Apple can claim that they have the right to usurp this guys program based on the exclusion clause in the Labor Code -- (see a1) "which does not relate to the business of the employer". As Apple has become the significant application developer for thier own platform, they could claim that any application that enhances the MacOS X platform relates to thier business.
Too vague a categorization. That's like saying "since we're in the business of selling stuff that serves a purpose, anything you make that serves a purpose is ours." Any lawyer attempting to argue that the Labor Code gives Apple the rights to anything any of their employees create that runs on a Mac is gonna get laughed at by the judge.
They could also make the more dubious claim that they anticipated developing such a program and the clause "a2" as well.
They would have to show proof of such in order to claim that. Saying "yeah, we been thinking of doing that for a while" doesn't hold legal water unless they can document their thoughts in writing.
In any case like this, the judge is (ideally) going to adhere to the spirit of the law in passing a ruling. The purpose of the law is to limit employers to preventing employees from leveraging their position in the company in competition with the company itself. It essentially says to employers "you own their directly job-related creations, but they're not your slaves".
Read the back of your card. Most say, "Not Valid Without Signature". The clerk was absolutely correct
Well certainly, but refusing to take it unless I sign it where she me doing it is what got me. True, there may be liability issues there, and all their actions may have been perfectly executed according to the rules, but still none of it was rational.
less than half of clerks that are unfamiliar with me even bother to turn the card over where, instead of a signature, it has PLEASE CHECK ID in bold letters.
I had the same thing on my credir card instead of my signature, until one day when I went to Best Buy and tried to purchase a $15 spindle of CDR's. The drone at the register said "I can't take an unsigned credit card; company policy". No amount of explaining why it's a bad idea to have the signature there where a card thief can see it (and possibly practice it), nor showing my driver's license (with signature!) as verification would change her mind. I offered to sign the card right there, but she said it had to be signed before it was given to her! The manager was summoned and he parroted back the same load of crap! As such I was unable to pay for the CDRs (which I needed immediately for work) and had to go outside empty handed-- where I immediately signed the back of the card. I then went inside, grabbed another spindle of CDRs, got in a different checkout line, and purchased them without incident. Few things drive me crazier than irrational security policy.
I don't like the term [principle] because I think it paints "fair use" as something special, or granted.
OK. [shrug]
No, if copyright law didn't exist there wouldn't be any such thing as *infringement*. Remember, "fair use" is just the things you do that the law says aren't infringing.
Errr....."fair use" and "infringing" are the two parts that public copying get split into when copyright law is applicable. You can't have one without the other.
we're spoiled brats when we expect those in authority to -give- us something to make up for us not doing some bad.
"Fair use" isn't something the government gives to us-- it's what's left of our natural rights after the government grants a de jure limited monopoly on the right to copy to a content creator. Copyright is an unnatural thing. It only exists to encourage creators of works to release their creations and enrich the public domain, after being able (for a limited time) to charge people for it initially.
the EU brought it in at the behest of WIPO. Which happens to be little more than a international legislation recommendation body sock puppet for US corporate interests.
Heh. I prefer to think of them as multi-national coprorate interests, since they're screwing us here in the US as well.
There is no "principle of fair use". That's just lawyer-speak for the things that would happen if the legal fiction of copyright didn't exist in the first place.
Cripes, man, go look up "principle" in the dictionary. You seem to think a principle has some legal meaning, which it doesn't. If you find his statement confusing, try reading it as "concept of fair use", or "idea of fair use".
Furthermore, fair use would certainly not exist "if the legal fiction of copyright didn't exist in the first place", because the idea of fair use itself is part of copyright law! If there is no copyright law, then there's no division between fair use and infringement.
Replace the dip switch inside the door opener with a 555 timer/counter circuit. Good times
Got one of those. Actually it's a flip-flip + crystal timer dealie, but same idea. It's also wired to a set of LEDs that read out the switching configuration as it goes. Very handy device. Only works on Linear 8 switch units though.
So how on earth are they justifying the asking price of nearly $70,000??
Add about 70% to the price for labor to assemble the damn thing properly, and then take THAT number and double it to keep any sane person from making them actually build one. I'm sure they would if someone was dumb enough to order one from them.
Hint: Even if Bill Gates held 90% of the shares in Microsoft, he couldn't wake up one day and decide to create the "make Bill happy fund" where most company profits go before awarding profits to shareholders.
Of course, with 90% of the shares, he'd already be getting most of the profits.
The usage of the word "suck" in the title, is an example of poor reporting. Comments are comments, title's are not comments. Whatever happened to standards?
