Averting the slush pile
on
Ask Larry Niven
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
As a sci-fi fan and (hopefully) a future author, I am very interested in knowing how you got your first published work through the "slush pile" that every editor keeps on their desk. Is it true that the only way you'll get your work noticed is by knowing someone who knows someone who knows and editor somewhere, or is it just chance?
Yes, it does make the ISP liable. And that's a GOOD thing. The BAD thing is that the definition of child porn is way too ambiguous to enforce without the wholesale decimation of purely legal content (adult or otherwise).
I would like to see a change in the Forward button, not the back button.
If I go to a page on a website (page A), visit a page from there (page B), and then go back to page A to visit yet another page from there (Page C), I would like to be able to go back to page A again, and then when I hit the forward button, be offered the chance to go to either page B or C. Kind of a tree arrangement.
Another alternative is to emulate Opera's Hotlist functionality - Have the hotlist dynamically build a folder-view type tree for each site I visit.
Aka, when I go to (for example) Realtor.com, I want to be able to go back to the search page and add more options just by going over to the hotlist and clicking on the Search "folder", three clicks back.
Back when I had a DecMate II, I spent a fortune ($1120) for a whopping 4MB hard disk!!! I was convinced that that was all I WOULD EVERY NEED. 4 MILLION BYTES?!? That's like 32 MILLION ones and zeros! Who would every fill up THAT MUCH SPACE? It's INCONCIEVABLE!
Two years earlier, I was using a DecMate, which only had two 8" floppy drives (RX02, for you DECies out there). I remember being completely amazed that the operating system required the use of both drives. Then I sprung for an analog coupler to call into the mainframe. At 180 bps, I was travelling faster than God himself could go.
God am I old or what? Does anyone but me remember playing Moria on a VAX?
I am aware of that, however, many inventions are both a trademark and a patent - examples: Ziploc bags, Kleenex, K-Y Jelly (that one also involves many trade secrets too...) etc.
Also, I like "Patent It Yourself", which is how I got my patent application filed. It's a really good text. Also, if you need representation, talk to the guys at GrayCary. They are a good bunch of folks, and they will do some consulting gratis and defer payment......
Why is it a big deal that the source code is closed to the public? I don't think we really need vote_for_me_many_times.mod going up on sourceforge, do we?
I certainly wouldn't want a L33T H4X0R messing with my vote.
I prefer to let the Supreme Court and the press do it for me.
This is an argument I've always made. There is just no practical way to backup a large HD. You can spend thousands on a large capacity tape storage unit (which still takes hours), or you can buy two or more drives for a RAID config. Even with the RAID config, hard disks fail a lot more quickly now, and replacing one of X# of drives every couple of months can get real expensive. I've already gone through two 80 Gig drives on my RAID-1 config, and I'm having trouble getting exact replacements now. It's like I'm going to need to buy drives by the dozen, just to keep them in stock.
Okay, thanks for the correction. I really wondered about that. You seem to know your stuff. I didn't have a tub of anti-freeze in the garage or I would have checked...
Okay, so you go and buy a Lexus. It costs ~$45,000. You could've bought a Toyota with all of the options for ~$35,000, but you didn't. Why? Two possible reasons are obvious;
1) Cachet: Owning a Lexus vs. a Toyota gives the owner cachet. It says "I can afford this." This essentially boils down to brand recognition.
2) There are a lot of perks with owning a Lexus instead of a Toyota. Better valet handling. Better dealership experience. Better service.
Despite the fact that the two cars are almost completely identical.
The same thing applies with software and big companies. One of the reasons that Linux has taken so long to get fully accepted by the corporate community was that it is free. It also has almost no support.
There are other things associated with this phenomenon that are purely political. Every department has a budget. Next quarter's budget is based on what you used this quarter. If you have $150,000 left at the end of the quarter, you didn't need it this quarter, what do you need it for next quarter? If you don't use it, you lose it. To get it back, you have to put together a use case statement to justify the increase in budget for next quarter. Big hassle. It's easier to spend it all this quarter.
