Our police have fairly respectable guidelines about what to put in their reports, at least most of the time. It's the fools who classify everything they can think of (including things like "Other") as speed-related who screw up the speed safety issue and warp the statistics.
As for the motorways, the argument usually seems to be that at 70mph, most cars don't have good enough headlights to see far enough ahead to stop comfortably in the event of something being in the road, someone who shouldn't be there, etc. At the kind of speeds some drivers do on our motorways, it's near impossible to judge distances safely based only on a pair of tail lights from a car in front that you're fast approaching. And of course, there's always the idiot coming the other way with main beam on, dazzling you to the point where you can't really see anything at all. Obviously this all goes even more for major non-motorway routes that don't have the same prohibitions on pedestrians, cyclists, lack of wildlife access and so on, and which can have much more "interesting" road layout. If I can find the original paper later on, I'll post a link, though unfortunately Googling for obvious things seems to turn up dozens of speed/anti-speed rants and not much else these days.
On that note, will it even be possible to customize the Ribbons in 2007?
Not unless the policy has changed very recently. The last statement I saw said explicitly that the ribbons would not be customisable. Apparently the vast majority of users don't customise their menus/toolbars, so maybe MS are learning from the hiding-menu-items fiasco.
Anything that helps keep control of the car, especially in slippery conditions is a good thing.
If other things were equal, sure. But other things aren't equal. Every time a new safety feature becomes compulsory on cars, it doesn't bring as much of a benefit as it should do, because certain types of person (including a high proportion of drivers) naturally compensate for the increased protection by taking more risks. Take a look at the stats from a few years before and after the compulsory introduction of something like seat belts, and you'll see the pattern pretty quickly.
Now, that's not to say you haven't got a point in theory. If everyone had the discipline to drive sensibly despite the safety features, we'd all be a lot safer. And although driving instructors like to say that skids are caused by driver error, and usually they'd be right, there are (very occasional) exceptions that even a skilled and experienced driver might not anticipate, and things like traction control and ABS can be useful for these.
Still, I think the grandparent makes a valid point, too. Technology that looks beneficial in principle can have surprising effects in practice, often for reasons entirely unrelated to the technology itself. In particular, "assistive" technology isn't guaranteed to get better results than someone skilled in the field would; it only needs to be better than the average, or even the least common denominator, to be marketable. There's a lot of this in typical Office software. Any skilled designer will come up with better formatting than the defaults in Word. Anyone who speaks good English won't trust the grammar checker.
That's an interesting page, but seems somewhat limited in scope.
For example, IIRC a recent research paper suggested that putting full time (when it's dark) street lights on all the UK's motorways would be the single most effective way to reduce motorway accidents, based on a study of the contributory factors in past accidents as recorded in police reports. (Sorry, no link on this PC, but it was on-line so I imagine hitting the magic keywords in Google will turn it up.)
In other words, context matters. Sometimes, things are good for one situation but work out badly in another.
I did watch the demo video on the Microsoft site -- and I use the term demo loosely, since half of it was uninformative marketeze -- and I'm afraid I wasn't that impressed. I gave them a fair chance to redeem themselves, but their interactive demo wouldn't play nicely for me, so the video is all I have.
My conclusion, as I've mentioned before, was simply that it's too much "pretty, pretty" and not enough real changes that actually make a difference to how easy it is to create useful documents. If they're committed to a big UI change but still worrying about the niceties of how the ribbon system will work, I fear Office 12 is going to a missed opportunity to shift the emphasis radically in other areas that could benefit from a fresh approach (styles and templates vs. ad-hoc formatting and copy-and-paste is the most obvious case, IMHO), which is a shame.
It's the reproduction that is illegal, the creation of a second copy.
Sure, but UIVMM different jurisdictions take different views on what constitutes the creation of a copy (and have different exceptions/exemptions where making a copy is explicitly not an infringement).
FWIW, the following advice seems to come up a lot in these discussions. I haven't interviewed much myself, so this is mostly my way of summarising second-hand information; take it with a pinch of salt.
Be friendly and confident, but don't try to be artificially authoritative. You won't carry it off, and since they're interviewing for a job with you there is enough implied authority on your side anyway.
Make written notes on key points, but don't become too focussed on it. Pay attention to the candidate at all times.
