I think this is incorrect. The main conclusions of Unsafe At ny Speed were NOT about the Corvair in particular, but rather the reluctance of Detroit to build safe cars, and that safety concerns were subordinated to style and marketing concerns.
If anything, the book was pretty bland, for the obvious reason that safety was subordinate because safety didn't sell.
I think you can even blame a lot of the out-sourcing to India on the boom, or, rather, the idiots it attracted.
Because if there were fewer programmers, they'd be able to do a greater volume of work at less cost, defeating the purpose of the outsourcing?
You have it *exactly backwards*, my friend. If there weren't so many people in the field, they'd be able to handle less volume, and be much more expensive. Outsourcing would have happened much faster, in greater quantities, than it has.
This is brilliantly put. But remember, the guy who is hired by the Bank of Fooblitzky is "just getting by". For those guys who want to be the next Bill Gates, well, it does no good at all.
The point is that as a good programmer, you should be able to do much better than simply "not go hungry".
Why? Is programming talent scarce? It seems to me that it's not. Not even hardly; leaving code monkeys out of it, good programmers are 99 cents a pound.
Now, people with good original ideas are indeed scarce - and they can make money out of them regardless (even, I should note, if they're lousy programmers). But good programmers aren't scarce, and if that's all you bring to the table, "not going hungry" - i.e. just getting by like everyone else - is pretty much all you should expect to get.
Apologies to those programmers who have dreams of fabulous riches. I'm sure you'll find a way to make it work, someday.
Let me do a little more history while I'm at it. The very first "intellectual property" laws were the Statute of Monopolies of 1624. This invested "copyright" (literally the right to print copies of anything whatsoever) in the Stationers' Company.
The Stationers' Company acted as warehouse for censorship and prior restraint. (This was the subject of Aeropagitica, John Milton's paean to the idea of a free press). After the Revolution in 1688, the idea of Big Brother deciding what could and could not be printed proved pretty damn horrifying to everyone, so "copyright" by 1695 had pretty much ceases to exist. Result? Cheap books from Scotland were wrecking the English printers' market share. The response was a modern copyright law, designed to encourage the dissemination of books (authors had no rights at all once their works had been bought and published!) and allowed the printer who had bought the book from the author a monopoly on printing it, in order to encourage them to make books widely available (since there was no fear of piracy)
No, it's not. That's not the original purpose of patent law. The original, animating purpose of patent law is to create a storehouse of ideas about industrial process and design. Inventors are given a short window of exclusive use as "payment" for contributing their inventions, ideas, designs, what have you. But the purpose was, and theoretically still is, to collect the ideas and make them available to the public.
(For copyright law, the idea was to encourage people to write stuff down - and the method was to compensate them with certain legal rights, yes. But the purpose is the publication, not the compensation. Go back and read Jefferson, or better yet the early theorists of copyright. Best place to start is the case of Donaldson v. Beckett from 1774.)
You're not patenting either. The patent is on the process for building the mousetrap. The design cannot be patented, neither can the trap itself. Just the method for building/creating it.
What they *can't*, do, is offer the trap building service. They can - in theory - make an identical trap, so long as they don't use your method. From a practical point of view, that is generally ignored.
The bottom line of intellectual property is this: The creator of that IP has an absolute moral right to determine how his property may be used.
And it's an idea that is 100% moose hockey.
Unlike the natural properties (things which are capable of being owned), ideas are not capable of being owned. "Intellectual property" is a creature of law, designed solely to encourage the fixture of ideas (not, crucially, the creation of ideas... the purpose of copyright and patent is solely to have people WRITE STUFF DOWN so that others can access it and use it). It's since gone badly off the rails, but that's the animating purpose behind all such laws.
You can't own an idea, any more than you can own the word "dental". You can keep an idea private, but that's different from owning it.
The fact is, that "moral rights" never even appeared on the radar screen of intellectual property until well after the current model of permanent ownership of the products of all human ideas came into being.
