While I agree that the question of restrictions needs to be thought out, I also think that the whole "they will be able to buy it when they graduate for a nominal fee" is retarded, as in "Ain't gonna happen." Would you want to buy a 6-year-old computer that's been dragged back and forth between home and school on a daily basis, and is probably obsolete as all hell?
Also, why not just spring for cheaper linux laptops, and just give them for free at the end of the 6 years? You'll save more up-front than you'd ever get on the back end with a "nominal fee", you won't have to pay for an OS update at the 3-year point, and you can upgrade the hard drive, ram, and wireless card easily and cheaply.
Heck, buy Windows laptops and then ask for a rebate on each unused copy of the OS.
There are no "game mechanics" that are "innovative enough" to meat the standard of being an "invention", and patentable in most board games (Mousetrap is the only possible exception that readily comes to mind).
GM makes crappy cars? And just who is this 'GM' person?
Could you define 'crappy car' in such a way that does not implicate the working members of the UAW?
I could, but I won't. The union is just as guilty as GM. By fighting automation, they made themselves uncompetitive. If they had realized that the only way to compete, and preserve most jobs, was to encourage GM to invest in robots, they wouldn't now be facing massive layoffs, and GM wouldn't be losing so much on every car they make, and not having enough $$$ to build quality into their cars.
Hell yes. One bus driver here made $102,000.00 last year. Why? Compulsory double and triple-time rates for driving on holidays, overtime, etc. - all thanks to his union.
Do you want to need permission from the union leaders before you can get a pay rise, or to have your pay limited to your inferior colleagues?
Unions aren't always about "equal pay for everyone regardless of quality." There's working conditions, compensation for overtime, right to refuse death-march-style working hours, collective bargaining to fight unjust actions by employers, proper notice for layoffs, a pool of sick days, vacations, etc.
I guess you were never in a union, if you think it's as inflexible as you seem to...
Do you think it might be that GM makes crap cars nobody wants because they don't have the money for proper development? They make what they know because the Union pensions and asinine wages for people putting bolts on are bleeding the company dry
GM got into the present pickle by not investing in more automation when times were good. Instead, they took the short-term approach of paying bonuses, dividends, etc. Now they're paying the price of having spent their seed corn... Toyota, which invested more in automation, can produce a car with fewer hours of labor, so they can sell a car at a profit, keep assembly lines open, and retain more of their workforce over the long haul. Their workers understood that robots didn't take away jobs permanently - they provided the basis for growing the business.
The problem with GM is that they didn't automate enough. Toyota takes fewer man-hours per vehicle, which makes the difference between profit and loss. GM didn't make the investment because that would have hurt the short-term bottom line - and Wagoner's stock options wouldn't have been worth as much. Fuck him, and the horse he rode in on. He should be fired immediately. The fact that the board hasn't done this shows that they also don't understand the underlying cause.
My old man was a pipefitter/welder who specialized in powerplants and pipelines.. and yes, he needed a union to keep them from working him and his crew literally to death in places like Alaska and fifty stories up on a cooling tower. As far as IT needing a union, get over it. We're a white-collar commodity.
So, what about death march projects and uncompensated overtime? A union can fix that. As for being a "white-collar commodity", so what? Unions aren't just for blue-collar jobs.
Then you need to consider the highly competitive IT environment. A lot of companies simply aren't healthy enough to support a union. And having a union puts that company at a competitive disadvantage compared to other companies.
If they can "support" a union for other parts of their operations, why should IT workers get it in the neck?
Unions aren't just about money. They're also about working conditions, unpaid overtime, getting the "death march" mentality under control, holding managements' feet to the fire when a project fails because of bad communications or mismanagement, etc., rather than blaming the coders who did the best they could to polish a turd.
Out of curiosity, how many of the people supporting this bill would have objections to management walking around a company asking employees to sign a "no" card?
Because it amounts to the same thing.
... this is the sort of tactic that was used to decertify unions... the whole "just sign a petition" thing is to prevent just such tactics. We do it a bit differently here. The union only needs to get 50% + 1 employee in a particular department to sign union cards. The rep then
sends a 1-page form to the government, along with proof of the signatures
goes to management and says "I have signed cards from more than half the employees in department "X" in my shirt pocket. We've applied for certification, and no, you're not allowed to see who signed.
In the event of a dispute, either side can go to the courts, or the union can call a strike. If the workers strike, anti-scab laws keep the company from hiring replacement workers - current management only have to fill in, which gets old fast.
