1. Did you ever ask for residuals? Did your parents? Do you have a union to help you negotiate?
Business isn't about getting what you deserve. It's about deserving as much as you can get. Unions help little people get more.
I work an honest day's work for an honest day's pay. I don't need residuals for my labor. I value unions in their ability to correct unsafe working conditions and drastically unfair wage exploitation, but I don't agree with most modern labor unions that only seem to exist to squeeze money when the workers are already well compensated.
The studios are going to get paid for the rest of the writers lives for that one momentary spark years ago. Copyright protects works for 95 years. If the studios are going to get paid, why shouldn't the writers?
Why should the studio? Cut copyright back to a reasonable length - like 50 years (or maybe just 20, same as patents). And my company makes millions of dollars each year selling products I've designed, but I don't get compensated on a percentage of sales and wouldn't want to be. Why don't the writers sell their script for the price they think it's worth and be happy with an honest day's pay? Movie rights for major books go for multiple millions of dollars. Are writers so unsure about their own work that they think it's worth nothing unless and until the public happens to like it?
My phone cost me $8 and I pay $90 for a full year of air time, at $0.18 a minute which I'll never use up. If I just wanted to call 911, I could have saved the $90. This is with Virgin Mobile.
And what about those who either choose not to have a cellphone
Try screaming and waving your arms. Someone will a cell phone will call 911 for you (or because of you).
No, you've got it all wrong. Because all of our lower-education but higher-paying jobs are moving away, we need more people to go to college. We can't afford to relegate all of our C students to truck drivers and welders, as you say: those jobs are going to be filled by D and F students, dropouts, and immigrants.
It's getting to the point where the college degree is a relatively unimpressive feat in today's world.
Don't sound so elitist. It's a good thing that a college degree is a common feat. For a lot of students, college is the first place that's going to make them think and work. If these C students can't do it, they'll drop out fast and become truck drivers. If, however, they are genuinely hard workers but just not bright, or bright but never motivated, they'll get out of college the tools they need to get a better job, live in a better place, have better health care, and raise kids able to get Bs and As and lead a better life.
Should every child go to college?
To reiterate: no. But, we need more than our B and A students going to college. Because the jobs left in our country require either no-skill or the education from a college degree, we need get our "average" student into college.
My 3rd grade science teacher took a day and listed, on the overhead projector, side-by-side "facts" from creationism and evolution. He came down very strongly on the creationism side. (This was in Lousisana.)
What should I have done? First off I was 9 and had just lived in Louisiana for a few months. Second most of the class likely agreed with him from their own parents' teachings.
It just made me uncomfortable. Incidentally the subject we were supposed to be studying at the time was the names of the different cloud shapes. I guess our teacher just wanted to imprint us while we were young.
I'm an engineer. It takes a lot of skill and creativity to make products work on first revision. Guess what? I don't get residuals for work I did last year, last month, or any time before my last paycheck. I don't need residuals to retire because I, you know, save money.
Both of my parents were writers and editors at one point, for the newspaper industry. Neither of them got any residuals, either. I don't suppose you continue to write residual checks to the artists that designed your car, or your sofa, or you house, either?
No advertising, no residual payments... not fair?
Go on strike and get a better contract. The law allows you to do that. But in no way do most of the working world consider this "unfair" to the special subset of people who feel that they need to be paid for the rest of their life for one momentary spark years ago. And when the time comes around that we can finally change copyright back to 50 years, thereby cutting off residuals for thousands of older writers or their descendants, you won't find me or most other people on Slashdot complaining.
My guess would be that you were modded troll because you were being overly smug. (Shrug, I'm an EE too. I know where my products are used, but no one else reading or posting on this topic cares.)
I have a cell phone. It cost me $8.95. My minutes cost me $90 per year. Only my dad and my wife know the number, and both know I don't like being called. It doesn't mean I'm better (or worse) than anyone else, it just means I don't like being permanently connected a large number of distant (read: not my wife or dad) acquaintances and have no need to chat with anyone constantly.
