Obviously they think that their master form is an original pattern, and that copying is is analogous to photocopying a book. That is: they consider the pattern, rather than the metal of the form to be the thing of value.
The sentiment above is quite right. The thing that's interesting about the template is its shape. The plastic from which it's made is, quite arguably, only the medium used to transmit the shape from the company to the user. In this sense, the Dove Tail MasterTemplate is quite like software, which is also carried to the user on bits of plastic, and which is nevertheless distinct from that plastic.
Router templates are susceptible to wear and to damage from a misguided router, so the idea with this template is that you first make one or more copies, and then you use those copies to cut the actual dovetail joints. So long as you're careful with the master, it should last a lot longer than it would if you used it directly to cut dovetails (which you could certainly do). You normally would make the copy from plastic, hardboard, or plywood, but you could also use a soft metal such as aluminum.
I'd have to say it would want to be a pretty amazing form.
It's not all that different from most other dovetail templates, but it is nevertheless different enough that I think they can claim it's original. One nice feature (especially since you can make multiple copies of the master) is that you can place multiple templates end to end to make one long template. Where most dovetail templates have regularly-spaced "fingers" that protrude from a central spine, this one connects the fingers at their ends, presumably for stability.
I think that the real problem for this company is that they're trying to use an EULA in a market where that's not at all expected. You walk into a woodworking store, you pick something off the shelf and pay for it, and you assume that you then own it and can do whatever you like with it. The store owner thinks of himself as a salesman, not a leasing agent. I hope they have the good sense to clearly state the restrictions on the package, and also to be flexible in enforcement (i.e. it should be okay to give or sell your master, so long as you also transfer with it or destroy any copies you've made).
I think these folks would have a tough time making their EULA stand up in court, but on the other hand I can see their point. This thing is a template, and as such you're supposed to use it to make copies of itself. Making those copies is not hard, not time consuming, and not expensive. You can even make several at once
So what's to stop you from buying one unit, and then making copies for all your friends?
Nothing, that's what. Copyrights and patents wouldn't seem to help much, because they're explicitly giving you permission to copy the thing as many times as you want. How do you protect your investment in something like that?
I think that if they had to defend it in court, they might try something like: Our product is not a thing, it's a shape. The physical implementation of the template is, in fact, only a medium for transporting the shape to the user. Would you pay $39 for a six ounce piece of plastic? Of course not. But our customers pay $39 for the Dove Tail TemplateMaster all the time, and they do so specifically because of its shape. Our license agreement serves only to protect our investment in developing that shape from those who would unscrupulously purchase a single unit and then sell or give away copies.
Now, I don't know if that would stand up in court, but I don't think that's much problem for them. I think they're goal is to persuade end users not to "pirate" the Dove Tail TemplateMaster, and to give them at least some leg, however shaky, to stand on in court should another company come along and start selling TemplateMaster duplicates.
Someone suggested that copyright holders ought to be responsible for maintaining a copy of the work in question, pay storage fees for the Library of Congress (in the US, obviously), etc.
I think you could take that one step further and simply charge an annual copyright maintainance fee which should increase exponentially with the age of the copyright. Any entity could hold a copyright for as long as it wants, so long as they continue to pay the annual fee. A reasonable formula might be:
fee = $(1.18)^(years since first publication)
So in the 25th year of copyright, the copyright owner would pay a mere $62.67. By year 50, he'd pay $3927.35. In year 100, he'd pay $15.4 million. You could pre-pay the first 10 or 20 years just to reduce your paper work if you wanted, and the first x years of the fee could be waived for a work's creator if he could show that it would cause financial hardship. The idea would be to make it cheap and easy for people to hold copyrights for a while, and to strongly encourage copyright holders to place their work in the public domain after a reasonable period.
The same would work for patents, but I'd increase the base value to 2.5 or so.
You have a good point. But I think you have to admit that getting something without paying for it tends to skew one's perception of value.
