I've been offered a job which includes text that might be similar to the contract this person had.
Here are a couple sections, so you have some sense of the type of agreement which might cause someone to be obligated to help with a patent, even after they stop working for a company.
2. (f) Patent and Copyright Registrations.
Employee shall assist
the Company, or its designee, at the Company's expense, in every
proper way to secure the Company's rights in the Inventions and any
copyrights, patents, mask work rights or other intellectual property
rights relating thereto in any and all countries, including the
disclosure to the Company of all pertinent information and data with
respect thereto, the execution of all applications, specifications,
oaths, assignments and all other instruments which the Company shall
deem necessary in order to apply for and obtain such rights and in
order to assign and convey to the Company, its successors, assigns,
and nominees the sole and exclusive rights, title and interest in and
to such Inventions, and any copyrights, patents, mask work rights or
other intellectual property rights relating thereto. Employee agrees
that it is Employee's obligation to execute or cause to be executed,
when it is in Employee's power to do so, any such instrument or
papers after the termination of this Agreement. If the Company is
unable because of the Employee's mental or physical incapacity or for
any other reason to secure Employee's signature to apply for or to
pursue any application for any United States or foreign patents or
copyright registrations covering Inventions or original works of
authorship assigned to the Company as above, then Employee hereby
irrevocably designates and appoints the Company and its duly
authorized officers and agents as Employee's agent and attorney in
fact, to act for and in Employee's behalf and stead to execute and
file any such applications and to do all other lawfully permitted
acts to further the prosecution and issuance of letters patent or
copyright registrations thereon with the same legal force and effect
as if executed by Employee.
12. Successors, Assigns and Survival.
This Agreement shall
be binding on Employee's heirs, executors, administrators and other
legal representatives and will be for the benefit of the Company, its
successors and assigns. The terms of this Agreement shall survive the
termination of Employee's employment and the assignment of this
Agreement by the Company to any successor in interest or other
assignee.
"The fact that Transmeta was able to buy back their licenses means that neither IBM nor Toshiba sees Transmeta as a good return on investment. If the technology was as impressive as the hype would have you believe, Transmeta would have only been able to get the licenses back from Toshiba and IBM by prying them out of their cold, dead hands."
Perhaps. Or it could mean that Transmeta included a buy-back opion in the original agreement, (perhaps with a fixed buyback price), and Transmeta has elected to use the option.
It is intirely possible (and likely) that all three companies are exlicitly not allowed to make any sort of public statement about the license agreements.
You are welcome to speculate, but I find fault with your logic, and I'd like to point out that your conclusion is not supported.
"Minimum wage laws may well be the extreme form of redress, but who on earth would think that people putting in the kinds of hours many volunteers have should be denied something more in the way of fair compensation for the time they give?"
I disagree with the suit. I think that the vovlunteers already had an option, which they failed to use. They could have left any time they wanted to.
They could have slacked off, they could have failed to follow the guidelines they didn't like. In fact, I'd guess that many of them did slack off, and that many of them did fail to follow the guidelines.
Let's look at the other side for a moment. A bunch of people offer to help AOL. AOL finds that some of the people helping seem to actually be making things worse, so they make some suggestions about how the volunteers should behave, and they offer training, hoping to improve the situation, while still allowing the people who want to help to do so.
They offer free accounts because they realize that some of the volunteers are actually making the service better, and they want to reward that sort of activity. They realize there is a risk of everyone signing up as a volunteer to get the free access, even if they aren't actually helping, so perhaps they attach some conditions to the free access to prevent it from being abused.
What have they done wrong? Have they forced anyone to put up with intolerable conditions? Have they abused anyone? Have they offered employment with a wage that is too low? At what point have they forced anyone to interact with them?
You've all been free to throw their disks away and ignore them. I know I've done so.
I don't see that AOL has done anything wrong in this case. Other cases, perhaps, but not this one.
"when you "pre-order" a game from them (well, it goes through digital river, which is probably why this whole thing happens) your credit card is charged immediately. "
That's not what I experienced.
I preordered SMACX on 2000-08-01.
My 2000-08-22 statement doesn't show a charge for the game.
On 2000-08-01 I recieved a confermation of my order.
