Your employer will not care one whit about you except to the minimal extent it is absolutely required to do so. It is your responsibility to take responsibility for your future. Your employer cares nothing about you except to the extent that you are of some value to them and in most cases will jettison you like an 80386 at the first point you stop being of value to them. The massive extent of downsizing, loss of company-funded pension plans and overseas outsourcing have made this utterly clear if it wasn't previously. Your conpamy does not care about you; it sees you as an expense and nothing more. If it was anything else we would not even be having this discussion, the company would be paying for your training as a matter of course and respect for the value of its people.
Also, be aware that if you have training, you're more valuable and could potentially be worth more money. This is why it is so hard to get even an entry-level job in IT because it's presumed as soon as they train you, that you'll jump ship to some other employer who pays more, so rather than spending any money on training of new or existing workers, they'll pay for someone who has needed experience because the beancounters see it as cheaper that way. That it represents a long-term waste of capital and human resources is not visible to people who are only interested in their own huge golden parachutes, and long term isn't five, ten or twenty years, but two quarters from now. It's no wonder there is so much turnover in I.T. The shortsidedness and incompetence of management creates a vicious cycle making things worse.
The big advantage to this is that it isn't really hard to do really well, because when bad mediocrity is the standard of ordinary performance, just doing a decent job can become outstanding.
do they cunningly assume you'll file the rebate and refrain from paying that portion of the tax
Impressively cynical, although devoid of understanding of the use tax. Read the fine print on any coupon; "purchaser is responsible for all taxes".
It depends on how they calculate it; some base it on list price, some on actual purchase price. I have a suspicion state laws requiring payment of tax on a list price not charged rather than actual purchase price might be unconstitutional.
If groceries are taxed in your area, check the next time you buy a box of pop tarts with a coupon from the sunday paper.
Yet another accounting issue: Federal law prohibits charging sales tax on food sold to someone using food stamps, so they have to have a means to mark all eligible items as being that way, which is one of the reasons stores started switching to using computerized cash registers. They also can't collect sales tax as all if the purchaser has diplomatic immunity such as executives of embassies, which you see a lot of around here. (Right now I live in the suburbs but about 15 years ago I was a cashier at a Washington, D.C. drug store that sold food as well, and during one period of severe unemployment I was on food stamps, so I've seen it from both sides.) What's interesting is in this region they use an ATM card so they aren't even "stamps" any more, it's just done via the cash machine networks.
Even if the signals being sent were some form of computer virus, it must enter an executable state in order to be activated. A computer virus even stored on disc on a system cannot infect that system until it is placed into memory and executed. A computer virus, even if stored in memory cannot infect that system until it is executed. Only if it reaches an execution vector can it infect a system.
Then, it must be capable of infecting the target system. A virus must be written for the target machine AND the target operating environment. A virus written for 80x86 (Pentium class) machines will do nothing on Apple computers, and vice versa. Even if it is written for the 80x86 series of machines, that's still not good enough. A virus written for 80x86 Windows cannot infect 80x86 Linux-based machines because the means to access the system is different for each. Nor is there a way for the program to query the operating system to find out which machine its on without faulting if it tries the wrong query.
Further, infections generally are caused by
targeting the machine through backdoors in the operating system when a direct connection exists between the target and the host trying to infect it (This was the plot device used in the movie Independence Day, which for them to do it to us implies the extraterrestrials have an Internet connection.)
Creating an executable that is run directly (implying the ETs have a means to deliver a program such as on disk or downloadable from a website, again meaning they have an Internet connection.)
Creating a command stream or series of commands to trigger a buffer overflow which can have malicious code inserted. This requires intimate knowledge of the SETI scanning program and it would have to have such a vulnerability. I can't see any reason for a SETI program to have to scan a large command list and I can't see how an attacker would know the exact instruction set to use as well as the means to force the command stream.
The possibility of a non-Terran (off-earth) extraterrestrial entity creating a virus that could infect Terran computers through SETI is essentially all but impossible. I don't know if the odds can be calculated but they are probably in the multi trillion-to-one against category. Virus must be specifically written for target environment and have correct instruction set, must target correct operating system, must have means to create execution vector to inject itself into target machine, must have access to means to trigger execution of vector. Unless all of those things happen the scenario is impossible. Thus the odds of this being a reality are so near zero as to be rounding error.
Now, if you want to argue some malicious cracker on Terra might figure a way to do this, the odds are still low but you'll get no argument from me about that scenario being much more plausible (although still unlikely.)
This is another attempt by a local jurisdiction to regulate unlicensed wireless networks, which (as was pointed out in an article I posted) under current federal law only the FCC has jurisdiction to license, regulate or control. This is no different from a college claiming they can ban other wireless networks from being operated on campus (only to find out they can't) or an airport mandating its tenants use only their wi-fi network (and pay them for the privelege).
This violates federal law and federal regulations and is thus unconstitutional since neither a local authority nor a state can pass a law that contradicts federal law.
The adware supply companies probably have provisions in their contracts causing affiliates to forfeit all unpaid commissions if they are caught spamming. So the adware company not only gets the money paid for the ads the affilliate spammer generated, they don't have to pay the spammer anything!
This reminds me of how some sweatshops would hire lots of illegal aliens to work for them, then after 3 weeks on the day before they were supposed to be paid, the INS would raid the place and deport them all, so as a result the business owner didn't have to pay them anything! And then he'd start over with a fresh crew.
Title 15, chapter 2, sec 13a of the US Code (Part of the The Clayton Antitrust Act) says it's illegal to:
to sell, or contract to sell, goods at unreasonably low prices for the purpose of destroying competition or eliminating a competitor.
