Crisis Pregnancy Centers offer help to young and struggling moms-to-be, such as free diapers and baby products, classes on parenting, and a lot of encouragement and support - being a young single mom is hard, but with help you can do it.
Certainly some Crisis Pregnancy Center volunteers are aware that if no assistance and support were offered, if these young women felt that they had to do it all alone, some would get abortions. Some may feel that abortion is similar to murder. Many are people who have themselves gone through the challenges of parenting , often as a single parent, and want to be of help to other people who are doing the same now.
You say there is an "opposing idealogy". There is an idealogy which opposes offering help and encouragement to people who are facing difficult challenges? An ideology which opposes educating young moms about child nutrition, how to calm a crying child, and how to maintain a healthly social network when you're a new parent? An ideology which wants young women to think that they ARE alone and that abortion is the only option?
Is that YOUR ideology? If so, you've been unusually honest, probably unintentionally.
Under which of the categories of fair use specified in the statute do you believe this use falls? Which of the statutory four criteria for how it is used apply, in opinion?
Let me guess, you had no idea that the statute lays out categories of use which are fair, and the conditions under which use within those categories may be fair. You couldn't guess what two of the categories are, much less articulate any cogent thoughts about how any of them applies to this case.
Rather, you're under the delusion that the law is whatever you wish it to be at the moment. This is not surprising, for two reasons. First, given that people with social deficiencies such as you have displayed tend also be be ignorant, to lack knowledge of the world around them. Second, the same ultra-selfcenteredness which allows you to think as though your desire for the law to be a certain way actually does make it so; this also makes it extremely difficult for such a person to converse in a civilized and respectful manner.
* The best arguments for fair use are under 107(3) and (4) - Java is more than just the APIs; and by being Java compatible, Android may increase, rather than decrease, the market for Java.
The attorneys make bank for navigating the over 60,000 pages of codified federal statues and regulations, plus the uncodified ones (just the LIST of uncodified laws is 1,400 pages), plus an equal amount of state law. Of course those are just a tiny fraction of the total law. With my eyes closed, I clicked a random bit of the Slashdot Terms & Conditions; this is what came up:
The Sites may contain links to other web sites operated by third parties, other than affiliates of the Company (âoeLinked Sitesâ). We neither control nor endorse such other web sites, nor have we reviewed or approved any content that appears on the Linked Sites.
Why do you figure that's in there? Because sometimes sue a site for linking to another site that was bad in some way. Plaintiff says "it's your fault Slashdot, you linked to them (thereby endorsing them), and I trusted your endorsement. Case law is another several hundred thousand pages of crap that the T&C is meant to protect against.
> there is a huge difference between modern Ubuntu like releases and CentOS. Even Ubuntu 14.04 (2 years old) is way ahead
I don't necesarily disagree. Let's assume that's right, that Ubuntu has had a lot of updates (changes) and CentOS hasn't. That's what you said, right?
Of course all that new stuff has new APIs and especially new ABIs. The APIs and ABIs of RHEL 6 haven't changed for six years, so it doesn't have all the new shinies. What do you call it when something doesn't change a lot over time, when it pretty much remains the same? For APIs and ABIs, we call that "stable".
Notice the word is neither "good" nor "bad", it's "stable", aka unchanging, remaining the same, reliable.
> but at least show a bit of fairness.
I can't think of anything more fair than stating a plain, objective fact. RHEL doesn't change the interfaces. They are stable. Love it or hate it, it's a fact. What would be UNFAIR would be to lie and say RHEL doesn't provide a stable environment. That's simply untrue as a factual matter, for the sense of the word "stable" that matters for software maintainence.
The major.minor kernel number for Red Hat 6.0 was chosen based on what was stable when it was released in 2010. Kernel updates since then are reflected in the revision number. Updates after initial release don't change the API, the ABI, or the major.minor parts of the version number. They change the revision number.
"CentOS 6 is really behind" means that it does not have a bunch of significant recent changes. Which is the definition of stable.
Has CentOS 6 kept up with recent changes? If so, it's not "really behind". If not, it's stable. Pick one.
I would say they've done as advertised, they kept it pretty stable. That happens to be what I want right now. If I wanted cutting-edge, I might use Fedora.
Genius may not have enough users to make this a major story. However, MOST users access major CDN networks, which have the same types of problems. So the issue effects everyone, Genius is just a small example.
