By extension, if we have responsibility over people's children in other countries, then we should invade Cuba and 'rescue' all of the children from their horrible lives in Cuba, taking them away from their families if the families don't want to come, too.
Some people in other countries actually like it there better than they think they would like it here. It is their right to live in a different kind of society if they want to. It is not our right to tell parents in other countries what kind of society their children must endure.
It would have been a totally different story if Elian's father wanted to come and live in the U.S. with his son, away from horrible Cuba (and the U.S. wanted to let him come), but this was not the case.
If you think that you are going to get moved from an office to a cube, and you have basically no choice in the matter, you should use the opportunity to get something 'in exchange'.
Companies often know that it is in their best interests to keep you happy, so they are often happy to salve your wounds with meaningless treasures. It makes you feel like you have some power (whether or not you had any real choice in the matter) and it makes you feel like you got something in return for what you lost (from the companies perspective, at least - maybe you like cubes, but don't tell them that).
When we got moved into cubes (even though we had no choice), we said, "you can only put us in cubes if you get us incandescent lighting and let us ban all fluorescence from the cube area."
So they got us all halogen desk lamps and floor lamps which we could point at the walls and ceiling.
It was wonderful. There was no direct light; it was all reflected off of some diffusing surface. The cubes were placid and quiet because of the subtlety. When people in other departments were stressed, they would sometimes lie down on our couch because it was so peacefull where we were.
Anyway, my point is, if you can make the company think that you don't want it, you can sometimes get something in exchange. Like, "you can take my office away and put me in a cube if you buy me this expensive ergonomic chair which I have been drooling over."
1.) The cubes are sonically isolated from people who use the phone for actual work (like sales people).
2.) The cube inhabitants listen to music on headphones, unless they can get a general agreement that their chosen volume level is low enough to make the music perfectly inaudible (music that you hear at the edge of your perception can be more distracting that blaringly loud music).
3.) People show each other respect when interrupting each other. The proper way to interrupt someone in a cube is to stand silently in the entrance until they choose to break away from their work and acknowledge your presence. If they actually don't see you in the doorway, you can quietly say, "knock, knock," and wait for a response. This way the person can continue their train of thought for a few minutes, and then , if necessary, they can say, "I'll come see you when I'm not busy."
4.) People are generally quiet - cubes just don't work with overly talkative people, but people who are generally quiet tend to find a decent level of grouping together between cubes and shooting the shit (which can be really good for your development team, in the appropriate quantity).
I have found that cubes can really work with a tight development team (where everyone is not off working on totally isolated projects). I have also watched people who didn't understand the concepts of concentration and personal space really piss each other off...
Ever see RCA cables made specifically for S/PDIF (digital audio)?
They often have triple shielding and claim that shielding is much more crucial for digital cables, when the truth is the exact opposite. You only need the shielding if you are passing through analog audio, where the noise is inseparable from the signal.
Using S/PDIF over the shittiest RCA cable you can find, with large amounts of interference, you still won't lose a single bit of data in the transfer.
Anytime they say anything about improving your experience with something (i.e., the web), it just means that they want to more accurately target their advertisements at you.
The assumption being that the quality of your experience with the web is directly proportional to how well they can target advertisements at you.
I was comparing using an analog loop to ripping to mp3 at 128KBits (which a lot of people do). I was not comparing the quality of the analog loop copy with ripping to.wav at 176Kbytes/sec.
Just because the employer owns the copyright to works for hire does not mean that he employer owns the right to patent intelectual property which an employee devised while employed by said employer.
Just because the employer owns the copyright to works for hire does not mean that he employer owns the right to patent intelectual property which an employee devised while employed by said employer.
They do the same thing with your IP when you get a job somewhere. The only reason you have to give up your right to patents you create on the job is because every "employment contract" (read: conglomerate of employment, NDA, and IP rights waiver) makes you give them up.
At times when engineers have more clout, they can do something about it (although I think most people just shrug and sign the forms without any negotiation, which could be part of the problem), but if you need the job, and they have it, you have to sign.
They pulled off the same scam with cable TV. First you pay for no commercials. Then, they gradually slip the commercials back in untill you are just paying for what used to be free (only butloads more of it). Plus, you get the cable station's logo floating annoyingly in the corner DURING THE CONTENT.