Standards? Pfff! Slashdot has degraded to Yet Another Weblog. They should change the line to "Views for Nerds; Stuff the Blathers"
I wish I could think of something funnier.
4996 of these people wont even get any accolades for their work that the company may end up using
Odds are, they're more likely to use the work of the top 4. They may cull a few interesting ideas from the lower ranks, but I doubt they'll choose to implement the 4983rd most efficient solution they have when there are 4982 that are better. You have to look at it properly: they aren't getting 5000 people to work for them for free, they are paying $20,000 to get the top 4 to submit their best solutions. I suspect they don't give a crap about the rest.
I have presented my evidence: without reference to soul, spirit, or other similar concepts, the body is all that there is. Until the body ceases to exist, by the complete action of chemistry and/or physics, it is the providence of the owner of the body, and no one else (save a will, or living relatives), what the disposition of the body is, given the action of chemisty and physics. Prove otherwise.
How will we know unless we dig 'em up and check?
Seriously though, even in cultures where corpses are revered, they are not given human rights. Maintaining the property rights to the gravesite is the responsibility of the living descendents. You obviously believe otherwise, but you'd find it hard to claim (strange hypothetical coming!) your grandfather still owns the house he built and demanded to be buried under unless his descendents had retained the deed to the property.
It's nice to know that when some of us want to intelligently point out that the company hung itself, we can always count on ignorant, childish remarks like yours to make sure nobody listens to us.
You need to not worry about the asshats, man. There's always some knob who sends an email full of sputtering invective. What's important is how many come in that AREN'T from freaks. A company that receives 6 freak emails and 200 non-freak emails, but then tosses them ALL out because of the 6 freak ones-- well, they weren't going to listen to you anyway.
How about respecting the dead? Is 'loss of tourism' really the best answer we can come up with to not open up two people's graves (at least one of whom is assuredly not Billy the Kid)?
Bah! Respecting the dead, sure. But what's the point of respecting their corpses? It's not like they're in there anymore.
This is the same country that managed to equip their F-4's with rear view windows for pennies on the dollar for what it would have cost the American Air Force.
Actually, it was rear view mirrors (the RIO rear view mirror on a late model F-4 is visible here), and the original apocryphal tale is about the Israeli Air Force being somehow "smarter" than the US Air Force because they thought to put mirrors in for use in dogfights and the USAF somehow never thought to do that. The truth is, however, that the US Air Force has had rear view mirrors on fighter aircraft since the time when they were still the Army Air Corps. The reason the early F-4 models did not was that it was not originally intended to be a dogfighter-- it didn't even have a gun (this was a completely different sort of folly, i.e. the belief that missiles were all you needed anymore). Later, during the Vietnam War, the gun and mirrors were added because (surprise) dogfights still happened!
The memory effect is real, but you are right, that reverse charging is a bigger danger. Both problems can be fixed. However to fix a reversed cell, you need to open the pack and charge that cell individually. I've seen both of these problems and fixed both.
The "article" you like to is the weakest piece of tripe i've ever seen on the subject. They even say themselves that it's not actually "memory", it's "voltage depression". Voltage depression is caused by overcharging, especially at high temperatures. The cure for voltage depression is complete discharging before recharging. The problem you run into there is the danger of running reverse polarity current through one or more cells.
What it comes down to is this: Nicads have trouble with voltage depression and cell polarity reversal. In multi cell nicad packs, you can end up with a situation where the cure for one problem will cause the other problem. The only solution is to cut the cells in the pack apart charge each cell separately.
Please understand, I'm not saying that people are imagining that their nicad packs go to shit-- only that the explaination cited is factually incorrect.
So, the net effect is that the batteries (which are very frequently used in a multi-cell arrangement) appear to the non-multimeter-equipped person to have decreased charge carrying performance over time?
Gosh. Sounds just like the "memory effect" that people describe with NiCad batteries.
"[It] sounds just like" and "It is" are not the same thing. The "memory effect" myth goes something like this: "if you don't run down a nicad all the way before recharging it, it chemically 'remembers' at what point it was recharged and won't discharge below that point next time". This is, despite what the behavior may appear to be, absolutely incorrect. There is no chemical "memory" going on. It is just one or more cells being damaged by polarity reversal. Neither the undamaged batteries nor the damaged ones "remember" anything, thus the "memory effect" is myth.
I live in a managed flat in Central London, where the entrance key to the concierge area is unlocked with an RFID tag.
