I will be remembering how funny/.'ers found this the next time somebody offers a software or hardware product which offends someone somewhere but has many legitimate uses. I don't have much sympathy for bill collectors as a whole but as someone who has on occasion had people not pay me (even though they have the money to pay) and simply ignore my attempts to get the money I understand how frustrating it is especially to small businesses. We don't want to get nasty about it but the system of annoying bill collectors calling you is far better than the one it replaced. Namely, bill collectors breaking your legs and stealing your stuff or getting you sent to debtor's prison.
I have been on both ends of the collections game and after just a month of this I can see why companies try to distance themselves from the nasty side of it and hire professional assholes to do the job
I think those who send these automated notices should be liable for legal fees and any other costs incurred by the recipient if they prove to be baseless or were sent because a human being did not check the content of the file in question.
You are really reaching there. By that logic playing my stereo loud enough for my neighbors to hear it or having a boombox on the beach is a public performance. In fact even having headphones on and having it loud enough for the person sitting next to you on the plane to hear the song could be a public performance by that logic.
Yes, except that political speech must be afforded the highest level of protection. Secondly he was clearly being arrested on orders from above because of his opinions not because of the possible defacement of the sidewalks. There are tens of thousands of illegal signs, posters, stickers, and leaflets that are defacing signs, sidewalks, and being littered throughout NYC on a daily basis but most of them have a commercial message. They knew he was coming down to demonstrate his bike and excercise his 1st ammendment rights and that is why he was arrested. He was being arrested for the content of his speech.
I bought the cable for my LG VX6000 phone and use some third party software bit_pm to upload ringtones that I make from any sound file. I just lower the quality a bit (soundforge free trial or any other editor) and make it mono and cut about 30-60 seconds out of an mp3 to make my ringtones then upload them to the phone. Took a fair amount of head scratching to get it all to work right but there is no reason to pay just to format shift the music you already have to a ringtone. Its amazing how the verizon software that comes with the cable can't even convert my phone book into a.csv but some guy in his spare time has managed to let me make my own ringtones.
This is why I support campaign finance reform when that reform includes provisions making corporate political contributions illegal. Corporations have the right to free speech but they do not have the right to fund campaigns because Corporations do not vote. Only voters should be allowed to donate to campaigns. Also the time period used to collect contributions should be cut down significantly to say no earlier than 6 months before the election. This will stop the outright bribery of incumbents who collect contributions that are basically bribes since they are probably in a solid district anyways. We do not allow foriegners to donate to campaigns in the U.S. and for-profit corporations should be similarly forbidden.
This sounds a lot like Robocop 2 where Robocop gets programmed with a few hundred directives related to being polite and healthy and all that other Nanny propoganda to the point where he is unable to function.
Perhaps movie studios should in addition to the previews which especially with the bad movies, tend to show the 5 minutes of good stuff only. Why not let people download say the first 15 minutes of a movie for free and then people can decide whether they want to pay to see the rest of it.
Lets say that this Twinkie represents the normal amount of junk research, junk science, and FUD produced by special interest groups and picked up by the media. Judging from this morning's sample it would be a Twinkie thirty-five feet long, weighing approximately six hundred pounds.
Tried to post this a few hours ago but they must have cut off my internet connection to stop me.
The Olympics are not about sport. They are about money and jingoism. The why of this rule coming into place is easy. As to how they can legally enforce silence on thousands of athletes whose own first hand accounts are far more interesting than the talking head commentary on "ennnnn bee see" is mostly due to how copyright laws have been twisted to the point where it would probably be better for the vast majority of us, who don't own TV stations, if there was no such thing as copyright.
The difference between news and entertainment blurred and now it is no surprise that the entertainment conglomerates tell the news organizations (mostly owned by those same conglomerates) that they have to pay to report the score of a football (or any other pro sport) game played in a stadium that taxpayers paid for.
Aside from a once or twice a year trip to Camden Yards to get a Boog's barbecue sandwich I really have no interest in Professional or College athletics because it has nothing to do with sport or competition and everything to do with making a ton of money by controling every aspect of perception of a publicly funded event.
