You've heard it a thousand times already: Intellectual property is not the same as real property. When people choose to publish their works, they lose certain privileges that they had before they made that choice. For example, they lose the ability to stop people from using excerpts of their work in ways that fall under the category of "fair use". They lose the ability to control what people do with the copies of their work (for example, they can't legally stop me from reselling a copy that I bought).
DRM is an attempt to use technology to make it impossible for the public to use works in ways that are perfectly legal, constructive, and beneficial to society as a whole. It's quite legal and useful to excerpt from a work in order to review and critique it. It's perfectly moral to rip a CD so you can listen to it on your MP3 player. There's everything wrong with the idea that a copyright holder can unilaterally decide to break all old copies of a work. I don't care how much sense Lucas thinks it makes to have Greebo shoot first, he shouldn't be able to force me to upgrade, or remove the old version from the public sphere altogether.
That is why I don't go ga-ga over all your "wonderful" examples: The whole thing is a Faustian bargain, and one I'm not willing to make. Copyright holders should not have the sort of complete control over their property that owners of tangible property expect, and the idea that they should flies in the face of hundreds of years of tradition.
"Their works." Sheesh. Ownership is not the issue. The complete and unilateral overthrow of the balance of copyright law by corporations is the issue.
Hardly true. Richard Stallman created the GPL, and he would probably agree with the grandparent's statement. The GPL was a kludge to force unrestrictedness onto a restrictive copyright system.
I'm more pragmatic, or maybe just less idealistic, than Stallman. I believe there are instances where restrictions on the "free flow of ideas" are beneficial. But the GPL is written precisely to ensure that ideas licensed under it are "allowed to freely flow between people in an unlimited fashion".
Napster-To-Go? Why is that a wonderful service? Nothing but the stubbornness of the copyright holders keeps N2G from offering "all you can eat" downloads in non-DRM'ed formats. The only real "value-adds" are the ability to disable your music if you quit their service.
Nor do I see any value in being able to disable a video in the future.
Copyright law was intended to be a balance between the rights of copyright holders and the rights of those receiving copies of their works. DRM--if successful--will smash that balancing act, allowing copyright holders complete control over how the public uses their works. I've no intention of trading in my fair use rights or my ability to use copyrighted works in any legal manner just so some corporation feels safe about publishing videos on the Internet.
No, your "free as in beer" crack didn't "cut down on the legalese", because it's completely wrong. Nothing about the GPL says you can't charge for software, but you originally implied that it did, and that Emperor Linux could be sued for doing so. Rather than cutting to the heart of the matter, you went off and punctured the matter's kneecap.
My entire point is that they don't just burn off an image, ship the laptop, and charge $500 extra. They charge $500 for additional services, including maintaining a good customer service presence, hiring people who test the living hell out of their configurations, and retaining people with the expertise needed to maintain a custom kernel.
None of these things are cheap, and you don't have to pay them a red cent to benefit from much of the work Emperor Linux does. Just download their kernel.
As I said before, the services they provide may or may not be worth the price to everybody. But they're real, and some people are glad they're being offered. I find your attempt at moral outrage unspeakably lame.
Your employer should have been preparing for this possibility a long time ago. He should have known how thoroughly your departure could screw up his business, and made sure that somebody else knew how to do everything you've been doing.
Your obligations here are minimal. Legally, you could be a complete twerp about it, walk off, and not return his calls. It sounds like you're being quite fair, and are fulfilling any ethical responsibilities you may have.
The flip side is, this is the guy's company. Your departure may lead to a string of disasters that could kill it off entirely. The big question is, is there enough bad blood between you and the company that you wouldn't mind letting your boss suffer for his mistakes? If so, I don't see any reason to let your relationship continue beyond the four weeks you outlined earlier. Maybe less, if your boss's counter-offer was galling enough.
But if you like and respect your former employer, do them a favor and be willing to negotiate some price at which you'll come back in and save their butts from certain doom. "Subsidized" is unreasonable. You have a right to not be taken advantage of, and a responsibility to make it clear that you won't be around forever. I would start with double your current hourly rate after your four weeks is up, and increment every week.
By the end of the fifth week, charge three times your old rate, and four times by the end of the sixth week. As your replacement (replacements, if your boss has learned anything from this experience) adapts to his new environment, their need for you will dwindle even as your rates increase. At some point, it's just not worth it for them to call you anymore.
For your remaining time, start documenting procedures, settings, and for godssake comment that rats nest of code! Good luck in your new job.
They're not suing because the contract upsets them. They're not going into court to prove that the contract doesn't give them as much as they'd like. They're going in to prove that the contract itself was illegal; that the intention of the contracts was to create "stealth employees" which could be treated the same as regular employees in every way except when it came to payroll taxes and benefits.
I don't understand your complaint about the suit happening "after the fact". First, we only know details about one of the thirty-three defendants (worked there for several years as a contractor, and stopped working for them a couple of weeks ago). Some of the others may still work there, and she may be the person doing the interviews because she doesn't work there and has nothing to lose.
Beyond that, we really don't know the history of this case. We don't know when or why these people became dissatisfied, whether they made efforts to reach an agreement with HP outside the courtroom, or what it took to convince them that it was time to file a lawsuit. "What took them so long?" is an important question, not a rhetorical one.
In the end, I'm biased for the little guy. Any multi-billion dollar corporation that could scrounge together $115M for an incompetent CEO with delusions of Lee Iacocca-hood can afford to not screw its employees with these permatemp shenanigans.
"I hope they loose. I hope HP does not punish its other contractors for this. What part of "CONTRACTor" do they not understand?"
