It's not going to help. Especially when you walk into court to establish who invented something first, and get laughed out by both the judge and the opposing attorney.
A better solution is to keep a lab notebook, and have copies of its pages regularly reviewed, signed, and dated by either a notary or your attorney (some patent attorneys will do this for a very nominal fee. An even better solution is to publish your material (like in a trade journal, etc.) - in the US you get 1 year from date of publication to file a patent, although publishing DOES torpedo your ability to file foreign patenets in many cases (since they don't allow that 1 year leeway.)
As far as "poor man's copyright" is concerned, there's absolutely NO reason to resort to those kinds of measures, as all material is automatically copyrighted the instant it's fixed into a medium. What many people don't know is that you really can't claim damages UNTIL YOU REGISTER WITH THE COPYRIGHT OFFICE. Thus, mailing shit to yourself does absolutely NO GOOD AT ALL. If you're one of those paranoid script writers, you can send a copy of your script to be registered with the Writer's Guild for a small fee, which gives you some protection, in the event you believe you've been ripped off.
As always, I'm not a lawyer, so any advice I give you (indeed, any advice ANYONE who is not an attorney gives you) should NOT be construed as legal advice. Go talk to a lawyer, from my experience, the good ones will give you a half hour free to get the stupid questions off your chest, before charging you for doing any real thinking. That should be enough to give you a sense of what your options are, and the things you need to do to protect yourself.
I remember reading about the autonomy concept early last year, so if they're trying to get press coverage of their group, they've been trying for quite a while now. That's one of the reasons that I've been skeptical. The only thing I see being incorporated into GM's cars in 2006 are the 48v internal bus systems, but only because the auto industry has more or less standardized on that as the next step to power all those onboard gadgets they want to sell you.
Drive by wire? Not for at least a decade. That's my prediction. Why? Because it would require the wheels to be independently powered, and would take the ICE out of the loop. I don't see the ICE dying at GM for another 8 years, at least. Why 8 years? Because it will take another generation of vehicles (about 4 years) before one of their competitors can take the leap, and another generation (another 4 years) for GM to adequately respond.
The problem is, to do anything REALLY great, you've got to buy off loads of politicians and bureaucrats (not to mention the occassional judge or two.) Otherwise, the instant you try to buy land, launch a nuclear spacecraft, or affect foreign policy, you'll get hordes of know-nothings with too much time on their hands screwing with your operations.
The cost of paving the way alone would consume a chunk of that billion, not to mention the tax investigators who would keep buzzing around to make sure you weren't hiding anything from them.
I suppose you could conduct your operations in secret, but the instant you went public, the NSA and Congress would be all over your ass faster than ants on a picnic.
Bill Gates has billions. Consider the uproar if he actually tried to directly influence ANYTHING. He's done the smart thing and let the foundations that he funds worry about keeping various palms crossed with silver.
1.Government Mandate. Make it happen or go to jail. This seems to be the present strategy and is doomed for a long list of reasons.
Like the fact that corporations can outlast most administrations? Yeah, that would make it a problem.
2.Hybrid cars (Fuel Cell / Gas, Fuel Cell / Electric or Fuel Cell / Electric / Gas) make it onto the market and become popular. Slowly, the infrastructure grows to service the Fuel Cell components of hybrid cars. Eventually the point is reached where pure fuel cell cars are viable in the open market.
That's what I'm hoping, but it'll take serious volume before Toyota and Honda can justify the costs associated with the development and production of their current cars. I estimate that we're still 2-3 generations away in terms of battery and powerplant technology before we can produce affordable vehicles, and it won't get better unless we can get more players into the game.
3.The government subsidizes Fuel Cell cars to the point where people buy enough of them to justify the development of the infrastructure needed to support them, and thus make them a viable product without subsidies.
