Ok so...
What if she's 21 years old?
What if you tell her where to buy a gun?
What if you tell her where to get some drugs?
What if she's 16 years old?
What if you tell her where to get an abortion?
Seems to me that free speech that depends on what you're saying or who you're saying it to isn't really free speech at all, is it?
Personally, I'm with the "links are free speech" camp, but the example made me chuckle. If the above things are bad, someone needs to ban the Yellow Pages of the phone book! I can find all of those things in the yellow pages, (and "escort services" that take MasterCard, too!) and there are no age restrictions on using a phonebook!
Quick! Write your Congresscritter! Something must be done to protect the children from phonebooks!
On a totally unrelated topic, is anybody else using Mozilla-0.93 and getting the "Slow down cowboy" message when posting to Slashdot? It seems like Mozilla is loading every page twice.
No, just you. This is my third post today, using Moz 0.9.3, build ID: 2001080110, Win32 version. No problems with/. posts.
I go for books every time.. I flat out refuse to buy an e-Book, 'cos it's not convenient.. I can't use it to unwind when I loaf on the sofa or the bed.. I can't take it hiking, or on trips..
I like non-protected e-books that I can download into my Palm. I can pack 4 or 5 books at a time in my smaller-than-a-paperback-book Palm IIIx, and take it hiking, or on trips, or loaf on the sofa or the bed reading it, or pull it out and read while waiting in line at the movies/doctor/store/govmnt office/etc. It's damn convenient, more so than a paperback book--I can't fit a paperback book in my jeans pocket, and I sure can't fit 5 of them there--along with the equivalent of a DayTimer, a small notebook, and a GameBoy!
First, this is going the way of DivX; nobody in their right mind is going to pay to read a book for a short period. People pay for books they want to keep permanently; for temporary trial reading, they borrow books from the free public library. As far as I can tell, they've just thought of a new way to prove that e-books are not profitable.
Second, is it just me or were they extraordinarily stupid to release their timed ebook in Adobe E-book format right after Elcomsoft's Advanced E-book Processor has been heavily publicized in every geek-oriented news channel on the Internet? What are they saying here, "Crack me! Crack me!"?
Third, making available preview e-book versions of a novel is effective marketing--if it's free. Baen Books has been making the first chapters of new books available for on-line preview for quite a while now, as well as making the first books of some popular series available in their entirety for free--apparently it's been an effective enough marketing tactic that they have expanded their list of free e-books. That's right, expanded! Now, can anyone tell me how effective that would have been if they charged a $1 fee for a short reading period per book in the Baen Free Library?
Do publishers actually think when they come up with these schemes, or did the geniuses that came up with dot.bomb business plans move into publishing when I wasn't looking?
I throttled fetchmail to not download e-mails over 200K, leaving all those damn viruses up on the server, and using webmail access to check and see if they are valid e-mails or viruses. If they are viruses, I've been sending people a form letter informing they are infected with the SirCam virus and giving the URL of an anti-virus vendor page on how to remove it.
I made the mistake of quoting the text portion of the virus just to show what had bit them. When replying to an @home user, I got an e-mail bounce giving an error 554: You have been infected by the SirCam virus. (I doubt it, I'm running Linux)
Apparently, some ISP's are scanning for SirCam on incoming mail, or at least for its text strings, and bouncing viral e-mails. Not bad; that at least informs the victim who is clueful enough to read the mailer-daemon error message. Not great; they apparently aren't scanning outgoing e-mails from their own users.
But not everyone has the imagination to foresee such a world. Maybe someone needs to write a dystopian story. I don't think much of Stallman's 'right to read' - it creaks under its ponderous moralizing. Maybe our 'generation' will produce a sci-fi writer who articulates the world of IP gone mad.
It's been done; check out the classical Cyperpunk stories. Better yet, watch a few Max Headroom episodes if you can find them. That cyberpunk show frequently dealt with insane corporate controls on IP... (Anyone remember the episode where the corporate goons were trying to arrest the underground ring with the printing press that was teaching poor people to read without buying licensed educational programs?)