Usually, I see this happen in the other direction, where price seems not to be an object for the reviewer. That's because, well, it isn't. In this case, I feel like Mr. Pogue is making a mountain out of a molehill. He talks about how great a number of features are, but then turns around and complains about a measley $129. Okay, I know $129 is a lot of dough for some of us, but it's only $30 more than the upgrade price for MS Word, and fully $100 less than Word's purchase price.
I don't have a problem with reviewers getting free stuff, though it'd be nice if they were a little more up front about it. I just feel that their reviews ought to give you enough information about the product itself to let YOU decide whether, given your own requirements and financial circumstances, the product will be a good value for you. YOU should be the one to say "I didn't buy x because it was too expensive," and THEY should tell you how well the product works, whether it lives up to the publisher's claims, and under what circumstances it works or doesn't work particularly well.
It's funny (strange) that Mr. Pogue makes such a big deal ("Now the big one:...") about the $130 upgrade price. I'm willing to bet that his copy of Panther didn't cost him even $0.01. He probably got a "review copy" or a "not for resale copy" or somesuch.
If you're the kind of guy who wants to get a lot of free stuff - books, gadgets, hardware, etc. - you can hardly do better than to become an author and reviewer. Write one or two books, and suddenly every other author in that field wants your name and a quote on the back of their book. I believe Dave Barry has written on this subject, and he's a lot funnier than I am, so I'll leave it to him.
Anyway, the upshot is that you should pretty much ignore anything that any hardware or software reviewer says about money, because they likely haven't spent any of theirs on hardware or software in quite a while.
It sounds exactly to me like the options you have when you right click on your Windows taskbar: Tile Windows Horizontally, Tile Windows Vertically, Minimize all Windows
It's entirely different. Expose rearranges some/all of your windows, but only for as long as you hold down the appropriate key. After that, they all snap back to their former location, unless you've done something to change that.
So you're working on a project and you need to get back to a window that's under 5 others, or you need to get to the desktop for a moment, and you don't want to move all your windows. You press a key, and the windows either shrink down so that you can see them all, allowing you to choose the one you want, or they all fly out of the way so you can manipulate stuff on the desktop. It's nice. It's a little whizzy, but it really does work well and is useful.
MS Windows' tiling features just make all your windows too small to be of any use.
1. Giant undersea release of methane or any other gas bubbles upward. 2. Unfortunate ship finds itself directly above said bubbles, weighs more than water/gas mixture and is suddenly no longer boyant. 3. Ship literally falls into the sea.
But there are many questions, none of which the article seems to answer. If these enormous methan releases exist, why has nobody every seen one? (Well, because they only occur once in a while, and they happen out at sea, and anyone who might have seen one probably now sleeps with the fishes.) More to the point, now that we think they might happen, how can we get a look at one? We apparently know where there are large methane deposits, so can we put a buoy with a camera nearby? Can we find evidence of a release on satellite photos? Can we hear them with underwater microphones? Or with seismographs? Are ships that might have been sunk by this sort of thing equipped with "black boxes" that would help us know how and why they sank?
Instead of a binary choice of black list or white list, where trust is all or nothing, a degree of trust should be established with keys signings from servers that endorse the level of trustworthiness of other servers. Perhaps the host keys used by SSH would be a good start on such a system.
Right. The role that I was thinking VeriSign (and many others, I hope) might want to play would be analogous to that of a credit reporting agency. If smtp.xyz.com contacts your server to send mail, you'd first determine for yourself whether you trust that server. You might do this just by looking at your own black and white lists, or you might just accept all mail, or you might ask one or more servers that you trust how much they trust xyz. For extra credit, the protocol should be designed so that you can ask a server not only 'do you trust xyz?' but also 'who trusts you?'.
It would be a shame, however, if there were no way for some trusted server to be used for anonymous email, which has its uses apart from spam. Maybe anonymous re-mailers could work again, as long as inbound messages come from a trusted server.
