Or maybe instead we should say that my storefront down the road had a small image of your storefront in it? That preserves the sense that it's a single mode of presentation in both cases, not distinct media such a a shop window and film. But enough of analogies...
I have two big problems with the "deep linking" argument. One is the absurdity of posting public information using a protocol whose key feature is support for hyper-linking, then demanding a right to control who hyperlinks to it. The other is that there is no real distinction, except in the diseased imagination of lawyers, between "deep" links and any other links.
The solution to both "problems" is the same. Stay off the Web, or start using a secure protocol that allows you to mediate access. But these bozos want it both ways: free, public access to catch the traffic, but fine-grained control over any mention of their site's content.
Anything that encourages lawsuits over linking, in any context, is a bad precedent that will ultimately be abused to further suppress opportunities for free comment. A quick look at the plaintiff's website is enough to show that this is, in fact, his agenda: to turn the Web into a legalistic minefield so that more nuisance lawsuits are possible.
On the one hand you claim we need government intervention, on the other you claim the market can straighten it out!
You know what I believe? I believe the market CAN and IS handling this.
What's it got to do with the market? This is a monopoly (well over 90% market share) that has subverted the legal system and the regulators, as well as its business partners, to prevent free competition and further entrench their position. Perhaps you failed to notice the US Attorney General bending over on our behalf. Or are you so historically ignorant that you think anti-trust law was just a bad idea?
Continuing to try to compete with MS is a necessity, given the alternatives, but you'd have to be delusional to think we're on a level playing field. And don't expect an "invisible handjob" will make you feel better.
Back in the bad old days, there were blasphemy laws. Now, if you take a corporation's or product's name in vain, you can wind up bankrupted through lawsuits, or in jail. We need to cut these bastards down to size by restricting abuses of corporate power before we're even more enslaved than we already are. This isn't about free markets, it's about corrupt attempts to limit the free flow of information that makes competition possible. Anyone who thinks that large corporations want to exist in a competitive market have been reading too many Ayn Rand books rather than observing actual corporate behavior.
Parent is flagrantly wrongheaded, and probably a troll. Let's look at another technology: presumably, following the same line of reasoning, you would say that a comparison test of two cars should not be allowed, since the testing conditions might not be controlled to the manufacturers' satisfaction? Or stereos? Or toasters? Or the service at a restaurant?
Sure, there might be some bad comparison tests, but the market for good information will weed those out. And only a moron would make a product choice solely on the basis of one half-assed benchmark that they read somewhere. But it's ludicrous to argue that manufacturers are the only ones that are qualified to discuss the performance or features of their products. Then on what basis would consumers then choose products? By reading vendors' marketing material? You cannot possibly be serious.
If we're searching for analogies, I think the most correct is that you've put items on display in a shop window on Main Street, and now you're trying to sue people to force them to pay for looking at the goods.
This is all for the benefit of oligopoly control over content, and the destruction of the Internet as a public space.
It's clear that the Powers that Be find the openness of the Web disturbing, and they're strangling it by the time-honored practice of unleasing lawyers on it.
ClearCase doesn't use an RDBMS (instead, it uses a versioned object base, which is a DBMS disguising itself as a file system), though you can configure it to export the metadata to an RDBMS such as Sybase.
Unless things have changed radically for the worse in the past couple of years, you do not have to have separate databases and servers for Windows and Unix clients. I set up a and ran a ClearCase facility about three years ago, and we did all our development into a single VOB on a single box. We hosted on Solaris rather than Windows, maybe that's why it went easier for us. On Solaris, it was rock-solid. Windows access to the VOB was via Samba. After initial teething trouble, that worked well too.
It was tricky getting Clearcase to work with Samba three years ago. Let's hope it has improved since then. Rational tech support did little then besides giving dire warnings that it was unsupported behavior, do not remove tag under penalty of law, contains no user-serviceable parts, etc.
Once we got it working, it was really sweet, though.
A word of caution-- reel-to-reel tapes are actually quite a lot worse than the best CDs. Signal/noise for current Ampex studio master multitrack analog tape is 64.8 dB. Digital recording with a good A/D converter, if it's true 16-bit (not just byte size, but actual resolution), would give you 96 dB. And people can generally perceive a difference of as little as 3 dB in signal/noise (I know because I've tested this). There are other noise and distortion sources in the signal chain, both on record and on playback, so your actual figures will be worse than that (which is one of the reasons that some CDs sound so crappy compared to old studio tape). The other reason is that recording engineers in those days knew how to mix and master so that the noise and distortion were less noticeable.