Another thing: Department Managers are also looking out for their future. Most managers are referenced by how much money they manage, and the size of the team they command. For example: Joe worked for X Company where he managed a IT department with a $5,000,000 quarterly budget. This is especially true when the manager is a climber, looking to work for the next big company with more responsibility. Money = Responsibility. It's a lot harder to make the case that the reason you had a smaller team and a smaller budget is because you can do the same job w/less money, not becausse you can't be trusted w/ a large team and a large amount of money.
Actually, you're exactly right. I just did that. I was thinking of another book which I was reading in my lawyer's library. (Moment to spam here: I just filed a patent application. GrayCary law firm helped greatly and did most of the work for free...)
While researching what parts of my software I could and could not patent, I was reading a LOT of books about the various avenues of intellectual property protection....
I did, just after posting, and I found several references to the practice here in the US and in the UK. I didn't realize that there was a tariff on recordable media. Hmph. I would love to see where that money actually goes.
Chapters 3, 4, 5, and 6. Copyright, Trademarks, Service Marks and Trade Secrets, respectively. I'm too lazy to go out to my car to get it, but go to Borders and look at it.
Copyrights cannot be lost, but you can lose offensive rights to them, especially after they become widely distributed. Patents can be lost if you don't keep up the maintenance fees.
"Heard that" in Patent It Yourself (a book..). It's also available at the USPTO's website.
Another person replied to this post, and he/she is exactly correct. The same thing happens with trade secret infringment. If you don't attempt to prosecute within 5 years, you've essentially said "it's okay. It's not that important to me."
Actually, that's not a bad idea, and for some stupid reason it didn't occur to me. Thanks for pointing it out.
As far as "on purpose", I doubt that the 11 NIC's I bought for our trade show that all had the same MAC address were spoofed on purpose. Thanks 3Com. I had to go to the local CompUSA and buy 11 new ones. It was a miserable time explaining the expense on the expense report...
The supreme court has ruled time and time again that you cannot patent a sound. Nor can you copyright it. You can copyright it's composition (the sheet music), but you can't own a sound.
Never mind that argument. Think on this: I have several.wavs and mp3's on my computer of my own composition. I own the rights to their use, and I choose to distribute them freely. My sharing of MP3's is NOT illegal under any construct of the law.
However, the act of copying music from CD's without approval IS a violation of the law, provided I do it for profit. The profit doesn't have to be monetary. I can exact profit from the loss of sales the artist would normally enjoy. That said, seeing as I am not SELLING the mp3's, and study after study has proven that the sharing of mp3's BOOSTS sales, they have to PROVE that they suffered a loss from my activities.
It gets even more complicated than that - they only have Offensive Rights for protected works. They means THEY have to sue ME, and if they don't do it within 5 years of the infringement, they lose offensive rights to that work in TOTAL.
So go ahead and argue that people who share mp3' s are stealing (and privately, I agree), but the RIAA and the artists themselves have the onus places on them to do something about it in court.
Some people are arguing that Napster, Morpheus, LimeWire et al are facilitating this, and are thereby guilty through association (in an "aiding and abetting sort of way). IF that's true, and I AM willing to scede that argument, then the RIAA and the artists need to take action against the manufacturers of CD-RW, DVD-RW, Casette tapes, mini-disc, VHS, Super-H, BetaMax etc etc etc, ad inifinitum. Anything less implies that they don't actually care about protecting their rights.
I am sure this is the start of a huge slew of lawsuits. UserFriendly had a strip about this on Sunday. You can view it here. It raises an interesting point. The comic implies that anyone with a big enough footprint can ignore/swat the RIAA if they want.
That said, I think that the banning of the RIAA from networks is a start. Now they need to ban the spoofers and companies like MediaDefender who spend all of their bandwidth downloading files from YOUR computer to keep other people off.