I'm not so sure that an IT union would be as strong as other unions. Most unions work because they have the power to shut down or severely hamper production. While I realize outsourcing to India or China is a hindrance to production, it does allow for a simple union busting strategy.
Unions generally have a rule about their members not working with "scabs", which would make it harder to outsource, not easier. Unless you're ready and able to outsource EVERYTHING, which, for most operations, isn't possible.
Toyota gives the competitors a tour of theor plants, because they aren't worried about anyone eating their lunch. They figure it spurs competition, and makes them better.
It's not the labor costs per se that make GM uncompetitive, but the lack of automation. It takes more man-hours per vehicle for GM than for Toyota, so while GM sells cars at a loss, Toyota makes a profit.
Aren't the rules of the game covered by copyright?
Yup. And that's basically what Hasbro was alleging in the copyright portion of their complaint, that there are no rules to Scrabulous, that "a user not already familiar with the rules of the SCRABBLE crossword game would not know how to play "Scrabulous," and "until earlier this year, defendants included on their website hyperlinks to official SCRABBLE webpages, resources such as the official SCRABBLE rules, and also other websites offering unauthorized and infringing versions of SCRABBLE."
Hasbro was claiming that the creators of Scrabulous infringed their copyrights on the official rulebook and game dictionary.
Wrong.
Read the link I posted - it's from the US Copyright Office. The rules of a game are NOT covered by copyright. What IS covered is the actual text, same as an original story would be covered. If you can express the rules using different words, you're good to go.
While Hasbro originally made a lot of noise about infringing the rules, they had to back off of that particular charge. They then went after the look of the board - one of the layouts exactly duplicated the point values of Scrabble. The devs changed that, made the letters round instead of square, stopped linking to Scrabble's official rules, and Hasbro no longer had the ghost of a claim, which is why this didn't go to court.
As for the rules, you can make a game with the same rules - as the US Copyright Office will tell you - you just can't copy, word for word, the rules someone else wrote because that particular expression of the rules is copyright.
GM used to have over 50% of the domestic market - now it's below 20%. You don't lose almost 2/3 of your market without a reason... and that reason is that people, more and more, don't want their cars. They're coasting on inertia.
The article speaks about people possibly being intimidated into signing a petition to unionize.
Let's see how many people already feel intimidated to the point where they have to post as AC if they want to say anything good about this idea.
And for all those that blame GMs' problems on the unions, wake up - GM makes crap cars nobody wants - THAT is the problem with GM.
Have I ever been a member of a union? Yes - the Steelworkers (they don't just organize steel plants, you know:-)
Would I ever again join a union? Sure, depending on the circumstances.
Do I think unions are practical for IT? Yes. The image of the code-worker who is "too independent-thinking" to join a union is a self-defeating myth. Get over yourselves already. If nurses and bus drivers can have unions, why not IT workers?
The idea for a game is not protected by copyright. The same is true of the name or title given to the game and of the method or methods for playing it.
Copyright protects only the particular manner of an author's expression in literary, artistic, or musical form. Copyright protection does not extend to any idea, system, method, device, or trademark material involved in the development, merchandising, or playing of a game. Once a game has been made public, nothing in the copyright law prevents others from developing another game based on similar principles.
In other words, the artwork is copyrightable, but neither the rules of the game, nor the method of play, is. That's simply the law.
Is it going to degrade after the person dies? I would assume it degrades because the LIVING person's body flushes it out of the system. If the person died while this was stuck in their artery, it probably wouldn't degrade.
People die long after they dumped the burger that made that fatal fat deposit... the beauty of this is that the scaffoldig breaks down, the tissue starts floating around, and who knows WHERE it ends up? If there's a brain clot, nobody's going to track its' former place of residence to a now-long-gone injection in the victims' rear end.
Write some stuff in C#/.NET sometime. Especially the embedded version. You'll see why. Every time MS puts out some patch...stuff breaks. Why? Because they do crap like this.
I was *going* to say that I stopped coding for Windows a LONG time ago, but it's more like an INT:-)
It would have bio-degraded long before the person keels over from an apparent "clot" during heavy exertion. That extra order of fries isn't immediately fatal, you know...
If you manage to get tissue forming in, say, a vital artery, who's to say that they won't drop dead long after the tissue is formed? Take a look at today's obese 15-year-olds with the arteries of 45-year-olds. They'll die earlier, but it's not directly traceable to which of the 50 Big Macs a month they're eating today.
