound callous and arrogant but... WALK AWAY If you don't like the thought of this, then don't take the job. Don't sign the contract. (OK, you should probably try to negotiate the clause away, first, but failing that....)
Convictions cost, my friend. Freedom isn't free. You have to decide how much is the right to your own work worth to you... or, equivalently, how much is the paycheck worth, in terms of sacrificed opportunities or inflicted indignities.
Now that CAN'T be enforcable. Once you leave a companies employ, they have no rights to what you do.
What about non-compete clauses? Those hold up in court. Of course they can control what you do... if you signed a contract agreeing to that. That's why you have to read everything carefully.
Well, although this is most likely going to be a serious pain in the ass for this guy, he shouldn't really have a giant problem winning...
... the only obstacle being the judge's existing ruling against him. So he already has "not won".:) Hopefully he'll do better on appeal. And hopefully he'll get himself a lawyer.
If you work for a university, the university claims ownership of your ideas.
I've also heard that if you're a student at many universities, the university claims ownership of your ideas. I've never seen a university try to enforce this, however.
Even better: During the time I was at Stanford as an astrophysics graduate student, I had to sign a form that could reasonably be interpreted to say: "If you write a best-selling novel, but you do it using your student account and our terminals, then we own all rights to it and you have none."
Which was a good reason for getting one's own computer. Then they tried the interpretation that, "If you write a best-selling novel, and you do it on a computer (even your own) on the Stanford network, then...."
How, one must ask, does that fit into the supposed theory behind intellectual-property law, which is to foster innovation and creativity for the public good?
My goodness, is there anyone out there who still believe in that old saw? Don't you know that the purpose of intellectual property law is to ensure that the most obscene amount of profit is wrung from the public domain by whoever got there first (or, more commonly, with the most lawyers)?
If your idea is work related, it proabably doesn't matter if you signed the contract or not.
OK, so what you're saying here is: Not only does the company own the very thoughts in your head; now, you don't even have to agree to it? You can't opt out? That's not employment -- it's slavery.
Of course "it matters" if you sign the contract. Otherwise why they insist that you do? The contract is certainly not optional from the point of view of the legal department.
You already get it with many items like candy - if you buy a huge bag of candy, often each piece will have "not for resale" written on it.
I heard, a while back, that there's a reason for that, and it's not to keep you from reselling the candy. The issue is, the candy is "not intended" for resale: meaning that the maker doesn't have to provide all the nutritional information on each and every pack. They can put it on the big pack and satisfy their obligation.
Now, I don't know if a store is obligated to provide nutritional information on things they sell. So maybe (or maybe not) the store would get hassled for selling the smaller packages. But the candy maker is in the clear.
With Open Source, the answer is always out there, usually. It isn't always so when trying to navigate a vendors website. With Open Source,if Red Hat, SuSE or say Debian doesn't have an answer for your problem, someone else usually does!
You don't think the relative difficulty and obscurity of Microsoft "solutions" should count as a cost? I think it's disingenuous to argue that installation and training are costs but hours lost to dead-end surfing or on hold to tech support are not. Let's not even mention per-incident phone support!
If it's the same price, it seems foolhardy to purchase the OS-less Dell and forego the free MS license.
It's not just the saved step and saved labor. It's also the reduced complexity in licensing. If a big corp buys a site license, they don't want extra copies under other licenses running around loose...
And we're not doing this to get ourselves subsidies or for other selfish reasons (mostly)
Or, perhaps, we're doing it for the right selfish reasons. There's nothing wrong with looking out for yourself, especially when you're looking out for others along the way. It's only when you actively crush others and abuse their rights that you've entered dark territory.
The NRA / AARP have lots of people ready to give money in $10 and $50 and $100 contributions, put in time, point and click their way to contacting their Congresscritters.
My goodness, you're right. I feel like I've been blind. What we need to counter the NRA, AARP, or more realistically, the RIAA and MPAA, comes down to
donations, even on the small scale
time put into contacting Congress
energy to organize and rally Oh, wait. That is activism, the thing McCullagh recommended we stop wasting our time on. Instead, because we haven't won yet, we should simply accept that we'll never win.