That's a bad idea. Subsidies artificially prop up the market, without actually promoting competition - take a look at solar cells, after 6 years of subsidies, the prices haven't gotten any lower, although supply is markedly better. I think what's happened is that there's an excuse to skim more money from the end customer, because they can get a rebate check from the government. What would be more desirable would be government-subsidized infrastructure, to lower the costs of production, which would allow free competition to produce the best products. Highways, bridges, power utilities (like the TVA), dams, sewer systems, etc. fall into this category. Seriously, do you thank GM would sell so many autos if someone didn't keep building new roads?:P
Clue: Any new technology that will revolutionize clean-air driving, and replace the ICE is always just "3-4" years down the road. This also corresponds to the length of many municipal, state, and federal administrations - coincidence? I think not...
Witness the 10-year long battle against zero-emissions vehicles in California. They'd rather spend money on lobbyists than researchers and production facilities, at the same time they get federal grants for researching alternative fuel vehicles - go figure.
What is interesting about this latest effort is that they are spending a significant amount of $$$ on it.
Spending money does not equate to delivering products. GM has had a long history of holding up really cool concept technology (anyone remmber their one-person commuter vechicle?), but only as hype - never as an actual product.
Superior technology argument is partially true (I'd argue that the benefits of hybrids currencly outweigh any negatives for 40% of the US population) - it takes a shitload of money to product cars for the consumer market - there's all sorts of saftety testing that must be done before certification, you still have to have manufacturing capacity to build the actual cars, even if you have the tech to produce an electric or hybrid drivetrain/powerplant. This is the barrier to entry for competitors, barring those who have gotten government supports for domestic competitive concerns (ie, military/industrial.)
Finally, you have to have a distribution network. It's like going up against Microsoft in the pre-open source days - nobody is gonna fund you.
In the interests of fairness, I'd yank all government funding to corporate labs that don't deliver products. No, the EV1 is not a product, and it never was. Witness the GM exec who said the EV1 was pulled because it "sold poorly." Of course it "sold poorly" -- IT WAS NEVER SOLD - only leased! This sound byte was repeated by the press so often, I'll bet every American was convinced that there was no market for the electric car - despite the fact that there was a long waiting list for new EV1s...
Depends on what you mean by hired. In California, all work done by contractors is NOT work-for-hire unless specifically stated in the contract. So, if you're in California, your above statement would be incorrect - if there is no language specifically indicating work-for-hire status one way or another, it would default to the photographer owning all rights.
Note that there are specific exemptions to work-for-hire covered under copyright law.
My question is, what does mod_gzip break? Hell, my crappy HTML/1.0 client supports gzip content (Netscape 4.08), so why aren't more people using it?
Not only does it save bandwidth on the server side, but text pages render instantaneously on the client side when the server supports it (I'm using Netscape on an old Mac, so this kind of stuff is important.) I say everyone should plug it in, and we'll fix all the broken stuff afterwards...
And because of this, the Chinese government sponsored the development of a competing royalty-free standard (SVCD) which, along with the existing video-CD (VCD) format, are now de-facto standards for video distribution in Asia.
Mod me down as redundant, but this "power" is illusory, and the consequence of many admins voluntarily using these publicly maintained blacklists. If you wanted to sue the people blocking you, you'd really have to sue the admins of the mailservers that you're using, as they're the ones actually implementing the blocks. The list maintainers just maintain a list of numbers.
If the list maintainers do a shitty job, nobody will use their lists, and they will have no "power" over you.
Actually, if they ever get them into production, helium-cooled graphite-moderated pebble-bed fission reactors could occupy less space than your local transformer station, and blend in better to boot. Of course, with the paranoia about radioactive materials, you'd end up with a huge-ass security perimeter with guards and a fence, and then a huge-ass saftey perimeter for the populace, thus negating that any size/concealment advantage.
On the other hand, you can cram probably a half dozen pebble-bed reactors on the same amount of space as an older US-style water-cooled reactor, so we could reuse some of that contaminated land. Hell, why not turn certain superfund sites (as long as they're geologically suitable) into reactor sites? As long as you're going to keep people from the area, might as well turn that to your advantage.
What about smaller wind gennys? I've got a AIR 403 sitting in the garage, with those sharp carbon-fiber blades. I haven't put it up yet because I haven't installed the inverter/battery setup, but I have worried about complaints of noise from the generator at night, and about possible injury to birds (I live in an urban/suburban area). After all, these generators only have a 3 ft dia, so they tend to spin fairly quickly. On the other hand, they do present a smaller cross-area, so if I stick lights on it (LEDs along a vane), maybe that will warn any flying creatures off.
