While I'm not normally one to go aiding SBC Communications, the current owner of Prodigy, I do believe BT needs to be smacked with a remedy of paying all the legal costs of the defendant. Because the ruling came early, it won't be so much. But because it is so blantantly harrassment and baseless, even SBC Communications deserves to recover the costs they had to spend to pay for their lawyers and legal department staff to research and prepare briefs, make motions, and all that other mumbo-jumbo that lawyer types do.
And one more thing. Could you perhaps post the Received: headers of the spam he sent, so we can see the backtrace of it? Some of us might want to pre-emptively block a known spammer.
So why not make a parody web site of his web site, but called something like bienerforspammer.com or bienerisaspammer.com or some such name. Of course, buy commercial hosting to run it and only access it from home, not work.
And be sure when you talk to people about his actions, you make sure they understand that free speech is fine and all that, but theft to accomplish it is still a crime. Do I get to steal a printing press just to put my message out? No. And so, I do not get to hijack a server, or a mailbox, which is intended for other things. Note my signature.
Sorry, your post was not viewed by the intended reader. Reason code number 9, subcode 45 was detected that prevented it from being accessed. More information follows:
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Providing a link to another site is simply providing information, and unless that information is illegal (e.g. how to crack into a server), then this is just an expression of information which should be under protection of the First Amendment of the United States Constitution. If you don't want me to be making that expression, then either don't make that information available in the first place (e.g. don't have that page up), or make it useless. But suppressing my right to free speech is wrong.
Your argument about people assuming you endorse a product is really inappropriate. I do know that often the law uses this, but it is stupid. We should not be making decisions on how we conduct commerce on the basis that a few stupid people won't understand something. The way to cut back on the excesses of litigation is for people to stop trying to blame other people for their failures.
There's nothing wrong with asking linkers to fill out a form or supply an email address. But that is asking. I believe there is no basis for prohibiting it, so asking is all it is. Telling someone you link to them is a courtesy. Unfortunately, courtesy these days often gets you threatened or even sued. So it is dangerous to do that.
If you have a friend who takes your private URL and posts it on Slashdot, maybe you should reconsider who your friends are. Give them all different URLs to the same page and you can find out which one screwed you over.
Now I can understand you having these problems on your personal web site. But when we're talking about large corporations, where most of these "don't link to us" chilling effects demands come from, this is not even applicable. They have massive bandwidth that even Slashdot can barely ding. It's not about your little web site that you give out to friends; it's about linking useful information so it's easier to find for the people who happen to be interested in it.
At least this case of deeping linking threat turned out better. But they still have problems with pinheads running the place at Belo, as the policy is still there for their flagship newspaper.
If someone comes to my site to get information, and if I describe what they might find on the internet, and point to where to find it, and it's a public method of access (e.g. not information on how to crack into someone's server), then I should be allowed to offer this information under the rights of the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States. A link is nothing more than information, and there is no crime implied by providing it (offering cracking information, for example, might well be a crime).
Why web site owners whine about people linking should be what you fuss about. If they don't like the fact that the HTTP Referer: gives a URL they don't approve of, then they can reprogram their site to deliver something different, or deliver nothing at all if they wish.
This might be different if the links were the kind to trick multitudes of web browsers into improper accesses. For example, if CmdrTaco were to hate some web site out there and wanted to cause it harm, he could stick in a few hundred 1x1 image references to the site's main page right here on slashdot and really clobber them. Imagine slashdot effect multiplied. But this isn't about that kind of linking. This is about the kind of linking that simply directs someone to visit another site for what is there.
And this isn't about copyrights or trademarks. Sure, those things can often be infringed on by those doing the linking. If they improperly copy parts of thet target site, such as using images or icons from there, even just to form the link, then that is an infringement, but it is not the linking issue.
Linking is not at all like spam as long as the information that describes the link is truthful and accurate. If I point to some page at some computer vendor site and say you can get fine warez there, that would be wrong. That should be prohibited. But if I deep link to the Linux section of www.ibm.com, and say "This is IBM's Linux section", and IBM is offering it to the public, then I should be able to. Afterall, all that I am doing is simply saying to whoever visits my site, there is a place that IBM offers this information to the public. If IBM wanted to close it to say just subscribed customers with password access, I'd think someone there would know how to do it. If they don't want the link coming from, say, a Lolita Porn site, they can certainly suppress the link on their end and redirect it to say the main page, or their legal page, or bring up a blank page. I'd think someone there would be able to do it.