There is no theft in the "theft" of an idea, for the simple fact that my appropriation of "your" idea does not alter or harm your own idea one iota. My taking the "idea" under my control does not, in any way, affect the control you have over the idea. As a result, ideas are simply not capable of being owned, since the only purpose of ownership is the taking under human control of those things that can be controlled.
Sorry for the heavy Hegelian slant of this (I'm hauling my concept of ownership, incidentally, out of Hegel's _Philosophy of Right_). But in a nutshell, ideas are not things, and treating them as things is stupid.
Open Source software is just that... the source code is published openly. Software can be Open Source and still be subject to copyright, patent, and other intellectual property restrictions.
Free Software is a bit more nebulous a term, but as I understand it, it refers to software for which the intellectual property rights (copyright and so forth) have been deliberately weakened so that others may modify it, create derivative works from it, and in some cases even redistribute it, without fear of legal reprisal.
I think a regular 60-minute cassette tape had about 80K of storage on it. So that makes 12.5 tapes per MB, or 12,500 tapes per GB. Your 10 GB super-duper movie would check in at a cool 125,000 cassette tapes, which in standard cassette cases would be... truckloads, I would guess.
Not exactly. At common law, parents do not bear responsibility for acts committed by their children, except where the act was done with the parent's knowledge and consent.
Only by "parental responsibility" statutes can parents be made responsible for their children's torts. All states except NH and NY appear to have these, but most have a pertty small cap on damage awards (often $1000).
However such laws apply (again, usually... this is a patchwork of 48 different statutes) only to torts... violations of intellectual property rights would presumably not apply, since they are not torts in any meaningful sense of the term.
I'm a lawyer... someone who consumes a lot of specialized services. As a result, my inbox gets flooded every day with emails "promoting the slightly obscure services that we provide". It's irritating, it's annoying, and because my e-mail is listed in Martindale-Hubbell, I'm going to continue receiving this crap.
Now snail mail... I have less of a problem with that, particularly since I have someone who can winnow out the garbage, and it costs you a few pennies to send - limiting the potential abuse. But yes, if you were to be bulk e-mailing it would be spam as surely as the sun came up this morning. The fact that you target which particular people to annoy doesn't make me any happier with it.
P.S. I know exactly what credit insurance is, meat. Not only is it "almost essential" for sh*t, but if you think that your business is somehow different or special from the 1000s of other service businesses out there, you are very sadly mistaken. How would your statements be any different if you worked for a pants-pressing service rather than a credit insurer?
If your customers aren't even aware of what credit insurance is, my suggestion is that you guys start paying for articles and advertising in the trade journals.
This is an interesting idea. While a suit under patent is obviously a non-starter, and a trademark suit difficult to litigate unless they were using the specific registered marks, a suit under the common-law doctrine of "passing off" could certainly be launched.
"Passing off", in simple terms, is a doctrine that allows someone engaged in trade to sue someone for attempting to "pass off" their goods as yours. In essence, it protects you from having someone erode your goodwill.
However, I don't know what rights or interests Phillips has in the CD format anymore. Can they command licence fees, etc.? If they own trademarks on "compact disc audio" you might be able to start a fire with that. Generally, though, I'd say OUTLOOK NOT SO GOOD. But it's an interesting thought.
Is the US planning to spam every Iranian email address with info on what server IP to connect to?
Yes. RTFA. The info will also be given out via Voice of America.
Re:So why ever go to university?
on
MIT Everyware
·
· Score: 1
Resume 1: MIT
Resume 2: Community college, but I looked at some of that opencourseware stuff.
Who gets hired? The article talks about what you say, all you have to do is actually read it
Who do I hire? I hire the one who seemed to learn more from their experience. I don't care that you have a piece of parchment with "MIT" printed on it. It's going to be harder to learn from the Opencourseware materials than from the courses themselves, but a motivated person (hopefully with some help from an online community) can certainly do it.