Ask the NRA or AARP how easy it was in their first half-decade of activism. Ask the NAACP, too. This fight is still young -- it's hardly time to declare defeat and move on.
It would be easier to do this if all procedings of congress were public, so you can see what people say and do, not just what they vote.
I think it would be a big step forward if the Congressional Record really was a record. As it stands, any senator or representative can "amend" the record post facto and insert or delete things at will. Make Congress publish an exact transcript of all its proceedings, and much could be done to wrest power back. Or at least to educate the sheep as to how their reps really work.
We may not be able to gather enough money to sway political opinion, but it is possible to make one person in particular suffer some sort of consequences, whether it's financially or public opinion.
I for one would be willing to donate time or money toward defeating Hollings, "the Senator from Disney" -- and I'm not from his state.
I'm not sure why this is presented as an either/or thing. Lots of people are politically active who also hold down regular jobs and (gasp) have lives. Why should geeks be the only class that can only focus on one task at a time? I rather expect we multitask pretty well.
It's important to keep writing the software that forces changes in the culture. But it's equally vital to educate people about those changes, to help ensure that the changes that come are positive. McCullagh's argument reads far too much like "Gee, this politics thing is hard. Let's go back to coding and pizza. I'm sure it will all work out" (or, for the more cynical, "Nothing I do will matter anyway.")
If these issues matter to you, then get out there and educate the less tech-savvy. That includes Congresscritters. It also includes family members, coworkers, etc. Don't surrender just because it looks hard. Or to put it another way: Yes, geeks organizing politically might fail to stop this headlong rush into technological totalitatianism. Even if we speak up, the worst might happen. But if we don't speak up, then the worst is guaranteed to happen.
I applaud people creating the disruptive technologies, but they aren't enough. It's interesting to offer up Shawn Fanning (Napster) as a shining example. How, exactly, is Napster doing right now? Yes, he helped usher in an era of peer-to-peer filesharing (ironically through the failure of the Napster model). But now we face increasingly aggressive legal attempts to legislate away computer security, privacy, and fair use rights to counter the things he's unleashed. Maybe unleashing it needed to be done -- but don't you think that maybe, just maybe, things would be in a better state if someone had clearly and forcefully articulated why these things are good, instead of leaving the field uncontested, to be defined by the PR flacks of the *AA groups?
The DMCA passed unamiously because the geeks were silent, by and large. Congresscritters had no white hats telling them what was at stake; and there wasn't even a nascent organized lobbying effort. And of course Rep. Coble would say the law is "performing the way we hoped." -- he helped write and pass the thing! Why not a quote from, say, Rep. Boucher:
But in the end, Congress agreed to a fundamentally flawed bill... To counter this emerging threat to traditionally accepted fair-use values, Congress must rewrite the law.
We as geeks have failed to make clear to Joe Sixpack and Jane Q. Public why they care. If we do that, then we're halfway to a victory. Anyone who says that Congress votes for their corporate sponsors over the vocal deamnds of their constituents must have been under a rock in July, when senators and representatives were falling over each other trying to be the first to fix the issues of corporate responsibility that they were shocked -- shocked! -- to discover in American capitalism.
The big lobbiess don't win because Senator Bob votes against his constituents and ignores their please. The big lobbies win because no one else is speaking.
So go ahead. Code the next generation of encryption software. Write the next secure anonymous emailer. Protect privacy at the router level. But, while you saving the world in codepsace, take a minute or two to write your senator or explain to your mom what's going wrong, why we're on the wrong track.
Only a multi-pronged approach holds any chance of success.
The producers and advertisers spend a lot of money trying to discover what we watch
Yeah, but they spend it poorly, and then deduce unreasonably precise patterns from extremely coarse data. And then they make a decision based on their preconceptions of how the audience will respond... meaning, in the end, they do decide for us.
It really doesn't matter what questions you ask or who, if you're going to massively filter the data...