Other people feel differently, and are perfectly happy to pay $50 a month in pursuit of their goal. My wife, for instance.
probably most people (90%+) would say their posts are in the public domain if asked about it
Not public domain, no, but with a license that allows quoting and republication on the internet with attribution. (I'm sure one of the Creative Commons licenses would work wonderfully.) Public domain works don't require attribution, so someone else could use my words as their own. That's not acceptable to me or most other posters, I'd assume.
Whether most posters would allow someone to take their words and include them in a written publication (for example, my new book The Words and Wisdom of Merk (25521)) is a separate consideration.
The universe is really big, mmkay? And 50 years is a really, really, short time. For the most part we can still just hear things that are being shouted directly at us, in order to get it above the noise. Likely no one else out there knows we are here to shout at us.
At the same time, the universe is really, really big. The odds are very good that the right combination of environment and events occurred many, many times. The odds just happen to be very bad that it happened a second time anywhere near our arm of our galaxy.
Here in Austin, Goodwill has a computer center that resells donated equipment. But, also, they've partnered with Dell to offer recycling of all computer electronics as well. So there's no need to separate the good from the bad. Give it all to the local Goodwill, and they'll put people to work learning how to test hardware and either bin it for safe recycling or put it up for resale and reuse.
I've taken the time to tape a "Good" or "Bad" sticker to the top of my electronics as I retire them, just because there are some things (like a motherboard with a north bridge that liked to lock up during 3d video rendering) that no tech is going to find, and I don't want that reused.
See the comment page. There's a note requesting that it be removed.
Just pulling the sentence off the article wouldn't have done any good, since someone would have just decided I'm wrong and put it back. To make it go away for good, the folks that regularly patrol that article need to agree with my position.
This book of Harry Potter Knitting Patterns clearly says on its first inside page:
This book is not authorized, approved, licensed, or endorsed by Warner Bros., J.K. Rowling, her publishers, or licensors. And it's being sold on Amazon right now.
(Killed time browsing through it at a yarn store last month, waiting on my wife.)
There are virtually no street vandalism, so they can put a lot of statues and art on the streets, and it stays untouched and unharmed.
In Tokyo a few weeks ago, I was amazed to see bikes parked on the sidewalks without locks. People just parked their bike and went in to shop or eat for an hour or two.
Even here in Austin, a relatively laid-back and bike-friendly place, your bike won't last long on a public street unless it's bolted down or holding you. And even then it can be iffy...
Would you consider it more NPOV if they stated that aunt Hilda's radio also failed because of tin whiskers? I don't think it's necessary to add irrelevant cases just to make it "neutral".
No, I don't think additional minor issues should be added. I think the examples included should be backed up by citation or removed. In this case, only the nuclear power plant has a citation, so the second sentence should be deleted entirely.
* Except, ironically, NASA and the like, due to the tin whisker panic.**
** All the evidence I've seen is that tin whiskers are 99% a non-issue panic. The Wikipedia entry is definitely not NPOV with its inflammatory list of "nuclear power plant, satellites in orbit, aircraft in flight, and implanted medical pacemakers" for places that failures have been seen due to the phenomenon.
Those numbers are from someone who clearly stated he's only mined about half the available armory data. And the armory only includes characters from North America and Europe, not Asia.
So about 9 million active characters in 2 of 3 game markets, and Blizzard claims 9 million total accounts active right now (and they explicitly exclude closed, expired trial, etc., accounts from "active").
It doesn't work. After I switched my cell phone from AT&T to Virgin Mobile last year, I kept getting automated phone calls and texts telling me that my service was expiring. This went on for months.
When I needed to call AT&T for some reason, I explicitly asked that they put my number on their Do Not Call list. The response I got?
"Sorry, we don't have one of our own. You need to register with the federal Do Not Call registry, and in about six weeks the calls will stop."
I've paid for shareware I've used before, with prices up to $60-$70 or so. However, that top price was for a full-featured "best in class" development program (VideoReDo) or for a major customized database application (Living Cookbook). I wouldn't pay that much for a "utility" type of software as opposed to an "application" type of software. (I don't know what you sell.)
