The patent system was created for a reason, and the "right or wrong" of software patents should, in my opinion, be judged against that intent, not against whether a legislative body notorious for its own failure to achieve stated intent has seen fit to alter it. I do not have data to judge whether the majority of software patents or related infringement suits are being used in a manner consistent with the intent of the patent system. I know that my subjective impression of software patents is highly negative, no doubt influenced by the fact that only the really egregious instances of abuse come to my attention via various sources of reporting. It may well be that the majority of software patents and the litigation of the same is wholly consistent with the intent of the system. I do know that many of the software patents of which I've become aware are so stupidly obvious to a practitioner in the field (of which I am one) that the system of reviewing and granting such patents appears to be quite thoroughly dysfunctional.
I suspect that because the system as it is benefits most those with the most financial resources, along with the fact that the same could be said of the legislative body whose task it is to set the rules, the current system will continue to tilt ever further against everyone else until it collapses. I have no reasonable hope that those who wield the purse strings of political campaigns will recognize the need for balance in their own long term interest, and bring their pet representatives to heel before that point. This tends to leave me eager to see the collapse, though apprehensive of the fallout.
Constant mobile internet connections were cool... in 1990.
In 1990 ANY internet connection was a sure sign of a nerd. "Cool" people only used a Macintosh (no "i") for word processing or desktop publishing, and otherwise did not use computers much. The internet was something that connected University systems and government or private research facility networks, mostly. Nerds enjoyed froups and email and ftp. Some people used AOL, but it wasn't available for DOS yet, and it wasn't the internet. BBSes were popular, maybe those were "cool"?
If you have stuff that you don't care about other people seeing, go ahead and store it on someone else's servers/drives/etc. if it's convenient and meets your needs.
If you have stuff that you want to keep private, keep it local, keep it encrypted, and be careful with it.
If you have stuff that incriminates you, BURN IT YESTERDAY. (And I do not mean to a CD-R.) Unless, of course, it's stuff that I think you should go to jail for, in which case, go turn yourself in, you crook.
[...] I don't see how it can have any measurable effect on any decision made by anyone on this planet in the foreseeable future.
Because the decisions made by the myopic semi-intelligent simians on some stupid backwater mud ball in the bad part of the galaxy are the only measure of "importance." Uh huh.
I'd like to point out that the bill we're discussing is intended to remove legal restrictions from employers, or at least to remove a category of workers from the protection of those restrictions. Your angst may be misdirected here.
To be precise, there is a law already in existence, and this bill is intended to modify that law such that it does not apply to IT workers who are compensated more than a certain specified amount per hour.
So, this is Congress considering modifying something it already did. (In 1938, originally, with many amendments since.)
Furthermore, Congress *can* legislate anything it wants. It's the job of the Supreme Court to rein them in when they exceed their constitutional powers, and the job of the Executive to figure out how to enforce or administer those acts of Congress. As a corollary, it is the job of the voters to elect people who will act in accordance with the will of the people, within the bounds set out in the Constitution.
Marx described what was going on then, in the industrial revolution, and predicted some of the excesses and disasters of the next few years.
What we are now doing is attempting to repeat history, and have another Gilded Age.
The rise of 20th century Communism and its relatives was largely a response to the consolidation of wealth and power in the hands of the very few, and the abuse and exploitation of the remainder of the population by those few.
The wealthy few are now trying to recreate the conditions that led to those fatally flawed overreactions. I sincerely hope we won't repeat the whole mess.
I haven't read the full text of the statute involved, but I suspect an existing contract would remain in force.
To answer the question, though, the Congress (both houses must pass the bill) may pass or amend a law which sets forth the legal limits of employment terms, such as the minimum wage you mentioned, and also the requirement to compensate certain types of worker for time worked beyond the normal work week (40 hours here). As I understand it, the intent of this bill is to amend the law such that certain IT workers are specifically excluded from the overtime pay requirement.
So, the next contract or a new job offer might not include overtime pay, and it's conceivable that existing non-contractual employment terms might be altered.
I'd also point out that a great many bills are introduced to committee, but few ever reach the floor of the Senate or House, and fewer without alteration. This one bears watching, but the sky has not fallen just yet.