That's the question the lawsuit is asking HP. If the plaintiffs' case is correct, HP seems to think it's "contractor (n): employees, minus those pesky payroll taxes and benefits."
It's not the suing contractors' faults that companies are starting to get skittish about contractor lawsuits. It's their own ignorance. All they have to do is follow the IRS guidelines, and they'll be safe. If it turns out that HP wasn't following those guidelines, and it "looses" the suit, it shouldn't affect compliant companies in the least.
Another slashdotter shoots off his mouth, presuming to know the facts of the case. Film at 11.
You do not know that the contractors were being paid more than the employees.
You do not know that the contractors had control over the hours they worked.
You do not know that the contractors were working through a contracting company, or that they were in a position to offer their "contracting services" to anyone but HP.
You do not know that the contractors were either inclined or able do more goofing off than the surrounding employees. In asserting that they were, you're just making groundless accusations to support conclusions long since made.
In fact, given the facts presented in the article, you do not know any differences between the contractors and the employees, except that the latter were receiving benefits. Further, the entire point of the lawsuit is the plaintiffs' claim that there was no effective difference between contractors and employees.
So what we have is a lawsuit claiming certain facts, and you claiming those facts to be false. Your only claim to inside information is that you were a contractor once. That fact is entirely irrelevant, since you cannot speak to the actual working conditions inside HP.
You're criticizing a company for selling Linux distros under the terms dictated by the creators of the distro. If you order a laptop with Fedora Core 3, Red Hat doesn't see a penny. If you order RH9 with a 12 month tech support contract, Red Hat gets paid for it. It works this way because that's how Red Hat says EmperorLinux needs to do it.
So, who is getting ripped off?
Further, you fundamentally misunderstand the GPL. It says nothing about "free as in beer" and in fact everything on the GNU website specifically denies that intention. All that is required under the GPL is that you cannot sell a binary without giving the recipient access to the source code as well. If I want to sell a custom kernel for $500 a pop, more power to me.
Again, nobody is getting ripped off. They're just taking what is being offered, and redistributing it under the terms of the offer. They're also sending kernel patches back to the kernel maintainers, which is something they're not legally obligated to do.
I know people who have bought from EL, and they've been most impressed with the tech support they've received. Impressive tech support isn't cheap. If their "value adds" have no value to you, you can buy the same laptop model elsewhere and figure out how to install Linux on a laptop yourself. It's tricky, but it will help if you download a really nifty kernel customized for laptops.
In short, if you don't like what they're doing, it's possible to do it yourself. How is that worse than "Bill and the Boys?"
The way I read this, their previous strategy was "dump sixty or seventy hours of work on an employee's desk, tell them to do it, and allow them to exhibit 'entrepreneurialism, innovation, and creativity' in getting it done."
Now that they're implementing overtime, they can't just assume that the employees will work those sixty or seventy hours "if necessary"*. So they'll start structuring their employees' days in such a way that they'll almost never have to pay out overtime, but will require solid work during the 40 hours the employee is on the clock.
I don't think most of their employees will miss the days of yore, when they got to bask in their company's "entrepreneurial culture" for most of their waking hours.
I've been resisting the desire to move over to an RP server for a long while now. One reason is that I know a couple of people on the PvP server I'm on right now. They play much more than I do, and have been sending me nifty stuff.
The other reason was that--real soon now--Blizzard would be implementing an honors system. I assumed that once it was installed, there would be some sort of punishment for people who ganked lower-level players.
That's what I want out of the honor system. Not epic armor, or ph4t l00t, or the chance to call myself "Grand Marshal" (I can do that anyways, thankyouverymuch). All I want out of it is a simple change in the game mechanics that provides a disincentive for high-level players to beat up on low-level players.
It looks like that's not going to happen, and that I don't have a temperament that enjoys the sort of crap being pulled on PvP servers. So I think it's time to put my characters into retirement, and move to an RP or RL* server.
* Real Life server. Much harder to farm for gold, the permadeath rules are worrying, and you never get an epic mount. But arguably the play is richer and more rewarding, and the server has zero latency and phenomenal uptime.
"WoW is the first MMORPG I've really gotten into, and all the stories I've heard of griefing and generally idiotic behaviour in these sorts of games seems to be pretty much unfounded. Granted I do play RP PvE."
Isn't that like saying, "All the stories I've heard about there being poor and homeless people in this country seem to be pretty much unfounded. Granted, I've never left my estate in Martha's Vineyard"?
Frankly, if you're spending all your time on a PvE server, you don't have a valid assessment of the overall situation. That goes double if you're playing on an RP server. Those servers just dont attract the gank-tastic morons who get their jollies from ruining the game for other players.
Out of curiosity, when you sit down to a fresh, steaming pile of someone else's code, do you start by running the whole thing through a pretty printer? I'm half way through a class on compilers, and it looks fairly straightforward to write one. I've always had a hunch that it would be a good way to enforce certain coding standards for a project.
The Utah legislature is in love with "message bills": bills that don't make a real difference, and pretty much beg to be shot down after an expensive and protracted legal battle. They inevitably draw time and money away from less sexy but more pressing needs.
Yet year after year, our legislators march themselves up the hill, pass a dozen of these bills to show their constituents that they're "tough on gays", "tough on crime", tough on pornography", and then march themselves back down, patting each other on the back.
"Without the benefit of government assistance?" Surely you jest. The whole thing started out as a government research project, the government regulates the telecom industry heavily (not always to the detriment of industry or consumer), and a sizeable portion of the infrastructure is owned, paid for, or subsidized by the government.