No, the law says it's illegal to discriminate in price for that reason, it does not matter whether the price is lower or not. This means that selling for a higher price (you must have an illegal monopoly or you couldn't get a higher price), a lower price (you are selling for less to run competitors out of business), or even the same price (which is price fixing) can all be considered a violation of law. Yeah, you got it right, technically any sale at all at any price could, theoretically be in violation of the Clayton Act since, supposedly one wants to make sales which can then eliminate competitors.
I once saw an episode of the TV show The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis which was made before I was even born, in which Dobie walks around campus wearing a brand-new suit made by a local tailor, and agrees to tell guys where he got it from (not mentioning he got it for free). So this practice was popular enough for it to be the plotline of an episode of a show that is over 50 years old, but apparently nobody has considered that the practice might still continue to be used.
Web logs are the prized platform of an online lynch mob spouting liberty but spewing lies, libel and invective. Their potent allies in this pursuit include Google and Yahoo.
With an opening such as this we can surely expect objective, factual reporting in a neutral and fair manner. Yeah, right.
Face it, if people can get good information directly from various websites, what do we need so-called professional journalists for? This is a threat to magazines like Forbes and the author of this reference article. And my guess is they realize this implicitly, and they don't have a solution other than the same solution Microsoft has tried to use against open source: fear, uncertainty and doubt. Or smear campaigns, which are essentially the same thing.
Certainly the potential for abuse is possible in what people say. But that is the price we pay for free speech and free press. The only other alternative is government regulation such as licensing of journalists which, of course, publications like Forbes could handle while private parties could not.
The presumption of this article is that people's weblogs cannot ever have anything of value. Also, like many others he chooses to pick on Groklaw and it's so-called pro-IBM and anti-SCO bias without regard to whether the comments on Groklaw are reasonable, accurate or true. The vitriolic tone of what the author wrote seems to indicate he has not read the material there, just taken the opinions of what people who don't like what is posted.
This seems to be the whole point of his article, his opinion is that people being able to directly expose their opinions to others without the filtering of some media organization is automatically bad. Which it is.
'When ideological division replaces informed exchange, dogma is the result and education suffers,' he said." What is your take?
Lysenkoism was the result when the Soviet Union decided that ideology was more important than science. And we may yet see such pseudoscientific dogma resurrected as a result of current trends. When the facts are altered to fit the theory or discarded when they can't be made conveniently to do so, or when a political standard is used instead of facts, accuracy or truth, ideology wins.
This is a company that has sued customers for developing competing game systems. Similar to the RIAA suing customers over alleged infringing file sharing - even threatening lawsuits where there is apparently only suspicions and no proof, unless massive payments effectively amounting to extortion are paid - when an organization has no respect for its customers and resorts to lawsuits, you shouldn't expect much respect from them (consider SCO and its actions against Autozone and Chrysler, for example.)
So expecting much respect from Blizzard is a futile and chimerical standing. Perhaps you should sue them in response, their rules may be unreasonable and / or unconsionable. If nothing else it will force them to spend thousands to defend their stand and perhaps might make them reconsider.
My understanding was that the Massachusetts state government was planning to switch to the OpenDocument format, yet here's this William F. Galvin saying "we will not be participating".
Basically, the department that provides IT services to state agencies is setting this policy, and state agencies that either use them or are required to follow their requirements would then do so.
Is Galvin not part of the Massachusetts state government? Could someone clarify for the benefit of someone not familiar with the US political system.
It is, of course, politics in action. The Office of Secretary of State in most U.S. States is usually a constitutional officer under that state's constitution, and as such, can conceivably set its own standards on what it wants to do, since a constitutional officer probably can't be required to act according to rules set by a mere state-chartered agency or department such as whatever Massachusetts has set up. Galvin probably thinks he can get more mileage out of this, is afraid of the consequences of angering Microsoft, or wants to curry favor with them. (Or he's ignorant of the issues involved, a point probably extremely likely.)
My big fear is we end up like it was in the 1970's all over again where you are forced to choose a platform to get the particular application you need.
Uh, this has been the standard in PC applications ever since we have had PCs. If you wanted to do spreadsheets you had to have an Apple ][ in order to use Visicalc (until 1-2-3 came out and buried it), if you wanted a database you had to have an IBM compatible (with MSDos or PCDos) to run DBase II (and later DBase III), then if you wanted software that runs on Windows you had to have that.
Quite frankly, people buy computers to solve problems. You don't necessarily want to run a payroll application, you just want to issue checks faster and less expensively than having clerks do so manually. The software is the means to provide the solution, and the O/S and computer are the platform needed to deliver it. Even if the solution can only be done using a computer, the computer is not the solution, the computer and underlying platforms are the vehicle to deliver the solution.
For example from over ten years ago, if your 'problem' is to be able to play DOOM, your means necessary (the 'vehicle') to provide the solution is an IBM Compatible (nothing from Apple would cut it) at least a 386 (because a 286 is inadequate to run the game) and at least 4 meg of memory. Being able to play the game is the solution; the software, the OS and the hardware is, and always has been, simply is the means in this case, the vehicle used to deliver that solution. Now there are clone versions of Doom (and other First-person shooters) available, one can use other software to solve the problem of getting that experience. But the computer and software were simply the means to solve the problem, they were not the solution itself except to the extent they are the only possible means to solve the problem.
Complaining that the particular software wanted dictates hardware or underlying OS purchases comes about 20 years too late. It also applies to development of applications; the most popular operating systems get the vast majority of development. The roads of the software world are littered with the bones of the corpses of dead companies that bet on OS/2 as a platform and died with the mirage it ended up becoming when IBM's lack of marketing and Windows 95 killed it.