Re:There isn't any...other than ad revenue
on
Gone Fission
·
· Score: 2
Blockquoth the poster:
that and a 'good old boy' network which, like most cliques, operates behind the scenes in a smoke filled room.
Um, aren't the editors more or less explicit about this? From the FAQ:
Deciding the interest level of a story is a very subjective thing, and we have to take into account not only the intrinsic interest of the story itself, but what else is happening that day. On a day when lots of things are happening, we reject some very good stories. But on a day when nothing interesting is happening, we may post something not really as cool. [*]
I've always worked very hard to make sure that Slashdot matches up with my interests and the interests of my authors. We think we're pretty typical Slashdot readers... but that does mean that occasionally one of us might post something that you think is inappropriate... Slashdot has been running for almost 3 years, and over that time, I have always been the final decision maker... [A]nd if we occasionally want to post something that someone doesn't think is right for Slashdot, well, we're the ones who get to make the call.[*]
I would say the "strong regulation" you describe is basically suggestive of the oversight regime that we just removed
I must be slipping. It's "suggestive" of that regime because I happen to feel that regime served the public interest more than this one does. I guess I should be (more?) explicit: I think deregulation has been a failure in essentially every industry to which it has been applied. It has created short-term lower prices, at the cost of any consumer protection and with the long term result of reemergent -- but this time unrestrained -- monopolies.
Since the "free market" does not seem to produce what might be the best outcome -- many, small suppliers of these services, in a field of true competition -- then I think it reasonable to wonder whether private investors are likely to look after the public good as well or even as consistently as oversight agencies do.
I believe firmly that (a) free market capitalism is the most efficient way to produce services and goods and (b) left to its own devices, unrestrained free market capitalism is inimical to human freedom and human dignity. The market is a wonderful engine, but for two decades, we've been treating it like the driver. The right way to harness market forces is to set the economic rules of the game so that socially favorable outcomes are the simplest way to make a profit. In that manner, the drive -- even avarice -- of capitalists can also produce real benefits: Doing good while doing well.
But if you remove all government oversight, you shouldn't be surprised when the wickedest of men doing the wickedest of things do, in fact, produce the wickedest of outcomes.
If you want to make money, on the other hand, the opposite is true; it's in the private utility's best interests to use the cheapest, dirtiest power generating techniques available, to encourage as much waste as possible, to cultivate their most profitable volume buyers at the expense of their least profitable low and middle income customers, to run as close to 100% capacity as they possibly can, and, of course, to create artificial shortages.
Unless, of course, we change the economics through (sensible) regulation. For example, massive penalties for pollution. (I'm actually a fan of tradable pollution credits coupled to absolutely devestating fines for failure to comply.) Another example: massive penalties for failing to provide universal access.
The legitimate issue is, how do you ensure that the regulation is sensible? Obviously that's a judgement call. And, in pure Adam Smith terms, you're going to build in some economic inefficiency. If you're a free market ideologue who thinks government == Evil, then of course the only "sensible" regulation is none at all...
Which is how we got into this mess in the first place: a generation of "government leaders" who hate the very jobs they occupy.
Kinda like stores that have "sales" on items that happen to have recently been marked up *gasp* the exact percentage of the sale!
Well, actually, that would result in a discount, albeit a small one. Assume the original price is p and the advertised percent markdown is f. Then the internal price (before the markdown) would be p'=p(1+f) and the sale price would be p''=p'(1-f)=p(1+f)(1-f), which of course is p(1-f^2). For f > 0, p'' < p... but by much less than the advertised amount.
(So, the really said thing is, I formatted those equations by hand in HTML. Ugh.)
Slashdot Mirror
True
God, this is going to sound callous and arrogant but... WALK AWAY If you don't like the thought of this, then don't take the job. Don't sign the contract. (OK, you should probably try to negotiate the clause away, first, but failing that....)
Convictions cost , my friend. Freedom isn't free. You have to decide how much is the right to your own work worth to you
What about non-compete clauses? Those hold up in court. Of course they can control what you do
Even better: During the time I was at Stanford as an astrophysics graduate student, I had to sign a form that could reasonably be interpreted to say: "If you write a best-selling novel, but you do it using your student account and our terminals, then we own all rights to it and you have none."