On 2000-08-02 I received another email from service@digitalriver.com which included this text:
We're Sorry! The product(s) you've ordered is currently out of stock and could not be
shipped. The product(s) has been placed on back-order and will be shipped as soon as
possible when the stock becomes available. You will receive another e-mail notification when
your order has actually shipped. Your credit card has been pre-authorized, but you will NOT
be charged until the product ships. Thank you for your patience and understanding.
Instead of saying "When you...." try saying "When I...." This will help differentiate the general and the specific.;-}
Perhaps I can help clarify the "if any attempt is made to force such textbooks on people" clause....
Some people are objecting to this because college students may be required to choose to buy these texts or leave college, which is different from buying TCP/IP Illustrated or doing without.
Let's consider another case. You have a young child who is required to go to school and attend fourth grade. The textbook is only available in ebook format, the class is required, you are legally obligated to provide your child with textbooks, the textbook only works for one year of school. You are forced to buy the book, and you want to buy the book in a format you can reuse for more than one year because you also have three other children in first, second and third grade, who will be attending the same classes in the same school.
"The first step towards fixing them is admitting that some parts of *nix do suck and should be made not to suck. Here's the relevant quote:"
All well and good, but pointing to closed source projects and claiming they don't reuse code between themselves detracts from his message.
There is actually quite a lot of code reuse. Perhaps not as much as he would like to see, but let's start by looking at examples of open source products instead. Projects where code reuse is at least an option.
There are also no bricks floating in the clouds. Duh.
"Various people like to criticize Microsoft for producing "bloated and monolithic applications". Before we criticize Microsoft, lets take a look at the end user applications that we have on Unix outside of GNOME: Netscape, GhostView, XDVI, Acrobat, Mathematica, Maple, Purify, FrameMaker, Star Office. "
Your examples of software projects that fail to have code reuse are mostly (or all, I'm not sure) propriatary non-free projects?!?
I've seen studies on the amount of code reuse among free software projects, and it's quite surprising how much is reused. For libraries you don't mention like readline and regex to small bits and pieces here and there.
"The only common denominator on those applications is libc and Xlib."
Perhaps you aren't aware of a little program called `ldd`. Try this:
ldd/usr/bin/* 2>/dev/null |grep "=>"|sort |tee/tmp/ldd.1 |cut -f 1 -d " "| uniq >/tmp/ldd.2; for i in `cat/tmp/ldd.2` ; do echo -n "$i : "; grep -c "$i"/tmp/ldd.1 ; done
That's what my "computing experience" is about, and it's not something I would ever want to try with a drag and drop interface.
"Any fanatic libertarians out there should keep this in mind: a vote for Lightfoot is a vote for Feinstein."
No. A vote for Lightfoot is a vote for Lightfoot. Only a vote for Feinstein is a vote for Feinstein.
A single vote for either of the main parties is unlikely to change the results of that election.
Each vote for a Libertarian candidate is useful, in that it shows there is one more voter who is fed up with the status quo, who agrees with the Libertarian platform, and who is willing to put aside the fear, uncertainty and doubt spouted by the main parties and wrok on what they believe in.
"Sorry my friend, but ethics are ethics, and have been laid down from a source that cannot be denied."
Wow. I'm just amazed.
You can't argue with logic like that. You can point and laugh, but you can't argue with it.
Just for the record, in order to prove that it can be done, I deny them. I also deny your god. Please refrain from stating that it isn't possible, as it obvious is. Tell me again that I can't deny something, and I'm likely to do just that, if I want.
It is my belief that criminals can be caught and punished without breaking the law. It takes a little more work, but it's still possible.
Breaking the law in order to catch someone and punish them is a lot like the death penalty. Is it fair for me to assume that you don't agree with the death penalty?
"And as I believe I've said before, sin is sin, and trying to count the "amount" of sin is a foolish and pointless exercise. If you are guilty of a crime, you must be punished. It's as simple as that."
You seem to be confusing 'sin' with 'crime'. Crime is defined by society. 'Sin', for those who believe, is defined by some higher power.
the important point here is that society can, and often does, change the definition of crime. Drinking alcohol in the United States is a good example. It's legal. It's illegal. It's legal again. Of course, this caused some confusion.