You seem to have this problem where you define the free market as "whatever big business happens to be doing at the moment."
You also seem to have lost sight of the story itself. The Internet is supposed to be a shining example of free market economics because everybody on the network can talk freely to everyone else on the network. But the story is about a company deciding to "poison the well" by blocking traffic it happens to find inconvenient to its current business model. So, no, the free market isn't forcing interoperability. Government intervention seems to be doing that job.
Finally, your argument works only if everyone in the market can force interoperability by threatening not to carry other people's traffic. While it works well for companies that already have large amounts of infrastructure to bring to the negotiating table, what about my friend with the small town wireless network? If the company providing his backbone connection starts degrading the quality of his service, in preparation for the rollout of their new SuperDeluxeWireless network, what can he do? He can't threaten to drop their traffic, since his company would go under before they even noticed. There's certainly nothing in his contract that will reimburse him for the value of his entire company. I guess he could do the commie-liberal-socialist-hippie thing and sue them for anticompetitive practices. But that would mean government intervention, and that's bad, right?
The situations you're describing, phone and internet service, isn't a free market, open to anyone with a will to compete. It's a self-perpetuating oligopoly populated by the companies who were big enough to get a place at the telco table ten years ago. Yes, there are market forces at work between the various companies. However, a truly free market requires some sort of base where everyone has equal access, not just AT&T's brats.
You're not making the important distinctions. A regulation saying ISPs have to handle third party VOIP traffic at least as well as they handle their own VOIP traffic is a regulation of the ISP. The regulation is about VOIP, but not on VOIP. So the voice provider isn't incurring the costs of the regulation.
How hard can it be to get a new ISP? Well, my parents live in a small town, about twenty miles from Salt Lake. Up until about a year ago, the only option for broadband to their home was a satellite system ala DirecTV. We kept asking the phone company when DSL would be available. Much like Doom 3, it would be done when it was done.
One of their neighbors got fed up and started his own wireless ISP. Great guy, great geek, not much of a businessman. His prices are far too reasonable for someone who has a lock on Internet service for three thousand people, he forgot to bill us the first two months, and he once gave my parents a full month refund for a three day outage.
This isn't Waxhole, Tennessee. This is a town less than twenty miles from a major city, and less than ten miles from another city of 10,000 people. Now that the neighbor is up and running, the business case for bringing DSL to their area has fallen apart. Everyone who wants broadband at the prices Qwest would offer already has it through the wireless ISP. Since everyone out there who wants cable has satellite, none of the cable providers will build out the area either.
The guy is doing a good job, treating his customers fairly, doing a lot of the phone support himself. Which is all wonderful, because there's no way my parents' neighborhood is going to see any competition from the traditional service providers for a long, long time.
Like I keep saying, Internet service for a given area has many of the features of a natural monopoly.
Your analogy about the insurance companies is bogus. Far too bogus to be punctuated with "Bullshit"s and "Duh"s. The insurance company doesn't own the roads, and cannot physically prevent you from doing anything. They can't turn off your car remotely, or reroute your car along a different road. All they can do if they find you violating the terms of your agreement is to drop you as a customer, or increase their fees, or whatever. Further, since insurance companies aren't natural monopolies, getting a new insurance company only takes a phone call. Nobody has to ask, "Okay, if I'm moving to the other side of town, can my insurance company still cover me?" They can.
You cannot easily apply the principle to a situation where service competition is fragmented. If you've got an area where neither a cable company nor a phone company is currently providing broadband, the first company to provide it is going to get all the potential customers, and any new provider is going to fail unless they offer a better service at a lower price. The only reason phone and cable companies are competing in the same areas anywhere is because they built out their respective systems back when they were selling different services, and hence weren't competing.
Two providers is not sufficient choice, if provider X is a cable company and provider Y is a phone company. Under your "they own the network they can do what they want" system, provider X can prohibit me from using their connection for VOIP, in order to "encourage" the use of their phone service. Provider Y can prohibit me from using their connection for streaming video, to make their cable offerings more compelling. If I need both VOIP and video, my only option is to pay both providers for a connection. I don't think anyone will argue that paying twice for basically the same service is the sort of solution the free market should be producing.
I never said that the free market was "utterly and completely broken". But in the case of Internet service, the necessity of running physical wires means that non-wireless providers are best done as natural monopolies. The fact that wanna-be provider Z can't rent lines from provider X or Y to undercut their prices means that Z would have to run its own lines. Two sets of wires run through the same area to provide the same service isn't an ideal allocation of resources, and the free market is supposed to be an ideal allocator of resources.
Nor did I claim that government would be the perfect solution, to this problem or anything else. Your all-cap histrionics are therefore unnecessary. What I'm trying to say is, left entirely to themselves, markets don't behave in ways that benefit the customer. Monopolies form, anticompetitive agreements get created, safety and environmental concerns get ignored. The government has a role in creating a space in which the free market can act beneficially.
That's the whole idea behind the UTOPIA project, which you conveniently mischaracterized as "a single state-offered provider". The goal of the project is to create infrastructure that anyone can use, then let service providers compete for customers. When I say compete, I mean really compete, not just "compete to see who can build out this neighborhood first, lock in the customers, and make it fiscal suicide for anyone else to enter. Read up on network effects, as they offer an insight into why it's hard for new providers of anything to compete on a level playing field.
Your neighborhood grocery store is a fine example of the power of the free market. Since I've granted that the free market works well with proper management, the analogy does nothing to further your argument. The reason your analogy fails is that grocery stores aren't natural monopolies. Instead, consider the road system.
