One way to do shared use of your work that is pretty common is to say that the company owns the code and all associated copyrights and/or patents; and the company grants you a perpetual, fully-paid-up, nonrevocable license to use, license, copy, sell, distribute, and otherwise exploit all of the code you write, without notice. It can specify that the company
You do need to talk with a lawyer, unfortunately, to try to cover all the corner cases. It should only take an hour or two of his time if he has ever done this before. That should set you back around $300 to $600 total. Ask in advance if he can do it for $300 (or whatever you want to spend).
Rather than complaining to the Slashdot population that copyright laws are painfully outdated, how about actually changing the law? That's what your representative exists for.
On trademark infringement, companies don't sue other companies to try to cash in. They do it because if they don't attempt to protect their trademark, courts will rule that it isn't a trademark anymore and isn't protectible. Aspirin, Zipper.
If you pack more data in the pointers, you'll have applications that break in a few years when that extra address space is needed. Ask Apple what happened when they moved from the 68000 (32-bit addresses of which only 24 bits were used) to the Mac II's 68020 (32-bit addressing). Four Macs (the II, IIx, IIcx, and SE/30) actually had versions of QuickDraw in ROM using the top byte to pack extra data into the pointers, as you recommend, and then Apple had to patch the entire QuickDraw package in RAM to code around this. Untold numbers of apps broke also of course.
In 1991, I and everyone else was told by Apple, Intel, and Motorola that x86 was dead, the power consumption of the Pentium chip was ridiculous and you could roast a hot dog on it. It's doomed! RISC is the future!
Now it's 2005 and the x86 internal architecture has changed a lot, but x86 is, as the poster said, going to live on for a century or so.
Movement of the stock price post-IPO gets Google nothing, nothing. Pricing the shares at 105 and ending with a $5 loss would have netted the company about $1.5 billion more and they obviously would have chosen this if they had the option. They just didn't, and had to price it at $85 due to lower priced demand than anticipated.
The original poster was ignorant of how an IPO works with the claim that they netted a nice little gain after the IPO.
One was mine, when I was new to the Apple II. Irritatingly, a program locked up and the disk drive's access light remained on for several minutes! My solution was to yank the disk controller card out of slot 6 and plug it into slot 7, hoping this would stop the disk access and unfreeze the computer. Some funny text characters appeared in a few different places on the screen. "That's odd," I said, then removed the controller card from slot 7 and plugged it back into slot 6. Still nothing. I think some of the random characters on the screen started flashing. I gave up and rebooted the computer, which kept working fine, not to my surprise -- why on earth would it not work perfectly fine?
The other story is thirdhand: in Softalk Magazine, I recall a wonderful abuse story of this kind from a fellow whose house was flooded with mud. After dealing with all the things that are important in life, he retreived all his 5.25" floppy disks, put them on the lawn, and *hosed them off* with a garden hose. He reported that only about 30% of the disks had disk errors.
The following is the best e-mail idea of the last two years, and should be a feature of every e-mail program.
As a person who writes a lot of e-mail, or as a manger, one major organizational problem is simply not having your messages replied to. It currently takes a ton of manual effort to decide which of your e-mails need a followup by you. So much effort that nobody does it. Some questions fall through the cracks when you write a hundred e-mails a day. Closing up these cracks would measurably, demonstrably improve the effectiveness of managers, project coordinators, and any other heavy communicators, since e-mail has become the most important and most used mode of communication for a large number of people. (It is very rare to see a manager actually send out an e-mail asking "Was this resolved?" Generally, un-followed-up e-mail is simply forgotten.)
A system for followup could be partially automated.
1. A checkbox exists when writing an e-mail. If turned on, it tells the e-mail client, locally, that you want to make sure this e-mail has been followed up. I'll call this a "follow-this-up", or FTU, e-mail.
2. After an FTU e-mail has been sent, the e-mail client remembers it in a list. Once an FTU e-mail is sent, a copy of it is placed in a mail folder which I'll call the FTU folder. The user of the e-mail client can open this mail folder at any time to see the FTU e-mails that still have to be followed up.
3. When the client detects that a recipient of an FTU e-mail has replied to that e-mail, then it provisionally removes the FTU e-mail from the FTU folder. (Probably the e-mail is grayed out in the list but not actually removed.) Making this detection complete and thorough is an interesting problem. The starting point would probably be based on receiving an e-mail from the recipient with an appropriate subject line (e.g. the same subject line prefaced by FW: or Re: or Re[5]:). And in order to increase the effectiveness of this technique, the client might actually maintain a database of previously-used subject lines that are already in the FTU folder, and nag the user if he sends a second e-mail with the same subject, asking him to write a more elaborate Subject line.