Carrying that logic forward, wouldn't a minimum wage just be part of a negotiation process?
The fact is that companies pay IT workers based on what other companies pay IT workers in the same market, with an incentive to reduce payroll overhead built into the compensation structure of the people on the other side of the negotiation. This puts an eternal downward pressure on the compensation offered, across the industry, and it doesn't even require an overt collusion between competitors to drive down salaries.
If they really need *you*, and you are a good negotiator, you can get more than the average for the job, but that person is the exception, not the rule. In every other case, they're going to pay the least they can get away with for the most work and expertise they can get, including not paying overtime.
This is also one of the causes of illegal immigration in the US and elsewhere - a percentage of companies will take shortcuts on payroll and benefits wherever they think they can get away with it, thus creating a demand for black market labor. The (illegally) cheap labor becomes a competitive advantage, as long as they don't get caught, or the penalties are less than the savings. The same applies to legal labor - the less you pay for the same work, the better the bottom line. This is why labor laws are a necessity. Employers have financial incentive to approach as close as legally allowed to slavery or its near relatives.
The fact that this bill has the much vaunted "bipartisan support" tends to bolster my suspicion that both parties are tools of the plutocracy and should be turned out on their ears en masse.
With all due respect, if the contract specifies destroying the drives, the associated costs should have been factored into the estimate in the first place.
The point of these is not so much for the person asking the question to get The Best Answer (tm) but rather to spark an interesting discussion which many will enjoy and possibly learn from. Over the years I've learned a TON of useful or entertaining things from Ask Slashdot discussions, many of which I would never have known to ask about in a google search or otherwise.
From this discussion I've already learned about Tizen which I had never heard of before today. I also enjoyed a few more bits of discussion about the Nook Tablet which I'm considering purchasing.
So I'm glad the question got asked, even if it wasn't the best way for the asker to get an answer.
Don't get me wrong, I know practically nothing about neutrinos.
But I know that dismissing new data because you prefer to believe a different set of data is how we get into unnecessary wars, Intelligent Design foolishness, and attempts to legislate that PI = 3.
The OPERA data have been neither independently replicated nor refuted to date, that I'm aware. That makes it "interesting data", something to be studied and verified, not something to be "believed" or "disbelieved". That way lies madness.
I found the article to be offensively biased, loaded with null-value emotionally charged language, and generally uninformative other than the couple of sentences that tried hard not to say "Oracle bought SleepyCat and re-wrote BerkelyDB with added features to avoid that whole open-source thing".
Like the many other "NoSQL" products the author maligned and slandered, Oracle's new product may be great for the purposes it's intended for. The writer of the article is not.
While I sympathize with your point of view, I generally find that all of the things I loved about the internet in the 80s and early 90s still work, and often better. There are several orders of magnitude more internet thingies that are out there now, including the profit driven stuff, but it's still mostly optional.
Also, the profit driven portions of the internet have funded my paycheck and supported my family for quite a few years now, so I won't moan too much about it. That would be rather hypocritical.
Wait... isn't slashdot a profit driven internet thingy?
That's impossible. I'll go have some freedom fries and ponder it. . . . . OK, I'm back. While I was gone, I had an epiphany. It seems to me that going around the world blowing up people and stuff for profit and political gain was what we disliked Mr. Qaddafi for in the first place. Right?
That does give a good amount of time to find the next job, though. Quite a bit better than my two experiences with layoffs. While that's no real consolation for the inevitable stress, it's at least some time to work it out.
Slashdot Mirror
How about ones that aren't stupidly obvious, and haven't been done before, and actually describe something that contributes to the state of the art?
I think I concur, for the most part.
The patent system was created for a reason, and the "right or wrong" of software patents should, in my opinion, be judged against that intent, not against whether a legislative body notorious for its own failure to achieve stated intent has seen fit to alter it. I do not have data to judge whether the majority of software patents or related infringement suits are being used in a manner consistent with the intent of the patent system. I know that my subjective impression of software patents is highly negative, no doubt influenced by the fact that only the really egregious instances of abuse come to my attention via various sources of reporting. It may well be that the majority of software patents and the litigation of the same is wholly consistent with the intent of the system. I do know that many of the software patents of which I've become aware are so stupidly obvious to a practitioner in the field (of which I am one) that the system of reviewing and granting such patents appears to be quite thoroughly dysfunctional.