Sigh, let's all go back to drawing cave pictures for each other and banging rocks together. Lower quality, maybe, but fewer commercials.
Funny how the recording industry is always complaining that digital technologies allow people to make "perfect digital copies" of "their" works.
But the vast majority of people making copies are ripping mp3s, which are audibly imperfect at the rates normally used on file sharing networks.
It takes more time, being realtime, but you can get a higher quality copy by connecting the analog output on your CD player to the analog input on decent PC audio hardware, and going through a whole D/A A/D conversion, than you can ripping a CD track to mp3 at 128Kbits.
Once one person has made a copy through an analog loop, they have removed any copy protection which is not encoded into the audio itself. At that point, they are free to make as many digital copies of that as they like.
As for encoding analog signatures in audio which can survive compression/decompression cycles, it would be an issue if people were trading high quality representations of the audio, but given the low quality of your average mp3, I doubt that any inaudible signature would survive (but people put up with those stupid floating logos on cable TV, which they are already paying for... maybe they would just as happily put up with a background screeching noise in all of their audio, representing the serial number of the track...)
It is truly sad that the result of all of this great technology and economic freedom is lower quality media with disadvantages like floating ads. Why should we progress if it means that in order to watch "All in the Family" reruns, we will have to peer through fifteen layers of floating advertisements? Or if to listen to a Led Zeppelin CD, we will first have to listen to targeted ads? Good old low quality analog tape beats that any day.
In order to truly protect their audio, they would need to release CDs which only play in a registered system which would consist of a full digital path from computer/player to speakers. Then, in order to get a decent reproducible analog signal, you would have to rip apart your speakers, which would be a violation of the DMCA.
P.S. If everyone were to distribute copies of copy protected CDs widely enough, it might send a message to the recording industry like, "you failed, losers... Try again..."
The biggest problem IN THE UNIVERSE!
on
SSSCA Hearing
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Michael Greene, President/CEO of the National Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences at the 44th Annual GRAMMY Awards:
"No question the most insidious virus in our midst is the illegal downloading of music on the Net."
This is obviously a bigger problem than cancer, AIDS, world hunger, or the state-sanctioned violence going on all over the world.
They say the SSSCA will "boost hardware sales." That is because you will have to dump the system you just bought and get a new one if you want to take advanage of all of the 'great new online content.'
I think the only solution is to boycott this crap when it comes out. Refuse to buy the new DRM 64GHz system. Waive your right to watch Madonna or Jurassic Park 47 online. Point out to these corrupt politicians that you are not stupid enough to let them obsolete a system that you bought last month.
It is annoying that we (taxpayers) and the hardware industry end up spending the time and money involved in implementing these systems for the entertainment industry, while they sit back and do nothing basking in the glow of the inconvenience that they have caused everyone.
On top of that, after we go through the expenditure and wast of accomodating these paranoid jerks, we inevitably find that it has basically zero effect (except the waste of time and money). How much time and effort was spent on the copy flags implemented on every CD you buy? Has it ever prevented you from doing anything you wanted to the contents of a CD? Have you ever seen a pirated copy of a CD on DAT tape? I haven't.
But still, this is the most pressing issue for human society to solve today.
At Orban, I worked on QNX drivers for a 16-channel audio I/O device called Sound Exchange. That was quickly shortened to SEx, but soon thereafter, we realized that the longer version, SExchange, was even better (more descriptive, and it rolls off of the tongue.
So I came back from an awesome camping trip, and for months told everyone, "I'm still camping." I called my cubicle my 'campsite' (I guess my system was the campfire), and considered getting my title changed from Software Engineer to Software Ranger.
We had a dry erase board which listed what all of the engineers were working on at the time. I was happy to see that several months after I had left there, the dry erase board still said, "Andrew - SEx and Camping."
From the why-are-you-asking-a-legal-question-on-slashdot dept.:
Evidence that this is the wrong forum in which to ask this question is the fact that, of the people who actually responded with advice, about half say, "only give opinions" while the other half say, "don't give any opinions, only verifiable fact."
Try Findlaw for informal legal advice with some hope of accuracy and/or consistency.