The comparison to spam is all wrong. This is NOT a "push" issue like spam is. If I didn't want people to visit my site, I'd take it down.
I'm not surprised that law.com would have such a policy, then claim they knew nothing about it. There's a lot of incompetency going on over there. Even their web page itself sucks with crappy HTML. They probably have a couple of high schools kids who want to show off their Javascript leetness doing the site.
The spectrum rules are generic for any use of RF, including microwave ovens. WiFi happens to be a standard that, since there were no government service licenses, and because it was intended for very local (home, office) usage, did not plan for this.
That said, it is clear that now we know there is a market for a licensed, possibly frequency coordinated, service in this category. As popular as it is expected to be, a lot of bandwidth might be needed. You'll probably not find that anywhere below 24 GHz in the spectrum. Also, licensed services won't work out in the Part 15 spectrum. To make this happen, the FCC would have to study what spectrum could be used, and set up rules to establishing a licensing. Surely there will be geo-spectral auctioning in the process. It's not unlike other services from broadcast to cell phones. But don't expect that only a handful of businesses will want to get into this. Hundreds probably will. Dividing spectrum by frequency isn't all that good, either, especially for digital. Spread spectrum sharing is what is going to have to happen, and even that will reduce bandwidth to each as total usage increases.
I do believe the FCC needs to designate part of the spectrum (by frequency) for non-commercial free services (but also shareable between overlapped free services), with reduced licensing requirements and no auction.
Will Personal Telco have to move again after the next commercial service comes along? How many times do they have to move until there are no more channels to move to?
Channels are finite and this is an unlicensed spectrum anyone can use. Both parties have to live with that. Starbucks/T-Mobile was just stupid by not planning better. It isn't hard for a planning engineer to whip out the WiFi and just check to see what's there on what channel.
It would be smart for Starbucks to move over to another channel. Surely there will be fewer users of their service than of the free one, so they can certainly offer a service based on better bandwidth availability.
But this won't last long. The spectrum is limited, and there is no licensing or frequency coordinators to manage it. Part 15 rules include the fact that users are subject to interference from other legal users, including microwave ovens. Basing a paid service on such rules is foolhardy. But one direction is that it's success could be used to get the FCC to open more spectrum, and a licensing structure, for just such kinds of services. It will probably have to be on all new spectrum, perhaps up at 10 or 24 GHz.
I see no problem with Starbucks wanting to offer a service. This isn't ham radio they are using, so they can certainly charge money for it. The issue is whether they should use the same channel as a previously existing service. Before they were aware of it, they could have planned to use a particular channel. But, a prudent planner would have checked to see what was active in the area by simply checking out the RF in the area using WiFi equipment.
But Starbucks/T-mobile knows about it now. So they have to decide whether they want to continue to share the channel and have degraded service and impose degraded service on others, or whether they move to another channel and have good service without bothering others (until there are more services than channels available to accomodate). Even if they decide to stay, I won't call Starbucks as evil, because channel sharing is inevitable. However, if they demand that others move off the channel, then they are evil. We'll see.
Make sure this database supports regular expressions. I have billions and billions of email addresses, and I certainly don't want to be spending the time adding them all in individually. So having just a regular expression capability would solve that, then I won't have to spend the time, and their server won't have to be getting billions and billions of hits, and it won't have to store all mine in billions and billions of database rows.
Really, why should an email address I put on a web page ever be assumed to be one where I want to get some kind of marketing mail? Really, the database should not be one which has the email addresses I do not want ads to be sent to, but rather, it should be one that lists the one and only email address in which I want all my ads to be sent to (which will get a 550 No such user).
It's not just the inexperienced who are unemployed. The dot-com and tech industry layoffs were quite across the board as whole projects in surviving companies, and whole companies that didn't survive at all, came to an end. When a manager who gets to stay if he makes his department lean has to deal with a budget slashed to the bone, and doesn't have much work for those who remain to do, anyway, he's not just going to pick the few lesser experienced people and send them packing. With no work, even the highly experienced people won't be bringing any value into the department or the company, so they are let go. The 1990's saw a lot of turnover of people, so in the minds of management, once they do need experts again, they can just hire them when they are needed.