Say roads were privatized: anyone can purchase a road, charge fees for using them, and (because you seem to want me to believe that private property rights are all-important) they can deny traffic "at will". So neighborhood grocery store X buys up all the roads around neighborhood grocery store Y, and refuses access to either customers or inventory destined for store Y.
See, the reason grocery stores aren't a natural monopoly is because the road system is equal access. Anyone with a car and a license can use the system to get to any grocery store connected to the road system. Ergo, the road system (a public utility) is creating a space in which the free market can work. It's a wonderful thing.
What isn't a wonderful thing is this idea you're trying to push, saying that the freedom of the market can only be assured if we allow service providers to act in a discriminatory manner to protect their current cashflows. I'm in favor of regulating the market because that's the only way to ensure maximum freedom for and benefit from the market.
These companies you revere for their ability to benefit society? They had a sweet deal back when they were selling "telephone service" or "cable TV service". But they were the ones who decided to get into the business of moving arbitrary data as well. If they couldn't understand that voice and picture could be shuttled about in such a way, and now their new service is eating into demand for their old service, they should suffer for their miscalculation, not their customers.
Question: How many broadband providers service your area? In mine there are two. If a third one wants to come into my area, they'll have to build their own lines or rent them from one of the existing providers. I honestly don't see the latter happening.
Your free market talk doesn't work. When it comes to Internet to the home, the words "natural monopoly" are appropriate, and the words "free market" are not. The only way I can see for providing a true free market for Internet service is if the government provides the infrastructure and leases its lines out to private companies at a set rate schedule.
That way, getting in the game only requires setting up your own servers. No building out redundant lines, no sending installers to individual houses to run wires and poke holes. Everyone has equipment that allows them to access any of the providers, and providers have to compete with every competitor and in every neighborhood. The UTOPIA Project is attempting to do that for Utah.
But since it requires government involvement, socialism must ensue, right?
Personally, I would much rather have the war over VOIP fought in the legislature and the courts than on my ISP's routers.
No, a better analogy would be lots of people not paying their phone bills, moving all their communication with their friends to instant messaging, and then having the ISP (which is also the phone company) blocking IM'ing so those people will have to start paying for phone service again.
How is your analogy even remotely useful? Seriously, explain it in excruciating detail.
"It is a private network?" Please. If a phone company started monitoring my phone calls in order to find out which brand of corn flakes I prefer, nobody would defend them by saying, "Well, it's their system."
The Internet is becoming a critical enabler of free speech, and if those who carry Internet traffic are going to start unduly mucking about with the packets I send, then it's time to make them stop.
You would have a point, if VOIP actually consumed mammoth amounts of bandwidth, or otherwise disrupted service for everyone. But it doesn't. Certainly there are much more pressing bandwidth hogs to go after. Anyways, all the quality of service issues that might be relevant to this could be handled by using simple traffic shaping against heavy users, without regard to what functions the traffic was serving.
Essentially, you're saying that if the Internet can do something, but your ISP would make more money if you were doing it a different way, it has the right to keep you from doing it over the Internet.
The "early Church fathers" were in no position to determine the authenticity of the documents from which they derived both their teachings and their authority. Nor is the fact that the books were written decades later the only issue. Look at the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. Here we have a book written many decades after most of the events took place. It is also the sole source for many of the details of Franklin's life; they cannot be corroborated by any other documentation.
The differences, though, are profound. We know who the author is, and have ample corroboration for a great many other details, which lead us to conclude that the autobiography as a whole is reliable enough.
The problem is, people like you--who want to convince everyone that the Bible is reliable--try to portray the authors of the synoptics as four independent sources, each writing from memory and also scouring the Judean countryside for eyewitnesses, and each having the sort of critical scrutiny that characterizes the best journalism today. Read Lee Strobel's "The Case for Christ" as a paragon of that approach.
The documentation just isn't anywhere near as reliable as you want to believe. We have four books, authors unknown, which crib from each other shamelessly even as they try to contradict each other on both biographical details and points of doctrine. The early Church fathers adopted the books not because they had critically investigated their origins and found the books reliable, but because they had a following and said what they considered acceptable doctrine.
You're also ignoring that the Bible should be held to a higher standard of historical evidence than ordinary historical questions. When somebody calls into question the authenticity of a love letter from King Henry VIII to one of his wives, or questions whether a later author added a particular passage to Romeo and Juliet, it doesn't matter. A few historians write a few papers, somebody loses or gains tenure, a few breathless books get written for public consumption. But in the end, it doesn't have any bearing on our lives today.
Contrast that with evidence that brings doubt on the authenticity of the Bible. According to religious folks like yourself, we have to be able to rely on the absolute truth of those ancient writings; we have to because we're expected to make decisions today based on its teachings. I guarantee, if the life of every man, woman, and child on the planet depended on the accuracy of some detail in Ben Franklin's autobiography, it would be held to far higher standards than any historians use in the ordinary course of of their work.
That's all we know for sure? One of the greatest theologians ever, who understood Jesus' message and Christianity extremely well and explained aspects of it in letters to many different churches "was familiar with the story of the tomb"? Is that really all you'll give him credit for?
Pretty much.
First, Paul's talent as a theologian isn't at issue. What is at issue is this: What is the source of his teachings?
As you well know, Paul never met Jesus in the flesh. Instead, he claims to have had a vision in which Christ appeared to him and told him to preach the gospel. Paul wasn't one of the twelve apostles, and in fact had a fractious relationship with them. As a believer, you have to work under the assumption that modern Christianity is correct. So Paul has to be an authentic source of teachings, and therefore couldn't have been an interloper trying to reshape Christianity to fit his own views.