Other starting techniques could include parsing the e-mail's content to see if part of the content matches an FTU e-mail that has been received. Or by utilizing e-mail fields or even implementing a new e-mail field which hopefully doesn't get stripped when the recipient replies.
This system, then, tries to ensure that after an FTU e-mail is sent, there is either a copy of the e-mail in the FTU folder so the user can see that the recipient hasn't followed up, and the user can follow up with a question; or there is a response from the recipient in the user's Inbox.
User interface is critical to making this system useful for the user:
4. When the client sees that an FTU e-mail has been replied to, it presumes that a followup has actually occurred. This obviously may not be true; the recipient may have responded with a joke, or with a followup question, or with "I'll get back to you Thursday". Presumably when you read a followup to an FTU e-mail, a new bar of UI should appear in the client saying to the user "This looks like a followup to an FTU e-mail you sent, which you can view by clicking here." Buttons would let the user choose things like "Yes, this resolves my FTU e-mail completely" or "No, I still need a followup", or "I now want my reply to this e-mail to be an FTU e-mail, and not the parent."
5. I imagine that the FTU folder displays its FTU e-mails in date order, showing the oldest non-followed-up e-mail at the top (colored red after 2 to 4 days or so). The user can mark these e-mail copies as already-followed-up (i.e. it's resolved, no more followup needed, because the recipient saw me in person and resolved it).
I don't think spoofing is a very great concern. The point of Lufthansa installing this is that business customers will fly Lufthansa and not BA. It's not to get thirty bucks.
The reason: this is marketing and not reporting.
on
Superbowling
·
· Score: 1
If you were to report on the Super Bowl, you could say "Super Bowl" 500 times in a row without breathing and not get sued for anything. What the NFL is alleging is that they'll perhaps sue you if you have a marketing campaign that causes confusion in consumers whether the product is affiliated with the Super Bowl.
It would sound to me like a radio station giving away tickets could probably take the risk of saying Super Bowl all the time, as they're not saying they're the official radio station of the Super Bowl or anything like that, and it's unlikely that any jury would find that this would cause confusion in the consumer, but the decision of whether to take that risk lies with the station owners and their lawyers.
The easiest problem to attack here is that it's too easy to open a credit card account. If this were made a grueling, lengthy process requiring written correspondence, with extra safeguards for changing addresses, then all the credit card side of identity theft would be mooted.
The FTC website says that if you're the victim of identity theft, you can contact the credit bureaus to put a FRAUD WARNING on the top of your credit card report. This makes me wonder whether we should all just do this anyway.
I have read that in Europe, getting a credit card is difficult and not instantaneous, and that identity theft (at least, on the credit card side) is less of a problem.
The design of the reactor itself seems safe, but the proponents are ignoring the fact that after its 30 year lifespan, what is left over is going to remain radioactive for the next 10,000 years. After putting up some yellow police tape around the area, who is to say that the reactor building itself won't corrode and decay in the next hundred or two hundred years, and then the secondary nuclear waste is exposed to ground water?
Parent comment is correct. Game companies have no motivation to optimize games for multiple CPU's. Over 99 percent of game consumers have single-CPU systems, and the game developers and publishers will always choose (correctly) to assign a programmer to some game feature rather than to assign a programmer to make the game ~twice as fast on the systems of 1% of their consumers.
You could not prove to any court that NVidia is using deceit. NVidia improved their driver so that a certain set of operations runs faster. There is nothing deceitful about this.
Even if they were to state on the box that they have the card that performs best on the 3DMark2003 benchmark, it would still be a truthful statement. Logically, it's a flaw of the benchmark that it is able to be exploited.
If there is any deceit involved, it would be if someone were to claim that the result of this one benchmark conclusively proves that the NVidia card is superior.
How often do you see people using the phones? I would bet the airlines' cut of the phone usage barely pays for the extra fuel they have to carry to bear the load. (Seriously.) Some airlines have started to remove the Airfone units.
Assuming all the uninvented stuff gets invented, the proposal as-is has no solution for lightning, and admits that the first lightning strike may well destroy the cable. Increasing the cable's resistance may simply not work because of... rain, coating the cable. The 'solution' is to park the cable at the place on the equator that has the least lightning, but it's acknowledged that just one lightning strike would probably spell the end of everything.
What would be your actual dollar cost of spam, if you didn't spend much time and effort fighting it?
He didn't actually answer the question. It's too bad that we don't see more actual analysis rather than opinions. Are we really concerned about people in our society who are "on the fence" about e-mail and might decide not to use it, at all, because of spam?
Like the poster of question #7, I am also skeptical of the actual cost.
Slashdot Mirror
It is mind boggling. Dvorak is right.