It didn't occur to me until you mentioned it, but anonymous re-mailers could work better than they ever did before. Once a re-mailer establishes itself as trustworthy, other mail servers should be satisfied that that server won't send spam, and will likely accept any mail it wants to send. There might be other reasons that the server chooses not to trade mail, but spam won't be one of them as long as the re-mailer can effectively police its users and enforce its 'no spam' policy. The same thing works to prevent child pornography and other illegal stuff.
Some ISP's might initially balk at the prospect of having to detect violations of their no-spam policies, but if they do it, they'll be rewarded with a huge reduction in the amount of mail that they have to transfer and an increase in available network capacity.
Well presumably, any gateway that delivers significant amounts of spam to AT&T will be removed from the white list and added to the black one.
Their whole approach may or may not work, but it's an interesting idea. The PGP "web of trust" concept never really caught on among the general public, but creating a web of trusted mail servers would seem like a simple and effective defense against spam. AT&T's move might be the first step in that direction.
The next step, of course, would be either a new protocol or an extension to an existing one that would let one mail server ask another "Hey, smtp.xyz.com wants to exchange mail with me, but I've never heard of him. Do you know him? Do you trust him?" If VeriSign really cared about innovating and improving the net, this is the sort of thing they should be working on.
Sorry... I didn't misread you, and I hope I didn't give the impression that I thought you agree with MS. I agree with you, and I disagree with them. I think you did a good job of analyzing Microsoft's position, and it's their position, not your analysis, to which I object.
They're saying that by using iTunes to rip CDs [to AAC] or the Apple Music Store [to purchase AAC files] you are limiting your ability to use those files
The thing is, you can make exactly the same argument with respect to Microsoft Office. If, for example, I write a paper with MS Word, then my ability to use that file with other word processors is limited unless I first convert it to some other format. And honestly, it's a valid point, because I really hate it when people mail me important files in Word format assuming that everyone on the planet uses Word.
On the flip side, though, AAC is relatively open. Microsoft is not likely to give its competitors a copy of the Word file format spec, but you can go out and buy a copy of the AAC spec if you want to.
Even if AAC is a problem for you because your player doesn't support it, or you just don't like it, or whatever, you can still use iTunes as a bang-up music app, and just stick any of the many other formats that QuickTime supports, mp3 and Ogg included.
Actually, we've got way too much corn. There was a great article in the NY Times magazine called "The (Agri)Cultural Contradictions Of Obesity" (Oct. 12 or 13, I think, but too old to link for free) which explains how:
1) the price of corn directly affects the prices of many other food items;
2) we produce way too much corn due to a screwy corn subsidy program which encourages farmers to produce as much as they can, rather than as much as we need, and this drives the price down to the point where we all get hurt;
3) overproduction leads directly to increased consumption, and this is the reason that Americans are experiencing an epidemic of obesity.
It's an astounding article -- head to the library and look it up, or just pay the Times a buck or two... it's very persuasive.
The card reader power switch has a certain amount of retro appeal. But to really do things right, wire one of those big red 1981 IBM PC power switches into your machine!
We'd prefer ICANN to become more of a trade association that promotes the growth of the network rather than a regulatory body that seems to have a very difficult time getting anything done.
I think the last line of the interview pretty much says it all. That pesky ICANN does nothing but get in VeriSign's way, and they'd be thrilled to relegate it to some toothless trade group.
How do you show what you are capable of to a perspective employeer when everything you have written at a high techinical level is property of the companies you have worked for, and for internal use only...
Develop a portfolio. Ask for permission to add screen shots of your projects to your portfolio. If that's not possible, then develop a personal web site that demonstrates at least a little of what you can do. Be prepared to talk about the rest of your work, leaving out details like exactly what you did for whom and when. In an interview situation, ask your prospective employer what kinds of problems they face and tell them what you are qualified to do to solve those problems.
