That is a myth spread by the anti-nuclear lobby, who are really anti-industry, as a side-effect of being anti-capitalist. Think about it logically for a minute. Why is spent fuel dangerous? Because it emits radiation. What is radiation? It is energy. What is the point of any fuel? That you can extract energy from it.
The chain of fallacies here is fascinating.
The photovoltaic and renewable energy industries may be anti-nulcear, but hardly anti-industry or anti-capitalist. (And being anti-capitalist doesn't mean being anti-industry.)
Spent fuel is not the only waste.
The fact that somethng emits radiation does not mean that said radiation can be harnessed as useful engergy.
Breeder reactors recycle uranium and trans-uranics, but still create non-recyclable fission products in their waste. (Yes, there are short-halflife products that "only" require hundreds of years of storage, rather than thousands.)
Breeder reactors produce plutonium. Nations tend to be awfuly cautious about letting their enemies or potential enemies build such plants (like Israel's attack on the Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981.
Because Notes should be burned, the ashes buryed in a lead-lined container, and the ground salted. With a marker erected over it all, as a warning to the next thousand generations to avoid the place...
Gad. I've never had a more unpleasant experience with software than having to use Notes.
Google-ing for '"lotus notes" sucks' gives almost 10,000 hits - I'll bet that's a extremely high suckage-complaint-count to user-base-size ratio.
Unless you believe there is something inherently "magical" about human beings (i.e., we have a soul) then we are simply following the laws of physics which determine how the matter and energy in our bodies will behave.
To say that we "follow" the laws of physics gives a misleding connotation. Physical "law" decribes how things act, it doesn't determine how things act.
If there were something about human beings such that the matter that makes up our bodies behaved differently than matter ourside of bodies (which I'm not asserting, BTW), it wouldn't be a violation of physical law, but an indication that our physical laws are an inaccurate description of the Universe. The Universe knows not of Maxwell's equations (or even of particles, energy, mass, and other human ideas); it just does its thing. Which happens to include bits of it forming into patterns (us) that make other patterns (words), some of which encode information about patterns in the thing (ideas like Maxwell's equations)...
For futher clarification, I recommend Raymond Smullyan's Is God A Taoist? (Stumbling upon this essay in Hofstadter and Dennett's The Mind's I changed my life.)
False. His software is not in competition with any product offered by Apple. Merely creating software doesn't make him a competitor, any more than a technical writer who writes a novel on his own is a competitor to his employer.
using skills he honed and resources he gained while being paid by his employer
Gaining skills is part of the nature of employment; those skills are as much the employee's as is his paycheck.
The only way Apple might have a case is if he used Apple-provided resources, but (despite your assertations) there's no mention of such use in the article.
Good think you added the contract exception, otherwise they might have claimed your first born
I think they could have had a case under the contract as it was originally written!
Basically what I said to them was, "If interpreted strictly, this contract means that you own any poems that I write, and that I can't teach the karate classes I do on some evenings and weekends. Now, I sure that that's not your intent, but I can only go by what's written here, so let's come up with an addendum that makes that clear, ok?" There was no problem getting them to agree.
If you are an engineer for Ford, you CANNOT go home and design car components in your spare time for your own personal gain.
Only to the degree that I'm competing with Ford. Ford doesn't make fuzzy dice; if I come up with radical new fuzzy dice design, Ford can't say, "We like it! It's ours because of your non-compete, sux0rs to be you!!" (Now, you might have a contract that says every electrical impluse in your bervous systems belongs to Ford, but the legality of that contract is highly suspect.)
That's the point I am making.
It might be the point you intended to make; however, statements like "If you don't like that, then you shouldn't be working for other people, because you're being selfish." don't seem to track with that very well.
it's likely that this particular programmer had greater-than-average privilege to Apple documentation, OS source, engineers who developed the source, and future business plans.
If Apple can show that such inside information was used, they have a case. At best, though, it's a rebuttable presumption, not grounds for automatic seizure of copyright.
More importantly, Apple may decide in the future to partner with Netflix (not saying they were going to, just that it could have been an option). So, if they did, Apple competes with their employee.
Future possibility of competition can't rationally be a criterion. My employer might decide to get into any line of business at some future date. They might buy out a martial arts school someday, does that mean I'm competing with them now?
What would they say? "We didn't have this agreement with Netflix when you released your shareware, but we do now so now we're going to take possession of it."?
In a rational system, they would say, "As of $DATE we will have this agreement, and any further work you do after that on your program would be competition. What you do before $DATE - sell the code to someone (we'll offer $PRICE!), open source it, burn it, whatever - is your choice as a free adult citizen of this great nation of ours."