Anyone running Vignette's V/6 Enterprise Application Platform is running Jakarta Tomcat. It's a prerequisite. You can of course make custom connections to another servlet engine, but it isn't supported.
I don't have a customer list or anything, but there it is.
Here in Austin, almost all of the Starbucks stores have the WiFi subscription service. Because I live within 1 mile of 3 of them, my home network keeps getting tied up with surfers at Starbucks making queries. I've had to set up my LinkSys wireless hub/router to give out IP's based on the card address, lest the folks at Starbucks use MY internet connection, which I am paying for.
Even after doing that, I've run into a couple of cases where people have had cards with the same address as one or both of mine, and I've been locked out of my own personal wireless network due to conflicts. And with Wireless, there's no easy way to resolve the issue as long as the boneheads at Starbucks keeps his laptop/PDA on. And before you say "Imposssible!", let me tell you that it's more than possible, it has happened at least a half dozen times.
Any experienced IT guy will have run into a case or three where they've gotten a batch of NICs, all with the same MAC address...
OTOH, it's fun to take my spare LinkSys router down to Starbucks set up to give IP addresses, and just plug it in. Just into the wall, with no WAN connection. Most of the time, people there will harvest an IP address from my router intead of the one at Starbucks, and be unable to surf the web.
I know Khomeni is dead. So is Mao-Tse Tung, but we has the fanatic of the month. My point is that they are only fanatic of the month as long as we need someone to hate.
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As a sci-fi fan and (hopefully) a future author, I am very interested in knowing how you got your first published work through the "slush pile" that every editor keeps on their desk. Is it true that the only way you'll get your work noticed is by knowing someone who knows someone who knows and editor somewhere, or is it just chance?
Yes, it does make the ISP liable. And that's a GOOD thing. The BAD thing is that the definition of child porn is way too ambiguous to enforce without the wholesale decimation of purely legal content (adult or otherwise).
I someone has physical access to your computer, the computer is no longer yours...
With that in mind, I can get Administrator access with a screwdriver...
I would like to see a change in the Forward button, not the back button.
If I go to a page on a website (page A), visit a page from there (page B), and then go back to page A to visit yet another page from there (Page C), I would like to be able to go back to page A again, and then when I hit the forward button, be offered the chance to go to either page B or C. Kind of a tree arrangement.
Another alternative is to emulate Opera's Hotlist functionality - Have the hotlist dynamically build a folder-view type tree for each site I visit.
Aka, when I go to (for example) Realtor.com, I want to be able to go back to the search page and add more options just by going over to the hotlist and clicking on the Search "folder", three clicks back.
I think I might have to prototype this..
Back when I had a DecMate II, I spent a fortune ($1120) for a whopping 4MB hard disk!!! I was convinced that that was all I WOULD EVERY NEED. 4 MILLION BYTES?!? That's like 32 MILLION ones and zeros! Who would every fill up THAT MUCH SPACE? It's INCONCIEVABLE!
Two years earlier, I was using a DecMate, which only had two 8" floppy drives (RX02, for you DECies out there). I remember being completely amazed that the operating system required the use of both drives. Then I sprung for an analog coupler to call into the mainframe. At 180 bps, I was travelling faster than God himself could go.
God am I old or what? Does anyone but me remember playing Moria on a VAX?
I am aware of that, however, many inventions are both a trademark and a patent - examples: Ziploc bags, Kleenex, K-Y Jelly (that one also involves many trade secrets too...) etc.
I strongly recommend going to to do searches on trademarks for your idea.
Also, I like "Patent It Yourself", which is how I got my patent application filed. It's a really good text. Also, if you need representation, talk to the guys at GrayCary. They are a good bunch of folks, and they will do some consulting gratis and defer payment......
Why is it a big deal that the source code is closed to the public? I don't think we really need vote_for_me_many_times.mod going up on sourceforge, do we?
