They can hold you if they have "reasonable suspicion" that you have committed theft (at least in Washington state) and that is what the cops are used to being called out for to retail stores. However, simply walking out the door doesn't sound like "reasonable suspicion" to me, and you'd probably have a good case against THEM for unlawful imprisonment. Ask the cops about it when they show up--it's a fun way of turning the tables.:)
You'd probably be a lot safer and healthier and live a lot longer if someone forced you to remain indoors at all times, too, but I doubt you'd be happier.
Basically what you are describing, complete with teamwork like you wouldn't believe (provided you bother... it isn't called team"work" for nothing, there is work involved), a much more realistic environment (ordnance interaction is not probability based, but rather directly calculated physics based on real-world armor and armament measurements) and a HUGE environment (by far the largest contiguous land space in any existing MMOG--all of WoW would fit into a small chunk of Belgium).
Where they fall down has been providing better tools for team organization and roles, but they are getting better. A new box release is scheduled for 2nd Quarter '05 and the North Africa theater should be out by early next year.
It's entirely skills based, too, which is a twist for a lot of traditional MMORPG players, but extremely refreshing... you can be a day one player, but if you know anything about marksmanship and basic infantry tactics (realistic, not bunny-hopping) you can go out and pwn 3-year veterans in your first five minutes. It's all about what you do and how you work together, not how long you've been playing and what drops you've camped.
Good point. He talks about it being mass-market entertainment, but people with mass-market experience don't expect to get the same audience for "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy" as you do "Monster Garage." They may be trying to spread the experience so thin that it just winds up being lame for everyone.
A better way for him to put it would be that the government will help you to secure your exclusive rights for a certain amount of time, and then it will stop.
You're only correct in your assertion to the extent that you refuse to divulge your intellectual property anywhere. If you did, and the government didn't recognize copyright, then anyone would be able to use your IP, and you wouldn't in any sense 'own' it. This, in fact, was the case before copyright existed and is the largest reason that it does.
Bad wording. An OEM preinstall can be patched up beforing it gets shipped to the user, and typically doesn't sit around in the box long enough to become obsoleted. A box copy of XP, on the other hand, is off the same master that was RTM'd months and months ago and it's been sitting on that shelf getting out of date and vulnerable to creepy crawlies ever since.
Strictly tongue in cheek; although, as a companion observation, I would be willing to say that most people who are TRULY technically knowledgeable are not easily categorized as either Linux or Windows people... they understand the place and utility of both and are capable of managing either competently.
There sure are "it just works" answers for Linux... the problem is that most of the advocates for it aren't content to just name one, but instead like to listen to themselves blather on and show off their technical knowledge of the differences.
The Windows crowd, on the other hand, simply don't have enough technical knowledge to blather about and so Windows wins out. PHBs don't like to be confused.
A competent IT manager will evaluate and present the recommendation best suited for the environment, not try to hold a pointless debate in front of PHBs who don't care and won't get it.
Yup... that's excellent advice. Most clients will assume that they own what you are producing, and it is in everyone's best interest if you make sure to clear the matter up with them before you ever get started.
Actually, not so--this is true for contractors, but not consultants unless they specifically agree in writing to have the work considered so. The relevant definition of "work for hire" in 17 USC section 101 would be:
(1) a work prepared by an employee within the scope of his or her employment; or
(2) a work specially ordered or commissioned for use as a contribution to a collective work, as a part of a motion picture or other audiovisual work, as a translation, as a supplementary work, as a compilation, as an instructional text, as a test, as answer material for a test, or as an atlas, if the parties expressly agree in a written instrument signed by them that the work shall be considered a work made for hire. For the purpose of the foregoing sentence, a "supplementary work" is a work prepared for publication as a secondary adjunct to a work by another author for the purpose of introducing, concluding, illustrating, explaining, revising, commenting upon, or assisting in the use of the other work, such as forewords, afterwords, pictorial illustrations, maps, charts, tables, editorial notes, musical arrangements, answer material for tests, bibliographies, appendixes, and indexes, and an "instructional text" is a literary, pictorial, or graphic work prepared for publication and with the purpose of use in systematic instructional activities.
So... your assumption is exactly the dangerous one that I am talking about. Unless you put it in writing, if you are not an employee of some sort, YOU continue to hold copywrite on your work whether you said so or not.
Heh... mostly true. However, the fact that most of them are like this has also created a niche where you can do pretty good business by NOT being that guy. After a company has been screwed over hard and finally begins to realize it, it can be both fun and profitable to come in as the straight shooter to clean it all up.