It is my belief that there currently exist many laws which actively harm society. Society would be better off without some of the laws.
I'm willing to suppose it may be a bit of a leap for you to agree that some laws harm society. Let's see if we can agree that there are laws which are just downright silly, and don't need to exist.
Please refer to www.dumblaws.com and see if you can find even one law which makes something a crime when it need not be.
Failing that, please explain the ethics behind this law:
New Mexico, Las Cruces: You may not carry a lunchbox down Main Street.
Is this a crime because The Lord told someone it should be?
Is it a sin?
Does it harm anyone?
Can you suggest any possible reason for this law?
Can you begin to understand how I might think that someone might be guilty of a crime yet still not need to be punished?
"...and this RBL thingie kinda negates my wishes."
I think perhaps you don't know what you're talking about.
The RBL allows system administrators to reduce the complexity of their job, by using a trusted source of information regarding open relays.
This is entirely optional, and not all system administrators use it.
You are free to ask your ISP if they do, and to ask them to send you your email before applying the filter.
This has nothing to do with censorship. The people sending spam still have the opertunity to send you email without using an open relay, just like everyone else does.
"It's also a matter of principle that criminals need to be stopped, and that these kinds of measures need to be taken for the betterment of society. After all its no use having free access to source code if you're barricaded in your home by armed criminals is it?"
Let's start by realizing that different people have different sets of ethics, and not everyone believes that the government has a strong sense of ethics. For example, I am confident that the government is extreamly hypocrytical, which by my sense of ethics is one of the worst things possible.
Asking dictionary.com about 'principle' gives "basic truth, law, or assumption", "A rule or standard, especially of good behavior" and "The collectivity of moral or ethical standards or judgments".
When you say "It's also a matter of principle that criminals need to be stopped...", it's reasonable for me to ask "Who's principle, who's ethics, which laws, and at what price?"
The question many people are raising is if catching the criminals is important enough to justify breaking the law, violating the constitution, and ignoring the bill of rights.
My answer is "No, of course it isn't worth it! The rules of society, as described by the constitution, make it clear that catching the criminals is NOT the most important thing."
Let me make this as clear as I can manage. The 'betterment of society' is not served, and is in fact harmed, by a law enforcement group which intentionally violates the law, ever, even once. It doesn't matter if they catch a thousand murders and ten thousand rapists at the same time, if they had to violate one law to do so, they have made the world a worse place. It's simply a matter of principle.
Obviously my principles are different from yours.
And to answer your question, it depends on the criminals. In particular, it depends on what laws they are guilty of breaking. I mean, it makes a big differance if they are all guilty of murder, say, or just, you know, jaywalking or speeding or maybe growing a bit of pot and then smoking it.
It doesn't matter if they lie about what they will do with the information. If they require it, we don't use their site.
Suppose I set my machine up to let any site know that I'm 30 years old, live in the US, and use Linux exclusively.
Now if any site requires my SSN or address, my browser logs the name of the site, the time, and the fields they requested to a file, adds that site to a list of hostnames for which A Href's shouldn't be considered to be links, and redirects my request to a page that the browser generates displaying the actions it's taken, the reasons for the action, and a list of alternative sites with simular information.
"This gives exponential growth; plausible parameters indicate that such a civilization would gobble up the whole galaxy in "only" a few million years. So why hasn't it happened? "
You missed a vitally important point....
Their growth would still be limited by the speed of light. Instead of Exponential growth, they would at best have cubic growth limited by some fraction of the speed of light.
"Not to flame, but how does this merit a score of 5 as insightful?"
It helps clarify the issue, and provides additional information about the history of the conflict at hand. Some people like to know more about what's really going on before they get all riled up.
Personnally I'd have picked 'informative' instead of 'insightful', but the score of 5 is perfectly appropriate.
It's time to stop complaining about highly scored posts. This would sugnificantly increase the signal/noise ratio by removing the noise that relates to scoring.
If you can't come up with something useful to add to the conversation, you could take the time instead to read a different story, or just kick back and think about this one some more.
Complaining about the scores just gets in the way.