One well-known CDN doesn't include the query string in its caching, so when the user requests google.com?q=its+ass the CDN will return the page cached for google.com?q=a+hole+in+the+ground . This CDN literally doesn't know its ass from a hole in the ground.
The lesson to be (re)learned, I think, is "don't write an http proxy without reading and following the http RFC on proxies". Most of the time when people write web proxies, they'd be better of configuring an existing proxy such as squid to do whatever they want to do. Squid will take care of doing the right thing for an http proxy, then add whatever function you want your proxy to do. If you absolutely must write your own http proxy, read and follow the RFC.
> We need to lose this mentality of selling our time and labor to make a living. > and when I have an answer, I'll be sure to first make my billions off of it before I share with the World.
My company is pretty much fully automated from the customer's perspective. Our automated systems provide the service to the customer. One of the first things I did when I got hired was I analyzed the code and made the automated system run 30% faster, and more reliably. Because the changes which I did once were deployed to dozens of servers servicing thousands of customers, it was very valuable to the business. It basically multiplies my value by thousands of times - I improve the code once, thousands of customers benefit forever.
It's been true for a while and I think it will become more true - for a good income it's best to provide knowledge and skill rather than basic labor. I study about 6 hours per week, and will continue doing that. That might be a new frame of mind for many, that your job is to a) improve your skills and knowledge and b) apply that immense knowledge. Also, for ling term financial stability you've got to invest the 10%-15% of your income in income-generating assets, so you become a part-owner (shareholder) of the robots and other equipment through the businesses that own them.
I realized that what I wrote about taxes wasn't exactly clear. For my business taxes, there is bookeeping data that drives the income and expense figures. I do my bookeeping in Gnucash. The taxes themselves are just a collection of forms, no real "data". For a form wizard to fill in the forms, I use Taxact.com, then save the output locally.
It's cheaper amd faster to use an online tax service than to set up a Windows VM and buy Windows tax software. Obviously that's personal preference, but consider the online option, saving the output locally when you're done. The online versions are better anyway because that's where companies are putting their development efforts.
I thought I'd throw in a few thoughts for people transitioning away from Windows.
Wine, a program that runs Windows software on Linux, might look attractive at first. Most of the time, it works better to run Linux / open software on Linux. You'll probably end up happier if you consider Wine as last resort, when you really want a specific brand of software (game?) that's Windows-only. How often did you use a Linux emulator to run Linux software on Windows? Examples - use Chrome or Firefox, rather than trying to run IE under Wine. Use LibreOffice/OpenOffice rather than Microsoft Office. For most people, Gimp will be better than Photoshop under Wine (graphics professionals will mostly be using Macs).
For taxes, that's something you do once per year. Good tax software is available under Linux, for countries other than the US. For US taxes, why screw around installing different different things trying to find something that runs well locally when the providers are all focusing on their online services. Ibuse Taxact.com. Better to have my taxes done in a few hours than to spend a few hours each year screwing around with different software.
The real power of Linux, the biggest advantage over Windows, is at the command line. Once you get used to using your main applications in GUI, experiment and learn a bit of the command line. It can save you many hours of tedious clicking.
If you really get stuck, the very same programmers who wrote Linux and created all of the open source software are here to help you! You wouldn't ever imagine that you could email Microsoft and the lead programmer for MS Office would personally answer your question, but that's exactly what happens with Linux, if you have a good question. Eric S. Raymond wrote a somewhat tongue-in-cheek but very useful guide to getting help called How To Ask Questions the Smart Way. Yes, you should use Google first (include the word "howto" in your searches) and maybe even read the directions. If you do your part and can't find an answer, though, you may well get an answer from Linus, or Ted Tso for filesystem issues, from Daniel J Bernstein for qmail his other software, from me for storage and Perl stuff, etc.
> Every single person I know that owned stocks were all bought back up by the company, and this is happening much more rapidly than one would think.
Do you work front-line support at Dell, and mostly only know other Dell employees? Taking a company private is relatively rare, though it is happening more often since Sarbanes-Oxley increased the cost of being public.
Anyway, when a company goes private, stockholders are generally paid about 30% more than the market value of their shares (they wouldn't vote to approve the deal otherwise). So congratulations, you just made easy money. Next I'd suggest re-investing that money in an index mutual fund. The risk is far lower than a single stock and index funds have very low expenses. I look for expense ratios of 0.10% or better. One example is IVE, another is UMBIX.