On the topic of advertising, has anyone seen the billboards with the horizontal wind generators, the ones that look like ultra-thin, slowly rotating helicopter blades?
Damn, I had those nightmares too. That was a wicked game - not to mention the Star Trek simulator game, and Asteroids. Those vector games were awsome - and I'll bet they cost a hell of a lot to build.
Almost all the major stock houses tend to take a very liberal approach to comping images.
And therein lies the difference. They're stock houses - they don't create artwork specifically for the client on order, artwork which may have diminished (or no value) for anyone else. Not to mention, they're probably a one or two-person outfit, who need to pay the rent and eat.
A better analogy would be comissioning a suit designer to tailor the perfect suit for your business presentation, and then saying (after you try it on), not in my style - sorry. Wouldn't you expect that they would still get paid?
While I agree, you have to be more flexible during the current economy, consistently doing work for clients and not getting paid for it (also known as doing work on spec) is a bad practice.
You may think you need to do this in order to get work, but all you're doing is saying "I'll do work for free." The kinds of people who hire people on spec are generally not the kind of people who will then turn around and pay you full price for your work in the future.
If you get paid by the hour, you do. At least, you do in California. If you're on salary, well, that's something else, isn't it? 16 hours should be good for time and a half for every hour past the normal 8 hour workday. I forget at which point you hit double wages...
No. They know how much damage they do. They simply don't care. They rationalize, saying that the products that they advertise and the "services" that they offer, outweigh the "minor inconvenience" of getting crap you didn't ask for, printed on paper you paid for, and tying up a machine that you have installed and pay on a monthly basis to have a dedicated line for.
Yes, jail time would be a start. Also mandatory fines against spammers which would go to educate small business owners that fax-spamming is illegal, and to report anyone trying to sell them fax-spamming services. I really don't think that there are enough people who KNOW that fax-spam is illegal, since there's so much of it, and the feds don't really make an issue of it that I've seen (with the exception of the FTC fine against fax.com.)
You might have run into an automated dialer that's waiting to put a recorded pitch into your voicemail/answering machine. Yes, these things are illegal (wardialing is illegal, and recorded pitches are illegal), and you can report them to the FTC.
Good luck trying to track them down in many instances just by the call - usually the bastards will not have any identifying info, and will just leave an 800 number (to get a great deal on FREE satillite TV, just call our sales agent at 800-xxx-xxxx:P)
However, every little bit of info helps - let the FTC know you're pissed, and they can make a good case of how the system is being abused the next time they report to Congress. Who knows, maybe some bright young senator/representative might take this up as their cause...
Now, someone answer me this - why doesn't the Attorney General make this shit a criminal offense? If they're willing to put some pimply faced teen-ager away for sharing his taped copy of ST: TNG, why are they letting people who are attacking insturments of business and medicine (read the article, fax-spammers were wardialing and attacking hospital fax machines), in flagrant violation of a Federal law against such? Dual standards of justice and mismanaged priorities...
Kudos to Steve Kirsch for putting this issue into the spotlight. All we got to do is wait for the judge to allow class action status - start saving the fax-spams people!
Sometimes I wish our legal system was like that world on the TV series Sliders, where lawyers were gunslingers, and legal battles were decided by shootouts between the two different legal teams. I don't know if that would make for better law, but we'd sure have a lot fewer lawyers...
Heh, I conceded defeat when when went into the AP exam after starting the EM portion of the physics course just a scant week and a half previous (why is it they don't teach this stuff concurrent with the newtonian stuff when it's HALF the damn test???) It's one of the reasons I didn't become an engineer - that and my inability to add/subtract numbers properly...
Oh, and why are public schools on the semester system? Forget everything during Winter break, waste 2 weeks of the new year cramming for exams. Might as well go quarter system if they're going to keep us in school till June. And why 6 periods a day? Why not take fewer courses per quarter, and make them a quarter long - at least then if you're going to flunk a class, you don't waste the rest of the year.