Just about everything from this to a piece of string could be used as a grisly murder weapon, although this seems a like a novel discovery thats a lot has interesting practical uses.
Yes, but how many murder weapons then leave the crime scene picture-perfect - "They died of natural causes - a clot in a vital organ | artery | whatever"?
Inject someone, let it form a scaffold for tissue to clot and block vital organs, and then it degrades, leaving no trace. Sure beats those KGB umbrella poison injectors.
Someone forgot to future-proof their language. 10 years from now, when you're running a 128-bit cpu with a quarter-terrabyte of ram, those 32-bit signed ints are going to look mighty quaint. "What do you mean, I can't store the [file size|number of inodes|ipv6 address|whatever] in a 128-bit int? What do you mean, 128-bit java doesn't have 128-bit ints? You're shitting me, right? This is 2018... what's gonna happen in 2038 - we gonna have a 2k38 java problem? No? Why should I believe you? You can't even right-size your ints..."
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While I agree that the question of restrictions needs to be thought out, I also think that the whole "they will be able to buy it when they graduate for a nominal fee" is retarded, as in "Ain't gonna happen." Would you want to buy a 6-year-old computer that's been dragged back and forth between home and school on a daily basis, and is probably obsolete as all hell?
Also, why not just spring for cheaper linux laptops, and just give them for free at the end of the 6 years? You'll save more up-front than you'd ever get on the back end with a "nominal fee", you won't have to pay for an OS update at the 3-year point, and you can upgrade the hard drive, ram, and wireless card easily and cheaply.
Heck, buy Windows laptops and then ask for a rebate on each unused copy of the OS.
There are no "game mechanics" that are "innovative enough" to meat the standard of being an "invention", and patentable in most board games (Mousetrap is the only possible exception that readily comes to mind).
I could, but I won't. The union is just as guilty as GM. By fighting automation, they made themselves uncompetitive. If they had realized that the only way to compete, and preserve most jobs, was to encourage GM to invest in robots, they wouldn't now be facing massive layoffs, and GM wouldn't be losing so much on every car they make, and not having enough $$$ to build quality into their cars.
Hell yes. One bus driver here made $102,000.00 last year. Why? Compulsory double and triple-time rates for driving on holidays, overtime, etc. - all thanks to his union.
Unions aren't always about "equal pay for everyone regardless of quality." There's working conditions, compensation for overtime, right to refuse death-march-style working hours, collective bargaining to fight unjust actions by employers, proper notice for layoffs, a pool of sick days, vacations, etc.
I guess you were never in a union, if you think it's as inflexible as you seem to ...
GM got into the present pickle by not investing in more automation when times were good. Instead, they took the short-term approach of paying bonuses, dividends, etc. Now they're paying the price of having spent their seed corn ... Toyota, which invested more in automation, can produce a car with fewer hours of labor, so they can sell a car at a profit, keep assembly lines open, and retain more of their workforce over the long haul. Their workers understood that robots didn't take away jobs permanently - they provided the basis for growing the business.
The problem with GM is that they didn't automate enough. Toyota takes fewer man-hours per vehicle, which makes the difference between profit and loss. GM didn't make the investment because that would have hurt the short-term bottom line - and Wagoner's stock options wouldn't have been worth as much. Fuck him, and the horse he rode in on. He should be fired immediately. The fact that the board hasn't done this shows that they also don't understand the underlying cause.
[...bunch of bullshit snipped ...]
So, what about death march projects and uncompensated overtime? A union can fix that. As for being a "white-collar commodity", so what? Unions aren't just for blue-collar jobs.
If they can "support" a union for other parts of their operations, why should IT workers get it in the neck?
Unions aren't just about money. They're also about working conditions, unpaid overtime, getting the "death march" mentality under control, holding managements' feet to the fire when a project fails because of bad communications or mismanagement, etc., rather than blaming the coders who did the best they could to polish a turd.
In the event of a dispute, either side can go to the courts, or the union can call a strike. If the workers strike, anti-scab laws keep the company from hiring replacement workers - current management only have to fill in, which gets old fast.
Unions generally have a rule about their members not working with "scabs", which would make it harder to outsource, not easier. Unless you're ready and able to outsource EVERYTHING, which, for most operations, isn't possible.
Toyota gives the competitors a tour of theor plants, because they aren't worried about anyone eating their lunch. They figure it spurs competition, and makes them better.