It's possible that your customers feel that the program is worth something to them, but they just don't feel it's worth $25. Since you get so little money anyway, why don't you try letting people pay whatever they choose in the range of $15-$25, and see if it boosts your total income? Maybe you could add value to those who choose to pay $20 or more by giving them free updates, new features, support, etc.?
And nag screens can bad (thanks for not having one!) but perhaps there's space on the menu bar to put in a text-only "donate and register" reminder? Can't hurt to remind people that they didn't pay anything for a utility they use all the time...
Somehow, our GameStop ended up with 3 extra CE copies. Alas, we hadn't preordered it, and they sold the three to those who stood outside the longest before the midnight opening. (We had an ice storm that night here in Texas, and I wasn't going to stand outside in below-freezing temperatures when I had a regular one on preorder. On the good side, work was closed the next day so my wife and I got the spend the whole day playing before the kiddies got home from school and clogged Hellfire Peninsula.)
Eh, just last night I searched for "something interesting" because I was bored and wanted the internet to entertain me. (Hint: The first google hit on that search will make your eyes bleed.)
Had I known of an opportunity to draw sheep, I would have jumped on it.
So I have a Virgin Mobile phone. As it turns out, I got to deal with their customer service today. I lost my cell phone while on a business trip to San Diego Monday night. It was lost either on a charter bus, at the home of a well-to-do CEO, or at my rather expensive hotel. (I should have drank less; my fault.) I expected it to be found and returned by the cleaning crew at one of those places. Today my wife started getting obscene text messages, so I guess I trusted them too much. I called to cancel that phone and buy another one.
My only complaint is that it was too damn hard to reach a person, and no menu option covered my need. After the first call, when they couldn't help me because I didn't have my PIN, but they were able to confirm enough to email the pin to me, the lady told me what words to use on my call back to get an operator right away. They didn't work, so I used the method from my first call. (Hint: go to Change Service, Replace Your Phone, then start banging buttons when they ask for your phone number or PIN.)
However, on both calls I did in fact reach a customer service person, who in both cases spoke good English, understood what I needed and did it for me, offered services (like wiping my phone's contact list) that I didn't know existed, and helped me along to get a replacement phone. All for a customer who spends $8 on his phone and $90 per year on minutes and texts.
Say what you will about the demons at AT&Suck (my home internet and phone provider) or Verizon, but don't assume all cell phone companies are that evil.
But why is that right extended to CORPORATE news org employees and not Slashdot commentors?
I think this is still a clash of "old world/new world" societies. When working on traditional topics and with more conservative people, those involved tend to favor traditional news sources, and so their bias toward "true journalists" limits them to just corporate professionals. However, with topics and people that themselves have embraced "new world" ideas, the notions of press can be much for flexible.
Consider, for example, a modern-day movie festival such as Fantastic Fest compared to a more traditional festival such as Cannes. It's far more likely that a blogger or web-only film reviewer would get a press pass at a festival sponsored by Ain't It Cool News, when compared to a festival enveloped in old-world snoot.
Rivers in most states eventually flow into a different state, too, but that doesn't mean that states can't restrict or ban water pollution. The CO2 can be defined a pollutant as soon as it leaves the vehicle, while it is still wholly contained within the state of the car (or power plant or factory) that emitted it.
Now if they tried to apply this ruling to vehicles merely crossing through their state, as opposed to those registered to drivers in that state, with state license plates, then yes, I agree that the courts could intervene. Pretty soon belching trucks from Mexico will be all over the US, and I bet there's nothing any state can do about those.
In other news, hordes of peoples wearing green alien masks and carrying signs that read "We welcome our new overlords" have descended on Dalhart, Texas, leaving Roswell, New Mexico a ghost town.
The government is claiming that a UFO, which crashed in Dalhart on October 22, is in fact a balloon from a weather experiment, the same official reason given for the July 1947 crash that triggered the alien invasion culture. UFO supporters are skeptical.