In the security business that's called a "prox card" (proximity) and, though it's essentialy the same thing as an RFID tag, the names aren't interchangeable. Prox cards have been around for 10+ years. RFID specifically refers to these little stick-on bits intended for inventory tracking and such that have come out recently. Prox card readers can only handle one card in range at a time. RFID readers are designed to handle multiple tags in range simultaneously. In short, all RFID tags are proximity devices, but not all proximity devices are RFID tags.
If RFID technology was cheap enough, easy to use and not too icky, I'd tag all my tools, the remote controls, the kids toys, and anything else we habitually lose. I'd like to try tagging the stuff I lose around the yard and house. Since I would assign the tags, there wouldn't be many privacy issues. People with scanners would know how many things I tagged, but not what they are.
I looked into doing something like that about a year ago. My idea was to tag all the things I habitually keep on my person, then have a small pager-like device that periodically polls the RFID tags and makes sure they're in range. If, for example, my Palm m505 falls out of my pocket in the booth of a diner, as soon as I get 5 feet from the table the RFID pager goes off and says "item number (whatever) out of range" and I know to turn around and pick up my Palm. In my case, I was looking for an interesting way to stop leaving tools behind at the job site, but the technology wasn't there yet. Maybe I'll check again...
One of my co-workers claims that very early battries could be recharged just by putting them out in sunlight, or warming them up somehow. I think hes full of crap. Anyone know for sure?
Full of crap. Earlier batteries' chemistry had a more limited "optimal" temperature range, e.g. at 50 deg F an old battery would run down to like the 10% point and the chemical reaction would slow down. Warming them up when they got weak would get the internal chemistry "going" again and give them a little more life. Batteries now aren't as touchy about temperature, so heating them up when they're dead doesn't do squat.
The public accepts the idea that batteries die and need to be replaced, so therefore, battery companies make money. What would be their incentive to create better batteries?
If you invent a bettery that lasts twice as long, you can charge three times as much. The convenience of a longer-life battery has value too. Notice the price of lithium vs. alkaline one-shot batteries.
NiCad batteries would get a memory effect, last very short times and have abyssimal storage capacity.
Actually, the "memory effect" thing is a myth. What really happens with multi-cell nicad packs is one or more of the cells runs down to 0 volts before the rest do and subsequently gets "anti-charged" by the other batteries in the pack. The reverse voltage damages that particular cell, reducing its capacity. A multi-cell pack only gives full voltage for as long as the weakest cell in the pack can. The weird thing about the "battery memory" thing is that the recommended means of avoiding problems (full discharge before recharging) is more likely to result in cell damage. Then again, the difference between that and the opposite (recharge frequently without discharging) is practically nil: nicads are just crap.
It's possible that batteries have indeed gotten better and more efficient but that the technology that we've been using them in has gotten more and more power hungry?
Actually, on average, devices have gotten LESS power hungry. Take, for example, scientific calculators. I had one 25 years ago that could run on a 9 volt battery for almost a month (if you remembered to turn it off when you were done). Now the power-hogging-est HP calculator I have runs on three 1.5v button cells that have only needed changing once in the last 6 years. Batteries, on the other hand, have improved only slightly. We still don't have rechargeable batteries that can beat a decent alkaline cell in amp-hours. The last significant improvement in battery-life was the non-rechargeable lithium battery, and that was 30+ years ago. Ever since the first ni-cad was invented in 1899, the big push has been to get rechargeables up to the same volume-to-power ratio as non-rechargeables. Really, batteries have gotten only incrementally better for 100+ years, while everything else has improved exponentially.
When it's essentially a choice between two slick jackasses in suits, neither of which represent your interests, why even bother voting?
To vote for the Libertarian canidate, who isn't a jackass, but everyone calls him that anyway. Why is it that the platform that can reverse the morbid obesity of the government gets badmouthed for taking soup away from Little Tommy, when it's the Democrats who took Little Tommy's dad's job away in the first place through overtaxation and protectionist legislation?!?
Hey, as a libertarian myself, I'm with you 100%. I've just given up any real hope of seeing a change in the two-party system. Too much inertia.
Slashdot Mirror
Too vague a categorization. That's like saying "since we're in the business of selling stuff that serves a purpose, anything you make that serves a purpose is ours." Any lawyer attempting to argue that the Labor Code gives Apple the rights to anything any of their employees create that runs on a Mac is gonna get laughed at by the judge.
They could also make the more dubious claim that they anticipated developing such a program and the clause "a2" as well.
They would have to show proof of such in order to claim that. Saying "yeah, we been thinking of doing that for a while" doesn't hold legal water unless they can document their thoughts in writing.