The IOC, the MLB, the NBA, and NFL and all the others can keep their steroid chomping illiterate super-athletes because if I want to have fun I am gonna go play my own game until they sue me for kicking a ball around without a license.
How long do you think he waited to tell the airline people he was a US Senator? How long after he said the S word was he allowed on the plane. How many levels of airline idiots did he have to go through before he got to one who knew what a US Senator is?
In the event an airline says they can't let me on the plane and they can't tell me why. I will just tell them that I work for Haliburton. I will probably fly for free.
I would just like to mention that one of the biggest problems of it becoming feasible to find a collision in MD5 is that a lot of routers use MD5 to authenticate routing updates with one another. If a hash is sniffed and the password is cracked then it becomes a trivial matter to inject bad routing updates and crash large networks especially if the inter-ISP BGP links are cracked. Its not quite as simple as I put it here but it is possible.
What Free Software does is make the knowledge and skills and the people who have them valuable and not just the intelectual property that they create.
FOSS means that the software is there to be used by all but you still need people capable of integrating it, modifying it, setting it up, monitoring it and supporting it. Knowledge of a product becomes more valuable than the product itself.
This is good for the great mass of businesses that shell out billions for overpriced software that barely works. This is even better for IT workers in general because creating a product and then firing all the people who helped code it and design it will no longer be an easy way to make money.
The commodization of software will not destroy people's jobs, rather it will make many jobs more secure. It will become necesary for software companies to retain their developers who have valuable knowledge of a product because the product without the support that comes with it is worthless. Companies that stick to the old model are already finding it difficult to compete with FOSS software.
GPL software will very likely increase the number of in-house programmers that companies hire because modification for in-house use is not subject to the mandatory release of source code.
FOSS requires companies to support their products in order to make money, not just sell them and tell their disgruntled customers to re-read their EULA's and take a hike.
FOSS will gradually increase free public access to a wide variety of software and stop forcing companies and individuals to reinvent the wheel. Software development will advance because it will not be necesary to redo the work of others or buy expensive licenses to develop new ideas for a wide variety of software. FOSS software will do what the public domain was not able to, guarantee that a wide ranging body of software related knowledge is free for everyone to use.
I started as an Business Info Systems major and after discovering that my major consisted of learning everything there is to know about Powerpoint for 3 semesters and then moving onto Access for the next 3 I decided that I either had to change schools or change majors.
It seems likely to me that biometrics are the way to go. With all the passwords I now have to remember both at home and at work I have begun to care less and less about keeping my retina or fingerprint away from any computer storage systems that might be used to invade my privacy later. A fingerprint or retinal scan or even voice recognition to one-way hashing mechanism (for privacy protection) could be very effective when tied to an accounting and privilege management system. One person one password. An employee leaves you simply suspend their account and assign their priveliges to their replacement if needed. My last job that I left ended up with me emailing them about a dozen passwords to virtually their entire internal IT system and web presence (small company). Granted all of those passwords (aside from my own email account) had been written down and given to management but lets just say they never really paid any attention to things like that. Biometrics means never ever having to give passwords over email to old bosses after you leave your job.
Free lunch and gyms in the building seem very Japanese style to me. Its a way of reducing overall stress for the employees. By not having to worry about where you are going for lunch (and by not having to pay for it) you reduce the daily stress. Also its a small, relatively, cheap gift to employees that breeds goodwill. It also increases the amount of time worked and reduces the issue of people taking too long for lunch. My last job was awful and the pay sucked but the occasional free lunch day made it bearable long enough to make a little money and get out.
And to those who say the program is weak there. I have to ask, what program isn't weak? Colleges have almost total control over what classes their degree programs require. They conform to certain basic elements for accreditation purposes but in most majors they still have a lot of room to make their own rules and they do. I was in a Business Info Systems program where the first three major classes were just meaningless Jargon and MOUS courses (without the actual tests of course). In some programs an engineering degree is almost entirely engineering, math and science courses because that is how engineering programs used to be. A liberal arts education is a great for those who want it but it does not "teach you to think" and the lack thereof does not make you an ignorant code-monkey. I think people greatly overestimate the importance of formal education and apply a much more rigid standard of competence to those who have not had one to those who have had one even when the idiocy of those who bullshitted their way to a degree when they can barely read makes itself apparent in seconds.