And before some complains that I'm being hypocritical, yeah, I know this is also noise. I'm hoping that it will help answer this guy's question and perhaps help others stop generating noise. You don't need to tell me about it, I already know. If you feel compelled to mention it, please hit the reply button, write out your comments, preview them as many times as you like to get the wording exactly right, then go on and do something else without actually submitting the comment. Know that my mystical connection to the universe has made me aware of your critisism, and I've agreed to act on all of your suggestions.
Now shut up and work on generating signal instead of noise.
Something to consider is to give your first novel away for free to develop an audience.
Your chances of making much money on your first novel are probably already fairly slim. If you write off all chance of making any money on your first book, and focus on getting people to read it, you have the potential (if people like your work) of developing a market for future books.
If you do this right, you can also get the feedback that you need to develop your writting style and make your future work better.
My advice is to focus on finishing the book, get some help editing it, and put as much work as you can into making it a good book.
Meanwhile, have someone else work on the technical details. Tell them what you want and have them make it happen.
What you want is to release it on-line, for free, in many formats. You want to make it easy for people to use it in whatever manner they want, and to encourage them to distribute it and share it with their friends.
You'll need to make it available for download in about 20 different formats, and to set up a web page inviting feedback to the author.
If you do these things, and you write a good book, you will have no trouble selling your next one, and having enough people know that they like your work enough to buy a book.
On the other hand, if you write a book that nobody like, you won't make any money this way. It's all a matter of how much confidence you have in your work. Ask yourself if you think that people would be likely to tell their friends they should read your book.
"Exactly. And the elections would continue until there is a candidate that enough people actually want to vote for."
That depends on how it is implemented.
For instance, a binding non of the above might mean that all the candidates in that election are excluded while you itterate the election again with new candidates, which seems to be the way you envision it...
Or it might be that after some set number of wins by none of the above the office is suspended, and the government continues without anyone holding that office, either for some set number of terms or forever, again depending on implementation.
Slashdot Mirror
Here are a couple sections, so you have some sense of the type of agreement which might cause someone to be obligated to help with a patent, even after they stop working for a company.
2. (f) Patent and Copyright Registrations.
Employee shall assist the Company, or its designee, at the Company's expense, in every proper way to secure the Company's rights in the Inventions and any copyrights, patents, mask work rights or other intellectual property rights relating thereto in any and all countries, including the disclosure to the Company of all pertinent information and data with respect thereto, the execution of all applications, specifications, oaths, assignments and all other instruments which the Company shall deem necessary in order to apply for and obtain such rights and in order to assign and convey to the Company, its successors, assigns, and nominees the sole and exclusive rights, title and interest in and to such Inventions, and any copyrights, patents, mask work rights or other intellectual property rights relating thereto. Employee agrees that it is Employee's obligation to execute or cause to be executed, when it is in Employee's power to do so, any such instrument or papers after the termination of this Agreement. If the Company is unable because of the Employee's mental or physical incapacity or for any other reason to secure Employee's signature to apply for or to pursue any application for any United States or foreign patents or copyright registrations covering Inventions or original works of authorship assigned to the Company as above, then Employee hereby irrevocably designates and appoints the Company and its duly authorized officers and agents as Employee's agent and attorney in fact, to act for and in Employee's behalf and stead to execute and file any such applications and to do all other lawfully permitted acts to further the prosecution and issuance of letters patent or copyright registrations thereon with the same legal force and effect as if executed by Employee.
12. Successors, Assigns and Survival.
This Agreement shall be binding on Employee's heirs, executors, administrators and other legal representatives and will be for the benefit of the Company, its successors and assigns. The terms of this Agreement shall survive the termination of Employee's employment and the assignment of this Agreement by the Company to any successor in interest or other assignee.
Perhaps. Or it could mean that Transmeta included a buy-back opion in the original agreement, (perhaps with a fixed buyback price), and Transmeta has elected to use the option.
It is intirely possible (and likely) that all three companies are exlicitly not allowed to make any sort of public statement about the license agreements.
You are welcome to speculate, but I find fault with your logic, and I'd like to point out that your conclusion is not supported.
I disagree with the suit. I think that the vovlunteers already had an option, which they failed to use. They could have left any time they wanted to.
They could have slacked off, they could have failed to follow the guidelines they didn't like. In fact, I'd guess that many of them did slack off, and that many of them did fail to follow the guidelines.