I suspect that because the system as it is benefits most those with the most financial resources, along with the fact that the same could be said of the legislative body whose task it is to set the rules, the current system will continue to tilt ever further against everyone else until it collapses. I have no reasonable hope that those who wield the purse strings of political campaigns will recognize the need for balance in their own long term interest, and bring their pet representatives to heel before that point. This tends to leave me eager to see the collapse, though apprehensive of the fallout.
Constant mobile internet connections were cool... in 1990.
In 1990 ANY internet connection was a sure sign of a nerd. "Cool" people only used a Macintosh (no "i") for word processing or desktop publishing, and otherwise did not use computers much. The internet was something that connected University systems and government or private research facility networks, mostly. Nerds enjoyed froups and email and ftp. Some people used AOL, but it wasn't available for DOS yet, and it wasn't the internet. BBSes were popular, maybe those were "cool"?
What a long, strange trip...
I like my aspect oriented punch cards.
I knap my flint analytical engine gears with a sabertooth fang, and only a putz would need anything more.
Is there anything stopping a doctor from prescribing a 1/4 pill dose of the old Finasteride?
If you have stuff that you don't care about other people seeing, go ahead and store it on someone else's servers/drives/etc. if it's convenient and meets your needs.
If you have stuff that you want to keep private, keep it local, keep it encrypted, and be careful with it.
If you have stuff that incriminates you, BURN IT YESTERDAY. (And I do not mean to a CD-R.) Unless, of course, it's stuff that I think you should go to jail for, in which case, go turn yourself in, you crook.
[...] I don't see how it can have any measurable effect on any decision made by anyone on this planet in the foreseeable future.
Because the decisions made by the myopic semi-intelligent simians on some stupid backwater mud ball in the bad part of the galaxy are the only measure of "importance." Uh huh.
Had to happen, it's a Rule!
IF the poster actually used the discovered methods of intrusion (which is likely) then you are absolutely right.
If on the other hand the poster simply noticed a problem but did not test it actively, then notifying the company is the decent thing to do.
In either case, it's now time to walk away.
I'd like to point out that the bill we're discussing is intended to remove legal restrictions from employers, or at least to remove a category of workers from the protection of those restrictions. Your angst may be misdirected here.
To be precise, there is a law already in existence, and this bill is intended to modify that law such that it does not apply to IT workers who are compensated more than a certain specified amount per hour.
So, this is Congress considering modifying something it already did. (In 1938, originally, with many amendments since.)
Furthermore, Congress *can* legislate anything it wants. It's the job of the Supreme Court to rein them in when they exceed their constitutional powers, and the job of the Executive to figure out how to enforce or administer those acts of Congress. As a corollary, it is the job of the voters to elect people who will act in accordance with the will of the people, within the bounds set out in the Constitution.
I mostly blame the idiots who hired these morons.
Marx described what was going on then, in the industrial revolution, and predicted some of the excesses and disasters of the next few years.
What we are now doing is attempting to repeat history, and have another Gilded Age.
The rise of 20th century Communism and its relatives was largely a response to the consolidation of wealth and power in the hands of the very few, and the abuse and exploitation of the remainder of the population by those few.
The wealthy few are now trying to recreate the conditions that led to those fatally flawed overreactions. I sincerely hope we won't repeat the whole mess.
I haven't read the full text of the statute involved, but I suspect an existing contract would remain in force.
To answer the question, though, the Congress (both houses must pass the bill) may pass or amend a law which sets forth the legal limits of employment terms, such as the minimum wage you mentioned, and also the requirement to compensate certain types of worker for time worked beyond the normal work week (40 hours here). As I understand it, the intent of this bill is to amend the law such that certain IT workers are specifically excluded from the overtime pay requirement.