Anything that gives traditional colleges something to worry about is good. Its called healthy competition.
Northface.edu runs 47 weeks a year and the program is composed of ten 10-week quarters.
10 quarters x 10 weeks=100 weeks of class in two years as opposed to 8 semesters x 13 weeks=104 weeks of class in four years.
Its a 4 year degree just a faster, cheaper (by a little bit), stronger one with additional benefits.
It makes you wonder why traditional colleges don't do this. Perhaps it is because they like raking in inflated housing fees and food sales and the annual tuition hikes. Perhaps they are simply milking their aging business model of enslaving their grad students and treating undergrads like cattel instead of customers. For Profit Colleges and technical schools continue to innovate and traditional colleges are still living in the 1950's.
IANAL but this is my understanding. The domain was registered before the book was published and Penguin and Tarball are just trying to pressure Jones into giving up the name even though they have plenty of money with which to buy it from her. Let the bidding start at $100,000. Jones can sell the domain to whoever she wants because just because she is no longer owning does not mean that Tarball somehow gets priority.
The title of the book was a bad choice unless they intended to purchase the domain. Of course if you want to sell books on this topic then the best thing is to name the book something that will resonate with the potential readers. Like: "thebadmantouchedme.com"
Personally that book always looked like it had been written by a team at the Lifetime network. Just another "...Not... my... daughter..." man-bashing Linda Hamilton special if you ask me.
Well if they tried to enforce an illegal non-compete agreement or just did it to harrass you (they are illegal in California altogether) you might have something to sue them about. IANAL
Also it appears that some states (Virginia is one) do have laws on the books that make it illegal for you to poach clients from your boss before you quit and even in california you can't "steal" a client list and try to get them to leave with you.
Americans use the metric system all the time. Its just that we only use it when we are buying and selling drugs. We pretend not to know it mostly because it annoys the French so much. And that is a cause just about everyone can get behind.
Would you Europeans stop whispering to each other, "maybe next time they will vote for someone else," because at this point I think I can repeat it in about 5 languages.
We are waiting for you to liberate us. And yes we have weapons of mass destruction.
A non-compete agreement has to be limited in scope and reasonable and include some kind of consideration for it to be valid. In many cases overly broad NC agreements were limited by the judge deciding the case or in some cases thrown out altogether. Depending on what state you live in Non-compete agreements may be harder to enforce. In Maryland where I live, it is pretty much impossible to enforce them since it is the position of the state that you cannot be prevented from earning a living in your chosen profession. Now client poaching from your employer is somewhat unethical but not illegal. There is also nothing wrong with leaving your job to work directly for a client of theirs since that it just using the contacts you built up at your other job which is how people find good jobs. If you work for Oracle in and later you get a job as the IT purchasing manager or Database manager with a big client of theirs, Oracle is a fool if they cry foul about it.
For a non-compete to be valid it generally must be limited. It can't stop you from working in your field forever and anywhere. It has to specify a region of non-competition like the city the employer is in or the county. It also has to be for a limited and reasonable amount of time. And there has to be some consideration (ie money) coming to you in exchange for agreeing to this.
Remember there is no such thing as a "standard contract" in anything and if you don't like something in a contract ask them about it. If you have a specific project you don't want them to own then make them exclude that in the contract.
A lot of times companies barely look at their "standard contracts" and often there are some strange provisions that don't really match to the job. I got an intership and they gave me a contract that included ownership of inventions and an agreement to not hold any other job. Obviously a 3 day a week intership does not need such provisions. So I said they needed to change those things and they gave me a different contract.
I am not entirely sure but I believe I read somewhere that several Western European Countries. UK, France, Germany do not allow class action lawsuits so they would have to be excluded.