> A Bill Gates or Eric Schmidt in no case are "burned" in the same sense
You're confusing high-level employees vs stockholders (retirement / home-purchase savings). 2% of Google is owned by Eric Schmidt. 4% of Microsoft is owned by Bill Gates. The vast majority of stock is owned by middle-class people saving up to buy a home, send a kid to college, or retire.
You actually have a very, very important choice to make. You can do what is easy for now and very painful later, or you can do what takes a bit of effort now and will pay off greatly in not-too-distant future. You can whine about rich people, which will have no practical effect other than wasting your time, or you can go spend a few minutes learning about index mutual funds, then about your company's 401k. If you take the second option, you'll likely learn that the company you work for is willing to give you free money. You save the first ten percent of your pay check and they'll throw in an additional 5%, free money for you. Then in just a few years you can own a house instead of throwing money away on rent every damn month. Do a bit of that and you end up financially comfortable.
The companies don't have a big room with stacks of $20 bills. "Cash" in this sense means investments they can sell quickly.
If Musk OWNS battery research lab and factory, selling that portion of the business might take a year or two. That's considered a long-term, illiquid investment. On the other hand, if Google finances the same type of battery R&D by buying 10% of the stock in a separate battery technology company, they can easily sell that stock within a day or two. That's called a liquid investment, or cash-equalivent.
Either way the money is invested in the same type of R&D and builds the same type of factory. It's accounted as cash when it's arranged so that the company can get out quickly, converting their investment into actual cash.
The most "cash like" is when Google hands the money to a bank, and then the bank loans the money to someone starting a new business or buying a house or whatever. All money ends up being invested. Again the distinction is whether it's a pure financial investment only, so the company can get out of that investment quickly , or if the investment is directly into the operations of the business, such as Cox investing in building a fiber-optic network. Cox can't quickly sell their fiber network, so that's a non-cash investment. It's all investment.
> When a Google gets "burned", that means potentially the stockholders end up moving from rich to slightly less rich. For the middle class, "burned" means
Those damn stockholders, rich people saving up tthousands of dollars in their 401k. Fuck them. They don't need to retire, to have hundreds of thousands of dollars when they're 72. Tax the hell out them, they can eat dog food when they're old.
You're attempting to draw a distinction between "stockholders" and "middle class". You're missing the fact that "stockholder" means "everyone over 30 who has half a clue". Stockholders ARE the middle class, all middle-class people who aren't ignorant or irresponsible invest for retirement. One day, not too long from now, you'll be old, 60,70,80 years old. You won't be able to work like you do in your twenties. That means you'll need enough savings to last you for 20 years or so - a million dollars or more. How the hell do you save up a million dollars so you can eat and pay bills for 20 years when your retired? You put the first 10%-15% of your income into mutual funds while you're working; you become a stockholder.
When I used to do locksmith work, it would take me a few seconds to unlock your car or house if you locked the key inside. Customers were happy that I could bypass the security for them.
Now that I work in information security, most people seem to think something is horribly wrong if I'm able to bypass the security.
There is an appropriate level of security for each use case. Neither your apartment nor your Slashdot account needs to be an impenetrable fortress that even the CIA can't get in to . Sometimes, convenience does trump security.
> if you are selling eight million of something per year you can probably keep doing that indefinitely if you wish.
Not when you're spending BILLIONS and selling MILLIONS. Just Nokia alone cost Microsoft $7.9 billion. They officially asmitted that 95% of that was wasted money when they took a $7.6 billion charge against their assets. The total cost of their mobile efforts is of course a lot higher. When you spend $30 million to make a few million back, you're in trouble.
You can read the DMCA notice requirements rather than guessing at what they say. I'll clear up a few misconceptions for you. First, though, since you didn't read the article or apparently even the summary, I'll quote it for you:
> (Let's pretend this happened in US, where there's DMCA.) ---- Mumsnet received a warning from Google: a takedown request had been made under the American Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), alleging that copyrighted material was posted without a licence on the thread.
As soon as the DMCA takedown request had been filed, Google de-listed the entire thread. All 126 posts are now not discoverable when a user searches Google for BuildTeam or any other terms. The search company told Mumsnet it could make a counterclaim, if it was certain no infringement had taken place ---
The above was the builder's strategy after their libel claim under UK law was refused.
