But it is my understanding that companies can't just arbitrarily assign exempt or non-exempt status. The Fair Labor Starndards Act determines the status, not management.
In practice, management assigns the status. They are supposed to do it according to the rules of the FLSA and the regulations based on it, but (apparently, as in this case), they don't always do so.
Expanding on this, why shouldn't they at least be allowed to increase the original cost of the patent inline with inflation?
Because their predecessor in interest, National Semiconductor, agreed to a $1000 license, with no consideration for inflation. Which Negotiated Data Solutions should have known when they bought the parent.
(Geez, "Negotiated Data Solutions" even sounds like the name of a shakedown organization)
And the employees who leave will be the ones best able to leave. The employees most valuable to other prospective employers will be the ones that have been most valuable to IBM.
Depends. If the employees most valuable to IBM are the ones who were working 20 hours of overtime a week, they won't be leaving -- this amounts to a 48% pay increase for them. Break-even is at about 7:12 overtime a week.
I've been "exempt" for the past 10 years, and wouldn't trade it for hourly wages + overtime for anything. The fact I'm "exempt" pretty much assures that I have a strong salary and needn't worry about those extra 5 overtime hours per pay period to make rent. I realize that sounds snobbish, but TFA gives examples of jobs in the 80k per year range...hardly the types of jobs that worry about making the rent payments.
I actually hired on to IBM out of college as exempt (I'm not there any more). They pretty much made everyone who wasn't temporary or clerical staff "exempt". Didn't bother me because as far as I was able to find out, the salary grid for "associate programmer" (exempt) was better than that for "assistant programmer". (non-exempt). You could make more "non-exempt", but I'm both "lazy" and fast, so working a lot of extra hours didn't appeal to me. Of course if they re-classify a job with overtime potential from "exempt" to "non-exempt" they are going to reduce pay; what would you expect?
The people making 80k a year aren't worried about rent payments. They're worried about the mortgage payments on their McMansion, car payments on their 2 SUVs, making their credit card payments, etc. No matter what the salary, there are people who can spend it all and more.
There's no point in posting this story on Slashdot; Slashdot just caved last time Scientology told them to censor themselves, and there's no reason to believe that has changed.
It's officially an artistic vagina, too; the work is in the Musee d'Orsay, a perfectly legitimate museum. Though I admit it's more than a bit jarring walking through the museum and suddenly coming upon _L'Origine du Monde_.
The first claim says "Take the average speed of vehicles on a toll road segment, subtract the average speed of vehicles on a parallel non-toll segment, and put that into a computer to determine a toll as a function of that difference.
The second claim says "Add as a parameter to that function a desired speed on the toll segment, and increase the toll if the average speed on the toll segment is less than or equal to that"
The third claim says that the increase described in the second claim should be proportional (actually, it uses the term "related") to the difference in the first claim.
The fourth claim (which is not dependent on the second or third claims) says "Add as a parameter to that function a desired speed on the toll segment, and decrease the toll if the average speed on the toll segment is greater than or equal to that"
The fifth claim says that the decrease described in the fourth claim should be proportional ("related") to the difference in the first claim.
The sixth claim combines the second and fourth claims
The seventh claim does for the sixth claim what the third does for the second.
The eighth claim does for the sixth claim what the fifth does for the fourth.
There's really something patentable here? Each claim except the first is basically a partial formula for determining a toll on the toll portion of a roadway split into toll and non-toll segments, and the most complex version of it, combining claims 7 and 8, is
IF average speed of toll segment is greater than desired
Toll = Standard toll - F((average speed of toll segment - average speed of non-toll segment)/C1_ ELSE if average speed of toll segment is less than desired
Toll = Standard toll + G((average speed of toll segment - average speed of non-toll segment)/C2) ELSE
Toll = Standard Toll (and this is merely implied)
(The functions F and G are unspecified, and their existence makes the two factors rather pointless, but that's the language of the claims)
The first claim simply says to use a formula based on the difference in average speeds of the segments to determine the tolls, without going into specifics.
In many areas there is good public transportation that only takes slightly longer to get where you are going.
Maybe on a logarithmic scale, it's "slightly".
The things you own begin to own you. Try riding a bike sometime. The more you rely on the car the more of your life is dedicated to maintaining that car. Its a vicious cycle that leads to lots and lots of time wasted in traffic.