It's not the labor costs per se that make GM uncompetitive, but the lack of automation. It takes more man-hours per vehicle for GM than for Toyota, so while GM sells cars at a loss, Toyota makes a profit.
Wrong.
Read the link I posted - it's from the US Copyright Office. The rules of a game are NOT covered by copyright. What IS covered is the actual text, same as an original story would be covered. If you can express the rules using different words, you're good to go.
While Hasbro originally made a lot of noise about infringing the rules, they had to back off of that particular charge. They then went after the look of the board - one of the layouts exactly duplicated the point values of Scrabble. The devs changed that, made the letters round instead of square, stopped linking to Scrabble's official rules, and Hasbro no longer had the ghost of a claim, which is why this didn't go to court.
As for the rules, you can make a game with the same rules - as the US Copyright Office will tell you - you just can't copy, word for word, the rules someone else wrote because that particular expression of the rules is copyright.
GM used to have over 50% of the domestic market - now it's below 20%. You don't lose almost 2/3 of your market without a reason ... and that reason is that people, more and more, don't want their cars. They're coasting on inertia.
The article speaks about people possibly being intimidated into signing a petition to unionize.
Let's see how many people already feel intimidated to the point where they have to post as AC if they want to say anything good about this idea.
And for all those that blame GMs' problems on the unions, wake up - GM makes crap cars nobody wants - THAT is the problem with GM.
Have I ever been a member of a union? Yes - the Steelworkers (they don't just organize steel plants, you know :-)
Would I ever again join a union? Sure, depending on the circumstances.
Do I think unions are practical for IT? Yes. The image of the code-worker who is "too independent-thinking" to join a union is a self-defeating myth. Get over yourselves already. If nurses and bus drivers can have unions, why not IT workers?
Law suits don't demonstrate this - it's the law at the US Copyright Office
The idea for a game is not protected by copyright. The same is true of the name or title given to the game and of the method or methods for playing it.
Copyright protects only the particular manner of an author's expression in literary, artistic, or musical form. Copyright protection does not extend to any idea, system, method, device, or trademark material involved in the development, merchandising, or playing of a game. Once a game has been made public, nothing in the copyright law prevents others from developing another game based on similar principles.
In other words, the artwork is copyrightable, but neither the rules of the game, nor the method of play, is. That's simply the law.
Sometimes a rewrite is good if it helps you take advantage of new instructions, or larger data sizes. eg: CMPXCHG
It's no longer that big a deal. It's not like the whole shift from 16 to 32 bits - people are more aware of the problems nowadays.
So you would propose that, unlike the other types, HugeInt not be a native type, but a class, with all the extra slowness that entails. Yuck.
People die long after they dumped the burger that made that fatal fat deposit ... the beauty of this is that the scaffoldig breaks down, the tissue starts floating around, and who knows WHERE it ends up? If there's a brain clot, nobody's going to track its' former place of residence to a now-long-gone injection in the victims' rear end.
I was *going* to say that I stopped coding for Windows a LONG time ago, but it's more like an INT :-)
It would have bio-degraded long before the person keels over from an apparent "clot" during heavy exertion. That extra order of fries isn't immediately fatal, you know ...
If you manage to get tissue forming in, say, a vital artery, who's to say that they won't drop dead long after the tissue is formed? Take a look at today's obese 15-year-olds with the arteries of 45-year-olds. They'll die earlier, but it's not directly traceable to which of the 50 Big Macs a month they're eating today.
Yes, but how many murder weapons then leave the crime scene picture-perfect - "They died of natural causes - a clot in a vital organ | artery | whatever"?
Inject someone, let it form a scaffold for tissue to clot and block vital organs, and then it degrades, leaving no trace. Sure beats those KGB umbrella poison injectors.
Well, if it were running on 64-bit java instead of 64-bit perl, it wouldn't - java ints are still only 32 bits in "64 bit java.
Someone forgot to future-proof their language. 10 years from now, when you're running a 128-bit cpu with a quarter-terrabyte of ram, those 32-bit signed ints are going to look mighty quaint. "What do you mean, I can't store the [file size|number of inodes|ipv6 address|whatever] in a 128-bit int? What do you mean, 128-bit java doesn't have 128-bit ints? You're shitting me, right? This is 2018 ... what's gonna happen in 2038 - we gonna have a 2k38 java problem? No? Why should I believe you? You can't even right-size your ints ..."