Your statement "it has been god-damn difficult to find someone GOOD to employ" might need to be questioned. How hard did you really try? And do you offer the level of pay that someone with 20 years experience is really worth, when they inquire? Hint: you're not going to find very many of them at the local college.
All the recording industry ever does is whine. If they would actually put up a real music site online where people could actually honestly pay for music, at a price that does not include the costs of manufacturing and distributing CDs (but would include the cost of running a site and the associated bandwidth, of course), then I believe a lot more people would honestly pay for the music. The price should be about $2 per 60 minute album, but definitely not more than $5.
This needs to be in format(s) to allow it to be played on any computer or any playback device. As long as they want to impose this DRM shit, then people are going to find ways around it, and as they do, sales will be lost in greater amounts than DRM would protect. If they are going to discriminate against certain sectors of the market and not sell music that they can play, then they should not whine when the people in those sectors find a way to get the music without paying.
It's the content I want to block. I don't want the spam to be sent to me in the first place. I don't want it to use up my bandwidth, which is half the reason for refusing spam in the first place. Plus, when handling other people's mail, it's one thing to block suspected spam sources for them; it's another thing entirely to examine the content, even if it's just computer logic doing it. If I am able to deploy the ability to examine mail for unacceptable content, then what else will I have to test for later? What will the government expect me to be able to do?
I'll stick with blocking dedicated spam houses, ISPs that harbor spammers, open relays, open proxies, dialup pools, and certain countries, by IP address and/or domain name. And I'll continue to block anything that can't get their reverse DNS right (this feature alone took out half the spam with very little collateral damage).
This was four years ago. I wasn't in a desperate need for a job, and I hadn't even heard of OpenOffice then. But I would definitely have loved to do that, to make the tweak in the contract and let them have that. Hopefully they wouldn't pull a "You need to sign our official copy here. We just sent it to your recruiter so you could read it ahead of time." Of course my response would then be "How do I know that one is exactly the same as the one I read yesterday?"
Fundamental differences in how Intel and HP processors treat binary numbers meant that some software was very difficult to translate, leading to delays that kept newly purchased equipment idle. "It's now working, but what a mess," the employee added.
Translation:
We were dumb and wrote endian-dependent code, such as accessing multi-byte numbers by loading one character at a time. We assumed the high-order bytes were first, but with the Intel processor, it's the other way around. So we had to go back and re-do it all over again. Don't worry, we'll find some way to blame management. They told us to write endian-dependent code; yeah, that's right.
I interviewed with a technology development company and was asked to sign one of these forms right there at the interview. It was made clear to me that if I didn't sign it right then and there, the interview could not continue. Most of it involved non-disclosure. But some of it did sign over all my invention rights to them.
There was one clause that specified that if I was not hired, then the contract only applied to information made available to me during the interview. It was not entirely clear how well that applied to the parts about me handing over all my rights to my own intellectual property.
The really stupid part of this wasn't that they wanted me to sign such a contract, but that they barely gave me enough time to read the whole thing (I actually did). Due to it being in the circumstance of an interview, it wasn't possible to go consult an attorney, much less find one that practiced in both employment law and intellectual property law (we're probably talking a week or two at least). When I asked the HR guy about it, he indicated they had interviewed 3 other candidates for the position and were looking to make the hiring decision within the week, and that such a delay would probably mean the position would no longer be open.
What made me decide to walk out wasn't so much the fact that the situation existed (though I might well have because of it), but rather, the fact that the HR guy was so perfectly prepared in his answer to me. Whether he was telling me the truth or not wasn't even relevant. Later, I found the same job was posted again. Who knows how many walkouts they had.
Later, a recruiter was trying to get me in to interview for a position at an entirely different company. On Monday he was saying they had people from their New York headquarters in for the week to do the interviewing and they were booked up very tight. By Wednesday, he had an appointment for me for a Friday interview. Then the surprise. He wanted to send me the non-disclosure and non-compete contract. His explanation was because the schedule was so tight, they wanted people to be coming in with the contract already signed. At first we had an issue with the fact that he was sending it to me in Microsoft Word format (whee, I get to see all the revisions they ever made to it). I pointed out to him that I was a Unix person, this was a Unix job, and he was a recruiter doing more than half his work with Unix positions, and he wanted me to run Microsoft crap? So I ended up having him pull up a copy and asked him about some clauses in it (he was patient enough to do this, surprisingly). I focused on the non-compete and asked him if there were any clauses that made it only apply if I got the job. There were none. So I explained to the recruiter that "If I interview there having signed this, find out what this secret area of business is that they are doing, them I'm no longer allowed to work for anyone else in the same line of business, or even related, even if I don't get this job?" He paused for a minute and then said "I guess not". now I wished I had gone ahead and let him send me a copy of that.