Companies do this all the time and I'm sure apple will make it right.
Buying you flowers and candy after they've ravaged your ass, does not "make it right".
If you or I so much as copy a song, it's a crime; if a large corporation claims to own your creation, it's buiness as usual. Welcome to modern corporate capitalism.
I felt like I was being a little paranoid when I demanded that my last contract - which stated that my "full productive capacity" belonged to my employer - be modified to make it clear that work I did on my time was my own.
Heh. I'll never silly about making such demands again.
Read your contracts, folks. Point out absurdities ("all your thoughts are belong to us") and refuse to sign until they're fixed. If they say "well, we don't mean that..." - get it in writing.
When someone wants to borrow notes, you can bet that they're not gonna want yours, as yours aren't in Word format.
Uh, you're taking notes with such heavy formating that you can't export to plain text (or at least RTF)? Damn, you must type and mouse fast to be able to do that.
(I can't type fast enough to make taking notes on a keyboard any where near practical, much less take notes with heavy formatting.)
Bullying is imprecise term, and carries with it connonations of "boys will be boys" expectations. We would be better servered to call acts of bullying by their specific names: assault, battery, harassment, defamation, and so on.
I could see this story happening another way.....a school invokes a policy where cruely making fun of another student would result in suspension......then a day later, we would have that little mouth taped up fellow icon detailing a story of how some stupid American school was stealing kids' free speach.
Good point.
There are lines between free speech, and defamation, harassment and stalking; but they are not always clear and well-lit.
To take a simple example: if I say "I'm going to hurt you so bad!" as we sit down for a game of chess, that is different than if I've cornered you in a dark alley and am walking toward you with a large knife. The former is legitimate speech, the latter is a threat.
Seriously, operator overloading is just syntactic sugar for a function call: it's no more and no less obfuscated.
True, but in my experience operator overloading is more subject to abuse. With a function, the devloper has to give it a name, and the potential namespace is much larger than the operator namespace.
In any case, if you don't know how templates work, you only know a little bit about C++.
As a widespread feature, templates are a relatively new addition to C++. The first C++ complier I ever used (in the early 90's) did not support them (or exception handling either). Discussion of function and class templates take up all of 12 pages in the C++ ARM.
Point being, there are people with several years of C++ development experience who haven't worked much with templates. You kids who grew up with C++ probably can't believe this, but I never worked on a project where we even used the STL (much less rolled our own templates) until about two years ago.
> Everybody should read this paper, then read > Linus Torvalds et. al. discussing the matter > on kernaltrap.org
The kerneltrap.org thread is very interesting - thanks.
Many developers have heard "goto is evil" so many times that they believe it without question; then they go and use break, continue, and exception handling without a second though. Guess what - under the covers, it's all goto. (Even loops and if-then-else have jumps in there).
Used properly, goto is occasionally very useful in C for handling exceptions:
void foo() { Thing *thing1=NULL, thing2=NULL;
if (something()) { thing1=get_thing(); if (we_are_fscked()) { goto cleanup; else { thing2=get_thing(); if (we_are_fscked()) goto cleanup; } else { thing1=get_other_thing(); if (we_are_fscked()) { goto cleanup; else finish_the_job(); }
cleanup: if (thing1 != NULL) free(thing1); if (thing2 != NULL) free(thing2); }
This (like any goto-using code) could be written without gotos, but at the cost of duplicating the cleanup code, or rewriting the conditionals to be less clear - here, it's clear that the condition we're concerned with in normal processing is something(), and we_are_fscked() is an error check.
(It's much less useful in C++ where a try/catch would be used instead.)
...the 'incorrect' use is more logical. The formal logic term should be "assumes the conclusion" or somthing similar, because there is no 'begging' going on.
Not when you understand the words. gnome-dictionary is your friend:
"Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913)" Beg:...4. To take for granted; to assume without proof.
Begging is assuming. The usage of this sense of beg is now rare outside of the phrase "begging the question", thus the confusion.
Dirty images and thoughts cause you to value women only for sexual reasons and leads to the treatment of women as objects.
There's nothing "dirty" about sex, except for having to change the sheets afterwards.
And sexual images and thoughts certainly do not cause men (sane intelligent men, anyway) to objectify women, or to be unable to value women for other than sexual reasons.
If that's your response to sexual images or thoughts, yes, you probably shouldn't view pornography. But if you've got such a serious psychological problem that you always objectify women you are sexually attracted to, I urge you to seek professional help.
As the old saying goes: Spare the Rod, Spoil the child.
The old and much misinterpreted saying.
The rod spoken of is a shepards' crook ("thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me"), not a stick for beating children. Guidance, not violence, is what is being prescribed.