On a potentially humorous note, I heard about someone in the banking industry who had been ripped off by a former employee. The employee actually had the gall to put her name down for a recommendation (without asking her, of course). So she replied, "I cannot recommend him too highly," and left it at that. Hmm... What do you suppose she meant by that, anyway...
And now for the IANAL-but-I-play-one-on-TV advice: AFAIK, not only can either party sue you for the contents of your letter, but another party can sue you over problems caused by the employee if misrepresentations are found to have been made.
I read about a case in CA where a high school student (allegedly molested by her principal) successfully sued the writers of recommendation letters for the principal because he had been accused of sexual harrassment before, and they failed to mention it. Of course, if they had mentioned it, the pricipal probably would have sued them.
Also, if you are the ex-employer, be even more carefull. In some states, at least, you are only allowed by law to verify the term of the employee's employment at your company, and nothing else.
They say that the law will boost hardware sales. Why? Because all of your current equipment will be incapable of accessing their crappy online content, so all of the morons out their who are brainwashed by Hollywood and the recording industry will have to throw away all of their old equipment (6 months old?) to play Britney Spears' new online-only (so you can't own a copy) single or Jurassic Park 8.
Think of all of the equipment that will become 'unusable' by the masses and therefore discarded. This will certainly help push California's new computer recycling legislation through.
Also, notice there is no consumer representation at this hearing (the closest thing being Intel). The consumers are affected by this law just as much as the tech industry, and probably much more than the recording and film industries (they will push the legislation through and then sit back and watch while everyone else suffers through it, but ultimately it probably won't make them any more money).
The nice thing is that during the transitional phase, they will probably end up alienating the masses who can't afford the equipment required to listen to new music or rent new movies. Then they will complain that piracy has caused their sales to go down. Lather, rinse, repeat...
The judge ruled that French laws don't apply to U.S. businesses, but it obviously doesn't work the other way around, as in the case of Dmitry Sklyarov.
They should have waited to file charges until Timothy Koogle was vacationing on the French Riviera, rather than having to try to extradite him.
I guess it's time to brush up on your foreign law, since we will all have to start obeying the laws of every other country in the world, including those that are mutually exclusive.
2.5. The 3rd party provider takes 4 months to finally install the DSL once the phone company has done their part (promising to come every few weeks or so, but never showing up). During that time, you still pay the phone company for the local line which isn't even wired into a jack.
When a company has enough leverage in the marketplace to get customers to agree not to sue if that company steals their IP, that is a pretty sure sign that there is a problem.
The only way that a company would make a concession like that is if they felt forced to sign an agreement in order to stay in business.
Therefore, in my view, the fact that companies were willing to sign such oppressive agreements is evidence that they were forced to buy Windows in order to stay afloat. (BTW, we are talking about the OEM customers, not the end-user customers.)
It seems like what they are saying is not that the settlement it weak, but that it is strong in MS's favor.
It hasn't even been agreed upon and they have already figured out crafty ways to use it to leverage more power over their customers, and possibly assist them in monopolizing new markets.
Like California's and the federal government's energy deregulation plans, this settlement most likely has plenty of loopholes explicitly written into it which give MS all sorts of advantages.
Digression:
The federal deregulation plan is what made Enron possible (Enron is basically a private energy stock market, which produces nothing, provides no service, and adds no value to any product, but the law was written expressly to provide for the existence of such leech entities for the purpose of skimming a profit off of the energy economy).
PG&E helped craft CA's plan, and restructured itself to take advantage of loopholes which it introduced into the plan. (WARNING: the following is simplistic and based on my half-assed understanding of the situation, but I think I have the general idea.) They basically split themselves into two corporations, a parent and a child. The parent company produced nothing, provided no service, and added no value to any product. Its sole purpose was to own the child company. The child company made enormous profits off of bilking the state of California.
Suddenly, despite record profits, the child company found itself out of cash. Where did the huge profits go? They were transferred to the parent corporation, which paid much of them out to their stockholders. The child company had some funds left over after this, so right before declaring bankruptcy, they gave a bunch of their executives and managers cash bonuses.