Hmm. OK, I tried riding my bike and froze my ass off in the mid-20s weather. Oops. My car has heat.
Now I tried riding in the summer and ran through a still-sticky asphalt patch (extending all the way across the road) and ruined both tires. Doh! My car tires are unbothered by such. If that doesn't happen, I get quite hot and extremely sweaty and have an all-around miserable experience.
Now I tried riding in the spring. Works, but after a few miles I get rather sweaty, and those hills between my home in my destination are killer. If I want to carry my laptop it's even harder. It can be done, but my car provides an all around better experience.
My bike requires maintenance far more often (on a per-mile basis) than my car. So it's not the car which owns me.
Well if we're going to use that excuse then why stop at web site defacement? Why not put out a contract on the heads of the music companies? After all "they had it coming".
Remember the Eleventh Commandment.
These are people who would have many of us raped in prison for defying the laws they bought, if they thought it would serve as an example to others. I find it hard to work up any moral outrage at anything you might to do them.
True. . . but it's also true that, at least for MacGuyver, they were at least responsible enough to leave out critical ingredients or steps for dangerous things, and NOT leave things out for life-savers "improvised" for the show.
Yes, in fact. If someone tries to trademark a word in its dictionary usage, the PTO is probably going to consider the use generic and thus not trademarkable.
Representative democracy means that you vote for representatives who make the laws and govern -- as opposed to direct democracy where the people make the laws and/or govern.
It it was that trivial for someone to hook it up to the Internet then the system design was probably bad in the first place.
Making it difficult for a trusted saboteur to do so is quite difficult. To keep costs and reliability reasonable, you have to use standard equipment and protocols, which means it can be connected to the Internet. Even if you aren't supposed to have an Internet connection in the same building, a saboteur could arrange one -- or even just a dialup connection.
Even in a facility designed to be secure, a saboteur could do it. Sure, he's going to have to run cables through a wall to do it, but assuming he's in IT, that's not too hard.
This article is just incendiary. It's pure flamebait, and you fell for it. I highly doubt that Apple "fans" are complaining about having to buy a copy of Vista because I highly doubt many of them are running Windows. I highly doubt they are complaining about batteries.
In fact, the only complaint that the article actually attributes to Apple users is that the battery on the MacBook Air isn't swappable. They aren't complaining about replacement at battery end-of-life, they're worried about swapping it while on a long flight. Everything else is just the author making things up and insinuating that Apple users think that way.
I suspect that there will be an aftermarket long-life battery that fits under the MacBook Air to handle the long-flight issue. If it even is an issue on the SSD-equipped version. At battery end of life, the road warriors will have gotten shiny new machines anyway, and the secondhand owners will either have the battery replaced or replace it themselves with a grey-market battery.
I'm still hoping for a patch to get rid of the memory leaks with their new garbage collection in Cocoa. Most "power" users I know can get about a day a gigabyte (RAM) out of Leopard. I get two to three days out of my old PowerMac with 1.75GB of RAM. A friend of mine has 3GB in a Mac Pro and he can get 3-4 days before a required reboot. My boss has 2GB in his iMac, and left it on during the holidays. He couldn't login to it to reboot when he got back after a week. There are problems with it.
Darwin melkor.local 9.1.0 Darwin Kernel Version 9.1.0: Wed Oct 31 17:46:22 PDT 2007; root:xnu-1228.0.2~1/RELEASE_I386 i386 [melkor:~] russotto% uptime 23:05 up 33 days, 9:39, 2 users, load averages: 0.06 0.09 0.03
I don't understand "flamebait". Apparently the mods have never seen real flamebait. Here's a (mild) example:
I use my brain, my editor, and grep. Fancier tools are merely a crutch for the incompetent. If you can't parse C and C++ in your head, you're obviously wasting your employer's money and should find another profession, preferebly one involving a paper hat.
(anyone modding this "Flamebait" will be metamodded "wiseass")
Except that there are a lot of people who play chess obsessively enough to get really, really good at it... and most of them don't have reputations as raving anti-Semitic whackos.
Most of them don't have reputations at all, outside chess circles.
Genius and madness are orthogonal. You can be smart and sane, smart and crazy, dumb and sane, or dumb and crazy. By and large, it's the smart sane ones who actually get things done.
I don't think they are orthogonal -- there are too many crazy geniuses out there. Both craziness and genius are rare conditions; if they were uncorrelated there should be far fewer of them.