Ask enough sensible, relevant questions to get a fair idea of the candidate's abilities. Once you've got that, don't draw the interview out unnecessarily. The odd friendly comment or joke by either side is fine if it's natural, but beware straying too far off-topic.
Open-ended questions are often better than those with a specific "right answer". You can tell a lot about a person from how they approach an open-ended question. Remember that listening is a more valuable skill than speaking.
Talk positively. If you're gauging whether they'd fit with your company's working practices, ask if they'd be comfortable with X rather than whether they'd "have a problem" with Y. If you're talking about something that the candidate once did wrong, focus on how they recovered rather than the mistake.
Don't ask trick questions. They don't tell you anything useful about the candidate, and make you look like an ass.
Remember that interviews are two-way things. Give your candidate a fair chance to ask questions in return, preferably throughout the interview not just as an afterthought before the final handshake. Treat these the same way you'd treat questions if you were being interviewed yourself: pitch your company in a good light, but be honest and accurate.
Check with someone in your legal team/HR/whatever you have access to about any questions you're not allowed to ask because of discrimination laws. Age-related questions might well be relevant in your case. For example, the answer to "Would you be comfortable working for someone younger than you?" can be informative, but you may not be allowed to ask that question.
Using a single interviewer is not an ideal recruiting practice, because any one person might have preconceptions or pick up the wrong vibe even if well-intentioned. If your circumstances mean you're in this position, be careful not to let any personal preferences or prejudices colour your objective judgement.
The parent makes an excellent point, in that what Skreems and co. really seem to be testing for is people who match their approach. The implicit assumption that their approach is (a) the only one that works, or (b) better than everyone else's, is not going to help improve their business.
There is also the problem that interview processes are two-way things. You don't know me, so let's assume for the sake of argument that I am a good programmer who knows his stuff. The moment I walk up to the building of a prospective employer I am sizing the company up. The moment someone greets me (or leaves me hanging around in reception for ten minutes) I am gauging how much value the people at the company really place on colleagues. And when we get to the technical questions, I am definitely judging the technical competence of those who would hire me, and the quality of the code produced by the existing staff if I see any.
So, dear interviewers of the world, let me put this simply. I am interviewing you, too, and I expect you to know your stuff. I would not be here if I wasn't interested in your business, but I am confident of my own abilities, including my ability to find another job quickly if yours isn't up to scratch. And it will cost me a lot less than it will cost you if today is a waste of time.
What does this mean in practice? Well, everyone's different. Personally, I think vague questions are fine and expected. I'll seek clarification without a second thought, because that's how the game works. But if the interviewer is a smart-ass, or repeatedly makes elementary mistakes, I won't take it upon myself to educate them. I will simply judge them incompetent, and not take a job working with them.
Now, perhaps a lot of companies wouldn't want to hire someone like me. (They probably wouldn't like my non-negotiable rules on IP and my expectation that I will work the hours in my contract and not give them 50% more for free, either.) That's their decision, and I accept that my principles here will rule out some companies that I might have been happy working for. But just as an employer usually gets enough applications not to worry about missing the odd good one because there will be others, so it goes with good people and finding jobs.
As they say, first impressions count. This is particularly true of interviews, because you'll never really know whether someone is a good candidate or an employer is a good place to work until a few days into the job, so the recruitment process is really just an attempt to make the guesses more educated. In this context, I'd advise any employer who wants to recruit people who are good rather than merely young and enthusiastic (now) to stick to sensible interview techniques, and avoid the time-wasting and trick questions. You aren't really hurting anyone but yourselves with that kind of stuff.
You left out "more expensive." Yeah, sure, it's age discrimination, and it's illegal.
No, it's not age discrimination. It would be age discrimination if you hired the younger guy just because he was younger, when both guys cost the same amount.
(I don't know what jurisdiction this is in or any specific legal definition of age discrimination, but if the above isn't true, your law isn't written in English.)
A default judgment resolves the issue of liability, the first phase.... Yhere [sic] is no need for RIAA to prove anything to get the minimum relief provided for by statute (the number of violations having been decided in the liability phase).
I haven't seen anything so far that indicates the number of violations decided. In the TFA it says, "Given that the record companies' expert opined that the defendant had downloaded over 200 sound recordings during 2005, those requested damages will probably be substantial." Did the court accept this figure?