A $50,000 prize is peanuts for the level of technology they expect to be developed. I guess because it doesn't have military applications (such as DARPA's recent unmanned vehicle contest, which has a $2 million prize) they can only afford a chump-change offer for the development of technology that is probably worth billions, but would most likely cost several million dollars to produce. And they expect that kind of technology on $50,000. I'm surprised they got much of a response at all.
There has long been precedent in Eminent Domain ("Compulsory purchase" in the U.K.), in which a government takes some private property for its own use and then pays the owner what is considered "just compensation." However, in some places the government pays the nominal fee and tells the party to sue them; this happened in Boston, Massachusetts back in the 1950s, when they wanted to build the Central Artery freeway, the city condemed hundreds of homes belonging to negroes, paid them $1 each and told them to sue (which none of them could afford to do) and in effect stole their houses.
The Taiwanese government could conceivably change the rules to impose new requirements for generic drug licensing in emergencies. Or they could simply change the laws to set royalty rates to a fixed amount, same as is done in the case of licensing of jukeboxes and phonograph records in the U.S., producers of competing records can negotiate a license directly or obtain a compulsory license for something around 3c per record or 1/2c per minute of running time, whichever is more. So they could simply change the laws to recognize that there is an emergency and the property rights holder refuses to negotiate at a rate the government considers fair and set a statutory rate.
Or they could simply impose an excise tax on those types of patents which are not licensed at 700% of worldwide revenues. Failure to pay the tax results in loss of patent royalties or ability to sue for nonpayment, or expiration of the patent. The company can't pay 7 times its total income they can't pay the tax (which is the whole point) and then the government isn't violating any laws. This presumes the government can break the law; in some legal systems such a concept is not considered possible. Most countries have maintenance fees on patents; if the maintenance fee is high and due monthly, it could be impossible to pay, or be equivalent to the amount the government has to pay in royalties above what it thinks is appropriate, which solves the problem.
The ability to exclude others or to collect royalties is not a natural right; it is a privelege granted by government statute, and the government can change the rules. Beyond that, I really wonder if there was that much money available from licensing fees in Taiwan to be worth bothering.
Also, as a result of the Nazi War Crimes Trials at Nuremberg, Germany, it was declared that in certain cases where it is necessary to save lives or to prevent certain crimes it is permissible to break the law. This might be a better argument to use, that after trying to negotiate in good faith, the only answer to prevent potential death was to go ahead and violate the patentholder's rights. This may be the tack those in the Taiwanese government have decided to use.
It's one thing to demand all the traffic can bear during normal times; squeeze people when there's an emergency and it could turn around and bite you.
Having read the article, I will say: It's all about money, nothing more. Some of these organizations think one format will make them more money than the other, and another group sees the other format as not allowing them to make as much money. It has nothing to do with concern for the customer, as they have never had concern for the customer.
Claims of concern over customer choice are red herrings to make their particular brand of greed instead sound like (nonexistent) concern for the customer. Attempts to impose draconian Digital Rights Management schemes (having nothing to do with preventing piracy and everything to do with preventing customers from using products in unapproved ways) and record companies suing customers (or threatening them with suit even when there is no evidence of unauthorized copying) shows their concern over customers is zero, other than concern over trying to increase profits.
I have no problem with that, but their claims of concern for customers are specious; their behavior has shown their concern for customers is exclusively in the range of complaining they are not squeezing enough money out of them.
All software still must meet strict products liability.
I am not a lawyer, but even I know this to be incorrect. Software license agreements declare the product "as is" which means the manufacturer/seller makes no warranty claim at all. You cannot sue the manufacturer (and collect; you can sue anyone for anything even if you have no case) for defective software because of the End User License Agreement (EULA) they require you to agree to to be able to install the product requires you accept their disclaimer of all warranties.
That is, if your software causes users physical harm then the software developer is still liable. For example, if navigation software causes a boat owner to drive his boat onto a sandbar and someone is hurt or killed, the software make is still liable.
Not unless you can show the software forced the boat and prevented the operator from correcting course; otherwise the operator of the boat had what is called the "last clear chance" to avoid the accident; the software is not necessarily at fault in your example, and might have had absolutely nothing to do with it.
Do you happen to have any case law at all, any case cite, where a company selling a software product with an as-is EULA was held liable for its defects, and where the judgement was upheld on appeal? (I am referring to software sold as a separate installable product from the device it is operated upon, not "intrinsic" or "embedded" software as sold as part of the device such as the control program for a microwave oven or a VCR.) I do not know of any case where a court found a EULA to be unconsionable enough to allow damages, and I have never heard of any appellate case on the issue. So unless you have case law to support your argument (and there's plenty of case law to the contrary: ProCD, Inc. v. Zeidenberg (86 Fed. Rep. 3d 1447, 7th Circuit 1996) for example) I'm going to have to presume you are incorrect on this.
This analogy would make sense except that you can void a warranty (and assumedly any liability) if you make any adjustments to the car that could negatively affect its braking system, etc.
Incorrect. In the U.S., anyway, the Magnuson Moss Warranty Act provides that if you offer a warranty, it is not voided by third-party equipment or non-authorized dealer repairs unless the device or repairs contributed to the failure. If you replace the ignition system with a new high-powered nitrous oxide feeder, and the car explodes because someone rear-ends you and the (untouched) gas tank explodes, the manufacturer is still liable. Also, the warranty on the ignition system would be voided because of the modifications, if not made by an authorized dealer. But if you replace the battery and the brakes fail due to defects in workmanship, the manufacturer is still liable.