I'm under no such compulsion, so you would have to demonstrate some reasons for me to believe that Paul was simply expounding the message of Christ, instead of co-opting it.
You misrepresent what I said when you ask, "Is that all you give him credit for?" I said that Paul demonstrates little familiarity
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Six exclamation points is the sign of a deranged mind. It's probably best that we end this conversation.
You've heard it a thousand times already: Intellectual property is not the same as real property. When people choose to publish their works, they lose certain privileges that they had before they made that choice. For example, they lose the ability to stop people from using excerpts of their work in ways that fall under the category of "fair use". They lose the ability to control what people do with the copies of their work (for example, they can't legally stop me from reselling a copy that I bought).
DRM is an attempt to use technology to make it impossible for the public to use works in ways that are perfectly legal, constructive, and beneficial to society as a whole. It's quite legal and useful to excerpt from a work in order to review and critique it. It's perfectly moral to rip a CD so you can listen to it on your MP3 player. There's everything wrong with the idea that a copyright holder can unilaterally decide to break all old copies of a work. I don't care how much sense Lucas thinks it makes to have Greebo shoot first, he shouldn't be able to force me to upgrade, or remove the old version from the public sphere altogether.
That is why I don't go ga-ga over all your "wonderful" examples: The whole thing is a Faustian bargain, and one I'm not willing to make. Copyright holders should not have the sort of complete control over their property that owners of tangible property expect, and the idea that they should flies in the face of hundreds of years of tradition.
"Their works." Sheesh. Ownership is not the issue. The complete and unilateral overthrow of the balance of copyright law by corporations is the issue.
Damn it, I've been trolled.
Hardly true. Richard Stallman created the GPL, and he would probably agree with the grandparent's statement. The GPL was a kludge to force unrestrictedness onto a restrictive copyright system.
I'm more pragmatic, or maybe just less idealistic, than Stallman. I believe there are instances where restrictions on the "free flow of ideas" are beneficial. But the GPL is written precisely to ensure that ideas licensed under it are "allowed to freely flow between people in an unlimited fashion".
I honestly don't care about any of your examples.
Napster-To-Go? Why is that a wonderful service? Nothing but the stubbornness of the copyright holders keeps N2G from offering "all you can eat" downloads in non-DRM'ed formats. The only real "value-adds" are the ability to disable your music if you quit their service.
Nor do I see any value in being able to disable a video in the future.
Copyright law was intended to be a balance between the rights of copyright holders and the rights of those receiving copies of their works. DRM--if successful--will smash that balancing act, allowing copyright holders complete control over how the public uses their works. I've no intention of trading in my fair use rights or my ability to use copyrighted works in any legal manner just so some corporation feels safe about publishing videos on the Internet.
No, your "free as in beer" crack didn't "cut down on the legalese", because it's completely wrong. Nothing about the GPL says you can't charge for software, but you originally implied that it did, and that Emperor Linux could be sued for doing so. Rather than cutting to the heart of the matter, you went off and punctured the matter's kneecap.
My entire point is that they don't just burn off an image, ship the laptop, and charge $500 extra. They charge $500 for additional services, including maintaining a good customer service presence, hiring people who test the living hell out of their configurations, and retaining people with the expertise needed to maintain a custom kernel.
None of these things are cheap, and you don't have to pay them a red cent to benefit from much of the work Emperor Linux does. Just download their kernel.
As I said before, the services they provide may or may not be worth the price to everybody. But they're real, and some people are glad they're being offered. I find your attempt at moral outrage unspeakably lame.
Your employer should have been preparing for this possibility a long time ago. He should have known how thoroughly your departure could screw up his business, and made sure that somebody else knew how to do everything you've been doing.
Your obligations here are minimal. Legally, you could be a complete twerp about it, walk off, and not return his calls. It sounds like you're being quite fair, and are fulfilling any ethical responsibilities you may have.
The flip side is, this is the guy's company. Your departure may lead to a string of disasters that could kill it off entirely. The big question is, is there enough bad blood between you and the company that you wouldn't mind letting your boss suffer for his mistakes? If so, I don't see any reason to let your relationship continue beyond the four weeks you outlined earlier. Maybe less, if your boss's counter-offer was galling enough.
But if you like and respect your former employer, do them a favor and be willing to negotiate some price at which you'll come back in and save their butts from certain doom. "Subsidized" is unreasonable. You have a right to not be taken advantage of, and a responsibility to make it clear that you won't be around forever. I would start with double your current hourly rate after your four weeks is up, and increment every week.
By the end of the fifth week, charge three times your old rate, and four times by the end of the sixth week. As your replacement (replacements, if your boss has learned anything from this experience) adapts to his new environment, their need for you will dwindle even as your rates increase. At some point, it's just not worth it for them to call you anymore.
For your remaining time, start documenting procedures, settings, and for godssake comment that rats nest of code! Good luck in your new job.
They're not suing because the contract upsets them. They're not going into court to prove that the contract doesn't give them as much as they'd like. They're going in to prove that the contract itself was illegal; that the intention of the contracts was to create "stealth employees" which could be treated the same as regular employees in every way except when it came to payroll taxes and benefits.
I don't understand your complaint about the suit happening "after the fact". First, we only know details about one of the thirty-three defendants (worked there for several years as a contractor, and stopped working for them a couple of weeks ago). Some of the others may still work there, and she may be the person doing the interviews because she doesn't work there and has nothing to lose.
Beyond that, we really don't know the history of this case. We don't know when or why these people became dissatisfied, whether they made efforts to reach an agreement with HP outside the courtroom, or what it took to convince them that it was time to file a lawsuit. "What took them so long?" is an important question, not a rhetorical one.