You can't bomb an entire village to catch one bad guy and then expect the locals to think that you are doing them a favor.
It's not about whether you're doing "the locals" any favors. It's about doing millions and millions of others a favor... blocking a spammer.
I can understand that you would want your individual concerns to be considered far more important than the collective concerns of millions of other people. But I don't agree that they should.
When the Meech Lake accord failed... the province made clear that anyone daring to fly a Canadian flag on Canada Day risked getting arrested for "inciting to riot".
As an astute/. reader will realize, this is a lie... it never happened.
assault (because someone was offended)
This is not assault, and no one has ever been convicted of assault due to being "offended". Threats of force by word or gesture ("I'll punch your lights out", shaking a fist in someone's face, etc), if they are reasonably believable, can constitute assault. Not otherwise.
There was a case a few years ago that actually tested the principle that truth was a legal defence against libel
This gets tested all the time, in all sorts of places. So what?
before you trot out the 1982 patriated constitution, with it's Charter of Rights and Freedoms, look up "notwithstanding clause".
Which has been used twice by Canadian governments in 21 years... once by Quebec on Bill 101 (the French-language law) and once by Saskatchewan on a labour bill. That's it. It's no more a limit on rights and freedoms than the the time lag in getting a court to rule on constitutionality.
Canadians fall into two camps: rats who pervert democracy via rule of the largest mob, or sheep, who are too tired or scared to fight back.
So I'm either a rat or a sheep, am I? I stand up for my civil liberties, thanks, and thank heaven that I am in a country where these - and my human rights - are protected.
I can understand you are upset with living in Canada (apparently for political reasons) and want to move... why aren't you able to emigrate? What's holding you back?
I am seriously considering giving my son up for adoption so he can return to the U.S.
Oh. Right. You're totally off your freaking rocker. My mistake.
Slashdot Mirror
If anything, the book was pretty bland, for the obvious reason that safety was subordinate because safety didn't sell.
Ah, see, I didn't know about it after all. Thanks, AC.
I don't use headphones. My iPod uses a 3/4" plug directly into my cerebral cortex.
Yes. Under campaign finance laws, any person or corporation can donate a maximum of $2000 to one candidate.
How sad is it that I, in Canada, know this, yet all these Americans don't?
This would only matter in the context of a criminal prosecution. Nobody is talking about criminal prosecution of Johnny. These are civil suits.
I think you can even blame a lot of the out-sourcing to India on the boom, or, rather, the idiots it attracted.
Because if there were fewer programmers, they'd be able to do a greater volume of work at less cost, defeating the purpose of the outsourcing?
You have it *exactly backwards*, my friend. If there weren't so many people in the field, they'd be able to handle less volume, and be much more expensive. Outsourcing would have happened much faster, in greater quantities, than it has.
This is brilliantly put. But remember, the guy who is hired by the Bank of Fooblitzky is "just getting by". For those guys who want to be the next Bill Gates, well, it does no good at all.
The point is that as a good programmer, you should be able to do much better than simply "not go hungry".
Why? Is programming talent scarce? It seems to me that it's not. Not even hardly; leaving code monkeys out of it, good programmers are 99 cents a pound.
Now, people with good original ideas are indeed scarce - and they can make money out of them regardless (even, I should note, if they're lousy programmers). But good programmers aren't scarce, and if that's all you bring to the table, "not going hungry" - i.e. just getting by like everyone else - is pretty much all you should expect to get.
Apologies to those programmers who have dreams of fabulous riches. I'm sure you'll find a way to make it work, someday.
Let me do a little more history while I'm at it. The very first "intellectual property" laws were the Statute of Monopolies of 1624. This invested "copyright" (literally the right to print copies of anything whatsoever) in the Stationers' Company.