You have every right to be investigating every single aspect of your minor children's lives.
At age 7, yes.
If you still find the need to do so at 17, you are failing to prepare them for adulthood. (Not to mention that by the time they're a teen, you're going to find that it's not possible to continually investigate every single aspect of your kid's life.)
the same people who couldn't figure out the Florida ballot
If you mean the butterfly ballot - no one could be expected to figure it out, as the instructions printed on the ballot could not be used. They called for the voter to mark their choice to the right of the candidate, however candidate names appeared on both sides of the punch-out.
It was impossible to vote for half of the candidates using the provided instructions.
If you're talking about the punch-card ballots, the problem was so much confusion as a higher degree of mechanical failure to read the punch card ballots than is found in the electronic voting machines. People in poor counties that used punch-card might have a 3% chance of their ballot not being counted, where someone in a richer country might only have a 0.5% chance.
The "those voters were too stupid to be allowed to vote" argument does not wash.
Slashdot Mirror
The chain of fallacies here is fascinating.
Mildly amusing, troll, but don't you have a better way to spend your time?
(Mods: read Fux's journal.)
Troll, troll, go away, find a better way to play.
Because Notes should be burned, the ashes buryed in a lead-lined container, and the ground salted. With a marker erected over it all, as a warning to the next thousand generations to avoid the place...
Gad. I've never had a more unpleasant experience with software than having to use Notes.
Google-ing for '"lotus notes" sucks' gives almost 10,000 hits - I'll bet that's a extremely high suckage-complaint-count to user-base-size ratio.
To say that we "follow" the laws of physics gives a misleding connotation. Physical "law" decribes how things act, it doesn't determine how things act.
If there were something about human beings such that the matter that makes up our bodies behaved differently than matter ourside of bodies (which I'm not asserting, BTW), it wouldn't be a violation of physical law, but an indication that our physical laws are an inaccurate description of the Universe. The Universe knows not of Maxwell's equations (or even of particles, energy, mass, and other human ideas); it just does its thing. Which happens to include bits of it forming into patterns (us) that make other patterns (words), some of which encode information about patterns in the thing (ideas like Maxwell's equations)...
For futher clarification, I recommend Raymond Smullyan's Is God A Taoist? (Stumbling upon this essay in Hofstadter and Dennett's The Mind's I changed my life.)
False. His software is not in competition with any product offered by Apple. Merely creating software doesn't make him a competitor, any more than a technical writer who writes a novel on his own is a competitor to his employer.
Gaining skills is part of the nature of employment; those skills are as much the employee's as is his paycheck.
The only way Apple might have a case is if he used Apple-provided resources, but (despite your assertations) there's no mention of such use in the article.
I think they could have had a case under the contract as it was originally written!
Basically what I said to them was, "If interpreted strictly, this contract means that you own any poems that I write, and that I can't teach the karate classes I do on some evenings and weekends. Now, I sure that that's not your intent, but I can only go by what's written here, so let's come up with an addendum that makes that clear, ok?" There was no problem getting them to agree.
Only to the degree that I'm competing with Ford. Ford doesn't make fuzzy dice; if I come up with radical new fuzzy dice design, Ford can't say, "We like it! It's ours because of your non-compete, sux0rs to be you!!" (Now, you might have a contract that says every electrical impluse in your bervous systems belongs to Ford, but the legality of that contract is highly suspect.)
It might be the point you intended to make; however, statements like "If you don't like that, then you shouldn't be working for other people, because you're being selfish." don't seem to track with that very well.If Apple can show that such inside information was used, they have a case. At best, though, it's a rebuttable presumption, not grounds for automatic seizure of copyright.
Future possibility of competition can't rationally be a criterion. My employer might decide to get into any line of business at some future date. They might buy out a martial arts school someday, does that mean I'm competing with them now?
In a rational system, they would say, "As of $DATE we will have this agreement, and any further work you do after that on your program would be competition. What you do before $DATE - sell the code to someone (we'll offer $PRICE!), open source it, burn it, whatever - is your choice as a free adult citizen of this great nation of ours."
That's what I do when I'm on the job.
What I do off the job, is mine. That's the distinction between an employee and a slave, and it's not being selfish to decline being a slave.
Non-compete is completely different from "all your ideas are belong to us".
Uh, his employer tries to lay claim to work done in his off hours, and he's the one with the bad attitude?
Buying you flowers and candy after they've ravaged your ass, does not "make it right".
If you or I so much as copy a song, it's a crime; if a large corporation claims to own your creation, it's buiness as usual. Welcome to modern corporate capitalism.