In the end, I'm biased for the little guy. Any multi-billion dollar corporation that could scrounge together $115M for an incompetent CEO with delusions of Lee Iacocca-hood can afford to not screw its employees with these permatemp shenanigans.
It's not the suing contractors' faults that companies are starting to get skittish about contractor lawsuits. It's their own ignorance. All they have to do is follow the IRS guidelines, and they'll be safe. If it turns out that HP wasn't following those guidelines, and it "looses" the suit, it shouldn't affect compliant companies in the least.
Another slashdotter shoots off his mouth, presuming to know the facts of the case. Film at 11.
You do not know that the contractors were being paid more than the employees.
You do not know that the contractors had control over the hours they worked.
You do not know that the contractors were working through a contracting company, or that they were in a position to offer their "contracting services" to anyone but HP.
You do not know that the contractors were either inclined or able do more goofing off than the surrounding employees. In asserting that they were, you're just making groundless accusations to support conclusions long since made.
In fact, given the facts presented in the article, you do not know any differences between the contractors and the employees, except that the latter were receiving benefits. Further, the entire point of the lawsuit is the plaintiffs' claim that there was no effective difference between contractors and employees.
So what we have is a lawsuit claiming certain facts, and you claiming those facts to be false. Your only claim to inside information is that you were a contractor once. That fact is entirely irrelevant, since you cannot speak to the actual working conditions inside HP.
You, sir, don't get it.
You're criticizing a company for selling Linux distros under the terms dictated by the creators of the distro. If you order a laptop with Fedora Core 3, Red Hat doesn't see a penny. If you order RH9 with a 12 month tech support contract, Red Hat gets paid for it. It works this way because that's how Red Hat says EmperorLinux needs to do it.
So, who is getting ripped off?
Further, you fundamentally misunderstand the GPL. It says nothing about "free as in beer" and in fact everything on the GNU website specifically denies that intention. All that is required under the GPL is that you cannot sell a binary without giving the recipient access to the source code as well. If I want to sell a custom kernel for $500 a pop, more power to me.
Again, nobody is getting ripped off. They're just taking what is being offered, and redistributing it under the terms of the offer. They're also sending kernel patches back to the kernel maintainers, which is something they're not legally obligated to do.
I know people who have bought from EL, and they've been most impressed with the tech support they've received. Impressive tech support isn't cheap. If their "value adds" have no value to you, you can buy the same laptop model elsewhere and figure out how to install Linux on a laptop yourself. It's tricky, but it will help if you download a really nifty kernel customized for laptops.
In short, if you don't like what they're doing, it's possible to do it yourself. How is that worse than "Bill and the Boys?"
The way I read this, their previous strategy was "dump sixty or seventy hours of work on an employee's desk, tell them to do it, and allow them to exhibit 'entrepreneurialism, innovation, and creativity' in getting it done."
Now that they're implementing overtime, they can't just assume that the employees will work those sixty or seventy hours "if necessary"*. So they'll start structuring their employees' days in such a way that they'll almost never have to pay out overtime, but will require solid work during the 40 hours the employee is on the clock.
I don't think most of their employees will miss the days of yore, when they got to bask in their company's "entrepreneurial culture" for most of their waking hours.
Sheesh. What a load of PHB-speak.
I've been resisting the desire to move over to an RP server for a long while now. One reason is that I know a couple of people on the PvP server I'm on right now. They play much more than I do, and have been sending me nifty stuff.
The other reason was that--real soon now--Blizzard would be implementing an honors system. I assumed that once it was installed, there would be some sort of punishment for people who ganked lower-level players.
That's what I want out of the honor system. Not epic armor, or ph4t l00t, or the chance to call myself "Grand Marshal" (I can do that anyways, thankyouverymuch). All I want out of it is a simple change in the game mechanics that provides a disincentive for high-level players to beat up on low-level players.
It looks like that's not going to happen, and that I don't have a temperament that enjoys the sort of crap being pulled on PvP servers. So I think it's time to put my characters into retirement, and move to an RP or RL* server.
* Real Life server. Much harder to farm for gold, the permadeath rules are worrying, and you never get an epic mount. But arguably the play is richer and more rewarding, and the server has zero latency and phenomenal uptime.
Frankly, if you're spending all your time on a PvE server, you don't have a valid assessment of the overall situation. That goes double if you're playing on an RP server. Those servers just dont attract the gank-tastic morons who get their jollies from ruining the game for other players.
Hmm... I suspect I've been trolled. Oh well.
Out of curiosity, when you sit down to a fresh, steaming pile of someone else's code, do you start by running the whole thing through a pretty printer? I'm half way through a class on compilers, and it looks fairly straightforward to write one. I've always had a hunch that it would be a good way to enforce certain coding standards for a project.
So what's your experience been?
The Utah legislature is in love with "message bills": bills that don't make a real difference, and pretty much beg to be shot down after an expensive and protracted legal battle. They inevitably draw time and money away from less sexy but more pressing needs.
Yet year after year, our legislators march themselves up the hill, pass a dozen of these bills to show their constituents that they're "tough on gays", "tough on crime", tough on pornography", and then march themselves back down, patting each other on the back.
Utah: A pretty, lame state.
"Without the benefit of government assistance?" Surely you jest. The whole thing started out as a government research project, the government regulates the telecom industry heavily (not always to the detriment of industry or consumer), and a sizeable portion of the infrastructure is owned, paid for, or subsidized by the government.
You seem to have this problem where you define the free market as "whatever big business happens to be doing at the moment."
