I'd guess its just down to a test of whether the contract is determined fair by the court, based on whether the clause is there for a valid reason, and whether its a reasonable restriction to make.
An NDA is vital for a company to function. It's already pretty much taken as read that an employee will not share trade secrets, and this is just a formal agreement to that effect.
Signing over the rights to your code to a professor is not so clear cut. His role is to teach the students engineering, not to make a profit from the software they produce. Therefore he has no need for ownership of the rights. The remedy is far too extreme for the problem it prevents.
Yes.. But this is not how its supposed to work. This method has exactly the same problems that the traditional proprietry business model has. They are still charging for information that they are not giving you permission to share. Instead of a restrictive licence on the software, this is a restrictive licence on the information about the software.
If they say "We can tell you, but it will cost you", then that is fine. You can choose an alternative source for the information. If they are the only ones with the information, they can charge a premium, but otherwise they should compete in an open market with other people with the information. Once they have given it away, they should not be able to hoard it.
1. Dark Energy It's energy. And its dark. Think Star Trek glowy thing but looking at negatives.
2. Water on Mars. Nope. Only chocolate, toffee, and some sort fo nougatish stuff.
3. The Murky, Mediocre Middle of the Milky Way - A more important question - What is it with chocolate and space?
4. The Origin of Life - Well, when a man and a woman love each other very much....
5. Lunar Secrets - As any fan of classic Trolls knows, the moon is a ridiculous liberal myth. It doesn't exist. That's the secret.
6. Are We Alone? - I was talking about this to Glarg - my venusian friend. He said that he felt that life on other planets was impossible. I'm not so sure
7. The Enigmatic Sun - Enigmatic? the things a bloomin exhibitionist!
8. Age of the Universe - I have the universes Birth Certificate right here. I think its rude to ask a univeses age though.
9. Missing planet - Obviously, the planets are wrong, not the theory. Planets are stupid after all. They just go round and round in circles. Whatr do they know? Anyway, to solve this problem, we plan to destroy Uranus and Neptune.
10. Can We Survive 2003? - I have a theory on this. The ramifications will take a while to work out. Can I tell you in 369 days time?
This is meant to be a punishment. Microsoft abused its monopoly position, and therefore has to do as its told, otherwise the courts might actually do something.
Perhaps they should be forced to give customers a choice of which browser to use. They were guilty of using these tactics against Netscape (although Netscape seemed to try to push out competitors with their own HTML extensions), and part of their monopolist tactics seemed to revolve around giving IE away. It wouldn't even cost them anything to bundle Mozilla.
As for Linux - Possibly. It forces them to show that there is a choice.
Forcing them to Bundle BeOS would be quite logical since it was MS's behaviour that killed it. This could have been a serious punishment since this would actually create an installed userbase of a faster, cleaner, better OS which had only one downside of lack of support. But it's up to MS to prove to the court that the inclusion of a piece of software would do a disproportinate amount of damage for the crime they committed.
As far as I understand it, in the US, there is no limit on the amount of money a party can spend on campaigning and advertising. The effect is that major parties need vast corporate donations to prevent themselves from being drowned out by the opposition.
European countries tend to feel giving the richest party the loudest voice leads to an unfair election, and typically impose strict limits on how much they can spend on their campaign, reducing the value of large corporate donations.
There are also strict rules about accepting private donations, so the media cartels can't very easily bribe individual MPs. Besides, in many countries, party politics rule, and the representatives have to tow the party line.
An analogous example would be when Bill and Ted told themselves to remind themselves to leave the keys, tape player, and garbage can in the appropriate spots so things could have gone the way they did (what a paradox if they failed, though)
This was used quite cleverly in one of the Monkey Island games, where you meet a version of yourself from the future. You have to avoid a temporal paradox by doing exactly the same as the alternative version of Guybrush did before.
It's interesting to compare the previous versions (linked below the main article here and here
I particularly liked:
1999:
Slow Server Response Times
"Slow response times are the worst offender against Web usability: in my survey of the original "top-ten" mistakes, major sites had a truly horrifying 84% violation score with respect to the response time rule."
Is it my imagination, or are the people who believe the moon landings were faked often the same people who there's an aliens conspiracy in the Whitehouse?
Maybe it's just the the two groups are lumped together as crackpots. Either that, or it was the aliens who prevented the Apollo missions from succeeding.
NASA should offer holidays to the moon. Anyone who doubts this can go up there, and see the evidence for themselves.