The immoral of the stories here are that companies will try to take advantage of you one way or another. And it's probably even worse during this current economic downturn (equivalent to a full blown depression if you look just at the high-tech businesses by themselves). Watch out for what you sign.
Very good point. I'm sure that is usable. I was eating out just yesterday at a Chinese restaurant, and I simply had water with my food. I guess we need to get the equivalent of water with our computers.
As much as we might like to hate this practice, it is common place in business. Restaurants typically sell only one soft-drink vendor line, such as Pepsi vs. Coke, in order to get the best pricing/terms on the deal. In part it's the volume that does this (if they sold both, each would sell at half the level, and they wouldn't get the biggest price break), and the salesman push to get an exclusive deal (he gets more commission).
With Microsoft it is different since they are a monopoly. The problem is the difference is overshadowed by the fact that it is a common business practice in cases where there isn't a clear cut monopoly (e.g. neither Pepsi nor Coke can be said to have a monopoly anywhere near what Microsoft has). Constructing a case against Microsoft (or even Dell) in this matter would not be easy, and would require some very smart lawyers, and not the bozos over at DOJ. But there might be a lawyer or two at each of about 9 states that might be able to work together at this. We'll see.
Blocking and filtering spam doesn't reduce the rate. In fact it's going up. There are hundreds of email addresses in my domains being repeatedly spammed, and these never existed (so there's no way in hell they could be confirmed opt-ins). It's probably the case they were making their money to begin with from places that today are not blocking it, so they still make money (morons transferring cash to other morons).
No one I know buys spammer crap. If they are making money, then maybe someone is, but who? Someone gonna break in to a spammer operations to get the data?
Slashdot Mirror
While I'm not normally one to go aiding SBC Communications, the current owner of Prodigy, I do believe BT needs to be smacked with a remedy of paying all the legal costs of the defendant. Because the ruling came early, it won't be so much. But because it is so blantantly harrassment and baseless, even SBC Communications deserves to recover the costs they had to spend to pay for their lawyers and legal department staff to research and prepare briefs, make motions, and all that other mumbo-jumbo that lawyer types do.
And one more thing. Could you perhaps post the Received: headers of the spam he sent, so we can see the backtrace of it? Some of us might want to pre-emptively block a known spammer.
So why not make a parody web site of his web site, but called something like bienerforspammer.com or bienerisaspammer.com or some such name. Of course, buy commercial hosting to run it and only access it from home, not work.
And be sure when you talk to people about his actions, you make sure they understand that free speech is fine and all that, but theft to accomplish it is still a crime. Do I get to steal a printing press just to put my message out? No. And so, I do not get to hijack a server, or a mailbox, which is intended for other things. Note my signature.
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Subcode 45: String text is "bill 1618"
Providing a link to another site is simply providing information, and unless that information is illegal (e.g. how to crack into a server), then this is just an expression of information which should be under protection of the First Amendment of the United States Constitution. If you don't want me to be making that expression, then either don't make that information available in the first place (e.g. don't have that page up), or make it useless. But suppressing my right to free speech is wrong.
Your argument about people assuming you endorse a product is really inappropriate. I do know that often the law uses this, but it is stupid. We should not be making decisions on how we conduct commerce on the basis that a few stupid people won't understand something. The way to cut back on the excesses of litigation is for people to stop trying to blame other people for their failures.
There's nothing wrong with asking linkers to fill out a form or supply an email address. But that is asking. I believe there is no basis for prohibiting it, so asking is all it is. Telling someone you link to them is a courtesy. Unfortunately, courtesy these days often gets you threatened or even sued. So it is dangerous to do that.
If you have a friend who takes your private URL and posts it on Slashdot, maybe you should reconsider who your friends are. Give them all different URLs to the same page and you can find out which one screwed you over.
