- You agree that comacast my snoop and sell
- you may not use VPN
- you may not run a server like Crowds or anything that might get in the way of comcast snooping and selling
- comcast has implemented the means to snoop and sell
And you get all this for 40+ dollars a month. Can there really be any question about what is going on here?
This is remindes me of the Tab project at Xerox PARC: http://www.parc.xerox.com/csl/members/want/papers/ parctab-pcs-dec95.pdf . The Tab has a series of keys down the side for input.
In most of the places I have worked at business process resides in a person, usually a manager. If you need to refer to a process you refer to what Mr./Ms. X is or is not doing. And then Mr./Ms. X leaves and the next person has to reinvent the wheel, again. This is the situation that most software developers find themselves trying to automate. At the one company that I worked for that was 9001 compliant, documenting the business process was a very peripheral activity.
The vast majority of businesses are in serious disarray. I believe that if business processes [behavior] were captured in something like UML and reflected on, it would result in an extraordinarily efficient business.
How many business are going to jump up and begin doing this? Well, OOAD often outputs a Use Case for the business process that is being automated. All it would take is for a business to have the will to put those artifacts to another use and to keep them up to date. At some point an organization will hit critical mass. Most people will know what the UML diagrams represent and how to use them. That way, when someone needs to talk about a process, they don't have to talk about Mr./Ms. X.
So, where am I going with this. XP makes the business people be more responsible for describing [and understanding] their process and the deliverable that they receive. It also gives the customer a very good insight into the amount and type of work that goes into developing a software product. Interaction design, on the other hand, takes that responsibility away from the customer/business person and insulates them from the development team. It looked to me from the article that the interaction design people don't just create a requirements doc but reengineer business process as well. This might be appropriate at times, and sounds like interesting and enjoyable work. But - from a larger perspective, I think interaction design is trying to solve the wrong problem. It seems to me that interaction design might be better applied to the ongoing issue of business behavior and process documentation, a meta process perhaps, than as an intermediary in the software development process.
Once the business process documentation and staff understanding was in place XP would provide the continuous process automation improvement to keep process and automation in sync for as long as needed.
Once the business process documentation and staff understanding was in place... yeah, well XP works now too;-).
First, if you are interested in learning more about the patent process in the US, I recommend the book "Patent It Yourself" by Patent Attorney David Pressman. This book can be found on the NOLO self help law site: www.nolo.com. A number of other books about patents can also be found under Patent & Trade Secrets/Patents on that site.
Second - how to fix the problem of patents granted for things that already exist. IANAL or an expert in the field, but it seems to me that the Patent Office will invalidate or revoke a patent when provided with documentation showing the existence of prior art that describes the invention that has a date earlier than the patented inventions date of inception. If the documentation describes the reduction to practice of a patented invention the patent should be invalidated - the invention already exists and is not patentable. Part of the patent application process is to search for and include prior art of similar inventions and to explain how your invention is unique and non-obvious. The responsibility belongs to the inventor and the inventor's Patent Attorney(s) to find and include the prior art.
So if you have prior art on a patented invention, send it to the Patent Office and see what happens.
Lastly, I have a question. How is it that if you change one gene in an organism which has million or billions of genes, that you then own the whole organism? That's like changing one register in an existing microprocessor and calling it your design. Or perhaps changing one line of code in Microsoft Office and getting a patent on the resulting code;-). When Mother Nature decides to kick butt for patent infringement it won't be happening in a court of law.
Before I get into IP I would like to say that option 2 is probably corp to corp as well because most companies won't risk the possible tax liabilities inherent in paying a non corporation. You wind up paying a fee to a corporation to be able to be billed as a corporation.
One of the greatest benefits of working for your own corporation is the protection of your own IP. About a year an a half ago I was offered a job with a consulting outfit. The contract I was asked to sign defined work for hire as anything I did at any time for any reason. When I mowed my lawn the company would own that work. I brought the contract to an attorney specializing in employment issues where my suspicions were confirmed and I learned about the definition of work for hire. I attempted to negotiate a more reasonable definition of work for hire but the company declined. As they were only accepting W3 employment, I turned the job down. This issue is as likely to turn up as not in W3 employment situations.