The Stationers' Company acted as warehouse for censorship and prior restraint. (This was the subject of Aeropagitica, John Milton's paean to the idea of a free press). After the Revolution in 1688, the idea of Big Brother deciding what could and could not be printed proved pretty damn horrifying to everyone, so "copyright" by 1695 had pretty much ceases to exist. Result? Cheap books from Scotland were wrecking the English printers' market share. The response was a modern copyright law, designed to encourage the dissemination of books (authors had no rights at all once their works had been bought and published!) and allowed the printer who had bought the book from the author a monopoly on printing it, in order to encourage them to make books widely available (since there was no fear of piracy)
No, it's not. That's not the original purpose of patent law. The original, animating purpose of patent law is to create a storehouse of ideas about industrial process and design. Inventors are given a short window of exclusive use as "payment" for contributing their inventions, ideas, designs, what have you. But the purpose was, and theoretically still is, to collect the ideas and make them available to the public.
(For copyright law, the idea was to encourage people to write stuff down - and the method was to compensate them with certain legal rights, yes. But the purpose is the publication, not the compensation. Go back and read Jefferson, or better yet the early theorists of copyright. Best place to start is the case of Donaldson v. Beckett from 1774.)
You're not patenting either. The patent is on the process for building the mousetrap. The design cannot be patented, neither can the trap itself. Just the method for building/creating it.
What they *can't*, do, is offer the trap building service. They can - in theory - make an identical trap, so long as they don't use your method. From a practical point of view, that is generally ignored.
The bottom line of intellectual property is this: The creator of that IP has an absolute moral right to determine how his property may be used.
And it's an idea that is 100% moose hockey.
Unlike the natural properties (things which are capable of being owned), ideas are not capable of being owned. "Intellectual property" is a creature of law, designed solely to encourage the fixture of ideas (not, crucially, the creation of ideas... the purpose of copyright and patent is solely to have people WRITE STUFF DOWN so that others can access it and use it). It's since gone badly off the rails, but that's the animating purpose behind all such laws.
You can't own an idea, any more than you can own the word "dental". You can keep an idea private, but that's different from owning it.
The fact is, that "moral rights" never even appeared on the radar screen of intellectual property until well after the current model of permanent ownership of the products of all human ideas came into being.
There is no theft in the "theft" of an idea, for the simple fact that my appropriation of "your" idea does not alter or harm your own idea one iota. My taking the "idea" under my control does not, in any way, affect the control you have over the idea. As a result, ideas are simply not capable of being owned, since the only purpose of ownership is the taking under human control of those things that can be controlled.
Sorry for the heavy Hegelian slant of this (I'm hauling my concept of ownership, incidentally, out of Hegel's _Philosophy of Right_). But in a nutshell, ideas are not things, and treating them as things is stupid.
Open Source software is just that... the source code is published openly. Software can be Open Source and still be subject to copyright, patent, and other intellectual property restrictions.
Free Software is a bit more nebulous a term, but as I understand it, it refers to software for which the intellectual property rights (copyright and so forth) have been deliberately weakened so that others may modify it, create derivative works from it, and in some cases even redistribute it, without fear of legal reprisal.
PRESS PLAY ON TAPE
I think a regular 60-minute cassette tape had about 80K of storage on it. So that makes 12.5 tapes per MB, or 12,500 tapes per GB. Your 10 GB super-duper movie would check in at a cool 125,000 cassette tapes, which in standard cassette cases would be... truckloads, I would guess.
Besides, B1FF@BIT.NET still appears from time to time on Usenet...
Moral rights are *not transferable*. The author cannot "sign them over" to anyone. Please don't pontificate on things you don't understand.
Not exactly. At common law, parents do not bear responsibility for acts committed by their children, except where the act was done with the parent's knowledge and consent.
Only by "parental responsibility" statutes can parents be made responsible for their children's torts. All states except NH and NY appear to have these, but most have a pertty small cap on damage awards (often $1000).
However such laws apply (again, usually... this is a patchwork of 48 different statutes) only to torts... violations of intellectual property rights would presumably not apply, since they are not torts in any meaningful sense of the term.
Let me give you my own take on this.