Some things should be hard or impossible to use unless you are fully coherent and concentrating on the job, because the consequences of fscking up are so severe.
A car SHOULD be (but isn't) hard enough to start and get out of the driveway that a drunk or drug-impaired driver can't do it. An airplane generally is that hard to start.
Several years ago I was higher than a kite from (legally prescribed) Vicodin painkillers, and yet was still able to turn on the computer, point-and-click through AOL, and post to my favorite newsgroup informing them that I was smashed off my ass. That experience convinced me that point-n-click interfaces are for utter morons; I certainly was a temporary moron at the time. It shouldn't be that easy to post to an international newsgroup, or send e-mail, or anything else that affects the world outside your own residence.
A computer hooked to the internet SHOULD require some concentration and understanding to use.
p.s. I don't let my doctor prescribe me Vicodin any more, either.
I wonder if The Register or anyone else has brought this to the WSJ's attention? Reputable newsfeeds have a history of getting a bit testy when people take their copy, alter it, and then represent the altered copy as being the original.
Sounds like low-level error from the driver itself, or at least the lower levels of the file system. I spent a few weeks in the weird and terrifying world of Windows NT device drivers (I had to learn to write a simple filter driver), and learned that all the devices are named somewhere in the internals of NT (and the registry) in a hierarchical tree that starts with \device\...
Anyway, \device\floppy0 is the name you would use for an CreateFile() call.
Well, yes, they do. Most porn sites are PAY sites, requiring you to have a valid credit card to get "service". The validated credit card *IS* the authentication of over-18 status...
Non-porn erotica (art, poetry, fiction) sites vary; some are serious about keeping minors out and require hard copies of authenticating documentation, and others (most hobby sites) are run by people who think it's all BS anyway and don't put up more than a token pop-up notifying you that it is an over-18 site.
For a near-perfect example of good coding, check out the latest version of Angband.
Of course, the entire Angband/Moria code-base was re-written nearly from scratch several years ago to make it more modular, portable and maintainable--the original codebase lifted from Moria was a labyrinthine mess of C code and had gotten to the point where it was nearly unmaintainable.
So of course it looks good--NOW. Find some really old copy of the original UMoria source code, and it won't look so good.
Of course, you might be saying that some open source projects could benefit from a complete re-write with an eye toward portability and maintainability the way Angband/Moria was--and you'd be right.
As I mentioned somewhere else on this article, I ran the Beginning Programming Lab as a TA for a few semesters. I found out that (a) I knew more than I thought I did because I was able to distill it down into explanations for confused students, and (b) I had a lot more solid understanding after having to distill it for the students. I also learned a hell of a lot about debugging Turbo Pascal programs... it got so I could look at a certain run-time error and say "You're dividing by 0 somewhere. Fix it" without looking at the code--just seeing the same error over and over again in the same circumstances.
My students also learned the value of believing the grad student TA when she says, "the power is flaky around here, SAVE YOUR WORK OFTEN!" I still remember the cries of dismay the first time power hiccuped during a T-storm.... the lab did not have UPSs, you see.
Oddly enough, '91 was about when I was a graduate teaching assistant in the Beginning Programming Lab... You weren't at Miss. State, were you?
I had to grade all those programs, and I have a very good memory; stuff sticks in my head. I wasn't even looking for cheating, but after looking at 30-60 different renditions of the same problem, the programs that were direct copies of each other just jumped out at me. One case of blatant plagiarism involved two students who had a NON-WORKING program sharing it; I caught it because of some weird typos that kept it from compiling that were identical in both student's copies. On close examination, I noticed that a few variable names had been changed, but otherwise the code was identical, down to misspelled comments.
The thing that gets me is that if you're going to risk an automatic 'F' by cheating, why not copy a WORKING PROGRAM?? Even if I hadn't caught the cheating, the students would have gotten a 'D' or 'F' for the lab because the program wouldn't even compile. What they did was akin to robbing a liquor store (and risking jail time, being shot by irate owner, etc.) for $3! Dumb. Just dumb.