The same is true with software vendors only amplified a thousand times. Software vendors have no way of telling ahead of time what kind of hardware faults, existing programs, etc, are already installed that could interfere with the operation and security of the program.
If a software package improperly feeds data to another part or fails in saving because of errors in the code, this is almost certainly not a hardware problem. Most software companies won't warrant their products because they have no way to know their people are even trained to do the job, while at the same time places that develop software are either outsourcing the work to cheaper countries and/or refusing to spend money to train people because they'll be more valuable and they don't want to have to pay them more to keep them from leaving. It is all about money, nothing more.
I have no problem with someone claiming "as-is" on software given away or sold for a small fee; it is completely unreasonable to expect someone who is not receiving any money or receiving very little money for a piece of software to be able to afford to offer warranty protection. However, I do have a bit of a problem with companies releasing buggy software at premimum rates, and then disclaiming any responsibility for their own misconduct or incompetence.
Hmm. I just thought of something. One way to solve the problem is require a company to include source code at no extra charge to their customers a software product which is sold if it is offered as is or if they fail to do so they cannot disclaim any warranty. If the customer who buys the product has the source they have (in theory) the capacity to fix the problem; if the customer is denied source then the manufacturer must wartant its performance. This would solve the problem rather nicely; companies like Microsoft could either give away the crown jewels and thus have to provide the means for anyone who bought the product to understand it, or they would have to provide technical support and warranty protection as part of the retail price of the product. Claims that they can't afford it are belied by the extreme price charged for new copies of the program or the excessively high charges for maintenance, often times for which they provide absolutely nothing. If software developers want to charge premium prices they should be providing at least minimum quality warranty protection or allow their customers to be able to fix problems that develop.
Few places are selling 5 1/4" diskettes for the occasional use in places that still have a need for them any more
8" diskettes died off perhaps ten years ago despite that I used them for several years
As is noted, mag tapes are dead (a 1600" mag tape only holds about 60 meg of data and is much more expensive than even
overpriced zip disks, which are also going away as did
2 GB Sparq disks when IOMega bought out the format and killed them off, and
now people are moving to DVDs because one DVD can hold as much as 6
CDs, except that, of course, more machines have CD readers/writers than DVD readers but the cost has come down so much that CDs are starting to become old hat.
A lot of machines either aren't networked or didn't have networking capability and thus using the Internet or anything similar to transfer files isn't necessarily an answer. Plus, the problem is many of these machines have data locked in proprietary formats that may not be accessible. (Anyone have any programs that use the RMS database format from Digital Equipment on their machines?)
There's also issues for cash-strapped institutions having to spend money to constantly move data from format to format as it changes. I've lost stuff I had because it was on older formats I can no longer read. I've been fortunate that many of the messages I wrote in the past on various mailing lists were kept by archive sites and I've been able to recover some of them. But a lot of stuff I otherwise saved is gone because I can't read some older disks.
There's also the possibility of corruption. I had an important set of programs that the source files were damaged on the CD and I can't read them; I may be able to find the person I sent the original tape from which I obtained them but if I can't, I'm out of luck.
Keeping some of this material on paper isn't always an option; if I was to keep paper listings of everything I have, it would cost a small fortune and would probably require room for thousands of pages of storage. And putting program listings on paper of a program that's 20,000 lines in length wouldn't help much as I'm unlikely to type that program back in if it were to be lost.
Important stuff now I keep multiple copies around but there's always the possibility of loss or damage, and if one doesn't keep count of what one has one can find one has data one has irretrievably lost due to format obsolescence or software obsolescence.
So it's okay to detain someone, subject them to arrest, search, DNA profiling, and having a police record, even though they have done nothing. It's okay to violate an innocent person's rights in a small way as long as they aren't tortured. It's that sort of standing that eventually leads to worse behavior by the police or the police becoming targets.
Pray you never get fired because you're late (or absent to work) because of something like this, and your employer doesn't then decide to let you go because he can't afford to have someone who has been under police suspicion working in his place.
The article gives an example of people having exact knowledge of their own predelection to various diseases and thus buying health insurance based on that knowledge causing uncertainty in the insurance market.
He seems to think that being aware of what diseases one is likely to be succeptible for either guarantees one will get those diseases, or that one won't buy health insurance because of that. Most people are already doing that; young and healthy people tend not to buy health insurance.
He also ignores that life (and health) insurance also covers things like injury as a result of accident or unpredictable event; I blew a blood vessel in my foot once and had to go to the hospital to get stitches. It is doubtful that any genetic test would show that the vessel was close to the top of my foot and was likely to pop the skin and start bleeding.
Nor was any genetic test likely to show when I would have an automobile accident (or if I was involved in one with someone who might be uninsured or underinsured, for example).
This presumes that, with more information, behavioral change will not cause other changes. The current way we sell insurance is based on lack of knowledge; chances are if the information becomes available to individuals, insurers will have access long before they do (unless it is barred to them by law). As the costs to provide health coverage change, prices, benefits and what insurers will offer will change as well.
This applies to all forms of insurance. Insurance companies may be rapacious in sticking to the fine print, but they aren't stupid; they will change their contracts - or get out of certain lines altogether - if they become unprofitable.
Another example he gives is of "forum shopping" for judges. He's noting that it could have been done before by examining judges' decisions but it was just too expensive. Meaning if you were looking at defending a $300,000,000 case you could afford to do it but not if you had to defend a $300,000 one. So it's simply lowered the barrier to entry for others.