I certainly wouldn't want a L33T H4X0R messing with my vote.
I prefer to let the Supreme Court and the press do it for me.
Cool, now when I go to Toronto, I have a map of all of the Starbucks downtown...
This is an argument I've always made. There is just no practical way to backup a large HD. You can spend thousands on a large capacity tape storage unit (which still takes hours), or you can buy two or more drives for a RAID config. Even with the RAID config, hard disks fail a lot more quickly now, and replacing one of X# of drives every couple of months can get real expensive. I've already gone through two 80 Gig drives on my RAID-1 config, and I'm having trouble getting exact replacements now. It's like I'm going to need to buy drives by the dozen, just to keep them in stock.
Also, warranties are getting shorter...
Okay, thanks for the correction. I really wondered about that. You seem to know your stuff. I didn't have a tub of anti-freeze in the garage or I would have checked...
Polyethelene Glycol is the major component of antifreeze, if I remember right...
Weren't we always told not to touchor drink the stuff as kids?
Well, let's take a look at the economics of this:
Okay, so you go and buy a Lexus. It costs ~$45,000. You could've bought a Toyota with all of the options for ~$35,000, but you didn't. Why? Two possible reasons are obvious;
1) Cachet: Owning a Lexus vs. a Toyota gives the owner cachet. It says "I can afford this." This essentially boils down to brand recognition.
2) There are a lot of perks with owning a Lexus instead of a Toyota. Better valet handling. Better dealership experience. Better service.
Despite the fact that the two cars are almost completely identical.
The same thing applies with software and big companies. One of the reasons that Linux has taken so long to get fully accepted by the corporate community was that it is free. It also has almost no support.
There are other things associated with this phenomenon that are purely political. Every department has a budget. Next quarter's budget is based on what you used this quarter. If you have $150,000 left at the end of the quarter, you didn't need it this quarter, what do you need it for next quarter? If you don't use it, you lose it. To get it back, you have to put together a use case statement to justify the increase in budget for next quarter. Big hassle. It's easier to spend it all this quarter.
Another thing: Department Managers are also looking out for their future. Most managers are referenced by how much money they manage, and the size of the team they command. For example: Joe worked for X Company where he managed a IT department with a $5,000,000 quarterly budget. This is especially true when the manager is a climber, looking to work for the next big company with more responsibility. Money = Responsibility. It's a lot harder to make the case that the reason you had a smaller team and a smaller budget is because you can do the same job w/less money, not becausse you can't be trusted w/ a large team and a large amount of money.
Actually, you're exactly right. I just did that. I was thinking of another book which I was reading in my lawyer's library. (Moment to spam here: I just filed a patent application. GrayCary law firm helped greatly and did most of the work for free...)
While researching what parts of my software I could and could not patent, I was reading a LOT of books about the various avenues of intellectual property protection....
I did, just after posting, and I found several references to the practice here in the US and in the UK. I didn't realize that there was a tariff on recordable media. Hmph. I would love to see where that money actually goes.
Chapters 3, 4, 5, and 6. Copyright, Trademarks, Service Marks and Trade Secrets, respectively. I'm too lazy to go out to my car to get it, but go to Borders and look at it.
Copyrights cannot be lost, but you can lose offensive rights to them, especially after they become widely distributed. Patents can be lost if you don't keep up the maintenance fees.
It actually covers Patents, Copyright, Trademarks, Trade Secrets and Service marks.
Chalk this up as "yet another reason to check the cited source before you decide it's irrelevent."
Or
Chalk this up as "yet another reason to stay quiet and look stupid than to speak and remove all doubt."
Actually, no I didn't. Interesting. Do you have a source for this?
How does the artist collect their share of the tariffs for the 100 pack of CD-RW's I just bought? I imagine it can't be a huge tarriff.
"Heard that" in Patent It Yourself (a book..). It's also available at the USPTO's website.