Understood, but the point is (and again, I'm no lawyer) I don't think the average NDA would prohibit one from disclosing one's own tax records to another party. If, for example, I chose to run for elected office, I might choose to make that information public. I very much doubt that the NDA I might have signed with Paranoid Projects, Inc. would prevent me from publishing the W-2 that they sent me, and which I later furnished the IRS. Therefore, I have to conclude that an NDA which tried to prevent me from disclosing the mere fact of my employment with any given company would be very difficult to enforce.
There are other ways that I think show that the mere fact of employment is essentially public information in nearly all cases. If Paranoid Projects operates in such a way that I could be observed by some third party arriving at their offices each day at 8am and leaving at 5pm for several years, it seems reasonable to assume that anyone that's interested enough in me could figure out where I work. If they don't keep copies of their phone list under lock and key, or if they provide me with buisness cards, or if I speak as a Paranoid employee in any public fora, then they can't very well expect that the fact of my employment with them is a secret subject to any NDA.
Nope. If they want to, they can hire you just because you made a really good impression in an interview.
Well of course anyone can hire you for any reason they like, provided you're willing to be hired. You got the sense of my comment backward... I was conjecturing that a past employer is obliged to verify the dates that I worked for them when my prospective employer calls them to check up on me. In the past, employees used to try to leave a company on good terms in the hope that the company would provide a good reference. But so many companies were sued by disgruntled employees for providing a bad reference that they stopped being honest when providing references, and either said only nice things, or nothing at all. And then companies were sued by other companies for providing good references for people who didn't live up to them, at which point they stopped even saying anything nice. Now, the standard response you'll get from any company when you try to get a reference for someone is "yes, so-and-so worked for use between this date and that, goodbye, [click]."
If you were an employee of these companies, then they must have a) paid you and b) withheld state and federal income tax, social security, etc. The IRS likely didn't sign an NDA before taking your money, and the NDA you signed very probably does not cover your own personal tax return. Ergo, the fact of your employment by these companies would seem to be public knowledge not covered by the NDA you signed.
What's more, if I'm not mistaken, the companies you worked for are pretty much obligated to verify the dates of your employment.
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. Go find one if you're really that worried about this, and pay 'em a hundred bucks for 15 minutes that will put your mind at ease.
If I lived in an area prone to forest fires, I'd sure love to be able to spray a coat of this stuff on the roof whenever a fire raged in the area. Many of the house fires that result from forest fires start when embers are blown onto rooves, and it sounds like "fire paste" could be a good and cheap defense. And rain might wash it away when it's no longer needed.
Something that doesn't absorb any energy would be a perfect insulator. I don't know of any of those, aside from a vacuum. You can decide for yourself whether a vacuum exists or is the absence of existance.
I'm not qualified to say whether a perfect insulator is physically possible or not. In light of superconductors, which are perfect conductors, it seems reasonable to think that some sort of perfectly insulating superinsulator might be possible. (Yes, electrical and thermal conductance are different, but I'm just giving an example.) If it did exist, though, what temperature would it be?
Most substances that aren't solid, and many that are, outgas like crazy in the mostly-vacuum environment of space. If this "fire paste" does, then what's left when it comes time for re-entry may not work as well as it should, or even work at all.
P2P is fine if they want to use it, but I don't think that hiding behind technology is a very good solution to their problem, if indeed the problem is real.
A much simpler defense against false reports is to encourage people who submit reports to suggest ways to verify their report, and at the same time to encourage others to actually do the verification, possibly attaching/linking a claim of verifcation to the original report. Readers would be openly informed that unverified reports should be treated as exactly that, and may be false.
The problem that P2P might help solve is the case where the government, or a group of individuals within the government, gets pissed off enough to try to shut the site down. Then you'd have a giant legal Whack-A-Mole, which would be fun to watch.
Slashdot Mirror
Obviously they think that their master form is an original pattern, and that copying is is analogous to photocopying a book. That is: they consider the pattern, rather than the metal of the form to be the thing of value.