Now I can understand you having these problems on your personal web site. But when we're talking about large corporations, where most of these "don't link to us" chilling effects demands come from, this is not even applicable. They have massive bandwidth that even Slashdot can barely ding. It's not about your little web site that you give out to friends; it's about linking useful information so it's easier to find for the people who happen to be interested in it.
At least this case of deeping linking threat turned out better. But they still have problems with pinheads running the place at Belo, as the policy is still there for their flagship newspaper.
If someone comes to my site to get information, and if I describe what they might find on the internet, and point to where to find it, and it's a public method of access (e.g. not information on how to crack into someone's server), then I should be allowed to offer this information under the rights of the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States. A link is nothing more than information, and there is no crime implied by providing it (offering cracking information, for example, might well be a crime).
Why web site owners whine about people linking should be what you fuss about. If they don't like the fact that the HTTP Referer: gives a URL they don't approve of, then they can reprogram their site to deliver something different, or deliver nothing at all if they wish.
This might be different if the links were the kind to trick multitudes of web browsers into improper accesses. For example, if CmdrTaco were to hate some web site out there and wanted to cause it harm, he could stick in a few hundred 1x1 image references to the site's main page right here on slashdot and really clobber them. Imagine slashdot effect multiplied. But this isn't about that kind of linking. This is about the kind of linking that simply directs someone to visit another site for what is there.
And this isn't about copyrights or trademarks. Sure, those things can often be infringed on by those doing the linking. If they improperly copy parts of thet target site, such as using images or icons from there, even just to form the link, then that is an infringement, but it is not the linking issue.
Linking is not at all like spam as long as the information that describes the link is truthful and accurate. If I point to some page at some computer vendor site and say you can get fine warez there, that would be wrong. That should be prohibited. But if I deep link to the Linux section of www.ibm.com, and say "This is IBM's Linux section", and IBM is offering it to the public, then I should be able to. Afterall, all that I am doing is simply saying to whoever visits my site, there is a place that IBM offers this information to the public. If IBM wanted to close it to say just subscribed customers with password access, I'd think someone there would know how to do it. If they don't want the link coming from, say, a Lolita Porn site, they can certainly suppress the link on their end and redirect it to say the main page, or their legal page, or bring up a blank page. I'd think someone there would be able to do it.
The comparison to spam is all wrong. This is NOT a "push" issue like spam is. If I didn't want people to visit my site, I'd take it down.
I'm not surprised that law.com would have such a policy, then claim they knew nothing about it. There's a lot of incompetency going on over there. Even their web page itself sucks with crappy HTML. They probably have a couple of high schools kids who want to show off their Javascript leetness doing the site.
Replace "lemonade stand" with "operating system".
The spectrum rules are generic for any use of RF, including microwave ovens. WiFi happens to be a standard that, since there were no government service licenses, and because it was intended for very local (home, office) usage, did not plan for this.
That said, it is clear that now we know there is a market for a licensed, possibly frequency coordinated, service in this category. As popular as it is expected to be, a lot of bandwidth might be needed. You'll probably not find that anywhere below 24 GHz in the spectrum. Also, licensed services won't work out in the Part 15 spectrum. To make this happen, the FCC would have to study what spectrum could be used, and set up rules to establishing a licensing. Surely there will be geo-spectral auctioning in the process. It's not unlike other services from broadcast to cell phones. But don't expect that only a handful of businesses will want to get into this. Hundreds probably will. Dividing spectrum by frequency isn't all that good, either, especially for digital. Spread spectrum sharing is what is going to have to happen, and even that will reduce bandwidth to each as total usage increases.
I do believe the FCC needs to designate part of the spectrum (by frequency) for non-commercial free services (but also shareable between overlapped free services), with reduced licensing requirements and no auction.
Read even more details about Part 15 rules here.
Will Personal Telco have to move again after the next commercial service comes along? How many times do they have to move until there are no more channels to move to?
Channels are finite and this is an unlicensed spectrum anyone can use. Both parties have to live with that. Starbucks/T-Mobile was just stupid by not planning better. It isn't hard for a planning engineer to whip out the WiFi and just check to see what's there on what channel.
It would be smart for Starbucks to move over to another channel. Surely there will be fewer users of their service than of the free one, so they can certainly offer a service based on better bandwidth availability.