Another person replied to this post, and he/she is exactly correct. The same thing happens with trade secret infringment. If you don't attempt to prosecute within 5 years, you've essentially said "it's okay. It's not that important to me."
Actually, that's not a bad idea, and for some stupid reason it didn't occur to me. Thanks for pointing it out.
As far as "on purpose", I doubt that the 11 NIC's I bought for our trade show that all had the same MAC address were spoofed on purpose. Thanks 3Com. I had to go to the local CompUSA and buy 11 new ones. It was a miserable time explaining the expense on the expense report...
Actually, it isn't stealing.
.wavs and mp3's on my computer of my own composition. I own the rights to their use, and I choose to distribute them freely. My sharing of MP3's is NOT illegal under any construct of the law.
The supreme court has ruled time and time again that you cannot patent a sound. Nor can you copyright it. You can copyright it's composition (the sheet music), but you can't own a sound.
Never mind that argument. Think on this: I have several
However, the act of copying music from CD's without approval IS a violation of the law, provided I do it for profit. The profit doesn't have to be monetary. I can exact profit from the loss of sales the artist would normally enjoy. That said, seeing as I am not SELLING the mp3's, and study after study has proven that the sharing of mp3's BOOSTS sales, they have to PROVE that they suffered a loss from my activities.
It gets even more complicated than that - they only have Offensive Rights for protected works. They means THEY have to sue ME, and if they don't do it within 5 years of the infringement, they lose offensive rights to that work in TOTAL.
So go ahead and argue that people who share mp3'
s are stealing (and privately, I agree), but the RIAA and the artists themselves have the onus places on them to do something about it in court.
Some people are arguing that Napster, Morpheus, LimeWire et al are facilitating this, and are thereby guilty through association (in an "aiding and abetting sort of way). IF that's true, and I AM willing to scede that argument, then the RIAA and the artists need to take action against the manufacturers of CD-RW, DVD-RW, Casette tapes, mini-disc, VHS, Super-H, BetaMax etc etc etc, ad inifinitum. Anything less implies that they don't actually care about protecting their rights.
I am sure this is the start of a huge slew of lawsuits. UserFriendly had a strip about this on Sunday. You can view it here. It raises an interesting point. The comic implies that anyone with a big enough footprint can ignore/swat the RIAA if they want.
That said, I think that the banning of the RIAA from networks is a start. Now they need to ban the spoofers and companies like MediaDefender who spend all of their bandwidth downloading files from YOUR computer to keep other people off.
Anyone running Vignette's V/6 Enterprise Application Platform is running Jakarta Tomcat. It's a prerequisite. You can of course make custom connections to another servlet engine, but it isn't supported.
I don't have a customer list or anything, but there it is.
Here in Austin, almost all of the Starbucks stores have the WiFi subscription service. Because I live within 1 mile of 3 of them, my home network keeps getting tied up with surfers at Starbucks making queries. I've had to set up my LinkSys wireless hub/router to give out IP's based on the card address, lest the folks at Starbucks use MY internet connection, which I am paying for.
Even after doing that, I've run into a couple of cases where people have had cards with the same address as one or both of mine, and I've been locked out of my own personal wireless network due to conflicts. And with Wireless, there's no easy way to resolve the issue as long as the boneheads at Starbucks keeps his laptop/PDA on. And before you say "Imposssible!", let me tell you that it's more than possible, it has happened at least a half dozen times.
Any experienced IT guy will have run into a case or three where they've gotten a batch of NICs, all with the same MAC address...
OTOH, it's fun to take my spare LinkSys router down to Starbucks set up to give IP addresses, and just plug it in. Just into the wall, with no WAN connection. Most of the time, people there will harvest an IP address from my router intead of the one at Starbucks, and be unable to surf the web.
I know Khomeni is dead. So is Mao-Tse Tung, but we has the fanatic of the month. My point is that they are only fanatic of the month as long as we need someone to hate.