The sentiment above is quite right. The thing that's interesting about the template is its shape. The plastic from which it's made is, quite arguably, only the medium used to transmit the shape from the company to the user. In this sense, the Dove Tail MasterTemplate is quite like software, which is also carried to the user on bits of plastic, and which is nevertheless distinct from that plastic.
Router templates are susceptible to wear and to damage from a misguided router, so the idea with this template is that you first make one or more copies, and then you use those copies to cut the actual dovetail joints. So long as you're careful with the master, it should last a lot longer than it would if you used it directly to cut dovetails (which you could certainly do). You normally would make the copy from plastic, hardboard, or plywood, but you could also use a soft metal such as aluminum.
I'd have to say it would want to be a pretty amazing form.
It's not all that different from most other dovetail templates, but it is nevertheless different enough that I think they can claim it's original. One nice feature (especially since you can make multiple copies of the master) is that you can place multiple templates end to end to make one long template. Where most dovetail templates have regularly-spaced "fingers" that protrude from a central spine, this one connects the fingers at their ends, presumably for stability.
I think that the real problem for this company is that they're trying to use an EULA in a market where that's not at all expected. You walk into a woodworking store, you pick something off the shelf and pay for it, and you assume that you then own it and can do whatever you like with it. The store owner thinks of himself as a salesman, not a leasing agent. I hope they have the good sense to clearly state the restrictions on the package, and also to be flexible in enforcement (i.e. it should be okay to give or sell your master, so long as you also transfer with it or destroy any copies you've made).
I think these folks would have a tough time making their EULA stand up in court, but on the other hand I can see their point. This thing is a template, and as such you're supposed to use it to make copies of itself. Making those copies is not hard, not time consuming, and not expensive. You can even make several at once
So what's to stop you from buying one unit, and then making copies for all your friends?
Nothing, that's what. Copyrights and patents wouldn't seem to help much, because they're explicitly giving you permission to copy the thing as many times as you want. How do you protect your investment in something like that?
I think that if they had to defend it in court, they might try something like: Our product is not a thing, it's a shape. The physical implementation of the template is, in fact, only a medium for transporting the shape to the user. Would you pay $39 for a six ounce piece of plastic? Of course not. But our customers pay $39 for the Dove Tail TemplateMaster all the time, and they do so specifically because of its shape. Our license agreement serves only to protect our investment in developing that shape from those who would unscrupulously purchase a single unit and then sell or give away copies.
Now, I don't know if that would stand up in court, but I don't think that's much problem for them. I think they're goal is to persuade end users not to "pirate" the Dove Tail TemplateMaster, and to give them at least some leg, however shaky, to stand on in court should another company come along and start selling TemplateMaster duplicates.
Someone suggested that copyright holders ought to be responsible for maintaining a copy of the work in question, pay storage fees for the Library of Congress (in the US, obviously), etc.
I think you could take that one step further and simply charge an annual copyright maintainance fee which should increase exponentially with the age of the copyright. Any entity could hold a copyright for as long as it wants, so long as they continue to pay the annual fee. A reasonable formula might be:
fee = $(1.18)^(years since first publication)
So in the 25th year of copyright, the copyright owner would pay a mere $62.67. By year 50, he'd pay $3927.35. In year 100, he'd pay $15.4 million. You could pre-pay the first 10 or 20 years just to reduce your paper work if you wanted, and the first x years of the fee could be waived for a work's creator if he could show that it would cause financial hardship. The idea would be to make it cheap and easy for people to hold copyrights for a while, and to strongly encourage copyright holders to place their work in the public domain after a reasonable period.
The same would work for patents, but I'd increase the base value to 2.5 or so.
You have a good point. But I think you have to admit that getting something without paying for it tends to skew one's perception of value.
Usually, I see this happen in the other direction, where price seems not to be an object for the reviewer. That's because, well, it isn't. In this case, I feel like Mr. Pogue is making a mountain out of a molehill. He talks about how great a number of features are, but then turns around and complains about a measley $129. Okay, I know $129 is a lot of dough for some of us, but it's only $30 more than the upgrade price for MS Word, and fully $100 less than Word's purchase price.