Which was a good reason for getting one's own computer. Then they tried the interpretation that, "If you write a best-selling novel, and you do it on a computer (even your own) on the Stanford network, then...."
My goodness, is there anyone out there who still believe in that old saw? Don't you know that the purpose of intellectual property law is to ensure that the most obscene amount of profit is wrung from the public domain by whoever got there first (or, more commonly, with the most lawyers)?
"Public good"? How quaint.
Umm, if they transfered that money to you without having an employment contract, then they didn't "pay" you. They gave you a gift. How nice of them.
OK, so what you're saying here is: Not only does the company own the very thoughts in your head; now, you don't even have to agree to it? You can't opt out? That's not employment -- it's slavery.
Of course "it matters" if you sign the contract. Otherwise why they insist that you do? The contract is certainly not optional from the point of view of the legal department.
I heard, a while back, that there's a reason for that, and it's not to keep you from reselling the candy. The issue is, the candy is "not intended" for resale: meaning that the maker doesn't have to provide all the nutritional information on each and every pack. They can put it on the big pack and satisfy their obligation.
Now, I don't know if a store is obligated to provide nutritional information on things they sell. So maybe (or maybe not) the store would get hassled for selling the smaller packages. But the candy maker is in the clear.
You don't think the relative difficulty and obscurity of Microsoft "solutions" should count as a cost? I think it's disingenuous to argue that installation and training are costs but hours lost to dead-end surfing or on hold to tech support are not. Let's not even mention per-incident phone support!
It's not just the saved step and saved labor. It's also the reduced complexity in licensing. If a big corp buys a site license, they don't want extra copies under other licenses running around loose...
Or, perhaps, we're doing it for the right selfish reasons. There's nothing wrong with looking out for yourself, especially when you're looking out for others along the way. It's only when you actively crush others and abuse their rights that you've entered dark territory.
Or joined the MPAA.
Now, slip a little radio transciever tag onto the thing and we're in busines...
My goodness, you're right. I feel like I've been blind. What we need to counter the NRA, AARP, or more realistically, the RIAA and MPAA, comes down to
donations, even on the small scale
time put into contacting Congress
energy to organize and rally
Oh, wait. That is activism, the thing McCullagh recommended we stop wasting our time on. Instead, because we haven't won yet, we should simply accept that we'll never win.
Ask the NRA or AARP how easy it was in their first half-decade of activism. Ask the NAACP, too. This fight is still young -- it's hardly time to declare defeat and move on.
I think it would be a big step forward if the Congressional Record really was a record. As it stands, any senator or representative can "amend" the record post facto and insert or delete things at will. Make Congress publish an exact transcript of all its proceedings, and much could be done to wrest power back. Or at least to educate the sheep as to how their reps really work.
Not meant as a flame or troll, but which countries, exactly, are you thinking of?
I for one would be willing to donate time or money toward defeating Hollings, "the Senator from Disney" -- and I'm not from his state.
It's important to keep writing the software that forces changes in the culture. But it's equally vital to educate people about those changes, to help ensure that the changes that come are positive. McCullagh's argument reads far too much like "Gee, this politics thing is hard. Let's go back to coding and pizza. I'm sure it will all work out" (or, for the more cynical, "Nothing I do will matter anyway.")
If these issues matter to you, then get out there and educate the less tech-savvy. That includes Congresscritters. It also includes family members, coworkers, etc. Don't surrender just because it looks hard. Or to put it another way: Yes, geeks organizing politically might fail to stop this headlong rush into technological totalitatianism. Even if we speak up, the worst might happen. But if we don't speak up, then the worst is guaranteed to happen.
