Yes sir, squire, this here is your actual stealth ship.
Of course you can't see it or touch it. That's what makes it a stealth ship.
But since I just happen to have one of these beauties in my possession and a need for some quick cash, I'm willing to part with it on low, low terms. If you pay up front, I'll even through in that bridge you can see right through the ship.
I have one issue with what you outline. No capital-S State is ever going to tell me how much notice I must give my employer, and no employer CAN tell me. Two weeks notice is common courtesy; I have always offered that (if not more). I also offer a reasonable amount of transitional consultation gratis after that period.
But it is no more than a courtesy at my sole discretion. If I want to walk out, that is my absolute natural right and the employer can suck on it.
Now if I were to do that without damn good reason, and word got out - and it would get out - I would be up shit creek without a paddle trying to find new employment. But nobody better try to make me a slave for two weeks.
A recent trend has been to make severance pay contingent on signing a legal agreement not to say disparaging things about the bastards who just tossed you in the street. I expect this trend to continue and expand.
As far as slavery goes, of course, there's this thing called a non-compete agreement that some companies in some locations have been known to use in unpleasant ways.
I truly don't get this. If an organization requires a law to tell it that it shouldn't do this - YOU DON'T WANT TO WORK THERE.
Consider yourself lucky that they demonstrated that right up front in the interview before you spent weeks/months/years there.
Try getting a decent job without peeing in a jar.
I don't do drugs, and I don't recommend doing drugs. I also don't recommend Reality TV or American Idol or lots of other things that rot your brain. I don't recommend piloting a ship or flying a plane while drunk.
However, I'm really very unhappy about pre-employment drug testing. I consider it to be one of the first in an escalating series of recent attacks on America and its ideals. It flies in the face of "Innocent until Proven Guilty".
Long before 9/11 cause us to all run bleating for safety, shedding freedoms as we ran, the Reagan administration rammed drug testing down our throats. About the same time as the mandate went out that we must all show our papers before being hired.
Drug testing wasn't made into law, however, except for Federally-related employment. But from there, the rot spread until practically no respectable living can be made without being forced into a drug test. Your "free market" choices are mostly either to work some crap job for crap wages or bend over and take it.
And if you can't make it through life without chemical assistance, become an alcoholic.
e-books will not seriously take off until they are suitably cheap. Once they're like iOS "games", selling for $1-2, people will start to buy them when selling portals are integrated into the various ereaders.
That won't happen for a very long time, book publishers are terrified of losing control of the entire distribution and "scarcity" control.
Some of them are. Smashwords is a publisher that presents up-and-coming ebook authors in inexpensive publications. Many of them are in the $2-$3 range. While proofreading is sometimes an issue and some of the stuff is definitely mass-market quality, a book that's under $3 and has the "Lend Me" sticker on it is frequently a no-brainer purchase for me. And it isn't all cheap junk. One of them recently showed up in dead tree form at the supermarket and Barnes&Noble brick&mortar, nicely packaged in paperback form at a respectable paperback price.
But it's interesting to see what some of the authors have to say about it. Here's a comment from Jim Butcher (Dresden Files, Codex Alera):
I literally receive notices every single day about available free downloads of books I put months if not years of work into, and that's from a simple Google alerts search. Over a three month period, I tracked over 22,000 total pirate downloads of my work, using the stats available from the various file-sharing sites which include a counter stating the number of times the files had been downloaded. Actual sales of e-copies during that same period? Just over 2,500. That's sales information taken from the sales reports I get from the publisher.
There's not enough information there. Butcher's latest work is selling in ebook form for somewhere around $15 or so - essentially the same as the hardbound book.
There are very few books that I have to have so desperately that I'll buy them hardbound. True, part of that is that I don't have so much storage space that I want to spare the room for bigger books than paperbacks, but partly because even my favorite authors are in the final analysis luxuries. So how about breaking down these figures by title and see if rampant piracy is all-encompassing or if it's mostly on the overpriced stuff.
Recently yet another study confirmed that people actually do want to pay for other people's work and given the option of free/pay generally will send money. But they also want to feel that they're getting a good value for their money.
There will always be deadbeats and shoplifters. The important thing is not to obsess about them, but to concentrate on the value customers and make them feel like buying more. The ultimately secure store is one so miserable that no one wants to walk into it.
Slashdot Mirror
So, your problem is with the fact that it doesn't match any known organism, because we don't know what else might be out there?
Well, didn't a wise man once say that there were "known unknowns" and "unknown unknowns"?