But this won't last long. The spectrum is limited, and there is no licensing or frequency coordinators to manage it. Part 15 rules include the fact that users are subject to interference from other legal users, including microwave ovens. Basing a paid service on such rules is foolhardy. But one direction is that it's success could be used to get the FCC to open more spectrum, and a licensing structure, for just such kinds of services. It will probably have to be on all new spectrum, perhaps up at 10 or 24 GHz.
I see no problem with Starbucks wanting to offer a service. This isn't ham radio they are using, so they can certainly charge money for it. The issue is whether they should use the same channel as a previously existing service. Before they were aware of it, they could have planned to use a particular channel. But, a prudent planner would have checked to see what was active in the area by simply checking out the RF in the area using WiFi equipment.
But Starbucks/T-mobile knows about it now. So they have to decide whether they want to continue to share the channel and have degraded service and impose degraded service on others, or whether they move to another channel and have good service without bothering others (until there are more services than channels available to accomodate). Even if they decide to stay, I won't call Starbucks as evil, because channel sharing is inevitable. However, if they demand that others move off the channel, then they are evil. We'll see.
Make sure this database supports regular expressions. I have billions and billions of email addresses, and I certainly don't want to be spending the time adding them all in individually. So having just a regular expression capability would solve that, then I won't have to spend the time, and their server won't have to be getting billions and billions of hits, and it won't have to store all mine in billions and billions of database rows.
Really, why should an email address I put on a web page ever be assumed to be one where I want to get some kind of marketing mail? Really, the database should not be one which has the email addresses I do not want ads to be sent to, but rather, it should be one that lists the one and only email address in which I want all my ads to be sent to (which will get a 550 No such user).
I think Slashdot has milked those teets dry! Or is that "Beef, it's what's for dinner".
It's not just the inexperienced who are unemployed. The dot-com and tech industry layoffs were quite across the board as whole projects in surviving companies, and whole companies that didn't survive at all, came to an end. When a manager who gets to stay if he makes his department lean has to deal with a budget slashed to the bone, and doesn't have much work for those who remain to do, anyway, he's not just going to pick the few lesser experienced people and send them packing. With no work, even the highly experienced people won't be bringing any value into the department or the company, so they are let go. The 1990's saw a lot of turnover of people, so in the minds of management, once they do need experts again, they can just hire them when they are needed.
Your statement "it has been god-damn difficult to find someone GOOD to employ" might need to be questioned. How hard did you really try? And do you offer the level of pay that someone with 20 years experience is really worth, when they inquire? Hint: you're not going to find very many of them at the local college.
All the recording industry ever does is whine. If they would actually put up a real music site online where people could actually honestly pay for music, at a price that does not include the costs of manufacturing and distributing CDs (but would include the cost of running a site and the associated bandwidth, of course), then I believe a lot more people would honestly pay for the music. The price should be about $2 per 60 minute album, but definitely not more than $5.
This needs to be in format(s) to allow it to be played on any computer or any playback device. As long as they want to impose this DRM shit, then people are going to find ways around it, and as they do, sales will be lost in greater amounts than DRM would protect. If they are going to discriminate against certain sectors of the market and not sell music that they can play, then they should not whine when the people in those sectors find a way to get the music without paying.
It's the content I want to block. I don't want the spam to be sent to me in the first place. I don't want it to use up my bandwidth, which is half the reason for refusing spam in the first place. Plus, when handling other people's mail, it's one thing to block suspected spam sources for them; it's another thing entirely to examine the content, even if it's just computer logic doing it. If I am able to deploy the ability to examine mail for unacceptable content, then what else will I have to test for later? What will the government expect me to be able to do?
I'll stick with blocking dedicated spam houses, ISPs that harbor spammers, open relays, open proxies, dialup pools, and certain countries, by IP address and/or domain name. And I'll continue to block anything that can't get their reverse DNS right (this feature alone took out half the spam with very little collateral damage).
This was four years ago. I wasn't in a desperate need for a job, and I hadn't even heard of OpenOffice then. But I would definitely have loved to do that, to make the tweak in the contract and let them have that. Hopefully they wouldn't pull a "You need to sign our official copy here. We just sent it to your recruiter so you could read it ahead of time." Of course my response would then be "How do I know that one is exactly the same as the one I read yesterday?"