Let's look at the other side for a moment. A bunch of people offer to help AOL. AOL finds that some of the people helping seem to actually be making things worse, so they make some suggestions about how the volunteers should behave, and they offer training, hoping to improve the situation, while still allowing the people who want to help to do so.
They offer free accounts because they realize that some of the volunteers are actually making the service better, and they want to reward that sort of activity. They realize there is a risk of everyone signing up as a volunteer to get the free access, even if they aren't actually helping, so perhaps they attach some conditions to the free access to prevent it from being abused.
What have they done wrong? Have they forced anyone to put up with intolerable conditions? Have they abused anyone? Have they offered employment with a wage that is too low? At what point have they forced anyone to interact with them?
You've all been free to throw their disks away and ignore them. I know I've done so.
I don't see that AOL has done anything wrong in this case. Other cases, perhaps, but not this one.
That's not what I experienced.
I preordered SMACX on 2000-08-01.
My 2000-08-22 statement doesn't show a charge for the game.
On 2000-08-01 I recieved a confermation of my order.
On 2000-08-02 I received another email from service@digitalriver.com which included this text: We're Sorry! The product(s) you've ordered is currently out of stock and could not be shipped. The product(s) has been placed on back-order and will be shipped as soon as possible when the stock becomes available. You will receive another e-mail notification when your order has actually shipped. Your credit card has been pre-authorized, but you will NOT be charged until the product ships. Thank you for your patience and understanding.
Instead of saying "When you...." try saying "When I...." This will help differentiate the general and the specific. ;-}
I don't see it on your homepage yet. Join us.
If it's already there, I missed it and it should be more prominent, perhaps in hundred point graphics like those other four links on your page.
It's not a short path because the MPAA and associates are all a bit insural, but here's one path:
http://www.mpaa.org
http://education.indiana.edu/cas/tt/v2i3/v2i3toc.h tmlu /iub/n g_the_Web/Meta_Search_Engines/l n g_the_Web/Portal_Sites/m
http://www.mpaa.org/home.htm
http://www.mpaa.org/relatedsites/index.htm
http://www.tvguidelines.org/
http://www.tvguidelines.org/resource.htm
http://www.medialit.org/
http://www.medialit.org/othersites.html
http://www.med.sc.edu:81/MEDIALIT/
http://education.indiana.edu/cas/tt/v2i3/tv.html
http://education.indiana.edu/cas/tt/tthmpg.html
http://webmaster.iu.edu/cgi/iub.pl?www.indiana.ed
http://www.iub.edu/
http://www.iub.edu/compute/
http://www.indiana.edu/~librcsd/internet/_Searchi
http://www.indiana.edu/~librcsd/internet/tree.htm
http://www.indiana.edu/~librcsd/internet/_Searchi
http://www.yahoo.com/
http://dir.yahoo.com/Entertainment/
http://dir.yahoo.com/Entertainment/Video/
http://dir.yahoo.com/Entertainment/Video/DVD/
http://www.pzcommunications.com/decss/articles.ht
http://www.pzcommunications.com/decss/main.htm
http://www.pzcommunications.com/decss/where.htm
http://www-ec.njit.edu/~adt6247/
http://www-ec.njit.edu/~adt6247/DeCSS.zip
With 26 links (inclusive), I'm certain someone can do a better job.
I'm doing that. I've been doing that, and I've just made it easier to find my adding a link to my home page. Hey, I finally have some content.
Some people are objecting to this because college students may be required to choose to buy these texts or leave college, which is different from buying TCP/IP Illustrated or doing without.
Let's consider another case. You have a young child who is required to go to school and attend fourth grade. The textbook is only available in ebook format, the class is required, you are legally obligated to provide your child with textbooks, the textbook only works for one year of school. You are forced to buy the book, and you want to buy the book in a format you can reuse for more than one year because you also have three other children in first, second and third grade, who will be attending the same classes in the same school.
Is there a problem?
If so, what is the problem, and who is to blaim?
All well and good, but pointing to closed source projects and claiming they don't reuse code between themselves detracts from his message.
There is actually quite a lot of code reuse. Perhaps not as much as he would like to see, but let's start by looking at examples of open source products instead. Projects where code reuse is at least an option.