I'm a huge advocate of personal freedom, but on an enterprise-class mobile device, support for centraly managed policy is a MUST to comply with HIPAA, SOX, etc.
You mean the dictates of Minihealth and Minifinance? Like I said, I hope Apple's the wrong company.
Yeesh. These guys give real meaning to the name "stuffed shirts". One disadvantage of the iPhone: with the competition, "users have little choice but to follow the corporate-mandated security routine." Blech. The prissy description of people trying to unlock the iPhone only confirms this. If they want a device which make 2008 feel more like 1984, I HOPE Apple's the wrong company to go to.
I think your parent poster doesn't realize how long it takes to turn a basic scientific discovery into a consumer product.
Example: GMR, discovered 1988, in products in 1997. Probably one of the shorter ones.
This use of silicon nanowires isn't nearly so basic a scientific discovery, though.
cannot imagine Joe Average plugging TWO wires, each of which is thicker than his wrist, into his car for a 3 minute recharge.
And yeah, you could drop it to 300 amps, but then you're talking 5000 volts.
The two thick wires you mention are no worse than those darn rubber nozzles. And 5000 volts isn't such a big deal. Yes, you'll need good insulation and interlocks, but if the battery can take it (and no reasonable battery can), transferring megawatts of power is not an unsolvable problem.
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Because their predecessor in interest, National Semiconductor, agreed to a $1000 license, with no consideration for inflation. Which Negotiated Data Solutions should have known when they bought the parent.
(Geez, "Negotiated Data Solutions" even sounds like the name of a shakedown organization)
Depends. If the employees most valuable to IBM are the ones who were working 20 hours of overtime a week, they won't be leaving -- this amounts to a 48% pay increase for them. Break-even is at about 7:12 overtime a week.
The foreign car brands that produce their vehicles domestically typically aren't union, though the unions have attempted to unionize those factories.
I actually hired on to IBM out of college as exempt (I'm not there any more). They pretty much made everyone who wasn't temporary or clerical staff "exempt". Didn't bother me because as far as I was able to find out, the salary grid for "associate programmer" (exempt) was better than that for "assistant programmer". (non-exempt). You could make more "non-exempt", but I'm both "lazy" and fast, so working a lot of extra hours didn't appeal to me. Of course if they re-classify a job with overtime potential from "exempt" to "non-exempt" they are going to reduce pay; what would you expect?
The people making 80k a year aren't worried about rent payments. They're worried about the mortgage payments on their McMansion, car payments on their 2 SUVs, making their credit card payments, etc. No matter what the salary, there are people who can spend it all and more.
If you're going to put it that baldly, you'll never get any support for it.
What's the point of eliminating poverty if it results in universal suffering?
There's no point in posting this story on Slashdot; Slashdot just caved last time Scientology told them to censor themselves, and there's no reason to believe that has changed.
It's officially an artistic vagina, too; the work is in the Musee d'Orsay, a perfectly legitimate museum. Though I admit it's more than a bit jarring walking through the museum and suddenly coming upon _L'Origine du Monde_.
The first claim says "Take the average speed of vehicles on a toll road segment, subtract the average speed of vehicles on a parallel non-toll segment, and put that into a computer to determine a toll as a function of that difference.
The second claim says "Add as a parameter to that function a desired speed on the toll segment, and increase the toll if the average speed on the toll segment is less than or equal to that"
The third claim says that the increase described in the second claim should be proportional (actually, it uses the term "related") to the difference in the first claim.
The fourth claim (which is not dependent on the second or third claims) says "Add as a parameter to that function a desired speed on the toll segment, and decrease the toll if the average speed on the toll segment is greater than or equal to that"
The fifth claim says that the decrease described in the fourth claim should be proportional ("related") to the difference in the first claim.
The sixth claim combines the second and fourth claims
The seventh claim does for the sixth claim what the third does for the second.
The eighth claim does for the sixth claim what the fifth does for the fourth.