The other thing with tapes is to beware of media cost. Multitrack reel-to-reel is very costly compared to CDR or even DAT tape.
One way to save money on digital is to consider the added value of 24-bit versus 16-bit technologies. Theoretical max signal-noise for 16-bit is about 96 dB. The very best 24-bit analog/digital converters give about 103 dB s/n (ignore the phony "A-weighted" number), and 95 dB THD+N (a more perceptually relevant noise figure that includes total harmonic distortion). That is, really not much better than 16 bits: 103 dB is under 18 bits. The only big gain in having 24 bits versus 16 is that you get some guard digits that are helpful when doing long, iterative calulations, such as the ones that happen in digital reverbs or some kinds of SFX; also handy when doing lots of sub-mixes. But 16-bit digital technology is far less costly and not much worse in terms of actual sound quality. And some mixing and FX software tacks on the guard digits anyway.
The military are a self-selected sample. And IQ testing tells you absolutely nothing about evolutionary fitness. Therefore, neither the sample space nor the scoring criteria are likely to tell you anything about evolution.
Re:Only Trillian v0.7x affected?
on
AOL vs. Trillian
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· Score: 1
So, you're telling me that I shouldn't be blocking browser ads either? And let's not forget email spam.
I don't own those slimebags a living. I'm going to exercise control over what I see and hear, regardless of the type of media it's on, to the greatest extent that I can. And if I have to transform its format to do that, so be it. Anything that disempowers me from exercising that control is a bad thing, and I don't really give a shit about whether my behavior impacts their revenue stream, since I never gave my consent to them milking me for revenue in the first place. This goes equally for media monopolies like AOL/Time Warner, OS monopolies, or content oligopolies protected by the DMCA. Since there is no competition to speak of in any of these cases, why should I respect sanctimonious talk about their "right" to earn a profit off of me? They didn't earn that right: they either stole it by unfair competition, or bought it at that auction house that we call the Congress.
Orange County is very much a suburb of LA, as well as (if the tautology needs to be stated at all) being a county. The previous poster seems to believe that the phony "city" and "county" boundaries in what is actually a huge, amorphous sprawl are in some way meaningful.
I would dispute Katz's use of "wealthy" though. He's obviously never been to Placentia, La Habra, Santa Ana, Stanton... The emptiness, vulgar materialism, white-shoe golf-Republicanism and near-total lack of culture, and obsession with brand-names sounds a lot like many of the more upper-middle-class enclaves, though.
By the way, I grew up in OC and live there now. And it never takes me more than 45 minutes to get to LA, unless traffic on the 405 is too bad...
People in a free society often submit to regulations and restraints to achieve the social order necessary for freedom to exist. Taxation and military service are common examples. If ID cards prove ineffective or onerous, the issue can be dealt with in an election. Free people, unlike slaves, can take on and remove restraints as they see fit.
Interesting to see these examples together. It took "free people" in a "free society" three or four generations from the founding of the country to nominally outlaw slavery, and another 100 or more years to start to make the cultural changes necessary to deal with its after-effects. And few now would deny the odiousness of that vile institution. Many would argue (myself included) that military conscription is itself a surviving form of involuntary servitude, as unnecessary as it is opporessive, but the Selective Service Act is still on the law books.
Based on this, what makes you think that we'll ever get rid of national identity cards once they're introduced, or that we'll be able to prevent their abuse once they have been issued?
The hard, cold fact is that, in government as well as in systems, preventing bad things from happening is far more effective than trying to undo the mistakes later.
And there are many serious-minded people who do not accept that the present government's "state of emergency" constitutes "reasonable limitations on one's behavior." For one thing, many of the most draconian provisions are ineffective, or are likely to make the situation worse. Most measures were tried in other countries (the UK, South Africa and Chile, to name three), and have always failed. Their only result was that the societies in which they were practiced became more brutal and repressive, and a number of innocent people were harassed, imprisoned, or killed.
Besides, what kind of MORON puts 70-100% of their retirement plan in ONE STOCK. Those kind of morons don't have any right to complain when that stock tanks.
Well, Enron offered a 401K where the employee's choice was to take the Enron stock or to not have a 401K. Employees can't choose 401K options that their employer-provided plan doesn't offer.
This is a practice that is widespread but slimy and which should be illegal.
On the other hand, anyone who worked for Enron deserves to be left holding the bag.