Translation:
We were dumb and wrote endian-dependent code, such as accessing multi-byte numbers by loading one character at a time. We assumed the high-order bytes were first, but with the Intel processor, it's the other way around. So we had to go back and re-do it all over again. Don't worry, we'll find some way to blame management. They told us to write endian-dependent code; yeah, that's right.
I interviewed with a technology development company and was asked to sign one of these forms right there at the interview. It was made clear to me that if I didn't sign it right then and there, the interview could not continue. Most of it involved non-disclosure. But some of it did sign over all my invention rights to them.
There was one clause that specified that if I was not hired, then the contract only applied to information made available to me during the interview. It was not entirely clear how well that applied to the parts about me handing over all my rights to my own intellectual property.
The really stupid part of this wasn't that they wanted me to sign such a contract, but that they barely gave me enough time to read the whole thing (I actually did). Due to it being in the circumstance of an interview, it wasn't possible to go consult an attorney, much less find one that practiced in both employment law and intellectual property law (we're probably talking a week or two at least). When I asked the HR guy about it, he indicated they had interviewed 3 other candidates for the position and were looking to make the hiring decision within the week, and that such a delay would probably mean the position would no longer be open.
What made me decide to walk out wasn't so much the fact that the situation existed (though I might well have because of it), but rather, the fact that the HR guy was so perfectly prepared in his answer to me. Whether he was telling me the truth or not wasn't even relevant. Later, I found the same job was posted again. Who knows how many walkouts they had.
Later, a recruiter was trying to get me in to interview for a position at an entirely different company. On Monday he was saying they had people from their New York headquarters in for the week to do the interviewing and they were booked up very tight. By Wednesday, he had an appointment for me for a Friday interview. Then the surprise. He wanted to send me the non-disclosure and non-compete contract. His explanation was because the schedule was so tight, they wanted people to be coming in with the contract already signed. At first we had an issue with the fact that he was sending it to me in Microsoft Word format (whee, I get to see all the revisions they ever made to it). I pointed out to him that I was a Unix person, this was a Unix job, and he was a recruiter doing more than half his work with Unix positions, and he wanted me to run Microsoft crap? So I ended up having him pull up a copy and asked him about some clauses in it (he was patient enough to do this, surprisingly). I focused on the non-compete and asked him if there were any clauses that made it only apply if I got the job. There were none. So I explained to the recruiter that "If I interview there having signed this, find out what this secret area of business is that they are doing, them I'm no longer allowed to work for anyone else in the same line of business, or even related, even if I don't get this job?" He paused for a minute and then said "I guess not". now I wished I had gone ahead and let him send me a copy of that.
The immoral of the stories here are that companies will try to take advantage of you one way or another. And it's probably even worse during this current economic downturn (equivalent to a full blown depression if you look just at the high-tech businesses by themselves). Watch out for what you sign.
Very good point. I'm sure that is usable. I was eating out just yesterday at a Chinese restaurant, and I simply had water with my food. I guess we need to get the equivalent of water with our computers.
As much as we might like to hate this practice, it is common place in business. Restaurants typically sell only one soft-drink vendor line, such as Pepsi vs. Coke, in order to get the best pricing/terms on the deal. In part it's the volume that does this (if they sold both, each would sell at half the level, and they wouldn't get the biggest price break), and the salesman push to get an exclusive deal (he gets more commission).
With Microsoft it is different since they are a monopoly. The problem is the difference is overshadowed by the fact that it is a common business practice in cases where there isn't a clear cut monopoly (e.g. neither Pepsi nor Coke can be said to have a monopoly anywhere near what Microsoft has). Constructing a case against Microsoft (or even Dell) in this matter would not be easy, and would require some very smart lawyers, and not the bozos over at DOJ. But there might be a lawyer or two at each of about 9 states that might be able to work together at this. We'll see.
Blocking and filtering spam doesn't reduce the rate. In fact it's going up. There are hundreds of email addresses in my domains being repeatedly spammed, and these never existed (so there's no way in hell they could be confirmed opt-ins). It's probably the case they were making their money to begin with from places that today are not blocking it, so they still make money (morons transferring cash to other morons).
No one I know buys spammer crap. If they are making money, then maybe someone is, but who? Someone gonna break in to a spammer operations to get the data?
Friends don't let friends read spam.