Slashdot Mirror
1. Did you ever ask for residuals? Did your parents? Do you have a union to help you negotiate?
Business isn't about getting what you deserve. It's about deserving as much as you can get. Unions help little people get more.
I work an honest day's work for an honest day's pay. I don't need residuals for my labor. I value unions in their ability to correct unsafe working conditions and drastically unfair wage exploitation, but I don't agree with most modern labor unions that only seem to exist to squeeze money when the workers are already well compensated.
The studios are going to get paid for the rest of the writers lives for that one momentary spark years ago. Copyright protects works for 95 years. If the studios are going to get paid, why shouldn't the writers?
Why should the studio? Cut copyright back to a reasonable length - like 50 years (or maybe just 20, same as patents). And my company makes millions of dollars each year selling products I've designed, but I don't get compensated on a percentage of sales and wouldn't want to be. Why don't the writers sell their script for the price they think it's worth and be happy with an honest day's pay? Movie rights for major books go for multiple millions of dollars. Are writers so unsure about their own work that they think it's worth nothing unless and until the public happens to like it?
My phone cost me $8 and I pay $90 for a full year of air time, at $0.18 a minute which I'll never use up. If I just wanted to call 911, I could have saved the $90. This is with Virgin Mobile.
And what about those who either choose not to have a cellphone
Try screaming and waving your arms. Someone will a cell phone will call 911 for you (or because of you).
No, you've got it all wrong. Because all of our lower-education but higher-paying jobs are moving away, we need more people to go to college. We can't afford to relegate all of our C students to truck drivers and welders, as you say: those jobs are going to be filled by D and F students, dropouts, and immigrants.
It's getting to the point where the college degree is a relatively unimpressive feat in today's world.
Don't sound so elitist. It's a good thing that a college degree is a common feat. For a lot of students, college is the first place that's going to make them think and work. If these C students can't do it, they'll drop out fast and become truck drivers. If, however, they are genuinely hard workers but just not bright, or bright but never motivated, they'll get out of college the tools they need to get a better job, live in a better place, have better health care, and raise kids able to get Bs and As and lead a better life.
Should every child go to college?
To reiterate: no. But, we need more than our B and A students going to college. Because the jobs left in our country require either no-skill or the education from a college degree, we need get our "average" student into college.
My 3rd grade science teacher took a day and listed, on the overhead projector, side-by-side "facts" from creationism and evolution. He came down very strongly on the creationism side. (This was in Lousisana.)
What should I have done? First off I was 9 and had just lived in Louisiana for a few months. Second most of the class likely agreed with him from their own parents' teachings.
It just made me uncomfortable. Incidentally the subject we were supposed to be studying at the time was the names of the different cloud shapes. I guess our teacher just wanted to imprint us while we were young.
I'm an engineer. It takes a lot of skill and creativity to make products work on first revision. Guess what? I don't get residuals for work I did last year, last month, or any time before my last paycheck. I don't need residuals to retire because I, you know, save money.
Both of my parents were writers and editors at one point, for the newspaper industry. Neither of them got any residuals, either. I don't suppose you continue to write residual checks to the artists that designed your car, or your sofa, or you house, either?
No advertising, no residual payments... not fair?
Go on strike and get a better contract. The law allows you to do that. But in no way do most of the working world consider this "unfair" to the special subset of people who feel that they need to be paid for the rest of their life for one momentary spark years ago. And when the time comes around that we can finally change copyright back to 50 years, thereby cutting off residuals for thousands of older writers or their descendants, you won't find me or most other people on Slashdot complaining.
My guess would be that you were modded troll because you were being overly smug. (Shrug, I'm an EE too. I know where my products are used, but no one else reading or posting on this topic cares.)
I have a cell phone. It cost me $8.95. My minutes cost me $90 per year. Only my dad and my wife know the number, and both know I don't like being called. It doesn't mean I'm better (or worse) than anyone else, it just means I don't like being permanently connected a large number of distant (read: not my wife or dad) acquaintances and have no need to chat with anyone constantly.