So what he's whining about is that now those who aren't ultra rich or powerful have access to tools previously only available to them.
I can think of another reason it might be valuable: if the potential litigant sees the judges would tend to rule against them they might be inclined to settle and thus the case doesn't clog up the courts in the first place.
All technology has benefits and drawbacks, and we learn to handle each as they become evident.
first, the count of vulnerabilities only includes those recognized by the manufacturer; if the manufacturer chooses not to recognize them, they aren't counted
Vulnerabilites for Internet Explorer are only the ones that could be detected by "black box" testing of attempts against the program since the source of the application is invisible;
Vulnerabilities for Mozilla can also include those that are discovered by someone examining the code of the product, which is, basically, anyone who wants to bother to do so.
Does it not stand to reason that if the source code is available there is a higher probability of finding errors and spoilage over a binary application to which source code is not available?
In which type of package are you more likely to be able to detect spoilage, an opened tube of hamburger or one wrapped in a sealed, opaque tube?
IE is shipped in an opaque tube, mozilla is always open for examination any time you choose to look at it. It's even more open than hamburger that was shipped in a transparent tube since you can see even inside the package. (I know the analogy is kind of greasy (pun intentional) since hamburger is at best shipped in transparent wrap over an opaque plate, and is never shipped in fully transparent materials, but I think the point is fairly clear.)
Someone once pointed out that if we can ever develop cloning successfully we can forget the use of anti-rejection drugs, blood type checks, and other such things. If you get a transplant from your own clone, everything you're getting is yours, the blood type and every bit of dna is a perfect match, the rest of your body will not know the difference and thus "will welcome our new clone masters."
In most industrialized nations, intellectual property (IP) generated by an employee through the course of his or her employment legally belongs to the employer. In the UK, this is embodied in the Patents Act 1977 and the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.
He's got it right, there, through the course of his or her employment. However, unless you have a contract saying so, whatever you do when you're not being paid by your employer, not using your employer's equipment, belongs to you (with limited exceptions generally not applicable here such as if you create a software product to compete with what your employer is paying you to do, and maybe not even then.) Your employer is not your owner and you are not an indentured servant owned by them 24/7. If he's got statutory or case law to the contrary to prove the claim he's making, I'd like to see it. Copyright law on status of ownership of works for hire and labor law are two different things. Interrelated, but they cover different areas.
Self-employed and contract software engineers are not usually bound by employer's IP rights but are unlikely to be strongly motivated to write OSS code unless they can earn a living from doing so, and the unpaid volunteer nature of OSS development tends to rule out this possibility.
I do sometimes write software which I am not paid for, and have made that available for others at no charge. I also am not paid to do so, but I write articles (and make edits to articles) like this one on Wikipedia, mainly because its fun and I like to export my own knowledge so others can see it, and to improve existing articles. Now, granted, I'm not a professional writer but I do believe the quality of what I write is close to or equivalent to that of someone who is one. People do a lot of things for rewards that are not necessarily monetary.
So, it would appear that the only people who are actually free to participate in OSS projects are self-employed or unemployed software professionals
Yes, but appearances (as he sees them) are extremely deceiving. He uses the original false premise (that your employer owns everything you could possibly create 24/7) to reach the false conclusion
Anyone else contributing to OSS projects may be unwittingly engaged in illegal activity by stealing their employer's IP
(that professional programmers cannot work on anything because their employer owns everything they might conceivably create).
Where he says "stealing their employer's IP," I hope he's referring to people who intentionally make copies of software developed while on the paid time of their employer and developed at their employer's behest, and is not trying to claim the employee is an owned possession of the employer because what he's then claiming is that they are not employees, but slaves of the employer. I hope he's not making that claim, but it sure sounds an awful lot like he is doing exactly that.
He also ignores - or may be ignorant of the concept - that there are a number of professional programmers who directly work as part of their paid employment in the improvement of open-source applications whose improvements become part of the public corpus (as opposed to private, unreleased modifications) of the work in question.
The process of creating software is more akin to an engineering discipline than an artistic endeavour
No kidding.
the much-lauded OSS process of peer review...is an unquestionably powerful method of improving code quality. But we seem to have forgotten that peer review is, or should be, part of the normal software engineering process
I have worked at many places developing software and not a single one of them engaged in peer review of anyone's code unless we were looking at how they did so
He is unlikely to get the paperwork done in 6-12 months, much less actually get a working model actually available for sale in that period of time, unless he had already developed it two years ago.
Obtain marketing contacts or resellers, or in the alternative, market it himself
If it was said he was looking at 18 months to two years - or indicated he's already a multimillionaire and can afford to spend (a lot) of his own cash to decrease the time to market - I'd be more inclined to believe it.
Remember the three-sided triangle: fast, good and cheap; you can only have, at most, two of these; the other automatically becomes inverted to make up for whichever two you do get.
This also presumes he has working technology ready, now, and not more vaporware as is often the case on some of these claimed developments to create so-called "pollution free" or "alternative fuel" vehicles or systems. There have been too many scams and frauds in the past in this field to be anything other than skeptical.
Slashdot Mirror
Also, be aware that if you have training, you're more valuable and could potentially be worth more money. This is why it is so hard to get even an entry-level job in IT because it's presumed as soon as they train you, that you'll jump ship to some other employer who pays more, so rather than spending any money on training of new or existing workers, they'll pay for someone who has needed experience because the beancounters see it as cheaper that way. That it represents a long-term waste of capital and human resources is not visible to people who are only interested in their own huge golden parachutes, and long term isn't five, ten or twenty years, but two quarters from now. It's no wonder there is so much turnover in I.T. The shortsidedness and incompetence of management creates a vicious cycle making things worse.