So, the next contract or a new job offer might not include overtime pay, and it's conceivable that existing non-contractual employment terms might be altered.
I'd also point out that a great many bills are introduced to committee, but few ever reach the floor of the Senate or House, and fewer without alteration. This one bears watching, but the sky has not fallen just yet.
Carrying that logic forward, wouldn't a minimum wage just be part of a negotiation process?
The fact is that companies pay IT workers based on what other companies pay IT workers in the same market, with an incentive to reduce payroll overhead built into the compensation structure of the people on the other side of the negotiation. This puts an eternal downward pressure on the compensation offered, across the industry, and it doesn't even require an overt collusion between competitors to drive down salaries.
If they really need *you*, and you are a good negotiator, you can get more than the average for the job, but that person is the exception, not the rule. In every other case, they're going to pay the least they can get away with for the most work and expertise they can get, including not paying overtime.
This is also one of the causes of illegal immigration in the US and elsewhere - a percentage of companies will take shortcuts on payroll and benefits wherever they think they can get away with it, thus creating a demand for black market labor. The (illegally) cheap labor becomes a competitive advantage, as long as they don't get caught, or the penalties are less than the savings. The same applies to legal labor - the less you pay for the same work, the better the bottom line. This is why labor laws are a necessity. Employers have financial incentive to approach as close as legally allowed to slavery or its near relatives.
The fact that this bill has the much vaunted "bipartisan support" tends to bolster my suspicion that both parties are tools of the plutocracy and should be turned out on their ears en masse.
With all due respect, if the contract specifies destroying the drives, the associated costs should have been factored into the estimate in the first place.
I wholly agree with you, but please learn to communicate more effectively. We'll get more traction that way. I promise.
OK, that's funny.
But...
The point of these is not so much for the person asking the question to get The Best Answer (tm) but rather to spark an interesting discussion which many will enjoy and possibly learn from. Over the years I've learned a TON of useful or entertaining things from Ask Slashdot discussions, many of which I would never have known to ask about in a google search or otherwise.
From this discussion I've already learned about Tizen which I had never heard of before today. I also enjoyed a few more bits of discussion about the Nook Tablet which I'm considering purchasing.
So I'm glad the question got asked, even if it wasn't the best way for the asker to get an answer.
I am a long time B&N customer, and have also been on slashdot for a while. I doubt I am alone in this.
While I agree with you on virtually every point, I would point out that this is slashdot, not "scientific community". We are a diverse lot.
This.
Don't get me wrong, I know practically nothing about neutrinos.
But I know that dismissing new data because you prefer to believe a different set of data is how we get into unnecessary wars, Intelligent Design foolishness, and attempts to legislate that PI = 3.
The OPERA data have been neither independently replicated nor refuted to date, that I'm aware. That makes it "interesting data", something to be studied and verified, not something to be "believed" or "disbelieved". That way lies madness.
I found the article to be offensively biased, loaded with null-value emotionally charged language, and generally uninformative other than the couple of sentences that tried hard not to say "Oracle bought SleepyCat and re-wrote BerkelyDB with added features to avoid that whole open-source thing".
Like the many other "NoSQL" products the author maligned and slandered, Oracle's new product may be great for the purposes it's intended for. The writer of the article is not.
While I sympathize with your point of view, I generally find that all of the things I loved about the internet in the 80s and early 90s still work, and often better. There are several orders of magnitude more internet thingies that are out there now, including the profit driven stuff, but it's still mostly optional.
Also, the profit driven portions of the internet have funded my paycheck and supported my family for quite a few years now, so I won't moan too much about it. That would be rather hypocritical.
Wait... isn't slashdot a profit driven internet thingy?
That's impossible. I'll go have some freedom fries and ponder it.
.
.
.
.
OK, I'm back. While I was gone, I had an epiphany. It seems to me that going around the world blowing up people and stuff for profit and political gain was what we disliked Mr. Qaddafi for in the first place. Right?
So what we will need is "dumb-ass website block".
My condolences to your friend.
That does give a good amount of time to find the next job, though. Quite a bit better than my two experiences with layoffs. While that's no real consolation for the inevitable stress, it's at least some time to work it out.