Slashdot Mirror
I will be remembering how funny /.'ers found this the next time somebody offers a software or hardware product which offends someone somewhere but has many legitimate uses. I don't have much sympathy for bill collectors as a whole but as someone who has on occasion had people not pay me (even though they have the money to pay) and simply ignore my attempts to get the money I understand how frustrating it is especially to small businesses. We don't want to get nasty about it but the system of annoying bill collectors calling you is far better than the one it replaced. Namely, bill collectors breaking your legs and stealing your stuff or getting you sent to debtor's prison.
I have been on both ends of the collections game and after just a month of this I can see why companies try to distance themselves from the nasty side of it and hire professional assholes to do the job
I think those who send these automated notices should be liable for legal fees and any other costs incurred by the recipient if they prove to be baseless or were sent because a human being did not check the content of the file in question.
If you give a mouse a laser he is going to want to take over the world.
You are really reaching there. By that logic playing my stereo loud enough for my neighbors to hear it or having a boombox on the beach is a public performance. In fact even having headphones on and having it loud enough for the person sitting next to you on the plane to hear the song could be a public performance by that logic.
Its a rare thing to be so wrong.
Yes, except that political speech must be afforded the highest level of protection. Secondly he was clearly being arrested on orders from above because of his opinions not because of the possible defacement of the sidewalks. There are tens of thousands of illegal signs, posters, stickers, and leaflets that are defacing signs, sidewalks, and being littered throughout NYC on a daily basis but most of them have a commercial message. They knew he was coming down to demonstrate his bike and excercise his 1st ammendment rights and that is why he was arrested. He was being arrested for the content of his speech.
I bought the cable for my LG VX6000 phone and use some third party software bit_pm to upload ringtones that I make from any sound file. I just lower the quality a bit (soundforge free trial or any other editor) and make it mono and cut about 30-60 seconds out of an mp3 to make my ringtones then upload them to the phone. Took a fair amount of head scratching to get it all to work right but there is no reason to pay just to format shift the music you already have to a ringtone. Its amazing how the verizon software that comes with the cable can't even convert my phone book into a .csv but some guy in his spare time has managed to let me make my own ringtones.
This is why I support campaign finance reform when that reform includes provisions making corporate political contributions illegal. Corporations have the right to free speech but they do not have the right to fund campaigns because Corporations do not vote. Only voters should be allowed to donate to campaigns. Also the time period used to collect contributions should be cut down significantly to say no earlier than 6 months before the election. This will stop the outright bribery of incumbents who collect contributions that are basically bribes since they are probably in a solid district anyways. We do not allow foriegners to donate to campaigns in the U.S. and for-profit corporations should be similarly forbidden.
This sounds a lot like Robocop 2 where Robocop gets programmed with a few hundred directives related to being polite and healthy and all that other Nanny propoganda to the point where he is unable to function.
Perhaps movie studios should in addition to the previews which especially with the bad movies, tend to show the 5 minutes of good stuff only. Why not let people download say the first 15 minutes of a movie for free and then people can decide whether they want to pay to see the rest of it.
Lets say that this Twinkie represents the normal amount of junk research, junk science, and FUD produced by special interest groups and picked up by the media. Judging from this morning's sample it would be a Twinkie thirty-five feet long, weighing approximately six hundred pounds.
Tried to post this a few hours ago but they must have cut off my internet connection to stop me.
The Olympics are not about sport. They are about money and jingoism. The why of this rule coming into place is easy. As to how they can legally enforce silence on thousands of athletes whose own first hand accounts are far more interesting than the talking head commentary on "ennnnn bee see" is mostly due to how copyright laws have been twisted to the point where it would probably be better for the vast majority of us, who don't own TV stations, if there was no such thing as copyright.
The difference between news and entertainment blurred and now it is no surprise that the entertainment conglomerates tell the news organizations (mostly owned by those same conglomerates) that they have to pay to report the score of a football (or any other pro sport) game played in a stadium that taxpayers paid for.
Aside from a once or twice a year trip to Camden Yards to get a Boog's barbecue sandwich I really have no interest in Professional or College athletics because it has nothing to do with sport or competition and everything to do with making a ton of money by controling every aspect of perception of a publicly funded event.