I don't have a problem with reviewers getting free stuff, though it'd be nice if they were a little more up front about it. I just feel that their reviews ought to give you enough information about the product itself to let YOU decide whether, given your own requirements and financial circumstances, the product will be a good value for you. YOU should be the one to say "I didn't buy x because it was too expensive," and THEY should tell you how well the product works, whether it lives up to the publisher's claims, and under what circumstances it works or doesn't work particularly well.
It's funny (strange) that Mr. Pogue makes such a big deal ("Now the big one:...") about the $130 upgrade price. I'm willing to bet that his copy of Panther didn't cost him even $0.01. He probably got a "review copy" or a "not for resale copy" or somesuch.
If you're the kind of guy who wants to get a lot of free stuff - books, gadgets, hardware, etc. - you can hardly do better than to become an author and reviewer. Write one or two books, and suddenly every other author in that field wants your name and a quote on the back of their book. I believe Dave Barry has written on this subject, and he's a lot funnier than I am, so I'll leave it to him.
Anyway, the upshot is that you should pretty much ignore anything that any hardware or software reviewer says about money, because they likely haven't spent any of theirs on hardware or software in quite a while.
It sounds exactly to me like the options you have when you right click on your Windows taskbar: Tile Windows Horizontally, Tile Windows Vertically, Minimize all Windows
It's entirely different. Expose rearranges some/all of your windows, but only for as long as you hold down the appropriate key. After that, they all snap back to their former location, unless you've done something to change that.
So you're working on a project and you need to get back to a window that's under 5 others, or you need to get to the desktop for a moment, and you don't want to move all your windows. You press a key, and the windows either shrink down so that you can see them all, allowing you to choose the one you want, or they all fly out of the way so you can manipulate stuff on the desktop. It's nice. It's a little whizzy, but it really does work well and is useful.
MS Windows' tiling features just make all your windows too small to be of any use.
Uh, don't you mean:
Unfortunately, in this case, it's more like:
1. Giant undersea release of methane or any other gas bubbles upward.
2. ???
3. Loss.
1. Giant undersea release of methane or any other gas bubbles upward.
2. Unfortunate ship finds itself directly above said bubbles, weighs more than water/gas mixture and is suddenly no longer boyant.
3. Ship literally falls into the sea.
But there are many questions, none of which the article seems to answer. If these enormous methan releases exist, why has nobody every seen one? (Well, because they only occur once in a while, and they happen out at sea, and anyone who might have seen one probably now sleeps with the fishes.) More to the point, now that we think they might happen, how can we get a look at one? We apparently know where there are large methane deposits, so can we put a buoy with a camera nearby? Can we find evidence of a release on satellite photos? Can we hear them with underwater microphones? Or with seismographs? Are ships that might have been sunk by this sort of thing equipped with "black boxes" that would help us know how and why they sank?
Instead of a binary choice of black list or white list, where trust is all or nothing, a degree of trust should be established with keys signings from servers that endorse the level of trustworthiness of other servers. Perhaps the host keys used by SSH would be a good start on such a system.
Right. The role that I was thinking VeriSign (and many others, I hope) might want to play would be analogous to that of a credit reporting agency. If smtp.xyz.com contacts your server to send mail, you'd first determine for yourself whether you trust that server. You might do this just by looking at your own black and white lists, or you might just accept all mail, or you might ask one or more servers that you trust how much they trust xyz. For extra credit, the protocol should be designed so that you can ask a server not only 'do you trust xyz?' but also 'who trusts you?'.
It would be a shame, however, if there were no way for some trusted server to be used for anonymous email, which has its uses apart from spam. Maybe anonymous re-mailers could work again, as long as inbound messages come from a trusted server.