Other people feel differently, and are perfectly happy to pay $50 a month in pursuit of their goal. My wife, for instance.
probably most people (90%+) would say their posts are in the public domain if asked about it
Not public domain, no, but with a license that allows quoting and republication on the internet with attribution. (I'm sure one of the Creative Commons licenses would work wonderfully.) Public domain works don't require attribution, so someone else could use my words as their own. That's not acceptable to me or most other posters, I'd assume.
Whether most posters would allow someone to take their words and include them in a written publication (for example, my new book The Words and Wisdom of Merk (25521)) is a separate consideration.
Yes, much easier for the sniper to pick you out of the crowd when you stand up.
The universe is really big, mmkay? And 50 years is a really, really, short time. For the most part we can still just hear things that are being shouted directly at us, in order to get it above the noise. Likely no one else out there knows we are here to shout at us.
At the same time, the universe is really, really big. The odds are very good that the right combination of environment and events occurred many, many times. The odds just happen to be very bad that it happened a second time anywhere near our arm of our galaxy.
Here in Austin, Goodwill has a computer center that resells donated equipment. But, also, they've partnered with Dell to offer recycling of all computer electronics as well. So there's no need to separate the good from the bad. Give it all to the local Goodwill, and they'll put people to work learning how to test hardware and either bin it for safe recycling or put it up for resale and reuse.
I've taken the time to tape a "Good" or "Bad" sticker to the top of my electronics as I retire them, just because there are some things (like a motherboard with a north bridge that liked to lock up during 3d video rendering) that no tech is going to find, and I don't want that reused.
See the comment page. There's a note requesting that it be removed.
Just pulling the sentence off the article wouldn't have done any good, since someone would have just decided I'm wrong and put it back. To make it go away for good, the folks that regularly patrol that article need to agree with my position.
(Killed time browsing through it at a yarn store last month, waiting on my wife.)
There are virtually no street vandalism, so they can put a lot of statues and art on the streets, and it stays untouched and unharmed.
In Tokyo a few weeks ago, I was amazed to see bikes parked on the sidewalks without locks. People just parked their bike and went in to shop or eat for an hour or two.
Even here in Austin, a relatively laid-back and bike-friendly place, your bike won't last long on a public street unless it's bolted down or holding you. And even then it can be iffy...
Would you consider it more NPOV if they stated that aunt Hilda's radio also failed because of tin whiskers? I don't think it's necessary to add irrelevant cases just to make it "neutral".
No, I don't think additional minor issues should be added. I think the examples included should be backed up by citation or removed. In this case, only the nuclear power plant has a citation, so the second sentence should be deleted entirely.
Dude, no one uses lead for soldering any more.* Get with the times.
* Except, ironically, NASA and the like, due to the tin whisker panic.**
** All the evidence I've seen is that tin whiskers are 99% a non-issue panic. The Wikipedia entry is definitely not NPOV with its inflammatory list of "nuclear power plant, satellites in orbit, aircraft in flight, and implanted medical pacemakers" for places that failures have been seen due to the phenomenon.
Those numbers are from someone who clearly stated he's only mined about half the available armory data. And the armory only includes characters from North America and Europe, not Asia.
So about 9 million active characters in 2 of 3 game markets, and Blizzard claims 9 million total accounts active right now (and they explicitly exclude closed, expired trial, etc., accounts from "active").
Pretty much lines up, really.
It doesn't work. After I switched my cell phone from AT&T to Virgin Mobile last year, I kept getting automated phone calls and texts telling me that my service was expiring. This went on for months.
When I needed to call AT&T for some reason, I explicitly asked that they put my number on their Do Not Call list. The response I got?
"Sorry, we don't have one of our own. You need to register with the federal Do Not Call registry, and in about six weeks the calls will stop."
I've paid for shareware I've used before, with prices up to $60-$70 or so. However, that top price was for a full-featured "best in class" development program (VideoReDo) or for a major customized database application (Living Cookbook). I wouldn't pay that much for a "utility" type of software as opposed to an "application" type of software. (I don't know what you sell.)