One way to do shared use of your work that is pretty common is to say that the company owns the code and all associated copyrights and/or patents; and the company grants you a perpetual, fully-paid-up, nonrevocable license to use, license, copy, sell, distribute, and otherwise exploit all of the code you write, without notice. It can specify that the company
You do need to talk with a lawyer, unfortunately, to try to cover all the corner cases. It should only take an hour or two of his time if he has ever done this before. That should set you back around $300 to $600 total. Ask in advance if he can do it for $300 (or whatever you want to spend).
Rather than complaining to the Slashdot population that copyright laws are painfully outdated, how about actually changing the law? That's what your representative exists for.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/
Adblock and Duplicate Tab work. Are you running that Firefox extension that blasts spam to all the people in your Outlook contacts list?
Intel announced a year ago that they wanted all their chips to have wireless network connectivity. All their CHIPS. That's the point of this work.
'
Where is the actual study? Submission just points to an article about it.
On trademark infringement, companies don't sue other companies to try to cash in. They do it because if they don't attempt to protect their trademark, courts will rule that it isn't a trademark anymore and isn't protectible. Aspirin, Zipper.
Since when does "I barely know anything about this subject" translate to "definitely not cut and dried one way or another"?
If you pack more data in the pointers, you'll have applications that break in a few years when that extra address space is needed. Ask Apple what happened when they moved from the 68000 (32-bit addresses of which only 24 bits were used) to the Mac II's 68020 (32-bit addressing). Four Macs (the II, IIx, IIcx, and SE/30) actually had versions of QuickDraw in ROM using the top byte to pack extra data into the pointers, as you recommend, and then Apple had to patch the entire QuickDraw package in RAM to code around this. Untold numbers of apps broke also of course.
In 1991, I and everyone else was told by Apple, Intel, and Motorola that x86 was dead, the power consumption of the Pentium chip was ridiculous and you could roast a hot dog on it. It's doomed! RISC is the future!
Now it's 2005 and the x86 internal architecture has changed a lot, but x86 is, as the poster said, going to live on for a century or so.
Movement of the stock price post-IPO gets Google nothing, nothing. Pricing the shares at 105 and ending with a $5 loss would have netted the company about $1.5 billion more and they obviously would have chosen this if they had the option. They just didn't, and had to price it at $85 due to lower priced demand than anticipated.
The original poster was ignorant of how an IPO works with the claim that they netted a nice little gain after the IPO.
One was mine, when I was new to the Apple II. Irritatingly, a program locked up and the disk drive's access light remained on for several minutes! My solution was to yank the disk controller card out of slot 6 and plug it into slot 7, hoping this would stop the disk access and unfreeze the computer. Some funny text characters appeared in a few different places on the screen. "That's odd," I said, then removed the controller card from slot 7 and plugged it back into slot 6. Still nothing. I think some of the random characters on the screen started flashing. I gave up and rebooted the computer, which kept working fine, not to my surprise -- why on earth would it not work perfectly fine?
The other story is thirdhand: in Softalk Magazine, I recall a wonderful abuse story of this kind from a fellow whose house was flooded with mud. After dealing with all the things that are important in life, he retreived all his 5.25" floppy disks, put them on the lawn, and *hosed them off* with a garden hose. He reported that only about 30% of the disks had disk errors.
The following is the best e-mail idea of the last two years, and should be a feature of every e-mail program.
As a person who writes a lot of e-mail, or as a manger, one major organizational problem is simply not having your messages replied to. It currently takes a ton of manual effort to decide which of your e-mails need a followup by you. So much effort that nobody does it. Some questions fall through the cracks when you write a hundred e-mails a day. Closing up these cracks would measurably, demonstrably improve the effectiveness of managers, project coordinators, and any other heavy communicators, since e-mail has become the most important and most used mode of communication for a large number of people. (It is very rare to see a manager actually send out an e-mail asking "Was this resolved?" Generally, un-followed-up e-mail is simply forgotten.)
A system for followup could be partially automated.
1. A checkbox exists when writing an e-mail. If turned on, it tells the e-mail client, locally, that you want to make sure this e-mail has been followed up. I'll call this a "follow-this-up", or FTU, e-mail.
2. After an FTU e-mail has been sent, the e-mail client remembers it in a list. Once an FTU e-mail is sent, a copy of it is placed in a mail folder which I'll call the FTU folder. The user of the e-mail client can open this mail folder at any time to see the FTU e-mails that still have to be followed up.
3. When the client detects that a recipient of an FTU e-mail has replied to that e-mail, then it provisionally removes the FTU e-mail from the FTU folder. (Probably the e-mail is grayed out in the list but not actually removed.) Making this detection complete and thorough is an interesting problem. The starting point would probably be based on receiving an e-mail from the recipient with an appropriate subject line (e.g. the same subject line prefaced by FW: or Re: or Re[5]:). And in order to increase the effectiveness of this technique, the client might actually maintain a database of previously-used subject lines that are already in the FTU folder, and nag the user if he sends a second e-mail with the same subject, asking him to write a more elaborate Subject line.