Please mod up overunderunderdone's previous post. It clarifies what I meant, and is wonderfully informative. The distinction is between "normative" and "de facto" standards.
Incidentally, I in no way meant to endorse the use of Word or Excel. But sadly, many people do just that, and accept the proprietary lock-in because, in the short term, it's the path of least resistance.
The industry understands quite well. There are official standards (say, 802.11) and de facto standards (of which Excel is a good example). Sometimes the marketplace runs ahead of the standards bureaucracy. That often leads to proprietary lock-in, but businesses need to inter-operate with their partners, and if it means (say) exchanging Word documents to do it, that's what they'll settle for.
Your idea of building a negative feedback loop into the patent system is outstanding. Maybe you should patent it?? Oh, never mind.
My only question is whether, by killing innovation, the pace of change in patent-heavy fields is already being slowed excessively. I think it is.
My conspiracy theory is that the pace of innovation in computing was too quick for comfort, so the Powers That Be let the lawyers in to gum up the works and slow things down to a crawl. That way, the big corp's could grab a piece of the pie without having to move too fast.
In the previous post, "acquiescence" might have been a more correct word than "support." The government does a lot of things that do not enjoy majority support, but which are not heinous enough (or visible enough) to cause the majority to rebel.
This is analogous to the behavior of a parasite that breeds to the maximum level that does not provoke an immune response from its host.
Actually, someone IS pointing a gun to your head. In most states, you cannot build a house or commercial building unless the plans have been reviewed by a licensed civil engineer.
The reason that civil engineering has such a certification process is that it is, for all intents and purposes, a dead field of inquiry, with a nearly-static body of knowledge.
The IEEE has long been pushing for a similar certification for software engineers. The reasons have nothing to do with quality. They want to be the certifying body, since it will give them political power, similar to the American Medical Association or the Bar Association. It might also drive up the wages of the past-their-prime, academically-credentialled system engineers at the expense of their younger and less formally qualified colleagues. The only reason that this has not already happened is that the rules of the game keep changing before some committee can codify them. That is a good thing.
I've been a system engineer for a very long time. I think that it will destroy the field if it gets locked down tight, and I am opposed to any attempt to turn my profession into yet another guild. The results are always the same: stagnation, politics, arbitrary barriers to entry, and jobs for life for the certification middlemen. I respect the good work that IEEE does, but this kind of brainfart is not part of that good work. Just imagine a scenario where some bureaucrat decides whether the work of the next Berners-Lee or Torvalds meets with their approval or not, and buries it in a committee to keep the boat from being rocked. Screw that. One of the reasons that the state of the art in our field keeps advancing is precisely because we don't have to jump through that kind of hoops.
When I was there, two ago, anyone could use a modem. However, the bandwidth was choked down to 2400 kbps when connecting to ISPs in less restrictive countries. I don't know if that was the result of policy, or (more likely) just the poor level of service of Saudi PTT.
As for the Saudi government controlling the flow of information, most people have satellite, which the government hasn't censored. Al-Jazira frequently shows news embarrassing to the Saudi, and other, governments. Print media, on the other hand, comes to you with parts cut out with scissors or blacked out with magic marker. A job creation scheme for the religious fanatics.
Secure Computing are in a morally equivalent position to those firms that sell cattle prods to various dictatorships, or instruments of torture, or wiretapping gear. The repression practiced by those regimes is the breeding ground for future Binladens, and worse. It's no coincidence that Saudi Arabia's corrupt, undemocratic and hypocritical regime was the home of so many of the hijackers.
It is not in our national interest to collude with governments who oppress their citizens like this. We should exert all possible non-violent pressure to stop firms from trading with goods that empower dictators. And yes, that includes deals with China too. If our gutless Congress weren't so busy passing repressive legislation and turning the US into a banana republic with Ashcroft as the tinpot jackbooted secret policeman, they would outlaw this trade, which contributes to oppression and ignorance, two of the root causes of terrorism.
Another thing to keep in mind with headhunters is that they make their money on turnover. This can mean that they have a greater incentive to close a deal than to find what's best for you. Repeat business by individual applicants (as opposed to employers) isn't a big factor for them.
My own most recent experience was of finding a good job on Monster at 30% better salary than the headhunters were turning up. But that was 18 months ago, when there were more options.
"Prosecute or lose it" does not apply to copyright. You're probably thinking of trademarks, which can pass into the public domain if they become terms of common use. Nothing of the sort can happen to copyrighted material.