Although, I also make up for putting myself out of work by charging higher hourly fees than most of my competition. I think it's justified to the customer, though, by not having to get dicked around for three months while the work is in progress.
I think he nails a lot of what people don't know, but should, if they want to make a living doing technical consulting. However, I think he's off-base on his suggestion to allow the customer to "own everything". The arrangement suggested is not legal and could result in an awful lot of trouble for either you or the customer down the road.
There are certain pieces of intellectual property that the customer owns simply because it originates with them--business processes, customer information, etc. Those things remain their property whether you are working with them in your project or not, and you can't re-use or re-publish them without express consent. However, in most cases, anything that you create remains yours under the same laws. It is possible for you to relenquish your right to the client, in effect giving the IP away, but if you do so, you do NOT have the right to re-use it again yourself in future projects. They own it, even the building blocks--you are infringing on their copyright at that point.
There are few situations in which this might actually come back to bite you (or them) but they are devastating if they do arise. For one, if you ever decide to sell another work based on that code to another client, under those same terms, you've created a potential liability for both of your clients, depending on how much you got in writing at any particular stage. Either the second is infringing because the first owns it, or the first is infringing after you sold the rights to the second.
It's possible, of course, to license your code any way you would like, but you have to retain ownership of the copyright in order to do so. You have to make it absolutely clear to the clients that you own what you code, but that what they are paying for is a perpetual license to use that code as they see fit. This has the same effect as what the author is going for, I believe, but without the potentially nasty side effects.
Actually, I think he's got it more close to correct than you do. I've been doing this for about ten years now, and although there is a lot of splashover in how the terms are used, the understanding of them among people I typically interact with is that contractors are single-job at a time, specifically skilled, with a specifically contracted engagement. Consultants, on the other hand, are those who typically manage a number of simultaneous engagements, often without specifically executed contracts, typically with a less well-defined issue at stake. I think what happened to muddy the terms is that a lot of companies found it was easier to hire contract labor if they called it 'consulting' and a lot of people found it more palatable to work without insurance and benefits as long as they got to think of themselves as 'consultants.'
I think you'd be surprised at the number of 'top professional companies' who use consultants; it's often less about hand-holding than bringing in fresh perspective or someone with experience at other companies for a common industry issue. I would agree it's less about customer service in those instances (although, in my own view of the 'types' of consultant out there, the two categories are 'technical', where you make your reputation by being correct, and 'sales', where you make it by handing out warm fuzzies... but I digress) because you are dealing with people at that point who have enough knowledge to know what it is they don't know, but it's definitely not the same as being brought in to fill in as a sysadmin for three months.
I would say it's more akin to growing and harvesting and processing the beans... you're comparing a thirty second process to something that even for small projects will take weeks or months, I hardly think it's an apt metaphor.
But case by case is the only way to look at this, definitely. The largest problem in my experience has been that few people, either on the IT side or the management side of the business, have a clear understanding of what they really need, which is the crucial factor in deciding whether a COTS package will do or whether it's worth doing the development in-house. You have to know the business well enough to judge whether the processes can be realigned to fit the COTS' paradigm without losing competetive advantage. A lot of time, people think they can't, but it's frequently difficult to separate the actuality of the situation from the knee-jerk of an entrenched manager--they all want to say their division is special, their situation is unique, and they are of course in the best position to know... but are they being intellectually honest with themselves about it? It's often hard to say.
I don't think he's so dumb... what he's saying is that anarchy may grant freedom but it can also limit opportunity. If you're interested in movies or music, it does little good to have an open source system if musicians and movie producers refuse to allow their works to be released in formats accessible to it. Sure, you have your freedom, in theory, but in practice, you have less to be free with than some schmoe who has Media Player and all the proprietary garbage necessary for watching/listening to those works.
Yeah; a better way to do it might be to install Firefox for default browsing and then point IE to a heavily locked down proxy only allowing access to the required business sites.
Which begs the question, what could be considered the end of this conflict?
For this sort of fight, I don't really think there is one--it's over when one side or the other is wiped out, because the views and passions are too deeply engrained. Which is another failing, of a sort, of the Conventions... or perhaps not a failing, but a failure; they don't really acknowledge the concept of total war, but of course that's something they were written to prevent.
I think the situation at Guantanamo is unacceptable from either perspective, really, an example of the worst possible compromise. From a human rights perspective, it's not acceptable to lock up indefinitely people who may or may not be legitimate enemies with no accurate means of determining that status. From a military perspective, it's not acceptable to try to imprison and sustain massive numbers of enemy combatants until they die of old age. How many generations of extremists can we afford to do that with?