I guess they could always argue that it was only the Apollo moon shot that was faked. Of course, then you may as well argue that so were Marco Polo's journeys.
Looking at it, it seems essentially the same, except that this will remove the most error prone part. Conversion of phonemes to proper sentences is not easy. there are too many homonomes. If you were to talk about a hare, it could easily be translated as a hair. Therefore a search for hare will nto produce a match.
If we convert the text to phonemes instead, hare and hair resolve to the same result. So a search for either of those words will produce a match.
In hindsight, this is an obvious idea. Like many obvious ideas, the person who spotted it was a genius.
Why? We all know that the information will be sold to marketers. It's not up to Slashdot to protect us from this. Simpky to inform us.
We have a choice. We can go without, follow the link and provide our details, or follow the link and lie about our details.
Most people lie. I was told that the average web surfer owns their own company and earns more than $1 000 000 per year.
as ever, there were many good points made by representatives of the media corporations and fair use advicacy groups. However, two comments were outstanding in their clarity and eloquence - one was a comment from a Mr. J. Valenti which said "Fair use is a myth spread by a bunchof unwashed hippes, and there should be no exceptions. I'm a member of a public, so I know what the public wants" which had $100 000 in used notes. stapled to it.
The other was from a Ms Hilary Rosen. This one was delivered in a Ferrari, and stated "If you make some exceptions, they'll just wnat more, so don't bother and save yourself the hassle. P.S. Keep the keys"
Clearly, the rest of them were just written by a bunch of pirates and unwashed hippies, so I spat on them, and then used them as firelighters.
The number of actual flights will not change. This is because they would replace the hub and spoke service with a point to point service.
If you have passengers wanting to go from New York to London, and New York to Frankfurt, then most airlines will have a flight from New York to Frankfurt, and a flight from frankfurt to London. The service will have a 747 takeoff from NY, a 747 landing at Frankfurt, a small aircraft takeoff at Frankfurt, and landing at Heathrow. Total of 2 takeoffs and two landings.
The cruiser will have two takeoffs at NY, and one landing at each European destination. Total 2 tyakeoffs and 2 landings.
Personally, I feel the airline industry could do with being shaken up a bit. The basic business model hasn't changed at all in the past 40 years. It's simply a case of sell tickets as cheaply as possible by putting as many people as you can onto a plane.
Nothing wrong with this in principle - it works, and it drives the costs of flights down. It does tend to discourage risk taking though.
Still, it would be nice to give an airline the chance to compete on something other than cost. A faster plane would be preferable to may people than a marginally cheaper ticket. This also would have given greater flexibility since presumably there would be more planes, so flights would be more frequent.
This would also mean that there would be more point to point services. Since two planes can go to two airports, whereas a single 747 can only go to a single airport, requiring a second plane to travel the short distance to the alternative airport (hub and spoke model).
We do, of course, have a right to freedom of speech as granted to us by the declaraion of human rights, which applies everywhere in the western world except the USA. The point of this document is that libel laws are being used to restrict peoples human rights, and as such, they should be changed. It is quite understandable that a law that was introduced many years before the World Wide Web, and the adoption of the Human Rights Act might be a little outdated.
But, of course, the US has the first ammendment that means that events such as this and this will not happen there.
Secondly, a large chunk of the money paid by the record industry is paid to.... The record industry. They can employ themselves to do the marketing. The record publisher doesn't even need to make a profit if it can cause other parts of the group to make a profit.
As opposed to the existing email field, which cannot be spidered at all you mean?
If people don't want their MSN displayed because they don't want their email spammed, then that's fair enough. They don't need to enter anything. Why is Taco protecting us? We never asked him to.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd guess its just down to a test of whether the contract is determined fair by the court, based on whether the clause is there for a valid reason, and whether its a reasonable restriction to make.
An NDA is vital for a company to function. It's already pretty much taken as read that an employee will not share trade secrets, and this is just a formal agreement to that effect.
Signing over the rights to your code to a professor is not so clear cut. His role is to teach the students engineering, not to make a profit from the software they produce. Therefore he has no need for ownership of the rights. The remedy is far too extreme for the problem it prevents.
Yes.. But this is not how its supposed to work. This method has exactly the same problems that the traditional proprietry business model has. They are still charging for information that they are not giving you permission to share. Instead of a restrictive licence on the software, this is a restrictive licence on the information about the software.