In any case like this, the judge is (ideally) going to adhere to the spirit of the law in passing a ruling. The purpose of the law is to limit employers to preventing employees from leveraging their position in the company in competition with the company itself. It essentially says to employers "you own their directly job-related creations, but they're not your slaves".
Well certainly, but refusing to take it unless I sign it where she me doing it is what got me. True, there may be liability issues there, and all their actions may have been perfectly executed according to the rules, but still none of it was rational.
I had the same thing on my credir card instead of my signature, until one day when I went to Best Buy and tried to purchase a $15 spindle of CDR's. The drone at the register said "I can't take an unsigned credit card; company policy". No amount of explaining why it's a bad idea to have the signature there where a card thief can see it (and possibly practice it), nor showing my driver's license (with signature!) as verification would change her mind. I offered to sign the card right there, but she said it had to be signed before it was given to her! The manager was summoned and he parroted back the same load of crap! As such I was unable to pay for the CDRs (which I needed immediately for work) and had to go outside empty handed-- where I immediately signed the back of the card. I then went inside, grabbed another spindle of CDRs, got in a different checkout line, and purchased them without incident. Few things drive me crazier than irrational security policy.
OK. [shrug] No, if copyright law didn't exist there wouldn't be any such thing as *infringement*. Remember, "fair use" is just the things you do that the law says aren't infringing.
Errr....."fair use" and "infringing" are the two parts that public copying get split into when copyright law is applicable. You can't have one without the other.
"Fair use" isn't something the government gives to us-- it's what's left of our natural rights after the government grants a de jure limited monopoly on the right to copy to a content creator. Copyright is an unnatural thing. It only exists to encourage creators of works to release their creations and enrich the public domain, after being able (for a limited time) to charge people for it initially.
Heh. I prefer to think of them as multi-national coprorate interests, since they're screwing us here in the US as well.
Cripes, man, go look up "principle" in the dictionary. You seem to think a principle has some legal meaning, which it doesn't. If you find his statement confusing, try reading it as "concept of fair use", or "idea of fair use".
Furthermore, fair use would certainly not exist "if the legal fiction of copyright didn't exist in the first place", because the idea of fair use itself is part of copyright law! If there is no copyright law, then there's no division between fair use and infringement.
Got one of those. Actually it's a flip-flip + crystal timer dealie, but same idea. It's also wired to a set of LEDs that read out the switching configuration as it goes. Very handy device. Only works on Linear 8 switch units though.
So how on earth are they justifying the asking price of nearly $70,000??
Add about 70% to the price for labor to assemble the damn thing properly, and then take THAT number and double it to keep any sane person from making them actually build one. I'm sure they would if someone was dumb enough to order one from them.
Of course, with 90% of the shares, he'd already be getting most of the profits.
Standards? Pfff! Slashdot has degraded to Yet Another Weblog. They should change the line to "Views for Nerds; Stuff the Blathers"
I wish I could think of something funnier.
Odds are, they're more likely to use the work of the top 4. They may cull a few interesting ideas from the lower ranks, but I doubt they'll choose to implement the 4983rd most efficient solution they have when there are 4982 that are better. You have to look at it properly: they aren't getting 5000 people to work for them for free, they are paying $20,000 to get the top 4 to submit their best solutions. I suspect they don't give a crap about the rest.
How will we know unless we dig 'em up and check?
Seriously though, even in cultures where corpses are revered, they are not given human rights. Maintaining the property rights to the gravesite is the responsibility of the living descendents. You obviously believe otherwise, but you'd find it hard to claim (strange hypothetical coming!) your grandfather still owns the house he built and demanded to be buried under unless his descendents had retained the deed to the property.
You need to not worry about the asshats, man. There's always some knob who sends an email full of sputtering invective. What's important is how many come in that AREN'T from freaks. A company that receives 6 freak emails and 200 non-freak emails, but then tosses them ALL out because of the 6 freak ones-- well, they weren't going to listen to you anyway.
Bah! Respecting the dead, sure. But what's the point of respecting their corpses? It's not like they're in there anymore.
Actually, it was rear view mirrors (the RIO rear view mirror on a late model F-4 is visible here), and the original apocryphal tale is about the Israeli Air Force being somehow "smarter" than the US Air Force because they thought to put mirrors in for use in dogfights and the USAF somehow never thought to do that. The truth is, however, that the US Air Force has had rear view mirrors on fighter aircraft since the time when they were still the Army Air Corps. The reason the early F-4 models did not was that it was not originally intended to be a dogfighter-- it didn't even have a gun (this was a completely different sort of folly, i.e. the belief that missiles were all you needed anymore). Later, during the Vietnam War, the gun and mirrors were added because (surprise) dogfights still happened!