The IOC, the MLB, the NBA, and NFL and all the others can keep their steroid chomping illiterate super-athletes because if I want to have fun I am gonna go play my own game until they sue me for kicking a ball around without a license.
How long do you think he waited to tell the airline people he was a US Senator? How long after he said the S word was he allowed on the plane. How many levels of airline idiots did he have to go through before he got to one who knew what a US Senator is?
In the event an airline says they can't let me on the plane and they can't tell me why. I will just tell them that I work for Haliburton. I will probably fly for free.
I would just like to mention that one of the biggest problems of it becoming feasible to find a collision in MD5 is that a lot of routers use MD5 to authenticate routing updates with one another. If a hash is sniffed and the password is cracked then it becomes a trivial matter to inject bad routing updates and crash large networks especially if the inter-ISP BGP links are cracked. Its not quite as simple as I put it here but it is possible.
What Free Software does is make the knowledge and skills and the people who have them valuable and not just the intelectual property that they create.
FOSS means that the software is there to be used by all but you still need people capable of integrating it, modifying it, setting it up, monitoring it and supporting it. Knowledge of a product becomes more valuable than the product itself.
This is good for the great mass of businesses that shell out billions for overpriced software that barely works. This is even better for IT workers in general because creating a product and then firing all the people who helped code it and design it will no longer be an easy way to make money.
The commodization of software will not destroy people's jobs, rather it will make many jobs more secure. It will become necesary for software companies to retain their developers who have valuable knowledge of a product because the product without the support that comes with it is worthless. Companies that stick to the old model are already finding it difficult to compete with FOSS software.
GPL software will very likely increase the number of in-house programmers that companies hire because modification for in-house use is not subject to the mandatory release of source code.
FOSS requires companies to support their products in order to make money, not just sell them and tell their disgruntled customers to re-read their EULA's and take a hike.
FOSS will gradually increase free public access to a wide variety of software and stop forcing companies and individuals to reinvent the wheel. Software development will advance because it will not be necesary to redo the work of others or buy expensive licenses to develop new ideas for a wide variety of software. FOSS software will do what the public domain was not able to, guarantee that a wide ranging body of software related knowledge is free for everyone to use.
I have found there are a lot of women in the graphics and web design fields.
I started as an Business Info Systems major and after discovering that my major consisted of learning everything there is to know about Powerpoint for 3 semesters and then moving onto Access for the next 3 I decided that I either had to change schools or change majors.
It seems likely to me that biometrics are the way to go. With all the passwords I now have to remember both at home and at work I have begun to care less and less about keeping my retina or fingerprint away from any computer storage systems that might be used to invade my privacy later. A fingerprint or retinal scan or even voice recognition to one-way hashing mechanism (for privacy protection) could be very effective when tied to an accounting and privilege management system. One person one password. An employee leaves you simply suspend their account and assign their priveliges to their replacement if needed. My last job that I left ended up with me emailing them about a dozen passwords to virtually their entire internal IT system and web presence (small company). Granted all of those passwords (aside from my own email account) had been written down and given to management but lets just say they never really paid any attention to things like that. Biometrics means never ever having to give passwords over email to old bosses after you leave your job.
Free lunch and gyms in the building seem very Japanese style to me. Its a way of reducing overall stress for the employees. By not having to worry about where you are going for lunch (and by not having to pay for it) you reduce the daily stress. Also its a small, relatively, cheap gift to employees that breeds goodwill. It also increases the amount of time worked and reduces the issue of people taking too long for lunch. My last job was awful and the pay sucked but the occasional free lunch day made it bearable long enough to make a little money and get out.
And to those who say the program is weak there. I have to ask, what program isn't weak? Colleges have almost total control over what classes their degree programs require. They conform to certain basic elements for accreditation purposes but in most majors they still have a lot of room to make their own rules and they do. I was in a Business Info Systems program where the first three major classes were just meaningless Jargon and MOUS courses (without the actual tests of course). In some programs an engineering degree is almost entirely engineering, math and science courses because that is how engineering programs used to be. A liberal arts education is a great for those who want it but it does not "teach you to think" and the lack thereof does not make you an ignorant code-monkey. I think people greatly overestimate the importance of formal education and apply a much more rigid standard of competence to those who have not had one to those who have had one even when the idiocy of those who bullshitted their way to a degree when they can barely read makes itself apparent in seconds.