Lets say you implemented a web site for a small business in the town where you live and charged a modest fee. Or you participated in an open source project during what you believed was your own time. Then your employer finds out and informs you that they own the product as work for hire. This probably does not happen much, but it could. IANAL, but it my understanding that even without an egregious contact work for hire can be more inclusive than you think. The way work for hire is defined, any work that you do, any time of the day or night, that fits within the definition of your job description can be construed as work for hire and belongs to your employer. As mentioned above, an employment contract can be used to mitigate this risk, if the employer will allow it.
This kind of thing is much less likely to happen to a corporation. Presumably the client corporation comes to your corporation because your company specializes in that type of work. Your client would not expect to be able to claim work you did for others because it was similar to the work you did for them, as they could if you were an employee. Also you would produce a statement of work and a contract for each job. All agreements would be reviewed and approved by your legal council. Any needs the client might have for exclusivity of the work product or your company's work output would be decided in detail upfront.
So, in addition to the discussion about the overhead of corporation, you might want to factor in whether you have any outstanding intellectual property rights issues as well.
Remeber, some dinosaurs were small, even very small, and dinosaurs filled every ecological niche an animal could fill. Of the major animal types: reptiles, amphibians, mamals and dinosaurs (not to mention insects and fish and whatnot)- ONLY the dinosaurs were COMPLETELY wiped out. Go figure.
There are a lot of excellent, detailed answers here, but I would like to take a different approach by asking this question: why do people sing? Yes, you can do it for money, but I think the vast amount of humanity that sings is not making money. And of those people that sing (for free), many of them like to do it for other people. It seems to me that the open source and free software movements are treated like a little dog balancing on top of a ball and playing with a yoyo. I think the activity of the people engaged in the open source / free software movements should be regarded as natural as singing.
It is my understanding that corporations in the USA produce many metric tons of DDT (banned in this country - it takes a long time to break down) and ship it to places like Mexico, where a lot of the coffee you drink is grown. This would not be true of coffee grown in the EU. Mexico has much less stringent rules about pesticide usage, i.e they use way more than is probably needed. So, the DDT that makes it through the filter of your body is finding it's way into the water table. This can't be good.
A dominican guy told me that most coffee sold in America is picked while partially green. Green coffee has high magnesium levels, which will definetly give you the shits. I have no idea why you do not keep shiting.
Slashdot Mirror
There is a bigger picture here:
- You agree that comacast my snoop and sell
- you may not use VPN
- you may not run a server like Crowds or anything that might get in the way of comcast snooping and selling
- comcast has implemented the means to snoop and sell
And you get all this for 40+ dollars a month. Can there really be any question about what is going on here?
This is remindes me of the Tab project at Xerox PARC: http://www.parc.xerox.com/csl/members/want/papers/ parctab-pcs-dec95.pdf . The Tab has a series of keys down the side for input.
In most of the places I have worked at business process resides in a person, usually a manager. If you need to refer to a process you refer to what Mr./Ms. X is or is not doing. And then Mr./Ms. X leaves and the next person has to reinvent the wheel, again. This is the situation that most software developers find themselves trying to automate. At the one company that I worked for that was 9001 compliant, documenting the business process was a very peripheral activity.
The vast majority of businesses are in serious disarray. I believe that if business processes [behavior] were captured in something like UML and reflected on, it would result in an extraordinarily efficient business.
How many business are going to jump up and begin doing this? Well, OOAD often outputs a Use Case for the business process that is being automated. All it would take is for a business to have the will to put those artifacts to another use and to keep them up to date. At some point an organization will hit critical mass. Most people will know what the UML diagrams represent and how to use them. That way, when someone needs to talk about a process, they don't have to talk about Mr./Ms. X.
So, where am I going with this. XP makes the business people be more responsible for describing [and understanding] their process and the deliverable that they receive. It also gives the customer a very good insight into the amount and type of work that goes into developing a software product. Interaction design, on the other hand, takes that responsibility away from the customer/business person and insulates them from the development team. It looked to me from the article that the interaction design people don't just create a requirements doc but reengineer business process as well. This might be appropriate at times, and sounds like interesting and enjoyable work. But - from a larger perspective, I think interaction design is trying to solve the wrong problem. It seems to me that interaction design might be better applied to the ongoing issue of business behavior and process documentation, a meta process perhaps, than as an intermediary in the software development process.
Once the business process documentation and staff understanding was in place XP would provide the continuous process automation improvement to keep process and automation in sync for as long as needed.
Once the business process documentation and staff understanding was in place... yeah, well XP works now too;-).