The big advantage to this is that it isn't really hard to do really well, because when bad mediocrity is the standard of ordinary performance, just doing a decent job can become outstanding.
Paul Robinson
Yet another accounting issue: Federal law prohibits charging sales tax on food sold to someone using food stamps, so they have to have a means to mark all eligible items as being that way, which is one of the reasons stores started switching to using computerized cash registers. They also can't collect sales tax as all if the purchaser has diplomatic immunity such as executives of embassies, which you see a lot of around here. (Right now I live in the suburbs but about 15 years ago I was a cashier at a Washington, D.C. drug store that sold food as well, and during one period of severe unemployment I was on food stamps, so I've seen it from both sides.) What's interesting is in this region they use an ATM card so they aren't even "stamps" any more, it's just done via the cash machine networks.
Then, it must be capable of infecting the target system. A virus must be written for the target machine AND the target operating environment. A virus written for 80x86 (Pentium class) machines will do nothing on Apple computers, and vice versa. Even if it is written for the 80x86 series of machines, that's still not good enough. A virus written for 80x86 Windows cannot infect 80x86 Linux-based machines because the means to access the system is different for each. Nor is there a way for the program to query the operating system to find out which machine its on without faulting if it tries the wrong query.
Further, infections generally are caused by
The possibility of a non-Terran (off-earth) extraterrestrial entity creating a virus that could infect Terran computers through SETI is essentially all but impossible. I don't know if the odds can be calculated but they are probably in the multi trillion-to-one against category. Virus must be specifically written for target environment and have correct instruction set, must target correct operating system, must have means to create execution vector to inject itself into target machine, must have access to means to trigger execution of vector. Unless all of those things happen the scenario is impossible. Thus the odds of this being a reality are so near zero as to be rounding error.
Now, if you want to argue some malicious cracker on Terra might figure a way to do this, the odds are still low but you'll get no argument from me about that scenario being much more plausible (although still unlikely.)
Paul Robinson
This violates federal law and federal regulations and is thus unconstitutional since neither a local authority nor a state can pass a law that contradicts federal law.
This reminds me of how some sweatshops would hire lots of illegal aliens to work for them, then after 3 weeks on the day before they were supposed to be paid, the INS would raid the place and deport them all, so as a result the business owner didn't have to pay them anything! And then he'd start over with a fresh crew.
I once saw an episode of the TV show The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis which was made before I was even born, in which Dobie walks around campus wearing a brand-new suit made by a local tailor, and agrees to tell guys where he got it from (not mentioning he got it for free). So this practice was popular enough for it to be the plotline of an episode of a show that is over 50 years old, but apparently nobody has considered that the practice might still continue to be used.
Face it, if people can get good information directly from various websites, what do we need so-called professional journalists for? This is a threat to magazines like Forbes and the author of this reference article. And my guess is they realize this implicitly, and they don't have a solution other than the same solution Microsoft has tried to use against open source: fear, uncertainty and doubt. Or smear campaigns, which are essentially the same thing.
Certainly the potential for abuse is possible in what people say. But that is the price we pay for free speech and free press. The only other alternative is government regulation such as licensing of journalists which, of course, publications like Forbes could handle while private parties could not.
The presumption of this article is that people's weblogs cannot ever have anything of value. Also, like many others he chooses to pick on Groklaw and it's so-called pro-IBM and anti-SCO bias without regard to whether the comments on Groklaw are reasonable, accurate or true. The vitriolic tone of what the author wrote seems to indicate he has not read the material there, just taken the opinions of what people who don't like what is posted.
This seems to be the whole point of his article, his opinion is that people being able to directly expose their opinions to others without the filtering of some media organization is automatically bad. Which it is.
For the media organizations.
So expecting much respect from Blizzard is a futile and chimerical standing. Perhaps you should sue them in response, their rules may be unreasonable and / or unconsionable. If nothing else it will force them to spend thousands to defend their stand and perhaps might make them reconsider.
Quite frankly, people buy computers to solve problems. You don't necessarily want to run a payroll application, you just want to issue checks faster and less expensively than having clerks do so manually. The software is the means to provide the solution, and the O/S and computer are the platform needed to deliver it. Even if the solution can only be done using a computer, the computer is not the solution, the computer and underlying platforms are the vehicle to deliver the solution.
For example from over ten years ago, if your 'problem' is to be able to play DOOM, your means necessary (the 'vehicle') to provide the solution is an IBM Compatible (nothing from Apple would cut it) at least a 386 (because a 286 is inadequate to run the game) and at least 4 meg of memory. Being able to play the game is the solution; the software, the OS and the hardware is, and always has been, simply is the means in this case, the vehicle used to deliver that solution. Now there are clone versions of Doom (and other First-person shooters) available, one can use other software to solve the problem of getting that experience. But the computer and software were simply the means to solve the problem, they were not the solution itself except to the extent they are the only possible means to solve the problem.
Complaining that the particular software wanted dictates hardware or underlying OS purchases comes about 20 years too late. It also applies to development of applications; the most popular operating systems get the vast majority of development. The roads of the software world are littered with the bones of the corpses of dead companies that bet on OS/2 as a platform and died with the mirage it ended up becoming when IBM's lack of marketing and Windows 95 killed it.
A $50,000 prize is peanuts for the level of technology they expect to be developed. I guess because it doesn't have military applications (such as DARPA's recent unmanned vehicle contest, which has a $2 million prize) they can only afford a chump-change offer for the development of technology that is probably worth billions, but would most likely cost several million dollars to produce. And they expect that kind of technology on $50,000. I'm surprised they got much of a response at all.