There are also no bricks floating in the clouds. Duh.
Your examples of software projects that fail to have code reuse are mostly (or all, I'm not sure) propriatary non-free projects?!?
I've seen studies on the amount of code reuse among free software projects, and it's quite surprising how much is reused. For libraries you don't mention like readline and regex to small bits and pieces here and there.
"The only common denominator on those applications is libc and Xlib."
Perhaps you aren't aware of a little program called `ldd`. Try this:
ldd /usr/bin/* 2>/dev/null |grep "=>"|sort |tee /tmp/ldd.1 |cut -f 1 -d " "| uniq > /tmp/ldd.2; for i in `cat /tmp/ldd.2` ; do echo -n "$i : "; grep -c "$i" /tmp/ldd.1 ; done
That's what my "computing experience" is about, and it's not something I would ever want to try with a drag and drop interface.
No. A vote for Lightfoot is a vote for Lightfoot. Only a vote for Feinstein is a vote for Feinstein.
A single vote for either of the main parties is unlikely to change the results of that election.
Each vote for a Libertarian candidate is useful, in that it shows there is one more voter who is fed up with the status quo, who agrees with the Libertarian platform, and who is willing to put aside the fear, uncertainty and doubt spouted by the main parties and wrok on what they believe in.
Wow. I'm just amazed.
You can't argue with logic like that. You can point and laugh, but you can't argue with it.
Just for the record, in order to prove that it can be done, I deny them. I also deny your god. Please refrain from stating that it isn't possible, as it obvious is. Tell me again that I can't deny something, and I'm likely to do just that, if I want.
It is my belief that criminals can be caught and punished without breaking the law. It takes a little more work, but it's still possible.
Breaking the law in order to catch someone and punish them is a lot like the death penalty. Is it fair for me to assume that you don't agree with the death penalty?
"And as I believe I've said before, sin is sin, and trying to count the "amount" of sin is a foolish and pointless exercise. If you are guilty of a crime, you must be punished. It's as simple as that."
You seem to be confusing 'sin' with 'crime'. Crime is defined by society. 'Sin', for those who believe, is defined by some higher power.
the important point here is that society can, and often does, change the definition of crime. Drinking alcohol in the United States is a good example. It's legal. It's illegal. It's legal again. Of course, this caused some confusion.
It is my belief that there currently exist many laws which actively harm society. Society would be better off without some of the laws.
I'm willing to suppose it may be a bit of a leap for you to agree that some laws harm society. Let's see if we can agree that there are laws which are just downright silly, and don't need to exist.
Please refer to www.dumblaws.com and see if you can find even one law which makes something a crime when it need not be.
Failing that, please explain the ethics behind this law:
New Mexico, Las Cruces:
You may not carry a lunchbox down Main Street.
Is this a crime because The Lord told someone it should be?
Is it a sin?
Does it harm anyone?
Can you suggest any possible reason for this law?
Can you begin to understand how I might think that someone might be guilty of a crime yet still not need to be punished?
I think perhaps you don't know what you're talking about.
The RBL allows system administrators to reduce the complexity of their job, by using a trusted source of information regarding open relays.
This is entirely optional, and not all system administrators use it.
You are free to ask your ISP if they do, and to ask them to send you your email before applying the filter.
This has nothing to do with censorship. The people sending spam still have the opertunity to send you email without using an open relay, just like everyone else does.
Let's start by realizing that different people have different sets of ethics, and not everyone believes that the government has a strong sense of ethics. For example, I am confident that the government is extreamly hypocrytical, which by my sense of ethics is one of the worst things possible.
Asking dictionary.com about 'principle' gives "basic truth, law, or assumption", "A rule or standard, especially of good behavior" and "The collectivity of moral or ethical standards or judgments".
When you say "It's also a matter of principle that criminals need to be stopped...", it's reasonable for me to ask "Who's principle, who's ethics, which laws, and at what price?"
The question many people are raising is if catching the criminals is important enough to justify breaking the law, violating the constitution, and ignoring the bill of rights.
My answer is "No, of course it isn't worth it! The rules of society, as described by the constitution, make it clear that catching the criminals is NOT the most important thing."