> You need to have a way to forward DMCA notices to users, so you have to know who they are.
The law requires no such thing.
> You need their identity, and since most people still don't use PGP yet, email alone probably isn't going to cut it.
The primary information int eh counter-notice which under signed under penalty of perjury is their name contact information. The recipient doesn't have to prove the identity of the sender via PGP or any other means. They receive a sworn statement of your identity; that's what DMCA requires.
> Are you sure you wouldn't just cut corners by having "DMCA notice means we immediately delete this stuff"?
I like the protection from liability, so yes I, and over 90% of US web hosting companies follow the DMCA. If you DELETE a company's web site or other content whenever you receive a complaint, you're (rightfully) wide open to a huge liability. Think about it. Suppose you earn your living from a web site. Maybe you make your living from a web site similar to groklaw (but written by non-lawyers who haven't bothered to read the laws they are writing about). The site earns you $25,000 / month. I'm your web host. Someone sends me an email claiming you copy pasted from their site. So I delete your business, your web site. You'd probably file suit against me right away, wouldn't you. By following the DMCA process, the "host" (whoever is storing the content) is protected from liability to either side.
The fine article explains that mumsnet refused to take the material down under the UK law. The builder then notified Google (a US company) per US law, law. Quoting the article for you: ---- Mumsnet received a warning from Google: a takedown request had been made under the American Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), alleging that copyrighted material was posted without a licence on the thread.
As soon as the DMCA takedown request had been filed, Google de-listed the entire thread. All 126 posts are now not discoverable when a user searches Google for BuildTeam â" or any other terms. The search company told Mumsnet it could make a counterclaim, if it was certain no infringement had taken place ---
Yeah Mumsnet, the site she posted on, should have simply sent back a counter-notice. I sure wish more people knew about DMCA counter-notice. Basically you just send back a signed note saying "I don't believe there is any copyright infringement in this case". Forms are available online.
> The chance that a site will have a good backup policy is usually related to their potential for loss.
I would say that more than half of companies who sign up for our backup/warm spare service do so right AFTER a loss incident. Their web hosting company has a fire, or vanishes in the night, or they get rooterd or whatever and they realize they should have had a solid backup. They get Clonebox to make sure that kind of thing doesn't happen again.
My stats are a bit skewed because they often call us for help recovering a borked server. We point out that a solid backup would have cost a lot less than trying to recover from a really bad situation.
Further, of the perhaps 12 hosting companies we've contacted about restoring backups, most of the time the backups didn't actually work. A common scenario was that the backups stopped working several months earlier but nobody noticed until they were needed.
That type of experience, and web hosting companies that go out of business, eventually forced us to create Clonebox.
> explain the task so I can understand the business motivation and the real deadlines
Mod up.
> that would mean I already did something vaguely similar and if that would be the case, then I would be perusing [reusing?] that other piece of code so there's no a third time.... The first case is a boring one that, fortunately doesn't happen too frequently.
It's interesting, I've almost always done some vaguely similar. Example 1: the organization has data in system X and they want it to be in system Y. Each can use (different) text-based formats to export and import data. Example 2: we want to a GUI to manage some information that's in a database. Example 3: we want to watch for cases outside the norm and trigger some action.
For most projects, I have some experience I can draw on. Yes, I'm a senior.
> I have rarely seen a programmer give an accurate estimate. Inexperienced programmers usually wildly underestimate how long a task will take.
I learned a while back that while programmers, including myself, generally give very bad estimates, each is pretty consistent in how far off they are. In other words, if I estimated 1/3rd the actual time on the last two projects, I'll probably do the same on the next two. If you over-estimated bu 50%, you'll probably over-estimate future projects by 50%.
Therefore, IF you write down each estimate beforehand, then write down the actual time, you can discover that Ray's estimates can be corrected by multiplying by three. People who have tested this report good results. I haven't done it consistently myself.
I suspect that some projects which include a significant element of inventing and developing new methods can't be estimated accurately at all. For "routine" projects like building a typical e-commerce site or GUI for a database, I suspect my estimates are wrong in a consistent, predictable way.
Can you tell your manager how long something will take? Have you tried doing so in a matter-of-fact, polite but firm way? Can you give an ACCURATE estimate?
I haven't worked for very many companies, but I haven't had this problem, not after showing that I know my job and giving matter-of-fact statements of how much time is needed.