It's possible that your customers feel that the program is worth something to them, but they just don't feel it's worth $25. Since you get so little money anyway, why don't you try letting people pay whatever they choose in the range of $15-$25, and see if it boosts your total income? Maybe you could add value to those who choose to pay $20 or more by giving them free updates, new features, support, etc.?
And nag screens can bad (thanks for not having one!) but perhaps there's space on the menu bar to put in a text-only "donate and register" reminder? Can't hurt to remind people that they didn't pay anything for a utility they use all the time...
Somehow, our GameStop ended up with 3 extra CE copies. Alas, we hadn't preordered it, and they sold the three to those who stood outside the longest before the midnight opening. (We had an ice storm that night here in Texas, and I wasn't going to stand outside in below-freezing temperatures when I had a regular one on preorder. On the good side, work was closed the next day so my wife and I got the spend the whole day playing before the kiddies got home from school and clogged Hellfire Peninsula.)
So anyway, yeah, our store got yer copies.
Eh, just last night I searched for "something interesting" because I was bored and wanted the internet to entertain me. (Hint: The first google hit on that search will make your eyes bleed.)
Had I known of an opportunity to draw sheep, I would have jumped on it.
How many malevolent companies/groups/governments/cabals can we be expected to tolerate.
Given how many we tolerate in Real Life, I expect we'll tolerate a bunch more of them on TV.
So I have a Virgin Mobile phone. As it turns out, I got to deal with their customer service today. I lost my cell phone while on a business trip to San Diego Monday night. It was lost either on a charter bus, at the home of a well-to-do CEO, or at my rather expensive hotel. (I should have drank less; my fault.) I expected it to be found and returned by the cleaning crew at one of those places. Today my wife started getting obscene text messages, so I guess I trusted them too much. I called to cancel that phone and buy another one.
My only complaint is that it was too damn hard to reach a person, and no menu option covered my need. After the first call, when they couldn't help me because I didn't have my PIN, but they were able to confirm enough to email the pin to me, the lady told me what words to use on my call back to get an operator right away. They didn't work, so I used the method from my first call. (Hint: go to Change Service, Replace Your Phone, then start banging buttons when they ask for your phone number or PIN.)
However, on both calls I did in fact reach a customer service person, who in both cases spoke good English, understood what I needed and did it for me, offered services (like wiping my phone's contact list) that I didn't know existed, and helped me along to get a replacement phone. All for a customer who spends $8 on his phone and $90 per year on minutes and texts.
Say what you will about the demons at AT&Suck (my home internet and phone provider) or Verizon, but don't assume all cell phone companies are that evil.
But why is that right extended to CORPORATE news org employees and not Slashdot commentors?
I think this is still a clash of "old world/new world" societies. When working on traditional topics and with more conservative people, those involved tend to favor traditional news sources, and so their bias toward "true journalists" limits them to just corporate professionals. However, with topics and people that themselves have embraced "new world" ideas, the notions of press can be much for flexible.
Consider, for example, a modern-day movie festival such as Fantastic Fest compared to a more traditional festival such as Cannes. It's far more likely that a blogger or web-only film reviewer would get a press pass at a festival sponsored by Ain't It Cool News, when compared to a festival enveloped in old-world snoot.
Rivers in most states eventually flow into a different state, too, but that doesn't mean that states can't restrict or ban water pollution. The CO2 can be defined a pollutant as soon as it leaves the vehicle, while it is still wholly contained within the state of the car (or power plant or factory) that emitted it.
Now if they tried to apply this ruling to vehicles merely crossing through their state, as opposed to those registered to drivers in that state, with state license plates, then yes, I agree that the courts could intervene. Pretty soon belching trucks from Mexico will be all over the US, and I bet there's nothing any state can do about those.
In other news, hordes of peoples wearing green alien masks and carrying signs that read "We welcome our new overlords" have descended on Dalhart, Texas, leaving Roswell, New Mexico a ghost town.
The government is claiming that a UFO, which crashed in Dalhart on October 22, is in fact a balloon from a weather experiment, the same official reason given for the July 1947 crash that triggered the alien invasion culture. UFO supporters are skeptical.