Slashdot Mirror
Or maybe instead we should say that my storefront down the road had a small image of your storefront in it? That preserves the sense that it's a single mode of presentation in both cases, not distinct media such a a shop window and film. But enough of analogies...
I have two big problems with the "deep linking" argument. One is the absurdity of posting public information using a protocol whose key feature is support for hyper-linking, then demanding a right to control who hyperlinks to it. The other is that there is no real distinction, except in the diseased imagination of lawyers, between "deep" links and any other links.
The solution to both "problems" is the same. Stay off the Web, or start using a secure protocol that allows you to mediate access. But these bozos want it both ways: free, public access to catch the traffic, but fine-grained control over any mention of their site's content.
Anything that encourages lawsuits over linking, in any context, is a bad precedent that will ultimately be abused to further suppress opportunities for free comment. A quick look at the plaintiff's website is enough to show that this is, in fact, his agenda: to turn the Web into a legalistic minefield so that more nuisance lawsuits are possible.
Continuing to try to compete with MS is a necessity, given the alternatives, but you'd have to be delusional to think we're on a level playing field. And don't expect an "invisible handjob" will make you feel better.
Mod parent up, please.
Back in the bad old days, there were blasphemy laws. Now, if you take a corporation's or product's name in vain, you can wind up bankrupted through lawsuits, or in jail. We need to cut these bastards down to size by restricting abuses of corporate power before we're even more enslaved than we already are. This isn't about free markets, it's about corrupt attempts to limit the free flow of information that makes competition possible. Anyone who thinks that large corporations want to exist in a competitive market have been reading too many Ayn Rand books rather than observing actual corporate behavior.
Parent is flagrantly wrongheaded, and probably a troll. Let's look at another technology: presumably, following the same line of reasoning, you would say that a comparison test of two cars should not be allowed, since the testing conditions might not be controlled to the manufacturers' satisfaction? Or stereos? Or toasters? Or the service at a restaurant?
Sure, there might be some bad comparison tests, but the market for good information will weed those out. And only a moron would make a product choice solely on the basis of one half-assed benchmark that they read somewhere. But it's ludicrous to argue that manufacturers are the only ones that are qualified to discuss the performance or features of their products. Then on what basis would consumers then choose products? By reading vendors' marketing material? You cannot possibly be serious.
Amazing. Intellectual-property ambulance-chasing.
If we're searching for analogies, I think the most correct is that you've put items on display in a shop window on Main Street, and now you're trying to sue people to force them to pay for looking at the goods.
This is all for the benefit of oligopoly control over content, and the destruction of the Internet as a public space.
It's clear that the Powers that Be find the openness of the Web disturbing, and they're strangling it by the time-honored practice of unleasing lawyers on it.
ClearCase doesn't use an RDBMS (instead, it uses a versioned object base, which is a DBMS disguising itself as a file system), though you can configure it to export the metadata to an RDBMS such as Sybase.
Unless things have changed radically for the worse in the past couple of years, you do not have to have separate databases and servers for Windows and Unix clients. I set up a and ran a ClearCase facility about three years ago, and we did all our development into a single VOB on a single box. We hosted on Solaris rather than Windows, maybe that's why it went easier for us. On Solaris, it was rock-solid. Windows access to the VOB was via Samba. After initial teething trouble, that worked well too.
It was tricky getting Clearcase to work with Samba three years ago. Let's hope it has improved since then. Rational tech support did little then besides giving dire warnings that it was unsupported behavior, do not remove tag under penalty of law, contains no user-serviceable parts, etc.
Once we got it working, it was really sweet, though.
A word of caution-- reel-to-reel tapes are actually quite a lot worse than the best CDs. Signal/noise for current Ampex studio master multitrack analog tape is 64.8 dB. Digital recording with a good A/D converter, if it's true 16-bit (not just byte size, but actual resolution), would give you 96 dB. And people can generally perceive a difference of as little as 3 dB in signal/noise (I know because I've tested this). There are other noise and distortion sources in the signal chain, both on record and on playback, so your actual figures will be worse than that (which is one of the reasons that some CDs sound so crappy compared to old studio tape). The other reason is that recording engineers in those days knew how to mix and master so that the noise and distortion were less noticeable.
The other thing with tapes is to beware of media cost. Multitrack reel-to-reel is very costly compared to CDR or even DAT tape.