It didn't occur to me until you mentioned it, but anonymous re-mailers could work better than they ever did before. Once a re-mailer establishes itself as trustworthy, other mail servers should be satisfied that that server won't send spam, and will likely accept any mail it wants to send. There might be other reasons that the server chooses not to trade mail, but spam won't be one of them as long as the re-mailer can effectively police its users and enforce its 'no spam' policy. The same thing works to prevent child pornography and other illegal stuff.
Some ISP's might initially balk at the prospect of having to detect violations of their no-spam policies, but if they do it, they'll be rewarded with a huge reduction in the amount of mail that they have to transfer and an increase in available network capacity.
Well presumably, any gateway that delivers significant amounts of spam to AT&T will be removed from the white list and added to the black one.
Their whole approach may or may not work, but it's an interesting idea. The PGP "web of trust" concept never really caught on among the general public, but creating a web of trusted mail servers would seem like a simple and effective defense against spam. AT&T's move might be the first step in that direction.
The next step, of course, would be either a new protocol or an extension to an existing one that would let one mail server ask another "Hey, smtp.xyz.com wants to exchange mail with me, but I've never heard of him. Do you know him? Do you trust him?" If VeriSign really cared about innovating and improving the net, this is the sort of thing they should be working on.
Which, together with control over what's playing, is why some of us still buy CD's.
Okay, AGAIN, I'm being misread
Sorry... I didn't misread you, and I hope I didn't give the impression that I thought you agree with MS. I agree with you, and I disagree with them. I think you did a good job of analyzing Microsoft's position, and it's their position, not your analysis, to which I object.
For some reason, having my stereo hooked up to the net buying songs seems just a little too close to pay-per-use than I'm comfortable with.
They're saying that by using iTunes to rip CDs [to AAC] or the Apple Music Store [to purchase AAC files] you are limiting your ability to use those files
The thing is, you can make exactly the same argument with respect to Microsoft Office. If, for example, I write a paper with MS Word, then my ability to use that file with other word processors is limited unless I first convert it to some other format. And honestly, it's a valid point, because I really hate it when people mail me important files in Word format assuming that everyone on the planet uses Word.
On the flip side, though, AAC is relatively open. Microsoft is not likely to give its competitors a copy of the Word file format spec, but you can go out and buy a copy of the AAC spec if you want to.
Even if AAC is a problem for you because your player doesn't support it, or you just don't like it, or whatever, you can still use iTunes as a bang-up music app, and just stick any of the many other formats that QuickTime supports, mp3 and Ogg included.
I'm sure the record companies would LOVE to use these, particularly if they can get the self-destruction time down to 1 or 2 years.
"Hey guys, look! We can make consumers buy the same music over and over again without having to keep changing the format!"
Actually, we've got way too much corn. There was a great article in the NY Times magazine called "The (Agri)Cultural Contradictions Of Obesity" (Oct. 12 or 13, I think, but too old to link for free) which explains how:
1) the price of corn directly affects the prices of many other food items;
2) we produce way too much corn due to a screwy corn subsidy program which encourages farmers to produce as much as they can, rather than as much as we need, and this drives the price down to the point where we all get hurt;
3) overproduction leads directly to increased consumption, and this is the reason that Americans are experiencing an epidemic of obesity.
It's an astounding article -- head to the library and look it up, or just pay the Times a buck or two... it's very persuasive.
The card reader power switch has a certain amount of retro appeal. But to really do things right, wire one of those big red 1981 IBM PC power switches into your machine!
We'd prefer ICANN to become more of a trade association that promotes the growth of the network rather than a regulatory body that seems to have a very difficult time getting anything done.
I think the last line of the interview pretty much says it all. That pesky ICANN does nothing but get in VeriSign's way, and they'd be thrilled to relegate it to some toothless trade group.
How do you show what you are capable of to a perspective employeer when everything you have written at a high techinical level is property of the companies you have worked for, and for internal use only...
Develop a portfolio. Ask for permission to add screen shots of your projects to your portfolio. If that's not possible, then develop a personal web site that demonstrates at least a little of what you can do. Be prepared to talk about the rest of your work, leaving out details like exactly what you did for whom and when. In an interview situation, ask your prospective employer what kinds of problems they face and tell them what you are qualified to do to solve those problems.