The fact that so many who have been released have returned to the fight doesn't say to me that we should have kept them locked up longer--it says that we really haven't a clue who we have and who we don't and what their true inclinations are. That's as frightening for those who are potentially innocent as it is for those of us threatened by the guilty. All in all, an untenable situation for all sides.
Funny you'd say that, since Cryptonomicon is far closer to the Baroque Cycle style than to SC or DA. I liked them all, but I've always (at odds with the majority, obviously) felt that Snow Crash is one of his weakest works. It's got a lot of good bits and pieces in it, but they never seem to all add up to a great story the way most of the rest of his books do.
I also particularly like his works under the Stephen Bury pen-name, and I think those are pretty close to his Baroque cycle style, too. I tend to view Snow Crash and Diamond Age as the outliers, and the rest as "his style" if there is such a thing.
If this thing is such a piece of crap that it breaks so often that you guys think the extended warranty is going to be a good deal, I'll pass. Can you direct me to the location of your nearest competitor, please?
"Will be?" This was it! There may be more but probably all on about this scale. People mostly associate "eruption" with something major, but in this case it's almost a technicality (not if you're standing inside the crater, in which case it would seem a damn important event...). I guess ya'll can be pardoned for not realizing that those tiny little whiffs of steam and ash on your TV were the main event. But we went through several rounds of this back in the mid-80's as well, and although it's interesting and unusual and all, for those of us that went through May 18th, it seems a little pedestrian.
Because that money is for building a military that is good at what our military is good at; what, you think simply dumping huge chunks of money into organizations automatically makes them good at things? It's what it's spent on, not the fact it is there.
The US military performs as designed and as advertised. Misuse a Porsche as a dump truck, if you like, the fact it was expensive isn't going to make it any better at the task.
Re:um... I'd have a different perspective
on
Less Might Be More
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· Score: 4, Funny
If they need admin rights on their own desktops, they should either know better, or they are running on crap software that isn't sufficiently granular to open up what they REALLY need without giving them blanket admin rights.
I'm aware that this is a huge issue on Windows (specifically coming to my attention with regard to Palm hotsyncing software) but I'm hesitant to blame Microsoft because they do have a fair amount of granularity in permissions post Win2K. Rather, I tend to blame lazy software developers who can't be bothered to write their programs to function in the context of a typical user security role.
In which case: find different software. The only way the market place gets better with regard to security is if we make security a priority in our purchasing decisions.
I shudder to think of the size of the handset needed to hold the processing power required for the insanely complex smart routing this concept would take to realize. Not to mention the batteries!
I agree that it's a neat concept, but early experiments with WiFi meshes seem to indicate that it will have problems scaling without a lot of horsepower behind it. And that's with fixed "pads" as it were.
Slashdot Mirror
They can hold you if they have "reasonable suspicion" that you have committed theft (at least in Washington state) and that is what the cops are used to being called out for to retail stores. However, simply walking out the door doesn't sound like "reasonable suspicion" to me, and you'd probably have a good case against THEM for unlawful imprisonment. Ask the cops about it when they show up--it's a fun way of turning the tables. :)
You'd probably be a lot safer and healthier and live a lot longer if someone forced you to remain indoors at all times, too, but I doubt you'd be happier.
Basically what you are describing, complete with teamwork like you wouldn't believe (provided you bother... it isn't called team"work" for nothing, there is work involved), a much more realistic environment (ordnance interaction is not probability based, but rather directly calculated physics based on real-world armor and armament measurements) and a HUGE environment (by far the largest contiguous land space in any existing MMOG--all of WoW would fit into a small chunk of Belgium).
Where they fall down has been providing better tools for team organization and roles, but they are getting better. A new box release is scheduled for 2nd Quarter '05 and the North Africa theater should be out by early next year.
It's entirely skills based, too, which is a twist for a lot of traditional MMORPG players, but extremely refreshing... you can be a day one player, but if you know anything about marksmanship and basic infantry tactics (realistic, not bunny-hopping) you can go out and pwn 3-year veterans in your first five minutes. It's all about what you do and how you work together, not how long you've been playing and what drops you've camped.
Good point. He talks about it being mass-market entertainment, but people with mass-market experience don't expect to get the same audience for "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy" as you do "Monster Garage." They may be trying to spread the experience so thin that it just winds up being lame for everyone.
A better way for him to put it would be that the government will help you to secure your exclusive rights for a certain amount of time, and then it will stop.