As for viruses/virii, we had a problem with the lab computers getting infested with the BRAIN virus, and I spent part of a lab session dumping a captured specimen into the debugger and showing interested students how the damn thing worked. (I was learning, too--I'd never had one in DEBUG before). That part of the lab was much more interesting to them than the usual stuff...
"After all, isn't that why it split in the first place?"
Not really. Henry VIII needed a divorce because his wife appeared to be barren. As the catholic church did not allow divorce the easiest solution was to invent a new religion. He certainly had no ideological reason for doing so. Indeed as far as we can tell he was a "devout" catholic, which was why he was awarded the "FD" title by the pope (It translates as Defender of the Faith and is still in use today).
As a former Catholic turned Lutheran, I can tell you that your view of the Reformation is a bit... off. What you just described was the foundation of the Anglican Church, which is one later branch of Protestantism. The Reformation, which was the birth of Protestantism, didn't start with Martin Luther, but he was the first one to really make it stick. (Earlier reformers like John Hus mostly managed to get burnt at the stake without inspiring any permanent changes.)
"They differ on fundamental Christian doctrines."
The Christian doctrine is really a minor issue in Northern Ireland. Its more about tribalism. Its for this reason that you can't be an atheist in NI. You have to be either a protestant atheist, or a catholic atheist.
That may be true of NI, but it's certainly not true of Protestant vs. Catholic in general. The differences in doctrine are deep and persistant. If you're curious about them, go find Luther's major works on the web (they are out there) and read them--he outlines the major doctrinal problems he had with the Church back then, and very few of those issues have changed in the intervening 5 centuries. About the only things that have changed are the selling of indulgences (no longer done) and allowing services and Bibles in the venacular (permitted finally in the 20th century). Everything else Martin Luther objected to is still a practice of the Catholic Church.
Just to confuse everyone, there are at least two, maybe three different groups of Protestant doctrine--the Lutheran, as inspired by Martin Luther, the Reformed, as inspired primarily by the writings and sermons of John Calvin and Zwingli, and whatever the Anglican church does, which I think is more like Catholic or Lutheran. Further information is left to the student as an exercise in research.
That's a bit specious, considering that software developed by the government is required to be public domain. Does that mean the NSA's mods are not GPL, but Public Domain?
The Public Domain nature of taxpayer-funded development of software is why TCP/IP is an open protocol. Funny how Microsoft has never complained about the Public Domain aspect of government-developed software, but the GPL gets them hysterical...
I take it your friend does not work in a Right-To-Work state like Louisiana or California? (Insert IANAL disclaimer) Non-compete agreements are unenforceable in RTW states, and not very enforceable in most other states--apparently you are not allowed to take away someone's right to make a living in his profession, no matter how silly the contract he signed.
Chances are, your friend can tell them to FOAD and go to work programming whenever he feels like. Don't let the bastards enslave you with lies.
Incentive? How about "my employer does not OWN me"? Slavery was abolished in the US over 100 years ago, and I don't sign indentured servitude contracts. My time after work hours is MY TIME, to use any way I damn well please that isn't out-and-out illegal. If I wanna work on Apache by night and IIS by day, guess what? I CAN! I am not a slave to XYZ Corp, and neither are you if you have a lick of sense.
Now my employer may take a dislike to my after-hours activities and fire me/lay me off/downsize me/<insert favorite euphemism here>, but then he might do that if he took a dislike to my after-hours politics/religious activities/sexual activities/etc. That's the risk of being a free human being. Should I spend my life worrying about what the boss might think? Do I have to ask my boss's permission for everything I do at home?
And book publishers don't labor under the delusion that they still own the book after you buy it. Copyright doesn't work that way, contrary to what music and video publishers would have you believe. You buy the *right* to view/listen to/read the material packaged in the media.
At one time, book publishers acted like the MPAA/RIAA/etc are doing now--they sued people daring to resell books at other-than-publisher dictated prices or without permission. However, in 1901 the Supreme Court confirmed the "Right of First Sale", which means that once you buy a book, it's yours, and you can do any damn thing you want with it including sell it to whomever you please at any price you want. The ONLY thing you can't do with it is copy it and distribute the copies.