Anything that gives traditional colleges something to worry about is good. Its called healthy competition.
Northface.edu runs 47 weeks a year and the program is composed of ten 10-week quarters.
10 quarters x 10 weeks=100 weeks of class in two years as opposed to 8 semesters x 13 weeks=104 weeks of class in four years.
Its a 4 year degree just a faster, cheaper (by a little bit), stronger one with additional benefits.
It makes you wonder why traditional colleges don't do this. Perhaps it is because they like raking in inflated housing fees and food sales and the annual tuition hikes. Perhaps they are simply milking their aging business model of enslaving their grad students and treating undergrads like cattel instead of customers. For Profit Colleges and technical schools continue to innovate and traditional colleges are still living in the 1950's.
IANAL but this is my understanding. The domain was registered before the book was published and Penguin and Tarball are just trying to pressure Jones into giving up the name even though they have plenty of money with which to buy it from her. Let the bidding start at $100,000. Jones can sell the domain to whoever she wants because just because she is no longer owning does not mean that Tarball somehow gets priority.
The title of the book was a bad choice unless they intended to purchase the domain. Of course if you want to sell books on this topic then the best thing is to name the book something that will resonate with the potential readers. Like: "thebadmantouchedme.com"
Personally that book always looked like it had been written by a team at the Lifetime network. Just another "...Not... my... daughter..." man-bashing Linda Hamilton special if you ask me.
Well if they tried to enforce an illegal non-compete agreement or just did it to harrass you (they are illegal in California altogether) you might have something to sue them about. IANAL
Also it appears that some states (Virginia is one) do have laws on the books that make it illegal for you to poach clients from your boss before you quit and even in california you can't "steal" a client list and try to get them to leave with you.
Americans use the metric system all the time. Its just that we only use it when we are buying and selling drugs. We pretend not to know it mostly because it annoys the French so much. And that is a cause just about everyone can get behind.
Would you Europeans stop whispering to each other, "maybe next time they will vote for someone else," because at this point I think I can repeat it in about 5 languages.
We are waiting for you to liberate us. And yes we have weapons of mass destruction.
A non-compete agreement has to be limited in scope and reasonable and include some kind of consideration for it to be valid. In many cases overly broad NC agreements were limited by the judge deciding the case or in some cases thrown out altogether. Depending on what state you live in Non-compete agreements may be harder to enforce. In Maryland where I live, it is pretty much impossible to enforce them since it is the position of the state that you cannot be prevented from earning a living in your chosen profession. Now client poaching from your employer is somewhat unethical but not illegal. There is also nothing wrong with leaving your job to work directly for a client of theirs since that it just using the contacts you built up at your other job which is how people find good jobs. If you work for Oracle in and later you get a job as the IT purchasing manager or Database manager with a big client of theirs, Oracle is a fool if they cry foul about it.
For a non-compete to be valid it generally must be limited. It can't stop you from working in your field forever and anywhere. It has to specify a region of non-competition like the city the employer is in or the county. It also has to be for a limited and reasonable amount of time. And there has to be some consideration (ie money) coming to you in exchange for agreeing to this.
Remember there is no such thing as a "standard contract" in anything and if you don't like something in a contract ask them about it. If you have a specific project you don't want them to own then make them exclude that in the contract.
A lot of times companies barely look at their "standard contracts" and often there are some strange provisions that don't really match to the job. I got an intership and they gave me a contract that included ownership of inventions and an agreement to not hold any other job. Obviously a 3 day a week intership does not need such provisions. So I said they needed to change those things and they gave me a different contract.
I am not entirely sure but I believe I read somewhere that several Western European Countries. UK, France, Germany do not allow class action lawsuits so they would have to be excluded.