You also seem to have lost sight of the story itself. The Internet is supposed to be a shining example of free market economics because everybody on the network can talk freely to everyone else on the network. But the story is about a company deciding to "poison the well" by blocking traffic it happens to find inconvenient to its current business model. So, no, the free market isn't forcing interoperability. Government intervention seems to be doing that job.
Finally, your argument works only if everyone in the market can force interoperability by threatening not to carry other people's traffic. While it works well for companies that already have large amounts of infrastructure to bring to the negotiating table, what about my friend with the small town wireless network? If the company providing his backbone connection starts degrading the quality of his service, in preparation for the rollout of their new SuperDeluxeWireless network, what can he do? He can't threaten to drop their traffic, since his company would go under before they even noticed. There's certainly nothing in his contract that will reimburse him for the value of his entire company. I guess he could do the commie-liberal-socialist-hippie thing and sue them for anticompetitive practices. But that would mean government intervention, and that's bad, right?
The situations you're describing, phone and internet service, isn't a free market, open to anyone with a will to compete. It's a self-perpetuating oligopoly populated by the companies who were big enough to get a place at the telco table ten years ago. Yes, there are market forces at work between the various companies. However, a truly free market requires some sort of base where everyone has equal access, not just AT&T's brats.
I would, if someone would just tell me why this bloody thing isn't compiling.
%include <iosrteam.com>
%include <iomannip.h>
void public static viod main( char *** argc, int argv[] )
{
sdt::cout <<< 'Hello, Wordl!' <<< Std::enld;
}
What? Hey, if you're so smart, YOU figure it out!
You're not making the important distinctions. A regulation saying ISPs have to handle third party VOIP traffic at least as well as they handle their own VOIP traffic is a regulation of the ISP. The regulation is about VOIP, but not on VOIP. So the voice provider isn't incurring the costs of the regulation.
How hard can it be to get a new ISP? Well, my parents live in a small town, about twenty miles from Salt Lake. Up until about a year ago, the only option for broadband to their home was a satellite system ala DirecTV. We kept asking the phone company when DSL would be available. Much like Doom 3, it would be done when it was done.
One of their neighbors got fed up and started his own wireless ISP. Great guy, great geek, not much of a businessman. His prices are far too reasonable for someone who has a lock on Internet service for three thousand people, he forgot to bill us the first two months, and he once gave my parents a full month refund for a three day outage.
This isn't Waxhole, Tennessee. This is a town less than twenty miles from a major city, and less than ten miles from another city of 10,000 people. Now that the neighbor is up and running, the business case for bringing DSL to their area has fallen apart. Everyone who wants broadband at the prices Qwest would offer already has it through the wireless ISP. Since everyone out there who wants cable has satellite, none of the cable providers will build out the area either.
The guy is doing a good job, treating his customers fairly, doing a lot of the phone support himself. Which is all wonderful, because there's no way my parents' neighborhood is going to see any competition from the traditional service providers for a long, long time.
Like I keep saying, Internet service for a given area has many of the features of a natural monopoly.
Your analogy about the insurance companies is bogus. Far too bogus to be punctuated with "Bullshit"s and "Duh"s. The insurance company doesn't own the roads, and cannot physically prevent you from doing anything. They can't turn off your car remotely, or reroute your car along a different road. All they can do if they find you violating the terms of your agreement is to drop you as a customer, or increase their fees, or whatever. Further, since insurance companies aren't natural monopolies, getting a new insurance company only takes a phone call. Nobody has to ask, "Okay, if I'm moving to the other side of town, can my insurance company still cover me?" They can.
You cannot easily apply the principle to a situation where service competition is fragmented. If you've got an area where neither a cable company nor a phone company is currently providing broadband, the first company to provide it is going to get all the potential customers, and any new provider is going to fail unless they offer a better service at a lower price. The only reason phone and cable companies are competing in the same areas anywhere is because they built out their respective systems back when they were selling different services, and hence weren't competing.
Two providers is not sufficient choice, if provider X is a cable company and provider Y is a phone company. Under your "they own the network they can do what they want" system, provider X can prohibit me from using their connection for VOIP, in order to "encourage" the use of their phone service. Provider Y can prohibit me from using their connection for streaming video, to make their cable offerings more compelling. If I need both VOIP and video, my only option is to pay both providers for a connection. I don't think anyone will argue that paying twice for basically the same service is the sort of solution the free market should be producing.
I never said that the free market was "utterly and completely broken". But in the case of Internet service, the necessity of running physical wires means that non-wireless providers are best done as natural monopolies. The fact that wanna-be provider Z can't rent lines from provider X or Y to undercut their prices means that Z would have to run its own lines. Two sets of wires run through the same area to provide the same service isn't an ideal allocation of resources, and the free market is supposed to be an ideal allocator of resources.
Nor did I claim that government would be the perfect solution, to this problem or anything else. Your all-cap histrionics are therefore unnecessary. What I'm trying to say is, left entirely to themselves, markets don't behave in ways that benefit the customer. Monopolies form, anticompetitive agreements get created, safety and environmental concerns get ignored. The government has a role in creating a space in which the free market can act beneficially.
That's the whole idea behind the UTOPIA project, which you conveniently mischaracterized as "a single state-offered provider". The goal of the project is to create infrastructure that anyone can use, then let service providers compete for customers. When I say compete, I mean really compete, not just "compete to see who can build out this neighborhood first, lock in the customers, and make it fiscal suicide for anyone else to enter. Read up on network effects, as they offer an insight into why it's hard for new providers of anything to compete on a level playing field.