Let me make this as clear as I can manage. The 'betterment of society' is not served, and is in fact harmed, by a law enforcement group which intentionally violates the law, ever, even once. It doesn't matter if they catch a thousand murders and ten thousand rapists at the same time, if they had to violate one law to do so, they have made the world a worse place. It's simply a matter of principle.
Obviously my principles are different from yours.
And to answer your question, it depends on the criminals. In particular, it depends on what laws they are guilty of breaking. I mean, it makes a big differance if they are all guilty of murder, say, or just, you know, jaywalking or speeding or maybe growing a bit of pot and then smoking it.
It doesn't matter if they lie about what they will do with the information. If they require it, we don't use their site.
Suppose I set my machine up to let any site know that I'm 30 years old, live in the US, and use Linux exclusively.
Now if any site requires my SSN or address, my browser logs the name of the site, the time, and the fields they requested to a file, adds that site to a list of hostnames for which A Href's shouldn't be considered to be links, and redirects my request to a page that the browser generates displaying the actions it's taken, the reasons for the action, and a list of alternative sites with simular information.
What's wrong with that?
Some people are infected with the Christianity meme, and some people have a memetic defense against that sort of nonsense.
These two groups of people can do little more that argue with one another. It's not worth the time for either of them.
Let it go already. Move on.
Trying to convert someone to your religion is like coughing on your friends when you have a cold.
You missed a vitally important point....
Their growth would still be limited by the speed of light. Instead of Exponential growth, they would at best have cubic growth limited by some fraction of the speed of light.
This leads to dramaticly different numbers.
Does that answer your question?
I don't know about you, but I can count to 1023 on my toes.
It helps clarify the issue, and provides additional information about the history of the conflict at hand. Some people like to know more about what's really going on before they get all riled up.
Personnally I'd have picked 'informative' instead of 'insightful', but the score of 5 is perfectly appropriate.
It's time to stop complaining about highly scored posts. This would sugnificantly increase the signal/noise ratio by removing the noise that relates to scoring.
If you can't come up with something useful to add to the conversation, you could take the time instead to read a different story, or just kick back and think about this one some more.
Complaining about the scores just gets in the way.
And before some complains that I'm being hypocritical, yeah, I know this is also noise. I'm hoping that it will help answer this guy's question and perhaps help others stop generating noise. You don't need to tell me about it, I already know. If you feel compelled to mention it, please hit the reply button, write out your comments, preview them as many times as you like to get the wording exactly right, then go on and do something else without actually submitting the comment. Know that my mystical connection to the universe has made me aware of your critisism, and I've agreed to act on all of your suggestions.
Now shut up and work on generating signal instead of noise.
Thank you.
Your chances of making much money on your first novel are probably already fairly slim. If you write off all chance of making any money on your first book, and focus on getting people to read it, you have the potential (if people like your work) of developing a market for future books.
If you do this right, you can also get the feedback that you need to develop your writting style and make your future work better.
My advice is to focus on finishing the book, get some help editing it, and put as much work as you can into making it a good book.
Meanwhile, have someone else work on the technical details. Tell them what you want and have them make it happen.
What you want is to release it on-line, for free, in many formats. You want to make it easy for people to use it in whatever manner they want, and to encourage them to distribute it and share it with their friends.
You'll need to make it available for download in about 20 different formats, and to set up a web page inviting feedback to the author.
If you do these things, and you write a good book, you will have no trouble selling your next one, and having enough people know that they like your work enough to buy a book.
On the other hand, if you write a book that nobody like, you won't make any money this way. It's all a matter of how much confidence you have in your work. Ask yourself if you think that people would be likely to tell their friends they should read your book.
Look for something called the 'demoronizer'. Find that and you will find your answers.
Microsoft has in fact (years ago) come up with a "compiled html file" format, which surprisingly enough requires IE 4.0 or later.
That depends on how it is implemented.
For instance, a binding non of the above might mean that all the candidates in that election are excluded while you itterate the election again with new candidates, which seems to be the way you envision it...
Or it might be that after some set number of wins by none of the above the office is suspended, and the government continues without anyone holding that office, either for some set number of terms or forever, again depending on implementation.
cat "208.48.26.217 www.nytimes.com" >> /etc/hosts