You're only correct in your assertion to the extent that you refuse to divulge your intellectual property anywhere. If you did, and the government didn't recognize copyright, then anyone would be able to use your IP, and you wouldn't in any sense 'own' it. This, in fact, was the case before copyright existed and is the largest reason that it does.
Bad wording. An OEM preinstall can be patched up beforing it gets shipped to the user, and typically doesn't sit around in the box long enough to become obsoleted. A box copy of XP, on the other hand, is off the same master that was RTM'd months and months ago and it's been sitting on that shelf getting out of date and vulnerable to creepy crawlies ever since.
Strictly tongue in cheek; although, as a companion observation, I would be willing to say that most people who are TRULY technically knowledgeable are not easily categorized as either Linux or Windows people... they understand the place and utility of both and are capable of managing either competently.
There sure are "it just works" answers for Linux... the problem is that most of the advocates for it aren't content to just name one, but instead like to listen to themselves blather on and show off their technical knowledge of the differences.
The Windows crowd, on the other hand, simply don't have enough technical knowledge to blather about and so Windows wins out. PHBs don't like to be confused.
A competent IT manager will evaluate and present the recommendation best suited for the environment, not try to hold a pointless debate in front of PHBs who don't care and won't get it.
Yup... that's excellent advice. Most clients will assume that they own what you are producing, and it is in everyone's best interest if you make sure to clear the matter up with them before you ever get started.
So... your assumption is exactly the dangerous one that I am talking about. Unless you put it in writing, if you are not an employee of some sort, YOU continue to hold copywrite on your work whether you said so or not.
Heh... mostly true. However, the fact that most of them are like this has also created a niche where you can do pretty good business by NOT being that guy. After a company has been screwed over hard and finally begins to realize it, it can be both fun and profitable to come in as the straight shooter to clean it all up.
Although, I also make up for putting myself out of work by charging higher hourly fees than most of my competition. I think it's justified to the customer, though, by not having to get dicked around for three months while the work is in progress.
I think he nails a lot of what people don't know, but should, if they want to make a living doing technical consulting. However, I think he's off-base on his suggestion to allow the customer to "own everything". The arrangement suggested is not legal and could result in an awful lot of trouble for either you or the customer down the road.
There are certain pieces of intellectual property that the customer owns simply because it originates with them--business processes, customer information, etc. Those things remain their property whether you are working with them in your project or not, and you can't re-use or re-publish them without express consent. However, in most cases, anything that you create remains yours under the same laws. It is possible for you to relenquish your right to the client, in effect giving the IP away, but if you do so, you do NOT have the right to re-use it again yourself in future projects. They own it, even the building blocks--you are infringing on their copyright at that point.
There are few situations in which this might actually come back to bite you (or them) but they are devastating if they do arise. For one, if you ever decide to sell another work based on that code to another client, under those same terms, you've created a potential liability for both of your clients, depending on how much you got in writing at any particular stage. Either the second is infringing because the first owns it, or the first is infringing after you sold the rights to the second.
It's possible, of course, to license your code any way you would like, but you have to retain ownership of the copyright in order to do so. You have to make it absolutely clear to the clients that you own what you code, but that what they are paying for is a perpetual license to use that code as they see fit. This has the same effect as what the author is going for, I believe, but without the potentially nasty side effects.
Actually, I think he's got it more close to correct than you do. I've been doing this for about ten years now, and although there is a lot of splashover in how the terms are used, the understanding of them among people I typically interact with is that contractors are single-job at a time, specifically skilled, with a specifically contracted engagement. Consultants, on the other hand, are those who typically manage a number of simultaneous engagements, often without specifically executed contracts, typically with a less well-defined issue at stake. I think what happened to muddy the terms is that a lot of companies found it was easier to hire contract labor if they called it 'consulting' and a lot of people found it more palatable to work without insurance and benefits as long as they got to think of themselves as 'consultants.'
I think you'd be surprised at the number of 'top professional companies' who use consultants; it's often less about hand-holding than bringing in fresh perspective or someone with experience at other companies for a common industry issue. I would agree it's less about customer service in those instances (although, in my own view of the 'types' of consultant out there, the two categories are 'technical', where you make your reputation by being correct, and 'sales', where you make it by handing out warm fuzzies... but I digress) because you are dealing with people at that point who have enough knowledge to know what it is they don't know, but it's definitely not the same as being brought in to fill in as a sysadmin for three months.
I would say it's more akin to growing and harvesting and processing the beans... you're comparing a thirty second process to something that even for small projects will take weeks or months, I hardly think it's an apt metaphor.