So, 100 years ago, books were where electronic content is now. All we need is for the courts to catch up with 1901 and figure out that Right of First Sale applies to MPG/DVD/all other electronic media/etc. as well.
Actually Information in your head IS considered property. Ever read a non-compete agreement? Or better yet an intelectual property agreement. A lot of them have a blip about anything you develop on your spare time is the property of the company you are currently employed under.
Only if you are silly enough to sign one. I've crossed those (your spare time ideas belong to the company, non-compete) out of my employment contracts, and I haven't had anyone refuse to hire me because of that yet.
It's up to you to stand up for your own rights when it comes to signing contracts--no one else will do it for you (unless you hire a lawyer). Some employers will happily let you sign yourself into indentured servitude, 13th Amendment not withstanding, if you are silly enough to go ahead and do it.
Others have already suggested helping your friends find jobs at the new place.. Here's one way you can be "fair" to your current company without shafting yourself:
Take the facts you have stated:
1) "My position is pivotal... if I bail ship, the company will likely either fold or have to transform itself immensely"
2) "I have two upcoming job offers that are both well paying and good career moves"
...take these facts to your boss and give them the chance to make a counteroffer to keep you. If they don't, oh well, you gave them a chance, go take the new job, and if they do, hey, you get a raise or whatever. Either way, you win!
BTW, this is a very common practice outside of IT professionals (bargaining), but for some reason a lot of programmers don't seem to know what they are worth and are not willing to push their employer to treat them as if they are valuable. Remember, management will try to get as much work out of you for as little money as they can get away with; they are quite happy to let you remain ignorant that you can haggle a higher salary or better working conditions out of them. You have to show them that they will lose YOUR valuable skills to a competitor if they don't value you at your true worth--and MEAN it.
>I'm sure the big 16" guns on US Battleships have very sophisticated firing [delay] systems. Just so they can hit the broadside of a barn at 15 miles. Otherwise, they could miss the broadside of a mountain!
Actually, the Iowa-class battleships use the original mechanical fire-control computer built for the big guns back in WWII. Why? It works, and it is damn accurate.. no point in replacing it.
Yep. I buy my computers as discrete parts and assemble them, so as to get my particular picky choice of hardware.. one of the parts I don't buy anymore is MS-Windoze. (I run Linux).
OT: So when is SuSE/Slackware/RedHat/etc coming out with a 2.4 release?
Download the MobiPocket reader from the same site. The.PRC files are DOC-format files with extra vaguely-XML-looking formattting used by that reader. Alternatively, if you hate MobiPocket and prefer TealDoc or some other reader, download the HTML and run it through a conversion program to convert it to plain vanilla DOC. I'm happy with MobiPocket for the Baen books, and TealDoc for everything else, and since my PDA will run both, no problem. Isn't freedom of choice great?
I would say that you are not a science-fiction reader, then. Both David Drake and David Weber are well-known, prolific modern Sci-Fi authors. Eric Flint seems to be an up & coming new sci-fi author. I have seen the works of every one of the authors in the Baen Free Library and the Baen Webscriptions service as offerings from the Science Fiction Book Club over the last two years or so, so I don't think they are exactly obscure.
Also, note that the Baen Free Library does not offer ALL the works by a given author, just a few that a given author is willing to give a way for free online. David Drake has many dozens of novels to his name, and David Weber has over a dozen.
I regularly read long novels on my PDA, and serialized amateur fiction on-line. It's quite easy to download and convert HTML or text files to DOC format and load them into a PDA reader; freeware conversion software for Windows and Linux can be found on Palm Gear HQ. (For Linux, look for dtk).
I like reading on a PDA; for some reason, it's easier on my eyes than staring at a CRT for hours, and it's half the size of paperback and goes everywhere. (Solves the problem of not being able to take your computer into the bathroom to read from). IMHO, PDAs have made e-books a reality.
I discovered the Baen Free Library and their Web Subscription service (they offer a nice selection of their non-free books as downloadable e-books if you buy a subscription.. go there and check it out for the details) just before Christmas. It was really nice reading On Basilisk Station (one of their FREE offerings) again--my paperback copy was ragged and missing somewhere in the den.
Slashdot Mirror
Ok so...