First, if you are interested in learning more about the patent process in the US, I recommend the book "Patent It Yourself" by Patent Attorney David Pressman. This book can be found on the NOLO self help law site: www.nolo.com. A number of other books about patents can also be found under Patent & Trade Secrets/Patents on that site.
;-). When Mother Nature decides to kick butt for patent infringement it won't be happening in a court of law.
Second - how to fix the problem of patents granted for things that already exist. IANAL or an expert in the field, but it seems to me that the Patent Office will invalidate or revoke a patent when provided with documentation showing the existence of prior art that describes the invention that has a date earlier than the patented inventions date of inception. If the documentation describes the reduction to practice of a patented invention the patent should be invalidated - the invention already exists and is not patentable. Part of the patent application process is to search for and include prior art of similar inventions and to explain how your invention is unique and non-obvious. The responsibility belongs to the inventor and the inventor's Patent Attorney(s) to find and include the prior art.
So if you have prior art on a patented invention, send it to the Patent Office and see what happens.
Lastly, I have a question. How is it that if you change one gene in an organism which has million or billions of genes, that you then own the whole organism? That's like changing one register in an existing microprocessor and calling it your design. Or perhaps changing one line of code in Microsoft Office and getting a patent on the resulting code
Before I get into IP I would like to say that option 2 is probably corp to corp as well because most companies won't risk the possible tax liabilities inherent in paying a non corporation. You wind up paying a fee to a corporation to be able to be billed as a corporation.
One of the greatest benefits of working for your own corporation is the protection of your own IP. About a year an a half ago I was offered a job with a consulting outfit. The contract I was asked to sign defined work for hire as anything I did at any time for any reason. When I mowed my lawn the company would own that work. I brought the contract to an attorney specializing in employment issues where my suspicions were confirmed and I learned about the definition of work for hire. I attempted to negotiate a more reasonable definition of work for hire but the company declined. As they were only accepting W3 employment, I turned the job down. This issue is as likely to turn up as not in W3 employment situations.
Lets say you implemented a web site for a small business in the town where you live and charged a modest fee. Or you participated in an open source project during what you believed was your own time. Then your employer finds out and informs you that they own the product as work for hire. This probably does not happen much, but it could. IANAL, but it my understanding that even without an egregious contact work for hire can be more inclusive than you think. The way work for hire is defined, any work that you do, any time of the day or night, that fits within the definition of your job description can be construed as work for hire and belongs to your employer. As mentioned above, an employment contract can be used to mitigate this risk, if the employer will allow it.
This kind of thing is much less likely to happen to a corporation. Presumably the client corporation comes to your corporation because your company specializes in that type of work. Your client would not expect to be able to claim work you did for others because it was similar to the work you did for them, as they could if you were an employee. Also you would produce a statement of work and a contract for each job. All agreements would be reviewed and approved by your legal council. Any needs the client might have for exclusivity of the work product or your company's work output would be decided in detail upfront.
So, in addition to the discussion about the overhead of corporation, you might want to factor in whether you have any outstanding intellectual property rights issues as well.
Remeber, some dinosaurs were small, even very small, and dinosaurs filled every ecological niche an animal could fill. Of the major animal types: reptiles, amphibians, mamals and dinosaurs (not to mention insects and fish and whatnot)- ONLY the dinosaurs were COMPLETELY wiped out. Go figure.
There are a lot of excellent, detailed answers here, but I would like to take a different approach by asking this question: why do people sing? Yes, you can do it for money, but I think the vast amount of humanity that sings is not making money. And of those people that sing (for free), many of them like to do it for other people. It seems to me that the open source and free software movements are treated like a little dog balancing on top of a ball and playing with a yoyo. I think the activity of the people engaged in the open source / free software movements should be regarded as natural as singing.
It is my understanding that corporations in the USA produce many metric tons of DDT (banned in this country - it takes a long time to break down) and ship it to places like Mexico, where a lot of the coffee you drink is grown. This would not be true of coffee grown in the EU. Mexico has much less stringent rules about pesticide usage, i.e they use way more than is probably needed. So, the DDT that makes it through the filter of your body is finding it's way into the water table. This can't be good.
A dominican guy told me that most coffee sold in America is picked while partially green. Green coffee has high magnesium levels, which will definetly give you the shits. I have no idea why you do not keep shiting.