Nothing I know about public schools in California makes sense - and this from someone who sat on one of those School-Based-Management showpieces as a student rep, to try and get teachers to publish a syllabus at the beginning of the year, so the student could evaluate, for him or herself, that this class would teach what they wanted to learn. I got a whole lot of flak from the teacher's reps, although the parents and community reps were behind me. The resolution was passed, but I'll bet it was dropped as soon as I graduated...
Because people like you are so focused on SAT scores and doing math without calculators that students never really learn to think, they just have to remember alot of useless facts, formulas, and other crap, when you are focused on remembering stuff you arent going to be able to think as well be creative.
While I agree with you on the useless formulas (look them up at the back of a book if you need them), what kind of thinking are you doing when you're punching buttons on a calculator? Certainly not more than you would carrying numbers by hand in a long-division problem. You saying that we shouldn't learn how to divide, that we should let machines handle it all? (think floating point bug here...)
As far as english, yes people should learn english from reading, but the problem is schools force students to read what THEY want them to read and this is one reason students dont learn to read as well as they would learn if they were reading what interests them.
Um, if they were reading what interests them, by your logic, they would already be reading well. This implies that school is the only place where they read, as this would be the point where being "forced" to read what the school wants them to read would retard their desire to read. Unfortunately, this is true, and a travesty - why is it that many people only read when forced to, and why is it that this place has to be school? The problem here is much deeper than not wanting to read...
Kids who like video games can learn to read playing final fantasy. Chatrooms and the web can also teach students to read. Allow the student the freedom to read whatever they want as long as it is within guidelines, and then make them write a paper about whatever they read, if it was a video game such, make them write a paper on it.
I wouldn't mind if video games, chatrooms, and the web were model sources for learning the English language - but they're NOT. Language is soaked up by daily interaction, and the purpose of the English class is to correct some of the stuff you learn. Yes, it's Nazi-ish, the proscription of the English language, but it's not without purpose - words can convey multiple shades of meaning, depending on the words you choose, written and spoken prose can convey different shades of feeling. Besides, if you don't know the rules, how can you break them intelligently?
Perhaps you went to a private school, but most people did not.
See my reply to an earlier post. I spent all 12 years in public school, with 30+ kids in the same class, a teacher either working on getting tenure or waiting for retirement (with a few thankful exceptions), and a stinking hour-long bus ride to and back from school to boot.
Oh, and while I'm ranting about how shitty the school systems are, why is it that HS textbooks (including the texts for some AP classes) are totally, utterly, and completely, USELESS? I learned more from studying the REA guide to the US History GRE exam, than I did from both my teacher and the damn textbook combined! Talk about over-simplified and re-filtered crap! The stinking encyclopedia has more information on history than these textbooks do!
I spent all 12 years of school in PUBLIC SCHOOL. Not public school in some rich area with 1:15 teacher student ratios, but public schools in fairly urbanized areas with more like 1:30+ ratios, (I had to do a shitload of busing, no thanks to overcrowding.)
In my last couple of years of HS, I took AP tests that my school did not offer, and I bullied my counselor into giving me the classes that I wanted. I realize that's not the norm, but neither *should* graduating HS without having basic math and english skills, as seems to be the custom these days.
And, I agree with fizbin - test taking is a specific skill, like taking notes, and learning to study, skills that are vital to success under the factory system of learning, but (at least, as far as I saw) never EVER explicitly taught as subjects in their own right.
I did the "straighten out and fly right" routine when I was in 10th grade and failing, and I haven't looked back since (although overcoming those early grades when applying to college was not easy.)
No need to boost the signal, just set up 6 access points with directional antennas on channel 1, and like a radiation machine to excise a cancer, set it up so all 6 of the beams intersect at the T-Mobile access point. That should swamp that access point until Starbucks decides to lower the gain on their antenna, or install shielding.
Actually, I'd argue that geometry has more in common with logic and trig than it does with algebra (remember those damn proofs.) It should be taught as a completely separate math course, parallel, prior, or after the algebra/algebra2 class, and should emphasise the ability to do proofs - no point in having to learn that nightmare all over again.