I applaud people creating the disruptive technologies, but they aren't enough. It's interesting to offer up Shawn Fanning (Napster) as a shining example. How, exactly, is Napster doing right now? Yes, he helped usher in an era of peer-to-peer filesharing (ironically through the failure of the Napster model). But now we face increasingly aggressive legal attempts to legislate away computer security, privacy, and fair use rights to counter the things he's unleashed. Maybe unleashing it needed to be done -- but don't you think that maybe, just maybe, things would be in a better state if someone had clearly and forcefully articulated why these things are good, instead of leaving the field uncontested, to be defined by the PR flacks of the *AA groups?
The DMCA passed unamiously because the geeks were silent, by and large. Congresscritters had no white hats telling them what was at stake; and there wasn't even a nascent organized lobbying effort. And of course Rep. Coble would say the law is "performing the way we hoped." -- he helped write and pass the thing! Why not a quote from, say, Rep. Boucher:
We as geeks have failed to make clear to Joe Sixpack and Jane Q. Public why they care. If we do that, then we're halfway to a victory. Anyone who says that Congress votes for their corporate sponsors over the vocal deamnds of their constituents must have been under a rock in July, when senators and representatives were falling over each other trying to be the first to fix the issues of corporate responsibility that they were shocked -- shocked! -- to discover in American capitalism.
The big lobbiess don't win because Senator Bob votes against his constituents and ignores their please. The big lobbies win because no one else is speaking
So go ahead. Code the next generation of encryption software. Write the next secure anonymous emailer. Protect privacy at the router level. But, while you saving the world in codepsace, take a minute or two to write your senator or explain to your mom what's going wrong, why we're on the wrong track.
Only a multi-pronged approach holds any chance of success.
Yeah, but they spend it poorly, and then deduce unreasonably precise patterns from extremely coarse data. And then they make a decision based on their preconceptions of how the audience will respond... meaning, in the end, they do decide for us.
It really doesn't matter what questions you ask or who, if you're going to massively filter the data...
Um, aren't the editors more or less explicit about this? From the FAQ:
And this time, I think I spelled his name right, dammit.
I must be slipping. It's "suggestive" of that regime because I happen to feel that regime served the public interest more than this one does. I guess I should be (more?) explicit: I think deregulation has been a failure in essentially every industry to which it has been applied. It has created short-term lower prices, at the cost of any consumer protection and with the long term result of reemergent -- but this time unrestrained -- monopolies.
Since the "free market" does not seem to produce what might be the best outcome -- many, small suppliers of these services, in a field of true competition -- then I think it reasonable to wonder whether private investors are likely to look after the public good as well or even as consistently as oversight agencies do.
I believe firmly that (a) free market capitalism is the most efficient way to produce services and goods and (b) left to its own devices, unrestrained free market capitalism is inimical to human freedom and human dignity. The market is a wonderful engine, but for two decades, we've been treating it like the driver. The right way to harness market forces is to set the economic rules of the game so that socially favorable outcomes are the simplest way to make a profit. In that manner, the drive -- even avarice -- of capitalists can also produce real benefits: Doing good while doing well.
But if you remove all government oversight, you shouldn't be surprised when the wickedest of men doing the wickedest of things do, in fact, produce the wickedest of outcomes.
Unless, of course, we change the economics through (sensible) regulation. For example, massive penalties for pollution. (I'm actually a fan of tradable pollution credits coupled to absolutely devestating fines for failure to comply.) Another example: massive penalties for failing to provide universal access.
The legitimate issue is, how do you ensure that the regulation is sensible? Obviously that's a judgement call. And, in pure Adam Smith terms, you're going to build in some economic inefficiency. If you're a free market ideologue who thinks government == Evil, then of course the only "sensible" regulation is none at all...
Which is how we got into this mess in the first place: a generation of "government leaders" who hate the very jobs they occupy.
Well, actually, that would result in a discount, albeit a small one. Assume the original price is p and the advertised percent markdown is f. Then the internal price (before the markdown) would be p'=p(1+f) and the sale price would be p''=p'(1-f)=p(1+f)(1-f), which of course is p(1-f^2). For f > 0, p'' < p... but by much less than the advertised amount.
(So, the really said thing is, I formatted those equations by hand in HTML. Ugh.)