Back to the point:
Sorry, too much detail. The point is that when the government gets into bed with a corporation in order to pass laws or reach some legal agreement, you can bet that they have paid someone off in order to get some carefully crafted loopholes thrown into the legalese. It is easy to write and hide loopholes in legalese, and later on you can act like the lawmakers failed to close the loopholes because they are only human.
In the CA energy scandal, several companies used the excuse that what they were doing, although obviously unethical, was perfectly legal. They neglected to mention that it was only legal because they had written the law.
That is exactly it. They want to use the settlement to force Sony and other companies to give up their rights on the basis that the uniform licence requirement means that MS has to impose the same oppressive licence on Sony that it imposes on the little guy. I guess they don't see the option of extending the same protections to the little guy that they currently offer Sony.
Anyway, they are using it to try to force Sony to agree to a new licence in which Sony would waive some rights (I don't know exactly which rights) to sue MS over patent infringement. As far as I can tell, besides being generally good for MS (the more people you can get to agree not to sue you, the better), it looks like a scam to try to rip off some PlayStation related IP.
Here's an article which summarizes Sony's complaint.
Slashdot Mirror
If you buy audio tapes to record music in your 4-track then you still have to pay a tax to the recording industry.
We should have the right to pirate to any media which is taxed for piracy. We already paid.
They could have some CD-Rs made expressly for pirating music, and only tax those. :)
with a slim majority used by corporate IT.
Some people in other countries actually like it there better than they think they would like it here. It is their right to live in a different kind of society if they want to. It is not our right to tell parents in other countries what kind of society their children must endure.
It would have been a totally different story if Elian's father wanted to come and live in the U.S. with his son, away from horrible Cuba (and the U.S. wanted to let him come), but this was not the case.
Companies often know that it is in their best interests to keep you happy, so they are often happy to salve your wounds with meaningless treasures. It makes you feel like you have some power (whether or not you had any real choice in the matter) and it makes you feel like you got something in return for what you lost (from the companies perspective, at least - maybe you like cubes, but don't tell them that).
When we got moved into cubes (even though we had no choice), we said, "you can only put us in cubes if you get us incandescent lighting and let us ban all fluorescence from the cube area."
So they got us all halogen desk lamps and floor lamps which we could point at the walls and ceiling.
It was wonderful. There was no direct light; it was all reflected off of some diffusing surface. The cubes were placid and quiet because of the subtlety. When people in other departments were stressed, they would sometimes lie down on our couch because it was so peacefull where we were.
Anyway, my point is, if you can make the company think that you don't want it, you can sometimes get something in exchange. Like, "you can take my office away and put me in a cube if you buy me this expensive ergonomic chair which I have been drooling over."
1.) The cubes are sonically isolated from people who use the phone for actual work (like sales people).
2.) The cube inhabitants listen to music on headphones, unless they can get a general agreement that their chosen volume level is low enough to make the music perfectly inaudible (music that you hear at the edge of your perception can be more distracting that blaringly loud music).
3.) People show each other respect when interrupting each other. The proper way to interrupt someone in a cube is to stand silently in the entrance until they choose to break away from their work and acknowledge your presence. If they actually don't see you in the doorway, you can quietly say, "knock, knock," and wait for a response. This way the person can continue their train of thought for a few minutes, and then , if necessary, they can say, "I'll come see you when I'm not busy."
4.) People are generally quiet - cubes just don't work with overly talkative people, but people who are generally quiet tend to find a decent level of grouping together between cubes and shooting the shit (which can be really good for your development team, in the appropriate quantity).
I have found that cubes can really work with a tight development team (where everyone is not off working on totally isolated projects). I have also watched people who didn't understand the concepts of concentration and personal space really piss each other off...
They often have triple shielding and claim that shielding is much more crucial for digital cables, when the truth is the exact opposite. You only need the shielding if you are passing through analog audio, where the noise is inseparable from the signal.
Using S/PDIF over the shittiest RCA cable you can find, with large amounts of interference, you still won't lose a single bit of data in the transfer.
The assumption being that the quality of your experience with the web is directly proportional to how well they can target advertisements at you.
Scraping the encrusted cat shit from the litterbox will suddenly become a joy, not a chore.