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It's not going to help. Especially when you walk into court to establish who invented something first, and get laughed out by both the judge and the opposing attorney.
A better solution is to keep a lab notebook, and have copies of its pages regularly reviewed, signed, and dated by either a notary or your attorney (some patent attorneys will do this for a very nominal fee. An even better solution is to publish your material (like in a trade journal, etc.) - in the US you get 1 year from date of publication to file a patent, although publishing DOES torpedo your ability to file foreign patenets in many cases (since they don't allow that 1 year leeway.)
As far as "poor man's copyright" is concerned, there's absolutely NO reason to resort to those kinds of measures, as all material is automatically copyrighted the instant it's fixed into a medium. What many people don't know is that you really can't claim damages UNTIL YOU REGISTER WITH THE COPYRIGHT OFFICE. Thus, mailing shit to yourself does absolutely NO GOOD AT ALL. If you're one of those paranoid script writers, you can send a copy of your script to be registered with the Writer's Guild for a small fee, which gives you some protection, in the event you believe you've been ripped off.
As always, I'm not a lawyer, so any advice I give you (indeed, any advice ANYONE who is not an attorney gives you) should NOT be construed as legal advice. Go talk to a lawyer, from my experience, the good ones will give you a half hour free to get the stupid questions off your chest, before charging you for doing any real thinking. That should be enough to give you a sense of what your options are, and the things you need to do to protect yourself.
I remember reading about the autonomy concept early last year, so if they're trying to get press coverage of their group, they've been trying for quite a while now. That's one of the reasons that I've been skeptical. The only thing I see being incorporated into GM's cars in 2006 are the 48v internal bus systems, but only because the auto industry has more or less standardized on that as the next step to power all those onboard gadgets they want to sell you.
Drive by wire? Not for at least a decade. That's my prediction. Why? Because it would require the wheels to be independently powered, and would take the ICE out of the loop. I don't see the ICE dying at GM for another 8 years, at least. Why 8 years? Because it will take another generation of vehicles (about 4 years) before one of their competitors can take the leap, and another generation (another 4 years) for GM to adequately respond.
The problem is, to do anything REALLY great, you've got to buy off loads of politicians and bureaucrats (not to mention the occassional judge or two.) Otherwise, the instant you try to buy land, launch a nuclear spacecraft, or affect foreign policy, you'll get hordes of know-nothings with too much time on their hands screwing with your operations.
The cost of paving the way alone would consume a chunk of that billion, not to mention the tax investigators who would keep buzzing around to make sure you weren't hiding anything from them.
I suppose you could conduct your operations in secret, but the instant you went public, the NSA and Congress would be all over your ass faster than ants on a picnic.
Bill Gates has billions. Consider the uproar if he actually tried to directly influence ANYTHING. He's done the smart thing and let the foundations that he funds worry about keeping various palms crossed with silver.
1.Government Mandate. Make it happen or go to jail. This seems to be the present strategy and is doomed for a long list of reasons.
:P
Like the fact that corporations can outlast most administrations? Yeah, that would make it a problem.
2.Hybrid cars (Fuel Cell / Gas, Fuel Cell / Electric or Fuel Cell / Electric / Gas) make it onto the market and become popular. Slowly, the infrastructure grows to service the Fuel Cell components of hybrid cars. Eventually the point is reached where pure fuel cell cars are viable in the open market.
That's what I'm hoping, but it'll take serious volume before Toyota and Honda can justify the costs associated with the development and production of their current cars. I estimate that we're still 2-3 generations away in terms of battery and powerplant technology before we can produce affordable vehicles, and it won't get better unless we can get more players into the game.
3.The government subsidizes Fuel Cell cars to the point where people buy enough of them to justify the development of the infrastructure needed to support them, and thus make them a viable product without subsidies.
That's a bad idea. Subsidies artificially prop up the market, without actually promoting competition - take a look at solar cells, after 6 years of subsidies, the prices haven't gotten any lower, although supply is markedly better. I think what's happened is that there's an excuse to skim more money from the end customer, because they can get a rebate check from the government. What would be more desirable would be government-subsidized infrastructure, to lower the costs of production, which would allow free competition to produce the best products. Highways, bridges, power utilities (like the TVA), dams, sewer systems, etc. fall into this category. Seriously, do you thank GM would sell so many autos if someone didn't keep building new roads?