Slashdot Mirror
> based on an opposing ideology
Crisis Pregnancy Centers offer help to young and struggling moms-to-be, such as free diapers and baby products, classes on parenting, and a lot of encouragement and support - being a young single mom is hard, but with help you can do it.
Certainly some Crisis Pregnancy Center volunteers are aware that if no assistance and support were offered, if these young women felt that they had to do it all alone, some would get abortions. Some may feel that abortion is similar to murder. Many are people who have themselves gone through the challenges of parenting , often as a single parent, and want to be of help to other people who are doing the same now.
You say there is an "opposing idealogy". There is an idealogy which opposes offering help and encouragement to people who are facing difficult challenges? An ideology which opposes educating young moms about child nutrition, how to calm a crying child, and how to maintain a healthly social network when you're a new parent? An ideology which wants young women to think that they ARE alone and that abortion is the only option?
Is that YOUR ideology? If so, you've been unusually honest, probably unintentionally.
Under which of the categories of fair use specified in the statute do you believe this use falls? Which of the statutory four criteria for how it is used apply, in opinion?
Let me guess, you had no idea that the statute lays out categories of use which are fair, and the conditions under which use within those categories may be fair. You couldn't guess what two of the categories are, much less articulate any cogent thoughts about how any of them applies to this case.
Rather, you're under the delusion that the law is whatever you wish it to be at the moment. This is not surprising, for two reasons. First, given that people with social deficiencies such as you have displayed tend also be be ignorant, to lack knowledge of the world around them. Second, the same ultra-selfcenteredness which allows you to think as though your desire for the law to be a certain way actually does make it so; this also makes it extremely difficult for such a person to converse in a civilized and respectful manner.
* The best arguments for fair use are under 107(3) and (4) - Java is more than just the APIs; and by being Java compatible, Android may increase, rather than decrease, the market for Java.
The attorneys make bank for navigating the over 60,000 pages of codified federal statues and regulations, plus the uncodified ones (just the LIST of uncodified laws is 1,400 pages), plus an equal amount of state law. Of course those are just a tiny fraction of the total law. With my eyes closed, I clicked a random bit of the Slashdot Terms & Conditions; this is what came up:
The Sites may contain links to other web sites operated by third parties, other than affiliates of the Company (âoeLinked Sitesâ). We neither control nor endorse such other web sites, nor have we reviewed or approved any content that appears on the Linked Sites.
Why do you figure that's in there? Because sometimes sue a site for linking to another site that was bad in some way. Plaintiff says "it's your fault Slashdot, you linked to them (thereby endorsing them), and I trusted your endorsement. Case law is another several hundred thousand pages of crap that the T&C is meant to protect against.
> there is a huge difference between modern Ubuntu like releases and CentOS. Even Ubuntu 14.04 (2 years old) is way ahead
I don't necesarily disagree. Let's assume that's right, that Ubuntu has had a lot of updates (changes) and CentOS hasn't. That's what you said, right?
Of course all that new stuff has new APIs and especially new ABIs. The APIs and ABIs of RHEL 6 haven't changed for six years, so it doesn't have all the new shinies. What do you call it when something doesn't change a lot over time, when it pretty much remains the same? For APIs and ABIs, we call that "stable".
Notice the word is neither "good" nor "bad", it's "stable", aka unchanging, remaining the same, reliable.
> but at least show a bit of fairness.
I can't think of anything more fair than stating a plain, objective fact. RHEL doesn't change the interfaces. They are stable. Love it or hate it, it's a fact. What would be UNFAIR would be to lie and say RHEL doesn't provide a stable environment. That's simply untrue as a factual matter, for the sense of the word "stable" that matters for software maintainence.
The major.minor kernel number for Red Hat 6.0 was chosen based on what was stable when it was released in 2010. Kernel updates since then are reflected in the revision number. Updates after initial release don't change the API, the ABI, or the major.minor parts of the version number. They change the revision number.
"CentOS 6 is really behind" means that it does not have a bunch of significant recent changes. Which is the definition of stable.
Has CentOS 6 kept up with recent changes? If so, it's not "really behind". If not, it's stable. Pick one.
I would say they've done as advertised, they kept it pretty stable. That happens to be what I want right now. If I wanted cutting-edge, I might use Fedora.
Genius may not have enough users to make this a major story. However, MOST users access major CDN networks, which have the same types of problems. So the issue effects everyone, Genius is just a small example.