If that is the case, then does the number of downloads matter anyway? I thought under US law it was uploading that was the copyright infringement? I suppose they could be arguing that if P2P software is in use, any downloaded file was likely to be uploaded as well, but I though earlier case law had shown that the exact details had to be supplied for uploads. Maybe that was a different jurisdiction.
I would like to think that such a contract would be unenforcable. Indeed, here in the UK we are in the middle of the Gowers Review of intellectual property, and I raised this very issue with them.
In the meantime, though, I wouldn't go near such a contract without a lawyer.
"Apple" is perhaps an unfortunate example, being the name of both a computer company and a music company whose worlds collided with the invention of iTunes...
Well, speaking as someone who had a nasty encounter with a snake as a kid and has not exactly got on with them ever since... <shuddershuddershudder>
Personally, I'm not entirely surprised about the low ticket sales. Ophidiophobia is one of the most common human phobias, for obvious genetic reasons, and I doubt you're going to get many people with a fear of snakes to go see this one.
For a made-up word that doesn't exist in dictionary, the argument is fairly easy - there was no word for iPod or Microsoft before some marketing department invented it.
But, as DancesWithBlowTorch reminded us above, the point is not (or rather, is not supposed to be) whether a name can be used in the right context, it is to prevent the name being abused by someone who is essentially trading on the good name of another.
This is why I remain to be convinced about things like the old mikerowesoft site. Sure, it was a good joke, but was anyone really going to mistake a site with a cute name by a guy named Mike Rowe for the world's biggest software company? Of course not. It seems that the kid in question was happy with how that case worked out, but it's absurd that the Microsoft lawyers even had a credible case.
It's not really a fair comparison. After all, can you name a games console where both the machine itself and the games that run on it are actually written by someone else and given away freely, yet still resold at profit by some sort of marketing outfit?
In response to grandparent, GPLv3 will become very relevant when you see some scum mass produce a $150 computer with GNU/Linux that is cryptographically locked and then sell $10 "extension" cartridges with popular free software, in the same way that Sony locks its gaming consoles.
Really? Or will someone else just come along and offer the same thing without the lock-in, since the chances are pretty much all of the code will be available freely-as-in-GPL anyway? What competitive advantage will the "mass-producing scum" have to prevent this?
Sure, I'm not saying that good people can't work on the same project at the same time. I just haven't seen any WP software yet that is anywhere close to supporting the necessary mechanics for this particular example.
It's insightful to remember the Scott McNealy quote: "You have zero privacy. Get over it."
I'm still waiting for crackers to post his credit card information and explicit photos of his family on zeroprivacygetoverit.com. I'm guessing his lawyers would take a different view at that point.
Well, my dictionaries don't agree with the wording of your definition, but that's somewhat beside the point. Even using your definitions, how can an inalienable right possibly be removed by a corporation?
If you want to be philosophical about it, then the only rights you truly have are those which are prepared to die defending, because ultimately anything else can be taken from you. We therefore invent modifiers like "legal" (those rights the law says you should have) and "moral" (those rights that someone believes you should have according to their personal ethical standards) to give us more practical concepts of "rights". We can then proceed on the assumption that someone does have the rights they should have according to the relevant authority.
Slashdot Mirror
Our police have fairly respectable guidelines about what to put in their reports, at least most of the time. It's the fools who classify everything they can think of (including things like "Other") as speed-related who screw up the speed safety issue and warp the statistics.
As for the motorways, the argument usually seems to be that at 70mph, most cars don't have good enough headlights to see far enough ahead to stop comfortably in the event of something being in the road, someone who shouldn't be there, etc. At the kind of speeds some drivers do on our motorways, it's near impossible to judge distances safely based only on a pair of tail lights from a car in front that you're fast approaching. And of course, there's always the idiot coming the other way with main beam on, dazzling you to the point where you can't really see anything at all. Obviously this all goes even more for major non-motorway routes that don't have the same prohibitions on pedestrians, cyclists, lack of wildlife access and so on, and which can have much more "interesting" road layout. If I can find the original paper later on, I'll post a link, though unfortunately Googling for obvious things seems to turn up dozens of speed/anti-speed rants and not much else these days.
It looks like you're trying to rant. Would you like help with that?