What if she's 21 years old?
What if you tell her where to buy a gun?
What if you tell her where to get some drugs?
What if she's 16 years old?
What if you tell her where to get an abortion?
Seems to me that free speech that depends on what you're saying or who you're saying it to isn't really free speech at all, is it?
Personally, I'm with the "links are free speech" camp, but the example made me chuckle. If the above things are bad, someone needs to ban the Yellow Pages of the phone book! I can find all of those things in the yellow pages, (and "escort services" that take MasterCard, too!) and there are no age restrictions on using a phonebook!
Quick! Write your Congresscritter! Something must be done to protect the children from phonebooks!
[/sarcasm off]On a totally unrelated topic, is anybody else using Mozilla-0.93 and getting the "Slow down cowboy" message when posting to Slashdot? It seems like Mozilla is loading every page twice.
No, just you. This is my third post today, using Moz 0.9.3, build ID: 2001080110, Win32 version. No problems with /. posts.
I go for books every time.. I flat out refuse to buy an e-Book, 'cos it's not convenient.. I can't use it to unwind when I loaf on the sofa or the bed.. I can't take it hiking, or on trips..
I like non-protected e-books that I can download into my Palm. I can pack 4 or 5 books at a time in my smaller-than-a-paperback-book Palm IIIx, and take it hiking, or on trips, or loaf on the sofa or the bed reading it, or pull it out and read while waiting in line at the movies/doctor/store/govmnt office/etc. It's damn convenient, more so than a paperback book--I can't fit a paperback book in my jeans pocket, and I sure can't fit 5 of them there--along with the equivalent of a DayTimer, a small notebook, and a GameBoy!
First, this is going the way of DivX; nobody in their right mind is going to pay to read a book for a short period. People pay for books they want to keep permanently; for temporary trial reading, they borrow books from the free public library. As far as I can tell, they've just thought of a new way to prove that e-books are not profitable.
Second, is it just me or were they extraordinarily stupid to release their timed ebook in Adobe E-book format right after Elcomsoft's Advanced E-book Processor has been heavily publicized in every geek-oriented news channel on the Internet? What are they saying here, "Crack me! Crack me!"?
Third, making available preview e-book versions of a novel is effective marketing--if it's free. Baen Books has been making the first chapters of new books available for on-line preview for quite a while now, as well as making the first books of some popular series available in their entirety for free--apparently it's been an effective enough marketing tactic that they have expanded their list of free e-books. That's right, expanded! Now, can anyone tell me how effective that would have been if they charged a $1 fee for a short reading period per book in the Baen Free Library?
Do publishers actually think when they come up with these schemes, or did the geniuses that came up with dot.bomb business plans move into publishing when I wasn't looking?
I throttled fetchmail to not download e-mails over 200K, leaving all those damn viruses up on the server, and using webmail access to check and see if they are valid e-mails or viruses. If they are viruses, I've been sending people a form letter informing they are infected with the SirCam virus and giving the URL of an anti-virus vendor page on how to remove it.
I made the mistake of quoting the text portion of the virus just to show what had bit them. When replying to an @home user, I got an e-mail bounce giving an error 554: You have been infected by the SirCam virus. (I doubt it, I'm running Linux)
Apparently, some ISP's are scanning for SirCam on incoming mail, or at least for its text strings, and bouncing viral e-mails. Not bad; that at least informs the victim who is clueful enough to read the mailer-daemon error message. Not great; they apparently aren't scanning outgoing e-mails from their own users.
But not everyone has the imagination to foresee such a world. Maybe someone needs to write a dystopian story. I don't think much of Stallman's 'right to read' - it creaks under its ponderous moralizing. Maybe our 'generation' will produce a sci-fi writer who articulates the world of IP gone mad.
It's been done; check out the classical Cyperpunk stories. Better yet, watch a few Max Headroom episodes if you can find them. That cyberpunk show frequently dealt with insane corporate controls on IP... (Anyone remember the episode where the corporate goons were trying to arrest the underground ring with the printing press that was teaching poor people to read without buying licensed educational programs?)