One way to save money on digital is to consider the added value of 24-bit versus 16-bit technologies. Theoretical max signal-noise for 16-bit is about 96 dB. The very best 24-bit analog/digital converters give about 103 dB s/n (ignore the phony "A-weighted" number), and 95 dB THD+N (a more perceptually relevant noise figure that includes total harmonic distortion). That is, really not much better than 16 bits: 103 dB is under 18 bits. The only big gain in having 24 bits versus 16 is that you get some guard digits that are helpful when doing long, iterative calulations, such as the ones that happen in digital reverbs or some kinds of SFX; also handy when doing lots of sub-mixes. But 16-bit digital technology is far less costly and not much worse in terms of actual sound quality. And some mixing and FX software tacks on the guard digits anyway.
The military are a self-selected sample. And IQ testing tells you absolutely nothing about evolutionary fitness. Therefore, neither the sample space nor the scoring criteria are likely to tell you anything about evolution.
So, you're telling me that I shouldn't be blocking browser ads either? And let's not forget email spam.
I don't own those slimebags a living. I'm going to exercise control over what I see and hear, regardless of the type of media it's on, to the greatest extent that I can. And if I have to transform its format to do that, so be it. Anything that disempowers me from exercising that control is a bad thing, and I don't really give a shit about whether my behavior impacts their revenue stream, since I never gave my consent to them milking me for revenue in the first place. This goes equally for media monopolies like AOL/Time Warner, OS monopolies, or content oligopolies protected by the DMCA. Since there is no competition to speak of in any of these cases, why should I respect sanctimonious talk about their "right" to earn a profit off of me? They didn't earn that right: they either stole it by unfair competition, or bought it at that auction house that we call the Congress.
They were a member of NATO. Norway and Denmark are the only two Scandinavian members. There was a lot of early-warning radar up there.
Of course, Maui's part of a Nato country too. But it's so much harder to get lutefisk there.
Orange County is very much a suburb of LA, as well as (if the tautology needs to be stated at all) being a county. The previous poster seems to believe that the phony "city" and "county" boundaries in what is actually a huge, amorphous sprawl are in some way meaningful.
I would dispute Katz's use of "wealthy" though. He's obviously never been to Placentia, La Habra, Santa Ana, Stanton... The emptiness, vulgar materialism, white-shoe golf-Republicanism and near-total lack of culture, and obsession with brand-names sounds a lot like many of the more upper-middle-class enclaves, though.
By the way, I grew up in OC and live there now. And it never takes me more than 45 minutes to get to LA, unless traffic on the 405 is too bad...
People in a free society often submit to regulations and restraints to achieve the social order necessary for freedom to exist. Taxation and military service are common examples. If ID cards prove ineffective or onerous, the issue can be dealt with in an election. Free people, unlike slaves, can take on and remove restraints as they see fit.
Interesting to see these examples together. It took "free people" in a "free society" three or four generations from the founding of the country to nominally outlaw slavery, and another 100 or more years to start to make the cultural changes necessary to deal with its after-effects. And few now would deny the odiousness of that vile institution. Many would argue (myself included) that military conscription is itself a surviving form of involuntary servitude, as unnecessary as it is opporessive, but the Selective Service Act is still on the law books.
Based on this, what makes you think that we'll ever get rid of national identity cards once they're introduced, or that we'll be able to prevent their abuse once they have been issued?
The hard, cold fact is that, in government as well as in systems, preventing bad things from happening is far more effective than trying to undo the mistakes later.
And there are many serious-minded people who do not accept that the present government's "state of emergency" constitutes "reasonable limitations on one's behavior." For one thing, many of the most draconian provisions are ineffective, or are likely to make the situation worse. Most measures were tried in other countries (the UK, South Africa and Chile, to name three), and have always failed. Their only result was that the societies in which they were practiced became more brutal and repressive, and a number of innocent people were harassed, imprisoned, or killed.
Besides, what kind of MORON puts 70-100% of their retirement plan in ONE STOCK. Those kind of morons don't have any right to complain when that stock tanks.
Well, Enron offered a 401K where the employee's choice was to take the Enron stock or to not have a 401K. Employees can't choose 401K options that their employer-provided plan doesn't offer.
This is a practice that is widespread but slimy and which should be illegal.
On the other hand, anyone who worked for Enron deserves to be left holding the bag.
Please mod up overunderunderdone's previous post. It clarifies what I meant, and is wonderfully informative. The distinction is between "normative" and "de facto" standards.