Other starting techniques could include parsing the e-mail's content to see if part of the content matches an FTU e-mail that has been received. Or by utilizing e-mail fields or even implementing a new e-mail field which hopefully doesn't get stripped when the recipient replies.
This system, then, tries to ensure that after an FTU e-mail is sent, there is either a copy of the e-mail in the FTU folder so the user can see that the recipient hasn't followed up, and the user can follow up with a question; or there is a response from the recipient in the user's Inbox.
User interface is critical to making this system useful for the user:
4. When the client sees that an FTU e-mail has been replied to, it presumes that a followup has actually occurred. This obviously may not be true; the recipient may have responded with a joke, or with a followup question, or with "I'll get back to you Thursday". Presumably when you read a followup to an FTU e-mail, a new bar of UI should appear in the client saying to the user "This looks like a followup to an FTU e-mail you sent, which you can view by clicking here." Buttons would let the user choose things like "Yes, this resolves my FTU e-mail completely" or "No, I still need a followup", or "I now want my reply to this e-mail to be an FTU e-mail, and not the parent."
5. I imagine that the FTU folder displays its FTU e-mails in date order, showing the oldest non-followed-up e-mail at the top (colored red after 2 to 4 days or so). The user can mark these e-mail copies as already-followed-up (i.e. it's resolved, no more followup needed, because the recipient saw me in person and resolved it).
I don't think spoofing is a very great concern. The point of Lufthansa installing this is that business customers will fly Lufthansa and not BA. It's not to get thirty bucks.
If you were to report on the Super Bowl, you could say "Super Bowl" 500 times in a row without breathing and not get sued for anything. What the NFL is alleging is that they'll perhaps sue you if you have a marketing campaign that causes confusion in consumers whether the product is affiliated with the Super Bowl.
It would sound to me like a radio station giving away tickets could probably take the risk of saying Super Bowl all the time, as they're not saying they're the official radio station of the Super Bowl or anything like that, and it's unlikely that any jury would find that this would cause confusion in the consumer, but the decision of whether to take that risk lies with the station owners and their lawyers.
Stupid. Waah.
The easiest problem to attack here is that it's too easy to open a credit card account. If this were made a grueling, lengthy process requiring written correspondence, with extra safeguards for changing addresses, then all the credit card side of identity theft would be mooted.
The FTC website says that if you're the victim of identity theft, you can contact the credit bureaus to put a FRAUD WARNING on the top of your credit card report. This makes me wonder whether we should all just do this anyway.
I have read that in Europe, getting a credit card is difficult and not instantaneous, and that identity theft (at least, on the credit card side) is less of a problem.
The design of the reactor itself seems safe, but the proponents are ignoring the fact that after its 30 year lifespan, what is left over is going to remain radioactive for the next 10,000 years. After putting up some yellow police tape around the area, who is to say that the reactor building itself won't corrode and decay in the next hundred or two hundred years, and then the secondary nuclear waste is exposed to ground water?
Parent comment is correct. Game companies have no motivation to optimize games for multiple CPU's. Over 99 percent of game consumers have single-CPU systems, and the game developers and publishers will always choose (correctly) to assign a programmer to some game feature rather than to assign a programmer to make the game ~twice as fast on the systems of 1% of their consumers.
The QWERTY-slow typewriter story has been debunked. QWERTY forever!
You could not prove to any court that NVidia is using deceit. NVidia improved their driver so that a certain set of operations runs faster. There is nothing deceitful about this.
Even if they were to state on the box that they have the card that performs best on the 3DMark2003 benchmark, it would still be a truthful statement. Logically, it's a flaw of the benchmark that it is able to be exploited.
If there is any deceit involved, it would be if someone were to claim that the result of this one benchmark conclusively proves that the NVidia card is superior.
How often do you see people using the phones? I would bet the airlines' cut of the phone usage barely pays for the extra fuel they have to carry to bear the load. (Seriously.) Some airlines have started to remove the Airfone units.
Assuming all the uninvented stuff gets invented, the proposal as-is has no solution for lightning, and admits that the first lightning strike may well destroy the cable. Increasing the cable's resistance may simply not work because of ... rain, coating the cable. The 'solution' is to park the cable at the place on the equator that has the least lightning, but it's acknowledged that just one lightning strike would probably spell the end of everything.
What would be your actual dollar cost of spam, if you didn't spend much time and effort fighting it?
He didn't actually answer the question. It's too bad that we don't see more actual analysis rather than opinions. Are we really concerned about people in our society who are "on the fence" about e-mail and might decide not to use it, at all, because of spam?
Like the poster of question #7, I am also skeptical of the actual cost.
PS: I don't like spam