But case by case is the only way to look at this, definitely. The largest problem in my experience has been that few people, either on the IT side or the management side of the business, have a clear understanding of what they really need, which is the crucial factor in deciding whether a COTS package will do or whether it's worth doing the development in-house. You have to know the business well enough to judge whether the processes can be realigned to fit the COTS' paradigm without losing competetive advantage. A lot of time, people think they can't, but it's frequently difficult to separate the actuality of the situation from the knee-jerk of an entrenched manager--they all want to say their division is special, their situation is unique, and they are of course in the best position to know... but are they being intellectually honest with themselves about it? It's often hard to say.
I don't think he's so dumb... what he's saying is that anarchy may grant freedom but it can also limit opportunity. If you're interested in movies or music, it does little good to have an open source system if musicians and movie producers refuse to allow their works to be released in formats accessible to it. Sure, you have your freedom, in theory, but in practice, you have less to be free with than some schmoe who has Media Player and all the proprietary garbage necessary for watching/listening to those works.
Yeah; a better way to do it might be to install Firefox for default browsing and then point IE to a heavily locked down proxy only allowing access to the required business sites.
Which begs the question, what could be considered the end of this conflict?
For this sort of fight, I don't really think there is one--it's over when one side or the other is wiped out, because the views and passions are too deeply engrained. Which is another failing, of a sort, of the Conventions... or perhaps not a failing, but a failure; they don't really acknowledge the concept of total war, but of course that's something they were written to prevent.
I think the situation at Guantanamo is unacceptable from either perspective, really, an example of the worst possible compromise. From a human rights perspective, it's not acceptable to lock up indefinitely people who may or may not be legitimate enemies with no accurate means of determining that status. From a military perspective, it's not acceptable to try to imprison and sustain massive numbers of enemy combatants until they die of old age. How many generations of extremists can we afford to do that with?
The fact that so many who have been released have returned to the fight doesn't say to me that we should have kept them locked up longer--it says that we really haven't a clue who we have and who we don't and what their true inclinations are. That's as frightening for those who are potentially innocent as it is for those of us threatened by the guilty. All in all, an untenable situation for all sides.
Funny you'd say that, since Cryptonomicon is far closer to the Baroque Cycle style than to SC or DA. I liked them all, but I've always (at odds with the majority, obviously) felt that Snow Crash is one of his weakest works. It's got a lot of good bits and pieces in it, but they never seem to all add up to a great story the way most of the rest of his books do.
I also particularly like his works under the Stephen Bury pen-name, and I think those are pretty close to his Baroque cycle style, too. I tend to view Snow Crash and Diamond Age as the outliers, and the rest as "his style" if there is such a thing.
(me, to salesguy and his manager)
If this thing is such a piece of crap that it breaks so often that you guys think the extended warranty is going to be a good deal, I'll pass. Can you direct me to the location of your nearest competitor, please?
"Will be?" This was it! There may be more but probably all on about this scale. People mostly associate "eruption" with something major, but in this case it's almost a technicality (not if you're standing inside the crater, in which case it would seem a damn important event...). I guess ya'll can be pardoned for not realizing that those tiny little whiffs of steam and ash on your TV were the main event. But we went through several rounds of this back in the mid-80's as well, and although it's interesting and unusual and all, for those of us that went through May 18th, it seems a little pedestrian.
Because that money is for building a military that is good at what our military is good at; what, you think simply dumping huge chunks of money into organizations automatically makes them good at things? It's what it's spent on, not the fact it is there.
The US military performs as designed and as advertised. Misuse a Porsche as a dump truck, if you like, the fact it was expensive isn't going to make it any better at the task.
If your tire blows out, do you blame Ford?
Oh, er, umm... bad example.
If they need admin rights on their own desktops, they should either know better, or they are running on crap software that isn't sufficiently granular to open up what they REALLY need without giving them blanket admin rights.
I'm aware that this is a huge issue on Windows (specifically coming to my attention with regard to Palm hotsyncing software) but I'm hesitant to blame Microsoft because they do have a fair amount of granularity in permissions post Win2K. Rather, I tend to blame lazy software developers who can't be bothered to write their programs to function in the context of a typical user security role.
In which case: find different software. The only way the market place gets better with regard to security is if we make security a priority in our purchasing decisions.
I'll second the recommendation on HPs. Had good luck with them, and they're not nearly as pricey as the Ciscoes.
I shudder to think of the size of the handset needed to hold the processing power required for the insanely complex smart routing this concept would take to realize. Not to mention the batteries!
I agree that it's a neat concept, but early experiments with WiFi meshes seem to indicate that it will have problems scaling without a lot of horsepower behind it. And that's with fixed "pads" as it were.