Your tax return in not public information.
Understood, but the point is (and again, I'm no lawyer) I don't think the average NDA would prohibit one from disclosing one's own tax records to another party. If, for example, I chose to run for elected office, I might choose to make that information public. I very much doubt that the NDA I might have signed with Paranoid Projects, Inc. would prevent me from publishing the W-2 that they sent me, and which I later furnished the IRS. Therefore, I have to conclude that an NDA which tried to prevent me from disclosing the mere fact of my employment with any given company would be very difficult to enforce.
There are other ways that I think show that the mere fact of employment is essentially public information in nearly all cases. If Paranoid Projects operates in such a way that I could be observed by some third party arriving at their offices each day at 8am and leaving at 5pm for several years, it seems reasonable to assume that anyone that's interested enough in me could figure out where I work. If they don't keep copies of their phone list under lock and key, or if they provide me with buisness cards, or if I speak as a Paranoid employee in any public fora, then they can't very well expect that the fact of my employment with them is a secret subject to any NDA.
Nope. If they want to, they can hire you just because you made a really good impression in an interview.
Well of course anyone can hire you for any reason they like, provided you're willing to be hired. You got the sense of my comment backward... I was conjecturing that a past employer is obliged to verify the dates that I worked for them when my prospective employer calls them to check up on me. In the past, employees used to try to leave a company on good terms in the hope that the company would provide a good reference. But so many companies were sued by disgruntled employees for providing a bad reference that they stopped being honest when providing references, and either said only nice things, or nothing at all. And then companies were sued by other companies for providing good references for people who didn't live up to them, at which point they stopped even saying anything nice. Now, the standard response you'll get from any company when you try to get a reference for someone is "yes, so-and-so worked for use between this date and that, goodbye, [click]."
If you were an employee of these companies, then they must have a) paid you and b) withheld state and federal income tax, social security, etc. The IRS likely didn't sign an NDA before taking your money, and the NDA you signed very probably does not cover your own personal tax return. Ergo, the fact of your employment by these companies would seem to be public knowledge not covered by the NDA you signed.
What's more, if I'm not mistaken, the companies you worked for are pretty much obligated to verify the dates of your employment.
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. Go find one if you're really that worried about this, and pay 'em a hundred bucks for 15 minutes that will put your mind at ease.
If I lived in an area prone to forest fires, I'd sure love to be able to spray a coat of this stuff on the roof whenever a fire raged in the area. Many of the house fires that result from forest fires start when embers are blown onto rooves, and it sounds like "fire paste" could be a good and cheap defense. And rain might wash it away when it's no longer needed.
Something that doesn't absorb any energy would be a perfect insulator. I don't know of any of those, aside from a vacuum. You can decide for yourself whether a vacuum exists or is the absence of existance.
I'm not qualified to say whether a perfect insulator is physically possible or not. In light of superconductors, which are perfect conductors, it seems reasonable to think that some sort of perfectly insulating superinsulator might be possible. (Yes, electrical and thermal conductance are different, but I'm just giving an example.) If it did exist, though, what temperature would it be?
Most substances that aren't solid, and many that are, outgas like crazy in the mostly-vacuum environment of space. If this "fire paste" does, then what's left when it comes time for re-entry may not work as well as it should, or even work at all.
P2P is fine if they want to use it, but I don't think that hiding behind technology is a very good solution to their problem, if indeed the problem is real.
A much simpler defense against false reports is to encourage people who submit reports to suggest ways to verify their report, and at the same time to encourage others to actually do the verification, possibly attaching/linking a claim of verifcation to the original report. Readers would be openly informed that unverified reports should be treated as exactly that, and may be false.
The problem that P2P might help solve is the case where the government, or a group of individuals within the government, gets pissed off enough to try to shut the site down. Then you'd have a giant legal Whack-A-Mole, which would be fun to watch.