If they say "We can tell you, but it will cost you", then that is fine. You can choose an alternative source for the information. If they are the only ones with the information, they can charge a premium, but otherwise they should compete in an open market with other people with the information. Once they have given it away, they should not be able to hoard it.
Yes we will. And I offer a full refund if I'm wrong.
Or, according to Al Bundy: A sixpack of beer and 2 horny teenagers...
I am trying to promote responsible astrophysics here.
1. Dark Energy It's energy. And its dark. Think Star Trek glowy thing but looking at negatives.
2. Water on Mars. Nope. Only chocolate, toffee, and some sort fo nougatish stuff.
3. The Murky, Mediocre Middle of the Milky Way - A more important question - What is it with chocolate and space?
4. The Origin of Life - Well, when a man and a woman love each other very much....
5. Lunar Secrets - As any fan of classic Trolls knows, the moon is a ridiculous liberal myth. It doesn't exist. That's the secret.
6. Are We Alone? - I was talking about this to Glarg - my venusian friend. He said that he felt that life on other planets was impossible. I'm not so sure
7. The Enigmatic Sun - Enigmatic? the things a bloomin exhibitionist!
8. Age of the Universe - I have the universes Birth Certificate right here. I think its rude to ask a univeses age though.
9. Missing planet - Obviously, the planets are wrong, not the theory. Planets are stupid after all. They just go round and round in circles. Whatr do they know? Anyway, to solve this problem, we plan to destroy Uranus and Neptune.
10. Can We Survive 2003? - I have a theory on this. The ramifications will take a while to work out. Can I tell you in 369 days time?
This is meant to be a punishment. Microsoft abused its monopoly position, and therefore has to do as its told, otherwise the courts might actually do something.
Perhaps they should be forced to give customers a choice of which browser to use. They were guilty of using these tactics against Netscape (although Netscape seemed to try to push out competitors with their own HTML extensions), and part of their monopolist tactics seemed to revolve around giving IE away. It wouldn't even cost them anything to bundle Mozilla.
As for Linux - Possibly. It forces them to show that there is a choice.
Forcing them to Bundle BeOS would be quite logical since it was MS's behaviour that killed it. This could have been a serious punishment since this would actually create an installed userbase of a faster, cleaner, better OS which had only one downside of lack of support. But it's up to MS to prove to the court that the inclusion of a piece of software would do a disproportinate amount of damage for the crime they committed.
Just different electoral rules.
As far as I understand it, in the US, there is no limit on the amount of money a party can spend on campaigning and advertising. The effect is that major parties need vast corporate donations to prevent themselves from being drowned out by the opposition.
European countries tend to feel giving the richest party the loudest voice leads to an unfair election, and typically impose strict limits on how much they can spend on their campaign, reducing the value of large corporate donations.
There are also strict rules about accepting private donations, so the media cartels can't very easily bribe individual MPs. Besides, in many countries, party politics rule, and the representatives have to tow the party line.
Hell! I never tried that!
An analogous example would be when Bill and Ted told themselves to remind themselves to leave the keys, tape player, and garbage can in the appropriate spots so things could have gone the way they did (what a paradox if they failed, though)
This was used quite cleverly in one of the Monkey Island games, where you meet a version of yourself from the future. You have to avoid a temporal paradox by doing exactly the same as the alternative version of Guybrush did before.
It's interesting to compare the previous versions (linked below the main article here and here
E C:www.useit.com/alertbox/9605.html+&hl=en&ie=UTF-8
8 C:www.useit.com/alertbox/990530.html+&hl=en&ie=UTF -8
I particularly liked: 1999:
Slow Server Response Times
"Slow response times are the worst offender against Web usability: in my survey of the original "top-ten" mistakes, major sites had a truly horrifying 84% violation score with respect to the response time rule."
Took me a couple of minutes for that to download
In 1996, we had Overly Long Download Times
The previous version are Cached by google,
http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=cache:pj5FFl38-p
http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=cache:tgqi1bumb7
It's the aliens moderating again. Those 8 foot lizards are not renowned for enjoying a joke.
Is it my imagination, or are the people who believe the moon landings were faked often the same people who there's an aliens conspiracy in the Whitehouse?
Maybe it's just the the two groups are lumped together as crackpots. Either that, or it was the aliens who prevented the Apollo missions from succeeding.
NASA should offer holidays to the moon. Anyone who doubts this can go up there, and see the evidence for themselves.
I guess they could always argue that it was only the Apollo moon shot that was faked. Of course, then you may as well argue that so were Marco Polo's journeys.