I'm a lawyer... someone who consumes a lot of specialized services. As a result, my inbox gets flooded every day with emails "promoting the slightly obscure services that we provide". It's irritating, it's annoying, and because my e-mail is listed in Martindale-Hubbell, I'm going to continue receiving this crap.
Now snail mail... I have less of a problem with that, particularly since I have someone who can winnow out the garbage, and it costs you a few pennies to send - limiting the potential abuse. But yes, if you were to be bulk e-mailing it would be spam as surely as the sun came up this morning. The fact that you target which particular people to annoy doesn't make me any happier with it.
P.S. I know exactly what credit insurance is, meat. Not only is it "almost essential" for sh*t, but if you think that your business is somehow different or special from the 1000s of other service businesses out there, you are very sadly mistaken. How would your statements be any different if you worked for a pants-pressing service rather than a credit insurer?
If your customers aren't even aware of what credit insurance is, my suggestion is that you guys start paying for articles and advertising in the trade journals.
This is an interesting idea. While a suit under patent is obviously a non-starter, and a trademark suit difficult to litigate unless they were using the specific registered marks, a suit under the common-law doctrine of "passing off" could certainly be launched.
"Passing off", in simple terms, is a doctrine that allows someone engaged in trade to sue someone for attempting to "pass off" their goods as yours. In essence, it protects you from having someone erode your goodwill.
However, I don't know what rights or interests Phillips has in the CD format anymore. Can they command licence fees, etc.? If they own trademarks on "compact disc audio" you might be able to start a fire with that. Generally, though, I'd say OUTLOOK NOT SO GOOD. But it's an interesting thought.
Not only that, he's asking himself to pass himself stuff.
Engr1 : Dude, pass me the caffeine.
Engr1 : Dude, you *already have* the caffeine.
Engr1 : Whoa. Hey, I do have it. I thought you had it, dude.
Engr1 : Dude, you've had it all along.
Engr1 : Whoa.
Engr1 : Whoa.
Okay, okay. Some of us become angry. Some of us become aroused.
Yes. RTFA. The info will also be given out via Voice of America.
Who do I hire? I hire the one who seemed to learn more from their experience. I don't care that you have a piece of parchment with "MIT" printed on it. It's going to be harder to learn from the Opencourseware materials than from the courses themselves, but a motivated person (hopefully with some help from an online community) can certainly do it.
It's not about whether you're doing "the locals" any favors. It's about doing millions and millions of others a favor... blocking a spammer.
I can understand that you would want your individual concerns to be considered far more important than the collective concerns of millions of other people. But I don't agree that they should.
As an astute /. reader will realize, this is a lie... it never happened.
assault (because someone was offended)
This is not assault, and no one has ever been convicted of assault due to being "offended". Threats of force by word or gesture ("I'll punch your lights out", shaking a fist in someone's face, etc), if they are reasonably believable, can constitute assault. Not otherwise.
There was a case a few years ago that actually tested the principle that truth was a legal defence against libel
This gets tested all the time, in all sorts of places. So what?
before you trot out the 1982 patriated constitution, with it's Charter of Rights and Freedoms, look up "notwithstanding clause". Which has been used twice by Canadian governments in 21 years... once by Quebec on Bill 101 (the French-language law) and once by Saskatchewan on a labour bill. That's it. It's no more a limit on rights and freedoms than the the time lag in getting a court to rule on constitutionality.
Canadians fall into two camps: rats who pervert democracy via rule of the largest mob, or sheep, who are too tired or scared to fight back.
So I'm either a rat or a sheep, am I? I stand up for my civil liberties, thanks, and thank heaven that I am in a country where these - and my human rights - are protected.
I can understand you are upset with living in Canada (apparently for political reasons) and want to move... why aren't you able to emigrate? What's holding you back?
I am seriously considering giving my son up for adoption so he can return to the U.S.
Oh. Right. You're totally off your freaking rocker. My mistake.