Yes sir, squire, this here is your actual stealth ship.
Of course you can't see it or touch it. That's what makes it a stealth ship.
But since I just happen to have one of these beauties in my possession and a need for some quick cash, I'm willing to part with it on low, low terms. If you pay up front, I'll even through in that bridge you can see right through the ship.
I have one issue with what you outline. No capital-S State is ever going to tell me how much notice I must give my employer, and no employer CAN tell me. Two weeks notice is common courtesy; I have always offered that (if not more). I also offer a reasonable amount of transitional consultation gratis after that period.
But it is no more than a courtesy at my sole discretion. If I want to walk out, that is my absolute natural right and the employer can suck on it.
Now if I were to do that without damn good reason, and word got out - and it would get out - I would be up shit creek without a paddle trying to find new employment. But nobody better try to make me a slave for two weeks.
A recent trend has been to make severance pay contingent on signing a legal agreement not to say disparaging things about the bastards who just tossed you in the street. I expect this trend to continue and expand.
As far as slavery goes, of course, there's this thing called a non-compete agreement that some companies in some locations have been known to use in unpleasant ways.
Slavery isn't always direct.
I truly don't get this. If an organization requires a law to tell it that it shouldn't do this - YOU DON'T WANT TO WORK THERE.
Consider yourself lucky that they demonstrated that right up front in the interview before you spent weeks/months/years there.
Try getting a decent job without peeing in a jar.
I don't do drugs, and I don't recommend doing drugs. I also don't recommend Reality TV or American Idol or lots of other things that rot your brain. I don't recommend piloting a ship or flying a plane while drunk.
However, I'm really very unhappy about pre-employment drug testing. I consider it to be one of the first in an escalating series of recent attacks on America and its ideals. It flies in the face of "Innocent until Proven Guilty".
Long before 9/11 cause us to all run bleating for safety, shedding freedoms as we ran, the Reagan administration rammed drug testing down our throats. About the same time as the mandate went out that we must all show our papers before being hired.
Drug testing wasn't made into law, however, except for Federally-related employment. But from there, the rot spread until practically no respectable living can be made without being forced into a drug test. Your "free market" choices are mostly either to work some crap job for crap wages or bend over and take it.
And if you can't make it through life without chemical assistance, become an alcoholic.
e-books will not seriously take off until they are suitably cheap. Once they're like iOS "games", selling for $1-2, people will start to buy them when selling portals are integrated into the various ereaders.
That won't happen for a very long time, book publishers are terrified of losing control of the entire distribution and "scarcity" control.
Some of them are. Smashwords is a publisher that presents up-and-coming ebook authors in inexpensive publications. Many of them are in the $2-$3 range. While proofreading is sometimes an issue and some of the stuff is definitely mass-market quality, a book that's under $3 and has the "Lend Me" sticker on it is frequently a no-brainer purchase for me. And it isn't all cheap junk. One of them recently showed up in dead tree form at the supermarket and Barnes&Noble brick&mortar, nicely packaged in paperback form at a respectable paperback price.
But it's interesting to see what some of the authors have to say about it. Here's a comment from Jim Butcher (Dresden Files, Codex Alera):
I literally receive notices every single day about available free downloads of books I put months if not years of work into, and that's from a simple Google alerts search. Over a three month period, I tracked over 22,000 total pirate downloads of my work, using the stats available from the various file-sharing sites which include a counter stating the number of times the files had been downloaded. Actual sales of e-copies during that same period? Just over 2,500. That's sales information taken from the sales reports I get from the publisher.
http://www.jimbutcheronline.com/bb/index.php/topic,26233.msg1117676.html#msg1117676
There's not enough information there. Butcher's latest work is selling in ebook form for somewhere around $15 or so - essentially the same as the hardbound book.
There are very few books that I have to have so desperately that I'll buy them hardbound. True, part of that is that I don't have so much storage space that I want to spare the room for bigger books than paperbacks, but partly because even my favorite authors are in the final analysis luxuries. So how about breaking down these figures by title and see if rampant piracy is all-encompassing or if it's mostly on the overpriced stuff.
Recently yet another study confirmed that people actually do want to pay for other people's work and given the option of free/pay generally will send money. But they also want to feel that they're getting a good value for their money.
There will always be deadbeats and shoplifters. The important thing is not to obsess about them, but to concentrate on the value customers and make them feel like buying more. The ultimately secure store is one so miserable that no one wants to walk into it.