Some things should be hard or impossible to use unless you are fully coherent and concentrating on the job, because the consequences of fscking up are so severe.
A car SHOULD be (but isn't) hard enough to start and get out of the driveway that a drunk or drug-impaired driver can't do it. An airplane generally is that hard to start.
Several years ago I was higher than a kite from (legally prescribed) Vicodin painkillers, and yet was still able to turn on the computer, point-and-click through AOL, and post to my favorite newsgroup informing them that I was smashed off my ass. That experience convinced me that point-n-click interfaces are for utter morons; I certainly was a temporary moron at the time. It shouldn't be that easy to post to an international newsgroup, or send e-mail, or anything else that affects the world outside your own residence.
A computer hooked to the internet SHOULD require some concentration and understanding to use.
p.s. I don't let my doctor prescribe me Vicodin any more, either.
I wonder if The Register or anyone else has brought this to the WSJ's attention? Reputable newsfeeds have a history of getting a bit testy when people take their copy, alter it, and then represent the altered copy as being the original.
Sounds like low-level error from the driver itself, or at least the lower levels of the file system. I spent a few weeks in the weird and terrifying world of Windows NT device drivers (I had to learn to write a simple filter driver), and learned that all the devices are named somewhere in the internals of NT (and the registry) in a hierarchical tree that starts with \device\...
Anyway, \device\floppy0 is the name you would use for an CreateFile() call.
Well, yes, they do. Most porn sites are PAY sites, requiring you to have a valid credit card to get "service". The validated credit card *IS* the authentication of over-18 status...
Non-porn erotica (art, poetry, fiction) sites vary; some are serious about keeping minors out and require hard copies of authenticating documentation, and others (most hobby sites) are run by people who think it's all BS anyway and don't put up more than a token pop-up notifying you that it is an over-18 site.
For a near-perfect example of good coding, check out the latest version of Angband.
Of course, the entire Angband/Moria code-base was re-written nearly from scratch several years ago to make it more modular, portable and maintainable--the original codebase lifted from Moria was a labyrinthine mess of C code and had gotten to the point where it was nearly unmaintainable.
So of course it looks good--NOW. Find some really old copy of the original UMoria source code, and it won't look so good.
Of course, you might be saying that some open source projects could benefit from a complete re-write with an eye toward portability and maintainability the way Angband/Moria was--and you'd be right.
Me too!
(Sorry, couldn't resist the AOL joke)
As I mentioned somewhere else on this article, I ran the Beginning Programming Lab as a TA for a few semesters. I found out that (a) I knew more than I thought I did because I was able to distill it down into explanations for confused students, and (b) I had a lot more solid understanding after having to distill it for the students. I also learned a hell of a lot about debugging Turbo Pascal programs... it got so I could look at a certain run-time error and say "You're dividing by 0 somewhere. Fix it" without looking at the code--just seeing the same error over and over again in the same circumstances.
My students also learned the value of believing the grad student TA when she says, "the power is flaky around here, SAVE YOUR WORK OFTEN!" I still remember the cries of dismay the first time power hiccuped during a T-storm.... the lab did not have UPSs, you see.
They believed me after that.
Oddly enough, '91 was about when I was a graduate teaching assistant in the Beginning Programming Lab... You weren't at Miss. State, were you?
I had to grade all those programs, and I have a very good memory; stuff sticks in my head. I wasn't even looking for cheating, but after looking at 30-60 different renditions of the same problem, the programs that were direct copies of each other just jumped out at me. One case of blatant plagiarism involved two students who had a NON-WORKING program sharing it; I caught it because of some weird typos that kept it from compiling that were identical in both student's copies. On close examination, I noticed that a few variable names had been changed, but otherwise the code was identical, down to misspelled comments.
The thing that gets me is that if you're going to risk an automatic 'F' by cheating, why not copy a WORKING PROGRAM?? Even if I hadn't caught the cheating, the students would have gotten a 'D' or 'F' for the lab because the program wouldn't even compile. What they did was akin to robbing a liquor store (and risking jail time, being shot by irate owner, etc.) for $3! Dumb. Just dumb.