[Yes] [No] [Oh just f**k off will you?!]
Not unless the policy has changed very recently. The last statement I saw said explicitly that the ribbons would not be customisable. Apparently the vast majority of users don't customise their menus/toolbars, so maybe MS are learning from the hiding-menu-items fiasco.
If other things were equal, sure. But other things aren't equal. Every time a new safety feature becomes compulsory on cars, it doesn't bring as much of a benefit as it should do, because certain types of person (including a high proportion of drivers) naturally compensate for the increased protection by taking more risks. Take a look at the stats from a few years before and after the compulsory introduction of something like seat belts, and you'll see the pattern pretty quickly.
Now, that's not to say you haven't got a point in theory. If everyone had the discipline to drive sensibly despite the safety features, we'd all be a lot safer. And although driving instructors like to say that skids are caused by driver error, and usually they'd be right, there are (very occasional) exceptions that even a skilled and experienced driver might not anticipate, and things like traction control and ABS can be useful for these.
Still, I think the grandparent makes a valid point, too. Technology that looks beneficial in principle can have surprising effects in practice, often for reasons entirely unrelated to the technology itself. In particular, "assistive" technology isn't guaranteed to get better results than someone skilled in the field would; it only needs to be better than the average, or even the least common denominator, to be marketable. There's a lot of this in typical Office software. Any skilled designer will come up with better formatting than the defaults in Word. Anyone who speaks good English won't trust the grammar checker.
That's an interesting page, but seems somewhat limited in scope.
For example, IIRC a recent research paper suggested that putting full time (when it's dark) street lights on all the UK's motorways would be the single most effective way to reduce motorway accidents, based on a study of the contributory factors in past accidents as recorded in police reports. (Sorry, no link on this PC, but it was on-line so I imagine hitting the magic keywords in Google will turn it up.)
In other words, context matters. Sometimes, things are good for one situation but work out badly in another.
I did watch the demo video on the Microsoft site -- and I use the term demo loosely, since half of it was uninformative marketeze -- and I'm afraid I wasn't that impressed. I gave them a fair chance to redeem themselves, but their interactive demo wouldn't play nicely for me, so the video is all I have.
My conclusion, as I've mentioned before, was simply that it's too much "pretty, pretty" and not enough real changes that actually make a difference to how easy it is to create useful documents. If they're committed to a big UI change but still worrying about the niceties of how the ribbon system will work, I fear Office 12 is going to a missed opportunity to shift the emphasis radically in other areas that could benefit from a fresh approach (styles and templates vs. ad-hoc formatting and copy-and-paste is the most obvious case, IMHO), which is a shame.
And what proportion of their losses was actually restored through those damages?
Sure, but UIVMM different jurisdictions take different views on what constitutes the creation of a copy (and have different exceptions/exemptions where making a copy is explicitly not an infringement).
FWIW, the following advice seems to come up a lot in these discussions. I haven't interviewed much myself, so this is mostly my way of summarising second-hand information; take it with a pinch of salt.
As they say, young men think old men to be fools, but old men know young men to be fools.
The parent makes an excellent point, in that what Skreems and co. really seem to be testing for is people who match their approach. The implicit assumption that their approach is (a) the only one that works, or (b) better than everyone else's, is not going to help improve their business.
There is also the problem that interview processes are two-way things. You don't know me, so let's assume for the sake of argument that I am a good programmer who knows his stuff. The moment I walk up to the building of a prospective employer I am sizing the company up. The moment someone greets me (or leaves me hanging around in reception for ten minutes) I am gauging how much value the people at the company really place on colleagues. And when we get to the technical questions, I am definitely judging the technical competence of those who would hire me, and the quality of the code produced by the existing staff if I see any.
So, dear interviewers of the world, let me put this simply. I am interviewing you, too, and I expect you to know your stuff. I would not be here if I wasn't interested in your business, but I am confident of my own abilities, including my ability to find another job quickly if yours isn't up to scratch. And it will cost me a lot less than it will cost you if today is a waste of time.
What does this mean in practice? Well, everyone's different. Personally, I think vague questions are fine and expected. I'll seek clarification without a second thought, because that's how the game works. But if the interviewer is a smart-ass, or repeatedly makes elementary mistakes, I won't take it upon myself to educate them. I will simply judge them incompetent, and not take a job working with them.