The Taiwanese government could conceivably change the rules to impose new requirements for generic drug licensing in emergencies. Or they could simply change the laws to set royalty rates to a fixed amount, same as is done in the case of licensing of jukeboxes and phonograph records in the U.S., producers of competing records can negotiate a license directly or obtain a compulsory license for something around 3c per record or 1/2c per minute of running time, whichever is more. So they could simply change the laws to recognize that there is an emergency and the property rights holder refuses to negotiate at a rate the government considers fair and set a statutory rate.
Or they could simply impose an excise tax on those types of patents which are not licensed at 700% of worldwide revenues. Failure to pay the tax results in loss of patent royalties or ability to sue for nonpayment, or expiration of the patent. The company can't pay 7 times its total income they can't pay the tax (which is the whole point) and then the government isn't violating any laws. This presumes the government can break the law; in some legal systems such a concept is not considered possible. Most countries have maintenance fees on patents; if the maintenance fee is high and due monthly, it could be impossible to pay, or be equivalent to the amount the government has to pay in royalties above what it thinks is appropriate, which solves the problem.
The ability to exclude others or to collect royalties is not a natural right; it is a privelege granted by government statute, and the government can change the rules. Beyond that, I really wonder if there was that much money available from licensing fees in Taiwan to be worth bothering.
Also, as a result of the Nazi War Crimes Trials at Nuremberg, Germany, it was declared that in certain cases where it is necessary to save lives or to prevent certain crimes it is permissible to break the law. This might be a better argument to use, that after trying to negotiate in good faith, the only answer to prevent potential death was to go ahead and violate the patentholder's rights. This may be the tack those in the Taiwanese government have decided to use.
It's one thing to demand all the traffic can bear during normal times; squeeze people when there's an emergency and it could turn around and bite you.
Claims of concern over customer choice are red herrings to make their particular brand of greed instead sound like (nonexistent) concern for the customer. Attempts to impose draconian Digital Rights Management schemes (having nothing to do with preventing piracy and everything to do with preventing customers from using products in unapproved ways) and record companies suing customers (or threatening them with suit even when there is no evidence of unauthorized copying) shows their concern over customers is zero, other than concern over trying to increase profits.
I have no problem with that, but their claims of concern for customers are specious; their behavior has shown their concern for customers is exclusively in the range of complaining they are not squeezing enough money out of them.
Do you happen to have any case law at all, any case cite, where a company selling a software product with an as-is EULA was held liable for its defects, and where the judgement was upheld on appeal? (I am referring to software sold as a separate installable product from the device it is operated upon, not "intrinsic" or "embedded" software as sold as part of the device such as the control program for a microwave oven or a VCR.) I do not know of any case where a court found a EULA to be unconsionable enough to allow damages, and I have never heard of any appellate case on the issue. So unless you have case law to support your argument (and there's plenty of case law to the contrary: ProCD, Inc. v. Zeidenberg (86 Fed. Rep. 3d 1447, 7th Circuit 1996) for example) I'm going to have to presume you are incorrect on this.
I have no problem with someone claiming "as-is" on software given away or sold for a small fee; it is completely unreasonable to expect someone who is not receiving any money or receiving very little money for a piece of software to be able to afford to offer warranty protection. However, I do have a bit of a problem with companies releasing buggy software at premimum rates, and then disclaiming any responsibility for their own misconduct or incompetence.
Hmm. I just thought of something. One way to solve the problem is require a company to include source code at no extra charge to their customers a software product which is sold if it is offered as is or if they fail to do so they cannot disclaim any warranty. If the customer who buys the product has the source they have (in theory) the capacity to fix the problem; if the customer is denied source then the manufacturer must wartant its performance. This would solve the problem rather nicely; companies like Microsoft could either give away the crown jewels and thus have to provide the means for anyone who bought the product to understand it, or they would have to provide technical support and warranty protection as part of the retail price of the product. Claims that they can't afford it are belied by the extreme price charged for new copies of the program or the excessively high charges for maintenance, often times for which they provide absolutely nothing. If software developers want to charge premium prices they should be providing at least minimum quality warranty protection or allow their customers to be able to fix problems that develop.
A lot of machines either aren't networked or didn't have networking capability and thus using the Internet or anything similar to transfer files isn't necessarily an answer. Plus, the problem is many of these machines have data locked in proprietary formats that may not be accessible. (Anyone have any programs that use the RMS database format from Digital Equipment on their machines?)
There's also issues for cash-strapped institutions having to spend money to constantly move data from format to format as it changes. I've lost stuff I had because it was on older formats I can no longer read. I've been fortunate that many of the messages I wrote in the past on various mailing lists were kept by archive sites and I've been able to recover some of them. But a lot of stuff I otherwise saved is gone because I can't read some older disks.
There's also the possibility of corruption. I had an important set of programs that the source files were damaged on the CD and I can't read them; I may be able to find the person I sent the original tape from which I obtained them but if I can't, I'm out of luck.
Keeping some of this material on paper isn't always an option; if I was to keep paper listings of everything I have, it would cost a small fortune and would probably require room for thousands of pages of storage. And putting program listings on paper of a program that's 20,000 lines in length wouldn't help much as I'm unlikely to type that program back in if it were to be lost.
Important stuff now I keep multiple copies around but there's always the possibility of loss or damage, and if one doesn't keep count of what one has one can find one has data one has irretrievably lost due to format obsolescence or software obsolescence.