There's really something patentable here? Each claim except the first is basically a partial formula for determining a toll on the toll portion of a roadway split into toll and non-toll segments, and the most complex version of it, combining claims 7 and 8, is
IF average speed of toll segment is greater than desired
Toll = Standard toll - F((average speed of toll segment - average speed of non-toll segment)/C1_
ELSE if average speed of toll segment is less than desired
Toll = Standard toll + G((average speed of toll segment - average speed of non-toll segment)/C2)
ELSE
Toll = Standard Toll (and this is merely implied)
(The functions F and G are unspecified, and their existence makes the two factors rather pointless, but that's the language of the claims)
The first claim simply says to use a formula based on the difference in average speeds of the segments to determine the tolls, without going into specifics.
In a sane world, none of this is patentable.
Maybe on a logarithmic scale, it's "slightly".
Hmm. OK, I tried riding my bike and froze my ass off in the mid-20s weather. Oops. My car has heat.
Now I tried riding in the summer and ran through a still-sticky asphalt patch (extending all the way across the road) and ruined both tires. Doh! My car tires are unbothered by such. If that doesn't happen, I get quite hot and extremely sweaty and have an all-around miserable experience.
Now I tried riding in the spring. Works, but after a few miles I get rather sweaty, and those hills between my home in my destination are killer. If I want to carry my laptop it's even harder. It can be done, but my car provides an all around better experience.
My bike requires maintenance far more often (on a per-mile basis) than my car. So it's not the car which owns me.
Remember the Eleventh Commandment.
These are people who would have many of us raped in prison for defying the laws they bought, if they thought it would serve as an example to others. I find it hard to work up any moral outrage at anything you might to do them.
Yes, in fact. If someone tries to trademark a word in its dictionary usage, the PTO is probably going to consider the use generic and thus not trademarkable.
Making it difficult for a trusted saboteur to do so is quite difficult. To keep costs and reliability reasonable, you have to use standard equipment and protocols, which means it can be connected to the Internet. Even if you aren't supposed to have an Internet connection in the same building, a saboteur could arrange one -- or even just a dialup connection.
Even in a facility designed to be secure, a saboteur could do it. Sure, he's going to have to run cables through a wall to do it, but assuming he's in IT, that's not too hard.
In fact, the only complaint that the article actually attributes to Apple users is that the battery on the MacBook Air isn't swappable. They aren't complaining about replacement at battery end-of-life, they're worried about swapping it while on a long flight. Everything else is just the author making things up and insinuating that Apple users think that way.
I suspect that there will be an aftermarket long-life battery that fits under the MacBook Air to handle the long-flight issue. If it even is an issue on the SSD-equipped version. At battery end of life, the road warriors will have gotten shiny new machines anyway, and the secondhand owners will either have the battery replaced or replace it themselves with a grey-market battery.
Darwin melkor.local 9.1.0 Darwin Kernel Version 9.1.0: Wed Oct 31 17:46:22 PDT 2007; root:xnu-1228.0.2~1/RELEASE_I386 i386
[melkor:~] russotto% uptime
23:05 up 33 days, 9:39, 2 users, load averages: 0.06 0.09 0.03
I don't understand "flamebait". Apparently the mods have never seen real flamebait. Here's a (mild) example:
I use my brain, my editor, and grep. Fancier tools are merely a crutch for the incompetent. If you can't parse C and C++ in your head, you're obviously wasting your employer's money and should find another profession, preferebly one involving a paper hat.
(anyone modding this "Flamebait" will be metamodded "wiseass")
Most of them don't have reputations at all, outside chess circles.
I don't think they are orthogonal -- there are too many crazy geniuses out there. Both craziness and genius are rare conditions; if they were uncorrelated there should be far fewer of them.
I use the Mark I eyeball, grep, emacs, and of course, the little gray cells.
(and GET OFF MY LAWN).
You mean the dictates of Minihealth and Minifinance? Like I said, I hope Apple's the wrong company.
Yeesh. These guys give real meaning to the name "stuffed shirts". One disadvantage of the iPhone: with the competition, "users have little choice but to follow the corporate-mandated security routine." Blech. The prissy description of people trying to unlock the iPhone only confirms this. If they want a device which make 2008 feel more like 1984, I HOPE Apple's the wrong company to go to.
The two thick wires you mention are no worse than those darn rubber nozzles. And 5000 volts isn't such a big deal. Yes, you'll need good insulation and interlocks, but if the battery can take it (and no reasonable battery can), transferring megawatts of power is not an unsolvable problem.
You can turn it off with this command:
defaults write com.nuance.dragon boomtoday false
But you have to run it every day, as there's ALWAYS "boom" tomorrow.