As for viruses/virii, we had a problem with the lab computers getting infested with the BRAIN virus, and I spent part of a lab session dumping a captured specimen into the debugger and showing interested students how the damn thing worked. (I was learning, too--I'd never had one in DEBUG before). That part of the lab was much more interesting to them than the usual stuff...
Not really. Henry VIII needed a divorce because his wife appeared to be barren. As the catholic church did not allow divorce the easiest solution was to invent a new religion. He certainly had no ideological reason for doing so. Indeed as far as we can tell he was a "devout" catholic, which was why he was awarded the "FD" title by the pope (It translates as Defender of the Faith and is still in use today).
As a former Catholic turned Lutheran, I can tell you that your view of the Reformation is a bit... off. What you just described was the foundation of the Anglican Church, which is one later branch of Protestantism. The Reformation, which was the birth of Protestantism, didn't start with Martin Luther, but he was the first one to really make it stick. (Earlier reformers like John Hus mostly managed to get burnt at the stake without inspiring any permanent changes.)
The Christian doctrine is really a minor issue in Northern Ireland. Its more about tribalism. Its for this reason that you can't be an atheist in NI. You have to be either a protestant atheist, or a catholic atheist.
That may be true of NI, but it's certainly not true of Protestant vs. Catholic in general. The differences in doctrine are deep and persistant. If you're curious about them, go find Luther's major works on the web (they are out there) and read them--he outlines the major doctrinal problems he had with the Church back then, and very few of those issues have changed in the intervening 5 centuries. About the only things that have changed are the selling of indulgences (no longer done) and allowing services and Bibles in the venacular (permitted finally in the 20th century). Everything else Martin Luther objected to is still a practice of the Catholic Church.
Just to confuse everyone, there are at least two, maybe three different groups of Protestant doctrine--the Lutheran, as inspired by Martin Luther, the Reformed, as inspired primarily by the writings and sermons of John Calvin and Zwingli, and whatever the Anglican church does, which I think is more like Catholic or Lutheran. Further information is left to the student as an exercise in research.
That's a bit specious, considering that software developed by the government is required to be public domain. Does that mean the NSA's mods are not GPL, but Public Domain?
The Public Domain nature of taxpayer-funded development of software is why TCP/IP is an open protocol. Funny how Microsoft has never complained about the Public Domain aspect of government-developed software, but the GPL gets them hysterical...
I take it your friend does not work in a Right-To-Work state like Louisiana or California? (Insert IANAL disclaimer) Non-compete agreements are unenforceable in RTW states, and not very enforceable in most other states--apparently you are not allowed to take away someone's right to make a living in his profession, no matter how silly the contract he signed.
Chances are, your friend can tell them to FOAD and go to work programming whenever he feels like. Don't let the bastards enslave you with lies.
Incentive? How about "my employer does not OWN me"? Slavery was abolished in the US over 100 years ago, and I don't sign indentured servitude contracts. My time after work hours is MY TIME, to use any way I damn well please that isn't out-and-out illegal. If I wanna work on Apache by night and IIS by day, guess what? I CAN! I am not a slave to XYZ Corp, and neither are you if you have a lick of sense.
Now my employer may take a dislike to my after-hours activities and fire me/lay me off/downsize me/<insert favorite euphemism here>, but then he might do that if he took a dislike to my after-hours politics/religious activities/sexual activities/etc. That's the risk of being a free human being. Should I spend my life worrying about what the boss might think? Do I have to ask my boss's permission for everything I do at home?
Nah, I don't think so.
And book publishers don't labor under the delusion that they still own the book after you buy it. Copyright doesn't work that way, contrary to what music and video publishers would have you believe. You buy the *right* to view/listen to/read the material packaged in the media.
At one time, book publishers acted like the MPAA/RIAA/etc are doing now--they sued people daring to resell books at other-than-publisher dictated prices or without permission. However, in 1901 the Supreme Court confirmed the "Right of First Sale", which means that once you buy a book, it's yours, and you can do any damn thing you want with it including sell it to whomever you please at any price you want. The ONLY thing you can't do with it is copy it and distribute the copies.