Pray you never get fired because you're late (or absent to work) because of something like this, and your employer doesn't then decide to let you go because he can't afford to have someone who has been under police suspicion working in his place.
Uh, he's in London, the U.K. has very little of the protections we expect in the U.S.
He seems to think that being aware of what diseases one is likely to be succeptible for either guarantees one will get those diseases, or that one won't buy health insurance because of that. Most people are already doing that; young and healthy people tend not to buy health insurance.
He also ignores that life (and health) insurance also covers things like injury as a result of accident or unpredictable event; I blew a blood vessel in my foot once and had to go to the hospital to get stitches. It is doubtful that any genetic test would show that the vessel was close to the top of my foot and was likely to pop the skin and start bleeding.
Nor was any genetic test likely to show when I would have an automobile accident (or if I was involved in one with someone who might be uninsured or underinsured, for example).
This presumes that, with more information, behavioral change will not cause other changes. The current way we sell insurance is based on lack of knowledge; chances are if the information becomes available to individuals, insurers will have access long before they do (unless it is barred to them by law). As the costs to provide health coverage change, prices, benefits and what insurers will offer will change as well.
This applies to all forms of insurance. Insurance companies may be rapacious in sticking to the fine print, but they aren't stupid; they will change their contracts - or get out of certain lines altogether - if they become unprofitable.
Another example he gives is of "forum shopping" for judges. He's noting that it could have been done before by examining judges' decisions but it was just too expensive. Meaning if you were looking at defending a $300,000,000 case you could afford to do it but not if you had to defend a $300,000 one. So it's simply lowered the barrier to entry for others.
So what he's whining about is that now those who aren't ultra rich or powerful have access to tools previously only available to them.
I can think of another reason it might be valuable: if the potential litigant sees the judges would tend to rule against them they might be inclined to settle and thus the case doesn't clog up the courts in the first place.
All technology has benefits and drawbacks, and we learn to handle each as they become evident.
- first, the count of vulnerabilities only includes those recognized by the manufacturer; if the manufacturer chooses not to recognize them, they aren't counted
- Vulnerabilites for Internet Explorer are only the ones that could be detected by "black box" testing of attempts against the program since the source of the application is invisible;
- Vulnerabilities for Mozilla can also include those that are discovered by someone examining the code of the product, which is, basically, anyone who wants to bother to do so.
Does it not stand to reason that if the source code is available there is a higher probability of finding errors and spoilage over a binary application to which source code is not available?In which type of package are you more likely to be able to detect spoilage, an opened tube of hamburger or one wrapped in a sealed, opaque tube?
IE is shipped in an opaque tube, mozilla is always open for examination any time you choose to look at it. It's even more open than hamburger that was shipped in a transparent tube since you can see even inside the package. (I know the analogy is kind of greasy (pun intentional) since hamburger is at best shipped in transparent wrap over an opaque plate, and is never shipped in fully transparent materials, but I think the point is fairly clear.)
A really Brave New World.
He's got it right, there, through the course of his or her employment. However, unless you have a contract saying so, whatever you do when you're not being paid by your employer, not using your employer's equipment, belongs to you (with limited exceptions generally not applicable here such as if you create a software product to compete with what your employer is paying you to do, and maybe not even then.) Your employer is not your owner and you are not an indentured servant owned by them 24/7. If he's got statutory or case law to the contrary to prove the claim he's making, I'd like to see it. Copyright law on status of ownership of works for hire and labor law are two different things. Interrelated, but they cover different areas.
I do sometimes write software which I am not paid for, and have made that available for others at no charge. I also am not paid to do so, but I write articles (and make edits to articles) like this one on Wikipedia, mainly because its fun and I like to export my own knowledge so others can see it, and to improve existing articles. Now, granted, I'm not a professional writer but I do believe the quality of what I write is close to or equivalent to that of someone who is one. People do a lot of things for rewards that are not necessarily monetary.
Yes, but appearances (as he sees them) are extremely deceiving. He uses the original false premise (that your employer owns everything you could possibly create 24/7) to reach the false conclusion
(that professional programmers cannot work on anything because their employer owns everything they might conceivably create).
Where he says "stealing their employer's IP," I hope he's referring to people who intentionally make copies of software developed while on the paid time of their employer and developed at their employer's behest, and is not trying to claim the employee is an owned possession of the employer because what he's then claiming is that they are not employees, but slaves of the employer. I hope he's not making that claim, but it sure sounds an awful lot like he is doing exactly that.
He also ignores - or may be ignorant of the concept - that there are a number of professional programmers who directly work as part of their paid employment in the improvement of open-source applications whose improvements become part of the public corpus (as opposed to private, unreleased modifications) of the work in question.
No kidding.
I have worked at many places developing software and not a single one of them engaged in peer review of anyone's code unless we were looking at how they did so
Let's see, he's got to
- Arrange financing
- Create manufacturing instructions (blueprints, designs, etc.)
- Obtain suppliers of components
- Obtain an assembler or set up an assembly plant
- Obtain marketing contacts or resellers, or in the alternative, market it himself
If it was said he was looking at 18 months to two years - or indicated he's already a multimillionaire and can afford to spend (a lot) of his own cash to decrease the time to market - I'd be more inclined to believe it.Remember the three-sided triangle: fast, good and cheap; you can only have, at most, two of these; the other automatically becomes inverted to make up for whichever two you do get.
This also presumes he has working technology ready, now, and not more vaporware as is often the case on some of these claimed developments to create so-called "pollution free" or "alternative fuel" vehicles or systems. There have been too many scams and frauds in the past in this field to be anything other than skeptical.