Clue: Any new technology that will revolutionize clean-air driving, and replace the ICE is always just "3-4" years down the road. This also corresponds to the length of many municipal, state, and federal administrations - coincidence? I think not...
Witness the 10-year long battle against zero-emissions vehicles in California. They'd rather spend money on lobbyists than researchers and production facilities, at the same time they get federal grants for researching alternative fuel vehicles - go figure.
What is interesting about this latest effort is that they are spending a significant amount of $$$ on it.
Spending money does not equate to delivering products. GM has had a long history of holding up really cool concept technology (anyone remmber their one-person commuter vechicle?), but only as hype - never as an actual product.
Superior technology argument is partially true (I'd argue that the benefits of hybrids currencly outweigh any negatives for 40% of the US population) - it takes a shitload of money to product cars for the consumer market - there's all sorts of saftety testing that must be done before certification, you still have to have manufacturing capacity to build the actual cars, even if you have the tech to produce an electric or hybrid drivetrain/powerplant. This is the barrier to entry for competitors, barring those who have gotten government supports for domestic competitive concerns (ie, military/industrial.)
Finally, you have to have a distribution network. It's like going up against Microsoft in the pre-open source days - nobody is gonna fund you.
In the interests of fairness, I'd yank all government funding to corporate labs that don't deliver products. No, the EV1 is not a product, and it never was. Witness the GM exec who said the EV1 was pulled because it "sold poorly." Of course it "sold poorly" -- IT WAS NEVER SOLD - only leased! This sound byte was repeated by the press so often, I'll bet every American was convinced that there was no market for the electric car - despite the fact that there was a long waiting list for new EV1s...
Depends on what you mean by hired. In California, all work done by contractors is NOT work-for-hire unless specifically stated in the contract. So, if you're in California, your above statement would be incorrect - if there is no language specifically indicating work-for-hire status one way or another, it would default to the photographer owning all rights.
Note that there are specific exemptions to work-for-hire covered under copyright law.
My question is, what does mod_gzip break? Hell, my crappy HTML/1.0 client supports gzip content (Netscape 4.08), so why aren't more people using it?
Not only does it save bandwidth on the server side, but text pages render instantaneously on the client side when the server supports it (I'm using Netscape on an old Mac, so this kind of stuff is important.) I say everyone should plug it in, and we'll fix all the broken stuff afterwards...
And because of this, the Chinese government sponsored the development of a competing royalty-free standard (SVCD) which, along with the existing video-CD (VCD) format, are now de-facto standards for video distribution in Asia.
Mod me down as redundant, but this "power" is illusory, and the consequence of many admins voluntarily using these publicly maintained blacklists. If you wanted to sue the people blocking you, you'd really have to sue the admins of the mailservers that you're using, as they're the ones actually implementing the blocks. The list maintainers just maintain a list of numbers.
If the list maintainers do a shitty job, nobody will use their lists, and they will have no "power" over you.
Actually, if they ever get them into production, helium-cooled graphite-moderated pebble-bed fission reactors could occupy less space than your local transformer station, and blend in better to boot. Of course, with the paranoia about radioactive materials, you'd end up with a huge-ass security perimeter with guards and a fence, and then a huge-ass saftey perimeter for the populace, thus negating that any size/concealment advantage.
On the other hand, you can cram probably a half dozen pebble-bed reactors on the same amount of space as an older US-style water-cooled reactor, so we could reuse some of that contaminated land. Hell, why not turn certain superfund sites (as long as they're geologically suitable) into reactor sites? As long as you're going to keep people from the area, might as well turn that to your advantage.
What about smaller wind gennys? I've got a AIR 403 sitting in the garage, with those sharp carbon-fiber blades. I haven't put it up yet because I haven't installed the inverter/battery setup, but I have worried about complaints of noise from the generator at night, and about possible injury to birds (I live in an urban/suburban area). After all, these generators only have a 3 ft dia, so they tend to spin fairly quickly. On the other hand, they do present a smaller cross-area, so if I stick lights on it (LEDs along a vane), maybe that will warn any flying creatures off.