One well-known CDN doesn't include the query string in its caching, so when the user requests google.com?q=its+ass the CDN will return the page cached for google.com?q=a+hole+in+the+ground . This CDN literally doesn't know its ass from a hole in the ground.
The lesson to be (re)learned, I think, is "don't write an http proxy without reading and following the http RFC on proxies". Most of the time when people write web proxies, they'd be better of configuring an existing proxy such as squid to do whatever they want to do. Squid will take care of doing the right thing for an http proxy, then add whatever function you want your proxy to do. If you absolutely must write your own http proxy, read and follow the RFC.
> We need to lose this mentality of selling our time and labor to make a living.
> and when I have an answer, I'll be sure to first make my billions off of it before I share with the World.
My company is pretty much fully automated from the customer's perspective. Our automated systems provide the service to the customer. One of the first things I did when I got hired was I analyzed the code and made the automated system run 30% faster, and more reliably. Because the changes which I did once were deployed to dozens of servers servicing thousands of customers, it was very valuable to the business. It basically multiplies my value by thousands of times - I improve the code once, thousands of customers benefit forever.
It's been true for a while and I think it will become more true - for a good income it's best to provide knowledge and skill rather than basic labor. I study about 6 hours per week, and will continue doing that. That might be a new frame of mind for many, that your job is to a) improve your skills and knowledge and b) apply that immense knowledge. Also, for ling term financial stability you've got to invest the 10%-15% of your income in income-generating assets, so you become a part-owner (shareholder) of the robots and other equipment through the businesses that own them.
I realized that what I wrote about taxes wasn't exactly clear. For my business taxes, there is bookeeping data that drives the income and expense figures. I do my bookeeping in Gnucash. The taxes themselves are just a collection of forms, no real "data". For a form wizard to fill in the forms, I use Taxact.com, then save the output locally.
It's cheaper amd faster to use an online tax service than to set up a Windows VM and buy Windows tax software. Obviously that's personal preference, but consider the online option, saving the output locally when you're done. The online versions are better anyway because that's where companies are putting their development efforts.
I thought I'd throw in a few thoughts for people transitioning away from Windows.
Wine, a program that runs Windows software on Linux, might look attractive at first. Most of the time, it works better to run Linux / open software on Linux. You'll probably end up happier if you consider Wine as last resort, when you really want a specific brand of software (game?) that's Windows-only. How often did you use a Linux emulator to run Linux software on Windows? Examples - use Chrome or Firefox, rather than trying to run IE under Wine. Use LibreOffice/OpenOffice rather than Microsoft Office. For most people, Gimp will be better than Photoshop under Wine (graphics professionals will mostly be using Macs).
For taxes, that's something you do once per year. Good tax software is available under Linux, for countries other than the US. For US taxes, why screw around installing different different things trying to find something that runs well locally when the providers are all focusing on their online services. Ibuse Taxact.com. Better to have my taxes done in a few hours than to spend a few hours each year screwing around with different software.
The real power of Linux, the biggest advantage over Windows, is at the command line. Once you get used to using your main applications in GUI, experiment and learn a bit of the command line. It can save you many hours of tedious clicking.
If you really get stuck, the very same programmers who wrote Linux and created all of the open source software are here to help you! You wouldn't ever imagine that you could email Microsoft and the lead programmer for MS Office would personally answer your question, but that's exactly what happens with Linux, if you have a good question. Eric S. Raymond wrote a somewhat tongue-in-cheek but very useful guide to getting help called How To Ask Questions the Smart Way. Yes, you should use Google first (include the word "howto" in your searches) and maybe even read the directions. If you do your part and can't find an answer, though, you may well get an answer from Linus, or Ted Tso for filesystem issues, from Daniel J Bernstein for qmail his other software, from me for storage and Perl stuff, etc.
> Every single person I know that owned stocks were all bought back up by the company, and this is happening much more rapidly than one would think.
Do you work front-line support at Dell, and mostly only know other Dell employees? Taking a company private is relatively rare, though it is happening more often since Sarbanes-Oxley increased the cost of being public.
Anyway, when a company goes private, stockholders are generally paid about 30% more than the market value of their shares (they wouldn't vote to approve the deal otherwise). So congratulations, you just made easy money. Next I'd suggest re-investing that money in an index mutual fund. The risk is far lower than a single stock and index funds have very low expenses. I look for expense ratios of 0.10% or better. One example is IVE, another is UMBIX.