I always thought that the last chapter should be, "What do I do if it still doesn't work?"
Big difference (a factor of more than 8).
Just because the employer owns the copyright to works for hire does not mean that he employer owns the right to patent intelectual property which an employee devised while employed by said employer.
Just because the employer owns the copyright to works for hire does not mean that he employer owns the right to patent intelectual property which an employee devised while employed by said employer.
You would expect the hit rate to be at least 50%, but it seems like people almost always use the wrong one.
At times when engineers have more clout, they can do something about it (although I think most people just shrug and sign the forms without any negotiation, which could be part of the problem), but if you need the job, and they have it, you have to sign.
Sigh, let's all go back to drawing cave pictures for each other and banging rocks together. Lower quality, maybe, but fewer commercials.
But the vast majority of people making copies are ripping mp3s, which are audibly imperfect at the rates normally used on file sharing networks.
It takes more time, being realtime, but you can get a higher quality copy by connecting the analog output on your CD player to the analog input on decent PC audio hardware, and going through a whole D/A A/D conversion, than you can ripping a CD track to mp3 at 128Kbits.
Once one person has made a copy through an analog loop, they have removed any copy protection which is not encoded into the audio itself. At that point, they are free to make as many digital copies of that as they like.
As for encoding analog signatures in audio which can survive compression/decompression cycles, it would be an issue if people were trading high quality representations of the audio, but given the low quality of your average mp3, I doubt that any inaudible signature would survive (but people put up with those stupid floating logos on cable TV, which they are already paying for... maybe they would just as happily put up with a background screeching noise in all of their audio, representing the serial number of the track...)
It is truly sad that the result of all of this great technology and economic freedom is lower quality media with disadvantages like floating ads. Why should we progress if it means that in order to watch "All in the Family" reruns, we will have to peer through fifteen layers of floating advertisements? Or if to listen to a Led Zeppelin CD, we will first have to listen to targeted ads? Good old low quality analog tape beats that any day.
In order to truly protect their audio, they would need to release CDs which only play in a registered system which would consist of a full digital path from computer/player to speakers. Then, in order to get a decent reproducible analog signal, you would have to rip apart your speakers, which would be a violation of the DMCA.
P.S. If everyone were to distribute copies of copy protected CDs widely enough, it might send a message to the recording industry like, "you failed, losers... Try again..."
This is obviously a bigger problem than cancer, AIDS, world hunger, or the state-sanctioned violence going on all over the world.
They say the SSSCA will "boost hardware sales." That is because you will have to dump the system you just bought and get a new one if you want to take advanage of all of the 'great new online content.'
I think the only solution is to boycott this crap when it comes out. Refuse to buy the new DRM 64GHz system. Waive your right to watch Madonna or Jurassic Park 47 online. Point out to these corrupt politicians that you are not stupid enough to let them obsolete a system that you bought last month.
It is annoying that we (taxpayers) and the hardware industry end up spending the time and money involved in implementing these systems for the entertainment industry, while they sit back and do nothing basking in the glow of the inconvenience that they have caused everyone.
On top of that, after we go through the expenditure and wast of accomodating these paranoid jerks, we inevitably find that it has basically zero effect (except the waste of time and money). How much time and effort was spent on the copy flags implemented on every CD you buy? Has it ever prevented you from doing anything you wanted to the contents of a CD? Have you ever seen a pirated copy of a CD on DAT tape? I haven't.
But still, this is the most pressing issue for human society to solve today.
So I came back from an awesome camping trip, and for months told everyone, "I'm still camping." I called my cubicle my 'campsite' (I guess my system was the campfire), and considered getting my title changed from Software Engineer to Software Ranger.
We had a dry erase board which listed what all of the engineers were working on at the time. I was happy to see that several months after I had left there, the dry erase board still said, "Andrew - SEx and Camping."
What a job!
Evidence that this is the wrong forum in which to ask this question is the fact that, of the people who actually responded with advice, about half say, "only give opinions" while the other half say, "don't give any opinions, only verifiable fact."
Try Findlaw for informal legal advice with some hope of accuracy and/or consistency.