I felt like I was being a little paranoid when I demanded that my last contract - which stated that my "full productive capacity" belonged to my employer - be modified to make it clear that work I did on my time was my own.
Heh. I'll never silly about making such demands again.
Read your contracts, folks. Point out absurdities ("all your thoughts are belong to us") and refuse to sign until they're fixed. If they say "well, we don't mean that..." - get it in writing.
Uh, you're taking notes with such heavy formating that you can't export to plain text (or at least RTF)? Damn, you must type and mouse fast to be able to do that. (I can't type fast enough to make taking notes on a keyboard any where near practical, much less take notes with heavy formatting.)
Bullying is imprecise term, and carries with it connonations of "boys will be boys" expectations. We would be better servered to call acts of bullying by their specific names: assault, battery, harassment, defamation, and so on.
Good point.
There are lines between free speech, and defamation, harassment and stalking; but they are not always clear and well-lit.
To take a simple example: if I say "I'm going to hurt you so bad!" as we sit down for a game of chess, that is different than if I've cornered you in a dark alley and am walking toward you with a large knife. The former is legitimate speech, the latter is a threat.
True, but in my experience operator overloading is more subject to abuse. With a function, the devloper has to give it a name, and the potential namespace is much larger than the operator namespace.
As a widespread feature, templates are a relatively new addition to C++. The first C++ complier I ever used (in the early 90's) did not support them (or exception handling either). Discussion of function and class templates take up all of 12 pages in the C++ ARM.
Point being, there are people with several years of C++ development experience who haven't worked much with templates. You kids who grew up with C++ probably can't believe this, but I never worked on a project where we even used the STL (much less rolled our own templates) until about two years ago.
> Everybody should read this paper, then read
> Linus Torvalds et. al. discussing the matter
> on kernaltrap.org
The kerneltrap.org thread is very interesting - thanks.
Many developers have heard "goto is evil" so many times that they believe it without question; then they go and use break, continue, and exception handling without a second though. Guess what - under the covers, it's all goto. (Even loops and if-then-else have jumps in there).
Used properly, goto is occasionally very useful in C for handling exceptions:
void foo()
{
Thing *thing1=NULL, thing2=NULL;
if (something()) {
thing1=get_thing();
if (we_are_fscked()) {
goto cleanup;
else {
thing2=get_thing();
if (we_are_fscked())
goto cleanup;
} else {
thing1=get_other_thing();
if (we_are_fscked()) {
goto cleanup;
else
finish_the_job();
}
cleanup:
if (thing1 != NULL)
free(thing1);
if (thing2 != NULL)
free(thing2);
}
This (like any goto-using code) could be written without gotos, but at the cost of duplicating the cleanup code, or rewriting the conditionals to be less clear - here, it's clear that the condition we're concerned with in normal processing is something(), and we_are_fscked() is an error check.
(It's much less useful in C++ where a try/catch would be used instead.)
Not when you understand the words. gnome-dictionary is your friend:
"Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913)"
Beg:...4. To take for granted; to assume without proof.
Begging is assuming. The usage of this sense of beg is now rare outside of the phrase "begging the question", thus the confusion.
There's nothing "dirty" about sex, except for having to change the sheets afterwards.
And sexual images and thoughts certainly do not cause men (sane intelligent men, anyway) to objectify women, or to be unable to value women for other than sexual reasons.
If that's your response to sexual images or thoughts, yes, you probably shouldn't view pornography. But if you've got such a serious psychological problem that you always objectify women you are sexually attracted to, I urge you to seek professional help.
The old and much misinterpreted saying.
The rod spoken of is a shepards' crook ("thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me"), not a stick for beating children. Guidance, not violence, is what is being prescribed.
At age 7, yes.
If you still find the need to do so at 17, you are failing to prepare them for adulthood. (Not to mention that by the time they're a teen, you're going to find that it's not possible to continually investigate every single aspect of your kid's life.)
If you mean the butterfly ballot - no one could be expected to figure it out, as the instructions printed on the ballot could not be used. They called for the voter to mark their choice to the right of the candidate, however candidate names appeared on both sides of the punch-out.
It was impossible to vote for half of the candidates using the provided instructions.
If you're talking about the punch-card ballots, the problem was so much confusion as a higher degree of mechanical failure to read the punch card ballots than is found in the electronic voting machines. People in poor counties that used punch-card might have a 3% chance of their ballot not being counted, where someone in a richer country might only have a 0.5% chance.
The "those voters were too stupid to be allowed to vote" argument does not wash.
Yes, and those megacorporations that control almost all of those outlets are certainly noted for their Leftist views. GE is a bunch of leftist peaceniks, and Disney is controlled by the unions.