On the topic of advertising, has anyone seen the billboards with the horizontal wind generators, the ones that look like ultra-thin, slowly rotating helicopter blades?
Damn, I had those nightmares too. That was a wicked game - not to mention the Star Trek simulator game, and Asteroids. Those vector games were awsome - and I'll bet they cost a hell of a lot to build.
Almost all the major stock houses tend to take a very liberal approach to comping images.
And therein lies the difference. They're stock houses - they don't create artwork specifically for the client on order, artwork which may have diminished (or no value) for anyone else. Not to mention, they're probably a one or two-person outfit, who need to pay the rent and eat.
A better analogy would be comissioning a suit designer to tailor the perfect suit for your business presentation, and then saying (after you try it on), not in my style - sorry. Wouldn't you expect that they would still get paid?
While I agree, you have to be more flexible during the current economy, consistently doing work for clients and not getting paid for it (also known as doing work on spec) is a bad practice.
You may think you need to do this in order to get work, but all you're doing is saying "I'll do work for free." The kinds of people who hire people on spec are generally not the kind of people who will then turn around and pay you full price for your work in the future.
If you get paid by the hour, you do. At least, you do in California. If you're on salary, well, that's something else, isn't it? 16 hours should be good for time and a half for every hour past the normal 8 hour workday. I forget at which point you hit double wages...
No. They know how much damage they do. They simply don't care. They rationalize, saying that the products that they advertise and the "services" that they offer, outweigh the "minor inconvenience" of getting crap you didn't ask for, printed on paper you paid for, and tying up a machine that you have installed and pay on a monthly basis to have a dedicated line for.
Yes, jail time would be a start. Also mandatory fines against spammers which would go to educate small business owners that fax-spamming is illegal, and to report anyone trying to sell them fax-spamming services. I really don't think that there are enough people who KNOW that fax-spam is illegal, since there's so much of it, and the feds don't really make an issue of it that I've seen (with the exception of the FTC fine against fax.com.)
You might have run into an automated dialer that's waiting to put a recorded pitch into your voicemail/answering machine. Yes, these things are illegal (wardialing is illegal, and recorded pitches are illegal), and you can report them to the FTC.
:P)
Good luck trying to track them down in many instances just by the call - usually the bastards will not have any identifying info, and will just leave an 800 number (to get a great deal on FREE satillite TV, just call our sales agent at 800-xxx-xxxx
However, every little bit of info helps - let the FTC know you're pissed, and they can make a good case of how the system is being abused the next time they report to Congress. Who knows, maybe some bright young senator/representative might take this up as their cause...
Now, someone answer me this - why doesn't the Attorney General make this shit a criminal offense? If they're willing to put some pimply faced teen-ager away for sharing his taped copy of ST: TNG, why are they letting people who are attacking insturments of business and medicine (read the article, fax-spammers were wardialing and attacking hospital fax machines), in flagrant violation of a Federal law against such? Dual standards of justice and mismanaged priorities...
Kudos to Steve Kirsch for putting this issue into the spotlight. All we got to do is wait for the judge to allow class action status - start saving the fax-spams people!
Sometimes I wish our legal system was like that world on the TV series Sliders, where lawyers were gunslingers, and legal battles were decided by shootouts between the two different legal teams. I don't know if that would make for better law, but we'd sure have a lot fewer lawyers...
Lynch 'em both, and their staffs, and their shady campaign consultants, and let God sort them out.
Heh, I conceded defeat when when went into the AP exam after starting the EM portion of the physics course just a scant week and a half previous (why is it they don't teach this stuff concurrent with the newtonian stuff when it's HALF the damn test???) It's one of the reasons I didn't become an engineer - that and my inability to add/subtract numbers properly...
Oh, and why are public schools on the semester system? Forget everything during Winter break, waste 2 weeks of the new year cramming for exams. Might as well go quarter system if they're going to keep us in school till June. And why 6 periods a day? Why not take fewer courses per quarter, and make them a quarter long - at least then if you're going to flunk a class, you don't waste the rest of the year.