> A Bill Gates or Eric Schmidt in no case are "burned" in the same sense
You're confusing high-level employees vs stockholders (retirement / home-purchase savings). 2% of Google is owned by Eric Schmidt. 4% of Microsoft is owned by Bill Gates. The vast majority of stock is owned by middle-class people saving up to buy a home, send a kid to college, or retire.
You actually have a very, very important choice to make. You can do what is easy for now and very painful later, or you can do what takes a bit of effort now and will pay off greatly in not-too-distant future. You can whine about rich people, which will have no practical effect other than wasting your time, or you can go spend a few minutes learning about index mutual funds, then about your company's 401k. If you take the second option, you'll likely learn that the company you work for is willing to give you free money. You save the first ten percent of your pay check and they'll throw in an additional 5%, free money for you. Then in just a few years you can own a house instead of throwing money away on rent every damn month. Do a bit of that and you end up financially comfortable.
The companies don't have a big room with stacks of $20 bills. "Cash" in this sense means investments they can sell quickly.
If Musk OWNS battery research lab and factory, selling that portion of the business might take a year or two. That's considered a long-term, illiquid investment. On the other hand, if Google finances the same type of battery R&D by buying 10% of the stock in a separate battery technology company, they can easily sell that stock within a day or two. That's called a liquid investment, or cash-equalivent.
Either way the money is invested in the same type of R&D and builds the same type of factory. It's accounted as cash when it's arranged so that the company can get out quickly, converting their investment into actual cash.
The most "cash like" is when Google hands the money to a bank, and then the bank loans the money to someone starting a new business or buying a house or whatever. All money ends up being invested. Again the distinction is whether it's a pure financial investment only, so the company can get out of that investment quickly , or if the investment is directly into the operations of the business, such as Cox investing in building a fiber-optic network. Cox can't quickly sell their fiber network, so that's a non-cash investment. It's all investment.
> When a Google gets "burned", that means potentially the stockholders end up moving from rich to slightly less rich. For the middle class, "burned" means
Those damn stockholders, rich people saving up tthousands of dollars in their 401k. Fuck them. They don't need to retire, to have hundreds of thousands of dollars when they're 72. Tax the hell out them, they can eat dog food when they're old.
You're attempting to draw a distinction between "stockholders" and "middle class". You're missing the fact that "stockholder" means "everyone over 30 who has half a clue". Stockholders ARE the middle class, all middle-class people who aren't ignorant or irresponsible invest for retirement. One day, not too long from now, you'll be old, 60,70,80 years old. You won't be able to work like you do in your twenties. That means you'll need enough savings to last you for 20 years or so - a million dollars or more. How the hell do you save up a million dollars so you can eat and pay bills for 20 years when your retired? You put the first 10%-15% of your income into mutual funds while you're working; you become a stockholder.
When I used to do locksmith work, it would take me a few seconds to unlock your car or house if you locked the key inside. Customers were happy that I could bypass the security for them.
Now that I work in information security, most people seem to think something is horribly wrong if I'm able to bypass the security.
There is an appropriate level of security for each use case. Neither your apartment nor your Slashdot account needs to be an impenetrable fortress that even the CIA can't get in to . Sometimes, convenience does trump security.
When you spend $30 BILLION make a few million back, you're in trouble.
> if you are selling eight million of something per year you can probably keep doing that indefinitely if you wish.
Not when you're spending BILLIONS and selling MILLIONS. Just Nokia alone cost Microsoft $7.9 billion. They officially asmitted that 95% of that was wasted money when they took a $7.6 billion charge against their assets. The total cost of their mobile efforts is of course a lot higher. When you spend $30 million to make a few million back, you're in trouble.
You can read the DMCA notice requirements rather than guessing at what they say. I'll clear up a few misconceptions for you. First, though, since you didn't read the article or apparently even the summary, I'll quote it for you:
> (Let's pretend this happened in US, where there's DMCA.)
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Mumsnet received a warning from Google: a takedown request had been made under the American Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), alleging that copyrighted material was posted without a licence on the thread.
As soon as the DMCA takedown request had been filed, Google de-listed the entire thread. All 126 posts are now not discoverable when a user searches Google for BuildTeam or any other terms. The search company told Mumsnet it could make a counterclaim, if it was certain no infringement had taken place
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The above was the builder's strategy after their libel claim under UK law was refused.