On a potentially humorous note, I heard about someone in the banking industry who had been ripped off by a former employee. The employee actually had the gall to put her name down for a recommendation (without asking her, of course). So she replied, "I cannot recommend him too highly," and left it at that. Hmm... What do you suppose she meant by that, anyway...
And now for the IANAL-but-I-play-one-on-TV advice: AFAIK, not only can either party sue you for the contents of your letter, but another party can sue you over problems caused by the employee if misrepresentations are found to have been made.
I read about a case in CA where a high school student (allegedly molested by her principal) successfully sued the writers of recommendation letters for the principal because he had been accused of sexual harrassment before, and they failed to mention it. Of course, if they had mentioned it, the pricipal probably would have sued them.
Also, if you are the ex-employer, be even more carefull. In some states, at least, you are only allowed by law to verify the term of the employee's employment at your company, and nothing else.
Think of all of the equipment that will become 'unusable' by the masses and therefore discarded. This will certainly help push California's new computer recycling legislation through.
Also, notice there is no consumer representation at this hearing (the closest thing being Intel). The consumers are affected by this law just as much as the tech industry, and probably much more than the recording and film industries (they will push the legislation through and then sit back and watch while everyone else suffers through it, but ultimately it probably won't make them any more money).
The nice thing is that during the transitional phase, they will probably end up alienating the masses who can't afford the equipment required to listen to new music or rent new movies. Then they will complain that piracy has caused their sales to go down. Lather, rinse, repeat...
They should have waited to file charges until Timothy Koogle was vacationing on the French Riviera, rather than having to try to extradite him.
I guess it's time to brush up on your foreign law, since we will all have to start obeying the laws of every other country in the world, including those that are mutually exclusive.
2.5. The 3rd party provider takes 4 months to finally install the DSL once the phone company has done their part (promising to come every few weeks or so, but never showing up). During that time, you still pay the phone company for the local line which isn't even wired into a jack.
The only way that a company would make a concession like that is if they felt forced to sign an agreement in order to stay in business.
Therefore, in my view, the fact that companies were willing to sign such oppressive agreements is evidence that they were forced to buy Windows in order to stay afloat. (BTW, we are talking about the OEM customers, not the end-user customers.)
It hasn't even been agreed upon and they have already figured out crafty ways to use it to leverage more power over their customers, and possibly assist them in monopolizing new markets.
Like California's and the federal government's energy deregulation plans, this settlement most likely has plenty of loopholes explicitly written into it which give MS all sorts of advantages.
Digression:
The federal deregulation plan is what made Enron possible (Enron is basically a private energy stock market, which produces nothing, provides no service, and adds no value to any product, but the law was written expressly to provide for the existence of such leech entities for the purpose of skimming a profit off of the energy economy).
PG&E helped craft CA's plan, and restructured itself to take advantage of loopholes which it introduced into the plan. (WARNING: the following is simplistic and based on my half-assed understanding of the situation, but I think I have the general idea.) They basically split themselves into two corporations, a parent and a child. The parent company produced nothing, provided no service, and added no value to any product. Its sole purpose was to own the child company. The child company made enormous profits off of bilking the state of California.
Suddenly, despite record profits, the child company found itself out of cash. Where did the huge profits go? They were transferred to the parent corporation, which paid much of them out to their stockholders. The child company had some funds left over after this, so right before declaring bankruptcy, they gave a bunch of their executives and managers cash bonuses.
Back to the point:
Sorry, too much detail. The point is that when the government gets into bed with a corporation in order to pass laws or reach some legal agreement, you can bet that they have paid someone off in order to get some carefully crafted loopholes thrown into the legalese. It is easy to write and hide loopholes in legalese, and later on you can act like the lawmakers failed to close the loopholes because they are only human.
In the CA energy scandal, several companies used the excuse that what they were doing, although obviously unethical, was perfectly legal. They neglected to mention that it was only legal because they had written the law.
Anyway, they are using it to try to force Sony to agree to a new licence in which Sony would waive some rights (I don't know exactly which rights) to sue MS over patent infringement. As far as I can tell, besides being generally good for MS (the more people you can get to agree not to sue you, the better), it looks like a scam to try to rip off some PlayStation related IP.
Here's an article which summarizes Sony's complaint.
BTW, why is this offtopic?