Nothing I know about public schools in California makes sense - and this from someone who sat on one of those School-Based-Management showpieces as a student rep, to try and get teachers to publish a syllabus at the beginning of the year, so the student could evaluate, for him or herself, that this class would teach what they wanted to learn. I got a whole lot of flak from the teacher's reps, although the parents and community reps were behind me. The resolution was passed, but I'll bet it was dropped as soon as I graduated...
Because people like you are so focused on SAT scores and doing math without calculators that students never really learn to think, they just have to remember alot of useless facts, formulas, and other crap, when you are focused on remembering stuff you arent going to be able to think as well be creative.
While I agree with you on the useless formulas (look them up at the back of a book if you need them), what kind of thinking are you doing when you're punching buttons on a calculator? Certainly not more than you would carrying numbers by hand in a long-division problem. You saying that we shouldn't learn how to divide, that we should let machines handle it all? (think floating point bug here...)
As far as english, yes people should learn english from reading, but the problem is schools force students to read what THEY want them to read and this is one reason students dont learn to read as well as they would learn if they were reading what interests them.
Um, if they were reading what interests them, by your logic, they would already be reading well. This implies that school is the only place where they read, as this would be the point where being "forced" to read what the school wants them to read would retard their desire to read. Unfortunately, this is true, and a travesty - why is it that many people only read when forced to, and why is it that this place has to be school? The problem here is much deeper than not wanting to read...
Kids who like video games can learn to read playing final fantasy. Chatrooms and the web can also teach students to read. Allow the student the freedom to read whatever they want as long as it is within guidelines, and then make them write a paper about whatever they read, if it was a video game such, make them write a paper on it.
I wouldn't mind if video games, chatrooms, and the web were model sources for learning the English language - but they're NOT. Language is soaked up by daily interaction, and the purpose of the English class is to correct some of the stuff you learn. Yes, it's Nazi-ish, the proscription of the English language, but it's not without purpose - words can convey multiple shades of meaning, depending on the words you choose, written and spoken prose can convey different shades of feeling. Besides, if you don't know the rules, how can you break them intelligently?
Perhaps you went to a private school, but most people did not.
See my reply to an earlier post. I spent all 12 years in public school, with 30+ kids in the same class, a teacher either working on getting tenure or waiting for retirement (with a few thankful exceptions), and a stinking hour-long bus ride to and back from school to boot.
Oh, and while I'm ranting about how shitty the school systems are, why is it that HS textbooks (including the texts for some AP classes) are totally, utterly, and completely, USELESS? I learned more from studying the REA guide to the US History GRE exam, than I did from both my teacher and the damn textbook combined! Talk about over-simplified and re-filtered crap! The stinking encyclopedia has more information on history than these textbooks do!
I spent all 12 years of school in PUBLIC SCHOOL. Not public school in some rich area with 1:15 teacher student ratios, but public schools in fairly urbanized areas with more like 1:30+ ratios, (I had to do a shitload of busing, no thanks to overcrowding.)
In my last couple of years of HS, I took AP tests that my school did not offer, and I bullied my counselor into giving me the classes that I wanted. I realize that's not the norm, but neither *should* graduating HS without having basic math and english skills, as seems to be the custom these days.
And, I agree with fizbin - test taking is a specific skill, like taking notes, and learning to study, skills that are vital to success under the factory system of learning, but (at least, as far as I saw) never EVER explicitly taught as subjects in their own right.
I did the "straighten out and fly right" routine when I was in 10th grade and failing, and I haven't looked back since (although overcoming those early grades when applying to college was not easy.)
No need to boost the signal, just set up 6 access points with directional antennas on channel 1, and like a radiation machine to excise a cancer, set it up so all 6 of the beams intersect at the T-Mobile access point. That should swamp that access point until Starbucks decides to lower the gain on their antenna, or install shielding.
Actually, I'd argue that geometry has more in common with logic and trig than it does with algebra (remember those damn proofs.) It should be taught as a completely separate math course, parallel, prior, or after the algebra/algebra2 class, and should emphasise the ability to do proofs - no point in having to learn that nightmare all over again.