Looking at it, it seems essentially the same, except that this will remove the most error prone part. Conversion of phonemes to proper sentences is not easy. there are too many homonomes. If you were to talk about a hare, it could easily be translated as a hair. Therefore a search for hare will nto produce a match.
If we convert the text to phonemes instead, hare and hair resolve to the same result. So a search for either of those words will produce a match.
In hindsight, this is an obvious idea. Like many obvious ideas, the person who spotted it was a genius.
Why? We all know that the information will be sold to marketers. It's not up to Slashdot to protect us from this. Simpky to inform us. We have a choice. We can go without, follow the link and provide our details, or follow the link and lie about our details.
Most people lie. I was told that the average web surfer owns their own company and earns more than $1 000 000 per year.
Me too, although thats down to a desire to punish spammers, and to avoid legitimising spam. Unfortunately, I think we're in the minority.
Many people will see the ad, think "that's cool", and forget that they're being charged for the advertiser to generate sales.
Executive summary
as ever, there were many good points made by representatives of the media corporations and fair use advicacy groups. However, two comments were outstanding in their clarity and eloquence - one was a comment from a Mr. J. Valenti which said "Fair use is a myth spread by a bunchof unwashed hippes, and there should be no exceptions. I'm a member of a public, so I know what the public wants" which had $100 000 in used notes. stapled to it.
The other was from a Ms Hilary Rosen. This one was delivered in a Ferrari, and stated "If you make some exceptions, they'll just wnat more, so don't bother and save yourself the hassle. P.S. Keep the keys"
Clearly, the rest of them were just written by a bunch of pirates and unwashed hippies, so I spat on them, and then used them as firelighters.
People do want both, but some people will pay a little extra for a faster flight. Especially if their time is valuable.
Of course, a smaller faster plane could be able to offer both.
The number of actual flights will not change. This is because they would replace the hub and spoke service with a point to point service.
If you have passengers wanting to go from New York to London, and New York to Frankfurt, then most airlines will have a flight from New York to Frankfurt, and a flight from frankfurt to London. The service will have a 747 takeoff from NY, a 747 landing at Frankfurt, a small aircraft takeoff at Frankfurt, and landing at Heathrow. Total of 2 takeoffs and two landings.
The cruiser will have two takeoffs at NY, and one landing at each European destination. Total 2 tyakeoffs and 2 landings.
Personally, I feel the airline industry could do with being shaken up a bit. The basic business model hasn't changed at all in the past 40 years. It's simply a case of sell tickets as cheaply as possible by putting as many people as you can onto a plane.
Nothing wrong with this in principle - it works, and it drives the costs of flights down. It does tend to discourage risk taking though.
Still, it would be nice to give an airline the chance to compete on something other than cost. A faster plane would be preferable to may people than a marginally cheaper ticket. This also would have given greater flexibility since presumably there would be more planes, so flights would be more frequent.
This would also mean that there would be more point to point services. Since two planes can go to two airports, whereas a single 747 can only go to a single airport, requiring a second plane to travel the short distance to the alternative airport (hub and spoke model).
Very niave, sir. I'm impressed.
We do, of course, have a right to freedom of speech as granted to us by the declaraion of human rights, which applies everywhere in the western world except the USA. The point of this document is that libel laws are being used to restrict peoples human rights, and as such, they should be changed. It is quite understandable that a law that was introduced many years before the World Wide Web, and the adoption of the Human Rights Act might be a little outdated.
But, of course, the US has the first ammendment that means that events such as this and this will not happen there.
"CD: It seems that I might have fallen for a hoax. Doh!"
Right there, after the text. I think that may be a correction.
It's events that happened that may be of interest to the readers.
An employee leaking news and getting caught is not something that happens on a daily basis. It interests us to learn what will happen to him.
Something that peopler keep missing is they charge things twice. They talk about royalties, and then about the recording and marketing costs.
.... The record industry. They can employ themselves to do the marketing. The record publisher doesn't even need to make a profit if it can cause other parts of the group to make a profit.
What they don't mention is that part of the recording and merketing costs are charged to the band (Source: courtney Love in Salon article)
Secondly, a large chunk of the money paid by the record industry is paid to
As opposed to the existing email field, which cannot be spidered at all you mean?
If people don't want their MSN displayed because they don't want their email spammed, then that's fair enough. They don't need to enter anything. Why is Taco protecting us? We never asked him to.