Your neighborhood grocery store is a fine example of the power of the free market. Since I've granted that the free market works well with proper management, the analogy does nothing to further your argument. The reason your analogy fails is that grocery stores aren't natural monopolies. Instead, consider the road system.
Say roads were privatized: anyone can purchase a road, charge fees for using them, and (because you seem to want me to believe that private property rights are all-important) they can deny traffic "at will". So neighborhood grocery store X buys up all the roads around neighborhood grocery store Y, and refuses access to either customers or inventory destined for store Y.
See, the reason grocery stores aren't a natural monopoly is because the road system is equal access. Anyone with a car and a license can use the system to get to any grocery store connected to the road system. Ergo, the road system (a public utility) is creating a space in which the free market can work. It's a wonderful thing.
What isn't a wonderful thing is this idea you're trying to push, saying that the freedom of the market can only be assured if we allow service providers to act in a discriminatory manner to protect their current cashflows. I'm in favor of regulating the market because that's the only way to ensure maximum freedom for and benefit from the market.
These companies you revere for their ability to benefit society? They had a sweet deal back when they were selling "telephone service" or "cable TV service". But they were the ones who decided to get into the business of moving arbitrary data as well. If they couldn't understand that voice and picture could be shuttled about in such a way, and now their new service is eating into demand for their old service, they should suffer for their miscalculation, not their customers.
Yes, the market will take care of everything.
Question: How many broadband providers service your area? In mine there are two. If a third one wants to come into my area, they'll have to build their own lines or rent them from one of the existing providers. I honestly don't see the latter happening.
Your free market talk doesn't work. When it comes to Internet to the home, the words "natural monopoly" are appropriate, and the words "free market" are not. The only way I can see for providing a true free market for Internet service is if the government provides the infrastructure and leases its lines out to private companies at a set rate schedule.
That way, getting in the game only requires setting up your own servers. No building out redundant lines, no sending installers to individual houses to run wires and poke holes. Everyone has equipment that allows them to access any of the providers, and providers have to compete with every competitor and in every neighborhood. The UTOPIA Project is attempting to do that for Utah.
But since it requires government involvement, socialism must ensue, right?
Personally, I would much rather have the war over VOIP fought in the legislature and the courts than on my ISP's routers.
No, a better analogy would be lots of people not paying their phone bills, moving all their communication with their friends to instant messaging, and then having the ISP (which is also the phone company) blocking IM'ing so those people will have to start paying for phone service again.
How is your analogy even remotely useful? Seriously, explain it in excruciating detail.
"It is a private network?" Please. If a phone company started monitoring my phone calls in order to find out which brand of corn flakes I prefer, nobody would defend them by saying, "Well, it's their system."
The Internet is becoming a critical enabler of free speech, and if those who carry Internet traffic are going to start unduly mucking about with the packets I send, then it's time to make them stop.
You would have a point, if VOIP actually consumed mammoth amounts of bandwidth, or otherwise disrupted service for everyone. But it doesn't. Certainly there are much more pressing bandwidth hogs to go after. Anyways, all the quality of service issues that might be relevant to this could be handled by using simple traffic shaping against heavy users, without regard to what functions the traffic was serving.
Essentially, you're saying that if the Internet can do something, but your ISP would make more money if you were doing it a different way, it has the right to keep you from doing it over the Internet.
The differences, though, are profound. We know who the author is, and have ample corroboration for a great many other details, which lead us to conclude that the autobiography as a whole is reliable enough.
The problem is, people like you--who want to convince everyone that the Bible is reliable--try to portray the authors of the synoptics as four independent sources, each writing from memory and also scouring the Judean countryside for eyewitnesses, and each having the sort of critical scrutiny that characterizes the best journalism today. Read Lee Strobel's "The Case for Christ" as a paragon of that approach.
The documentation just isn't anywhere near as reliable as you want to believe. We have four books, authors unknown, which crib from each other shamelessly even as they try to contradict each other on both biographical details and points of doctrine. The early Church fathers adopted the books not because they had critically investigated their origins and found the books reliable, but because they had a following and said what they considered acceptable doctrine.
You're also ignoring that the Bible should be held to a higher standard of historical evidence than ordinary historical questions. When somebody calls into question the authenticity of a love letter from King Henry VIII to one of his wives, or questions whether a later author added a particular passage to Romeo and Juliet, it doesn't matter. A few historians write a few papers, somebody loses or gains tenure, a few breathless books get written for public consumption. But in the end, it doesn't have any bearing on our lives today.
Contrast that with evidence that brings doubt on the authenticity of the Bible. According to religious folks like yourself, we have to be able to rely on the absolute truth of those ancient writings; we have to because we're expected to make decisions today based on its teachings. I guarantee, if the life of every man, woman, and child on the planet depended on the accuracy of some detail in Ben Franklin's autobiography, it would be held to far higher standards than any historians use in the ordinary course of of their work.
Pretty much.
First, Paul's talent as a theologian isn't at issue. What is at issue is this: What is the source of his teachings?
As you well know, Paul never met Jesus in the flesh. Instead, he claims to have had a vision in which Christ appeared to him and told him to preach the gospel. Paul wasn't one of the twelve apostles, and in fact had a fractious relationship with them. As a believer, you have to work under the assumption that modern Christianity is correct. So Paul has to be an authentic source of teachings, and therefore couldn't have been an interloper trying to reshape Christianity to fit his own views.
I'm under no such compulsion, so you would have to demonstrate some reasons for me to believe that Paul was simply expounding the message of Christ, instead of co-opting it.
You misrepresent what I said when you ask, "Is that all you give him credit for?" I said that Paul demonstrates little familiarity