Incidentally, I in no way meant to endorse the use of Word or Excel. But sadly, many people do just that, and accept the proprietary lock-in because, in the short term, it's the path of least resistance.
Umm, you have yin and yang reversed. Apart from that, the interpretation is correct.
The industry understands quite well. There are official standards (say, 802.11) and de facto standards (of which Excel is a good example). Sometimes the marketplace runs ahead of the standards bureaucracy. That often leads to proprietary lock-in, but businesses need to inter-operate with their partners, and if it means (say) exchanging Word documents to do it, that's what they'll settle for.
Your idea of building a negative feedback loop into the patent system is outstanding. Maybe you should patent it?? Oh, never mind.
My only question is whether, by killing innovation, the pace of change in patent-heavy fields is already being slowed excessively. I think it is.
My conspiracy theory is that the pace of innovation in computing was too quick for comfort, so the Powers That Be let the lawyers in to gum up the works and slow things down to a crawl. That way, the big corp's could grab a piece of the pie without having to move too fast.
In the previous post, "acquiescence" might have been a more correct word than "support." The government does a lot of things that do not enjoy majority support, but which are not heinous enough (or visible enough) to cause the majority to rebel.
This is analogous to the behavior of a parasite that breeds to the maximum level that does not provoke an immune response from its host.
Actually, someone IS pointing a gun to your head. In most states, you cannot build a house or commercial building unless the plans have been reviewed by a licensed civil engineer.
The reason that civil engineering has such a certification process is that it is, for all intents and purposes, a dead field of inquiry, with a nearly-static body of knowledge.
The IEEE has long been pushing for a similar certification for software engineers. The reasons have nothing to do with quality. They want to be the certifying body, since it will give them political power, similar to the American Medical Association or the Bar Association. It might also drive up the wages of the past-their-prime, academically-credentialled system engineers at the expense of their younger and less formally qualified colleagues. The only reason that this has not already happened is that the rules of the game keep changing before some committee can codify them. That is a good thing.
I've been a system engineer for a very long time. I think that it will destroy the field if it gets locked down tight, and I am opposed to any attempt to turn my profession into yet another guild. The results are always the same: stagnation, politics, arbitrary barriers to entry, and jobs for life for the certification middlemen. I respect the good work that IEEE does, but this kind of brainfart is not part of that good work. Just imagine a scenario where some bureaucrat decides whether the work of the next Berners-Lee or Torvalds meets with their approval or not, and buries it in a committee to keep the boat from being rocked. Screw that. One of the reasons that the state of the art in our field keeps advancing is precisely because we don't have to jump through that kind of hoops.
When I was there, two ago, anyone could use a modem. However, the bandwidth was choked down to 2400 kbps when connecting to ISPs in less restrictive countries. I don't know if that was the result of policy, or (more likely) just the poor level of service of Saudi PTT.
As for the Saudi government controlling the flow of information, most people have satellite, which the government hasn't censored. Al-Jazira frequently shows news embarrassing to the Saudi, and other, governments. Print media, on the other hand, comes to you with parts cut out with scissors or blacked out with magic marker. A job creation scheme for the religious fanatics.
[please mod parent up]
Secure Computing are in a morally equivalent position to those firms that sell cattle prods to various dictatorships, or instruments of torture, or wiretapping gear. The repression practiced by those regimes is the breeding ground for future Binladens, and worse. It's no coincidence that Saudi Arabia's corrupt, undemocratic and hypocritical regime was the home of so many of the hijackers.
It is not in our national interest to collude with governments who oppress their citizens like this. We should exert all possible non-violent pressure to stop firms from trading with goods that empower dictators. And yes, that includes deals with China too. If our gutless Congress weren't so busy passing repressive legislation and turning the US into a banana republic with Ashcroft as the tinpot jackbooted secret policeman, they would outlaw this trade, which contributes to oppression and ignorance, two of the root causes of terrorism.
You bet. Also, in the UK, Hoover, Biro, Durex and I forget what else.
Another thing to keep in mind with headhunters is that they make their money on turnover. This can mean that they have a greater incentive to close a deal than to find what's best for you. Repeat business by individual applicants (as opposed to employers) isn't a big factor for them.
My own most recent experience was of finding a good job on Monster at 30% better salary than the headhunters were turning up. But that was 18 months ago, when there were more options.
"Prosecute or lose it" does not apply to copyright. You're probably thinking of trademarks, which can pass into the public domain if they become terms of common use. Nothing of the sort can happen to copyrighted material.