So, 100 years ago, books were where electronic content is now. All we need is for the courts to catch up with 1901 and figure out that Right of First Sale applies to MPG/DVD/all other electronic media/etc. as well.
Actually Information in your head IS considered property. Ever read a non-compete agreement? Or better yet an intelectual property agreement. A lot of them have a blip about anything you develop on your spare time is the property of the company you are currently employed under.
Only if you are silly enough to sign one. I've crossed those (your spare time ideas belong to the company, non-compete) out of my employment contracts, and I haven't had anyone refuse to hire me because of that yet.
It's up to you to stand up for your own rights when it comes to signing contracts--no one else will do it for you (unless you hire a lawyer). Some employers will happily let you sign yourself into indentured servitude, 13th Amendment not withstanding, if you are silly enough to go ahead and do it.
Others have already suggested helping your friends find jobs at the new place.. Here's one way you can be "fair" to your current company without shafting yourself:
Take the facts you have stated:
1) "My position is pivotal... if I bail ship, the company will likely either fold or have to transform itself immensely"
2) "I have two upcoming job offers that are both well paying and good career moves"
...take these facts to your boss and give them the chance to make a counteroffer to keep you. If they don't, oh well, you gave them a chance, go take the new job, and if they do, hey, you get a raise or whatever. Either way, you win!
BTW, this is a very common practice outside of IT professionals (bargaining), but for some reason a lot of programmers don't seem to know what they are worth and are not willing to push their employer to treat them as if they are valuable. Remember, management will try to get as much work out of you for as little money as they can get away with; they are quite happy to let you remain ignorant that you can haggle a higher salary or better working conditions out of them. You have to show them that they will lose YOUR valuable skills to a competitor if they don't value you at your true worth--and MEAN it.
>I'm sure the big 16" guns on US Battleships have very sophisticated firing [delay] systems. Just so they can hit the broadside of a barn at 15 miles. Otherwise, they could miss the broadside of a mountain! Actually, the Iowa-class battleships use the original mechanical fire-control computer built for the big guns back in WWII. Why? It works, and it is damn accurate.. no point in replacing it.
Yep. I buy my computers as discrete parts and assemble them, so as to get my particular picky choice of hardware.. one of the parts I don't buy anymore is MS-Windoze. (I run Linux).
OT: So when is SuSE/Slackware/RedHat/etc coming out with a 2.4 release?
Download the MobiPocket reader from the same site. The .PRC files are DOC-format files with extra vaguely-XML-looking formattting used by that reader. Alternatively, if you hate MobiPocket and prefer TealDoc or some other reader, download the HTML and run it through a conversion program to convert it to plain vanilla DOC. I'm happy with MobiPocket for the Baen books, and TealDoc for everything else, and since my PDA will run both, no problem. Isn't freedom of choice great?
I would say that you are not a science-fiction reader, then. Both David Drake and David Weber are well-known, prolific modern Sci-Fi authors. Eric Flint seems to be an up & coming new sci-fi author. I have seen the works of every one of the authors in the Baen Free Library and the Baen Webscriptions service as offerings from the Science Fiction Book Club over the last two years or so, so I don't think they are exactly obscure.
Also, note that the Baen Free Library does not offer ALL the works by a given author, just a few that a given author is willing to give a way for free online. David Drake has many dozens of novels to his name, and David Weber has over a dozen.
I regularly read long novels on my PDA, and serialized amateur fiction on-line. It's quite easy to download and convert HTML or text files to DOC format and load them into a PDA reader; freeware conversion software for Windows and Linux can be found on Palm Gear HQ. (For Linux, look for dtk).
I like reading on a PDA; for some reason, it's easier on my eyes than staring at a CRT for hours, and it's half the size of paperback and goes everywhere. (Solves the problem of not being able to take your computer into the bathroom to read from). IMHO, PDAs have made e-books a reality.
I discovered the Baen Free Library and their Web Subscription service (they offer a nice selection of their non-free books as downloadable e-books if you buy a subscription.. go there and check it out for the details) just before Christmas. It was really nice reading On Basilisk Station (one of their FREE offerings) again--my paperback copy was ragged and missing somewhere in the den.