The "article" you like to is the weakest piece of tripe i've ever seen on the subject. They even say themselves that it's not actually "memory", it's "voltage depression". Voltage depression is caused by overcharging, especially at high temperatures. The cure for voltage depression is complete discharging before recharging. The problem you run into there is the danger of running reverse polarity current through one or more cells.
What it comes down to is this: Nicads have trouble with voltage depression and cell polarity reversal. In multi cell nicad packs, you can end up with a situation where the cure for one problem will cause the other problem. The only solution is to cut the cells in the pack apart charge each cell separately.
Please understand, I'm not saying that people are imagining that their nicad packs go to shit-- only that the explaination cited is factually incorrect.
"[It] sounds just like" and "It is" are not the same thing. The "memory effect" myth goes something like this: "if you don't run down a nicad all the way before recharging it, it chemically 'remembers' at what point it was recharged and won't discharge below that point next time". This is, despite what the behavior may appear to be, absolutely incorrect. There is no chemical "memory" going on. It is just one or more cells being damaged by polarity reversal. Neither the undamaged batteries nor the damaged ones "remember" anything, thus the "memory effect" is myth.
In the security business that's called a "prox card" (proximity) and, though it's essentialy the same thing as an RFID tag, the names aren't interchangeable. Prox cards have been around for 10+ years. RFID specifically refers to these little stick-on bits intended for inventory tracking and such that have come out recently. Prox card readers can only handle one card in range at a time. RFID readers are designed to handle multiple tags in range simultaneously. In short, all RFID tags are proximity devices, but not all proximity devices are RFID tags.
I looked into doing something like that about a year ago. My idea was to tag all the things I habitually keep on my person, then have a small pager-like device that periodically polls the RFID tags and makes sure they're in range. If, for example, my Palm m505 falls out of my pocket in the booth of a diner, as soon as I get 5 feet from the table the RFID pager goes off and says "item number (whatever) out of range" and I know to turn around and pick up my Palm. In my case, I was looking for an interesting way to stop leaving tools behind at the job site, but the technology wasn't there yet. Maybe I'll check again...
Full of crap. Earlier batteries' chemistry had a more limited "optimal" temperature range, e.g. at 50 deg F an old battery would run down to like the 10% point and the chemical reaction would slow down. Warming them up when they got weak would get the internal chemistry "going" again and give them a little more life. Batteries now aren't as touchy about temperature, so heating them up when they're dead doesn't do squat.
If you invent a bettery that lasts twice as long, you can charge three times as much. The convenience of a longer-life battery has value too. Notice the price of lithium vs. alkaline one-shot batteries.
Actually, the "memory effect" thing is a myth. What really happens with multi-cell nicad packs is one or more of the cells runs down to 0 volts before the rest do and subsequently gets "anti-charged" by the other batteries in the pack. The reverse voltage damages that particular cell, reducing its capacity. A multi-cell pack only gives full voltage for as long as the weakest cell in the pack can. The weird thing about the "battery memory" thing is that the recommended means of avoiding problems (full discharge before recharging) is more likely to result in cell damage. Then again, the difference between that and the opposite (recharge frequently without discharging) is practically nil: nicads are just crap.
It's possible that batteries have indeed gotten better and more efficient but that the technology that we've been using them in has gotten more and more power hungry? Actually, on average, devices have gotten LESS power hungry. Take, for example, scientific calculators. I had one 25 years ago that could run on a 9 volt battery for almost a month (if you remembered to turn it off when you were done). Now the power-hogging-est HP calculator I have runs on three 1.5v button cells that have only needed changing once in the last 6 years. Batteries, on the other hand, have improved only slightly. We still don't have rechargeable batteries that can beat a decent alkaline cell in amp-hours. The last significant improvement in battery-life was the non-rechargeable lithium battery, and that was 30+ years ago. Ever since the first ni-cad was invented in 1899, the big push has been to get rechargeables up to the same volume-to-power ratio as non-rechargeables. Really, batteries have gotten only incrementally better for 100+ years, while everything else has improved exponentially.
To vote for the Libertarian canidate, who isn't a jackass, but everyone calls him that anyway. Why is it that the platform that can reverse the morbid obesity of the government gets badmouthed for taking soup away from Little Tommy, when it's the Democrats who took Little Tommy's dad's job away in the first place through overtaxation and protectionist legislation?!?
Hey, as a libertarian myself, I'm with you 100%. I've just given up any real hope of seeing a change in the two-party system. Too much inertia.