Now, perhaps a lot of companies wouldn't want to hire someone like me. (They probably wouldn't like my non-negotiable rules on IP and my expectation that I will work the hours in my contract and not give them 50% more for free, either.) That's their decision, and I accept that my principles here will rule out some companies that I might have been happy working for. But just as an employer usually gets enough applications not to worry about missing the odd good one because there will be others, so it goes with good people and finding jobs.
As they say, first impressions count. This is particularly true of interviews, because you'll never really know whether someone is a good candidate or an employer is a good place to work until a few days into the job, so the recruitment process is really just an attempt to make the guesses more educated. In this context, I'd advise any employer who wants to recruit people who are good rather than merely young and enthusiastic (now) to stick to sensible interview techniques, and avoid the time-wasting and trick questions. You aren't really hurting anyone but yourselves with that kind of stuff.
No, it's not age discrimination. It would be age discrimination if you hired the younger guy just because he was younger, when both guys cost the same amount.
(I don't know what jurisdiction this is in or any specific legal definition of age discrimination, but if the above isn't true, your law isn't written in English.)
I haven't seen anything so far that indicates the number of violations decided. In the TFA it says, "Given that the record companies' expert opined that the defendant had downloaded over 200 sound recordings during 2005, those requested damages will probably be substantial." Did the court accept this figure?
If that is the case, then does the number of downloads matter anyway? I thought under US law it was uploading that was the copyright infringement? I suppose they could be arguing that if P2P software is in use, any downloaded file was likely to be uploaded as well, but I though earlier case law had shown that the exact details had to be supplied for uploads. Maybe that was a different jurisdiction.
I would like to think that such a contract would be unenforcable. Indeed, here in the UK we are in the middle of the Gowers Review of intellectual property, and I raised this very issue with them.
In the meantime, though, I wouldn't go near such a contract without a lawyer.
The parent wasn't funny, it was scarily prescient.
Yep, this party's over...
"Apple" is perhaps an unfortunate example, being the name of both a computer company and a music company whose worlds collided with the invention of iTunes...
Well, speaking as someone who had a nasty encounter with a snake as a kid and has not exactly got on with them ever since... <shuddershuddershudder>
Personally, I'm not entirely surprised about the low ticket sales. Ophidiophobia is one of the most common human phobias, for obvious genetic reasons, and I doubt you're going to get many people with a fear of snakes to go see this one.
Horses and dogs? It's the goat I feel sorry for...
But, as DancesWithBlowTorch reminded us above, the point is not (or rather, is not supposed to be) whether a name can be used in the right context, it is to prevent the name being abused by someone who is essentially trading on the good name of another.
This is why I remain to be convinced about things like the old mikerowesoft site. Sure, it was a good joke, but was anyone really going to mistake a site with a cute name by a guy named Mike Rowe for the world's biggest software company? Of course not. It seems that the kid in question was happy with how that case worked out, but it's absurd that the Microsoft lawyers even had a credible case.
It's not really a fair comparison. After all, can you name a games console where both the machine itself and the games that run on it are actually written by someone else and given away freely, yet still resold at profit by some sort of marketing outfit?
Really? Or will someone else just come along and offer the same thing without the lock-in, since the chances are pretty much all of the code will be available freely-as-in-GPL anyway? What competitive advantage will the "mass-producing scum" have to prevent this?
Sure, I'm not saying that good people can't work on the same project at the same time. I just haven't seen any WP software yet that is anywhere close to supporting the necessary mechanics for this particular example.
I'm still waiting for crackers to post his credit card information and explicit photos of his family on zeroprivacygetoverit.com. I'm guessing his lawyers would take a different view at that point.
Well, my dictionaries don't agree with the wording of your definition, but that's somewhat beside the point. Even using your definitions, how can an inalienable right possibly be removed by a corporation?
If you want to be philosophical about it, then the only rights you truly have are those which are prepared to die defending, because ultimately anything else can be taken from you. We therefore invent modifiers like "legal" (those rights the law says you should have) and "moral" (those rights that someone believes you should have according to their personal ethical standards) to give us more practical concepts of "rights". We can then proceed on the assumption that someone does have the rights they should have according to the relevant authority.