> You need to have a way to forward DMCA notices to users, so you have to know who they are.
The law requires no such thing.
> You need their identity, and since most people still don't use PGP yet, email alone probably isn't going to cut it.
The primary information int eh counter-notice which under signed under penalty of perjury is their name contact information. The recipient doesn't have to prove the identity of the sender via PGP or any other means. They receive a sworn statement of your identity; that's what DMCA requires.
> Are you sure you wouldn't just cut corners by having "DMCA notice means we immediately delete this stuff"?
I like the protection from liability, so yes I, and over 90% of US web hosting companies follow the DMCA. If you DELETE a company's web site or other content whenever you receive a complaint, you're (rightfully) wide open to a huge liability. Think about it. Suppose you earn your living from a web site. Maybe you make your living from a web site similar to groklaw (but written by non-lawyers who haven't bothered to read the laws they are writing about). The site earns you $25,000 / month. I'm your web host. Someone sends me an email claiming you copy pasted from their site. So I delete your business, your web site. You'd probably file suit against me right away, wouldn't you. By following the DMCA process, the "host" (whoever is storing the content) is protected from liability to either side.
The fine article explains that mumsnet refused to take the material down under the UK law. The builder then notified Google (a US company) per US law, law. Quoting the article for you:
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Mumsnet received a warning from Google: a takedown request had been made under the American Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), alleging that copyrighted material was posted without a licence on the thread.
As soon as the DMCA takedown request had been filed, Google de-listed the entire thread. All 126 posts are now not discoverable when a user searches Google for BuildTeam â" or any other terms. The search company told Mumsnet it could make a counterclaim, if it was certain no infringement had taken place
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Yeah Mumsnet, the site she posted on, should have simply sent back a counter-notice. I sure wish more people knew about DMCA counter-notice. Basically you just send back a signed note saying "I don't believe there is any copyright infringement in this case". Forms are available online.
> The chance that a site will have a good backup policy is usually related to their potential for loss.
I would say that more than half of companies who sign up for our backup/warm spare service do so right AFTER a loss incident. Their web hosting company has a fire, or vanishes in the night, or they get rooterd or whatever and they realize they should have had a solid backup. They get Clonebox to make sure that kind of thing doesn't happen again.
My stats are a bit skewed because they often call us for help recovering a borked server. We point out that a solid backup would have cost a lot less than trying to recover from a really bad situation.
Further, of the perhaps 12 hosting companies we've contacted about restoring backups, most of the time the backups didn't actually work. A common scenario was that the backups stopped working several months earlier but nobody noticed until they were needed.
That type of experience, and web hosting companies that go out of business, eventually forced us to create Clonebox.
> explain the task so I can understand the business motivation and the real deadlines
Mod up.
> that would mean I already did something vaguely similar and if that would be the case, then I would be perusing [reusing?] that other piece of code so there's no a third time. ... The first case is a boring one that, fortunately doesn't happen too frequently.
It's interesting, I've almost always done some vaguely similar. Example 1: the organization has data in system X and they want it to be in system Y. Each can use (different) text-based formats to export and import data. Example 2: we want to a GUI to manage some information that's in a database. Example 3: we want to watch for cases outside the norm and trigger some action.
For most projects, I have some experience I can draw on. Yes, I'm a senior.
> I have rarely seen a programmer give an accurate estimate. Inexperienced programmers usually wildly underestimate how long a task will take.
I learned a while back that while programmers, including myself, generally give very bad estimates, each is pretty consistent in how far off they are. In other words, if I estimated 1/3rd the actual time on the last two projects, I'll probably do the same on the next two. If you over-estimated bu 50%, you'll probably over-estimate future projects by 50%.
Therefore, IF you write down each estimate beforehand, then write down the actual time, you can discover that Ray's estimates can be corrected by multiplying by three. People who have tested this report good results. I haven't done it consistently myself.
I suspect that some projects which include a significant element of inventing and developing new methods can't be estimated accurately at all. For "routine" projects like building a typical e-commerce site or GUI for a database, I suspect my estimates are wrong in a consistent, predictable way.
Can you tell your manager how long something will take? Have you tried doing so in a matter-of-fact, polite but firm way? Can you give an ACCURATE estimate?
I haven't worked for very many companies, but I haven't had this problem, not after showing that I know my job and giving matter-of-fact statements of how much time is needed.