For the time period, some contracts may specify a definite time period, some may claim rights indefinitely. Local law may supercede some claims though.
Some contracts specify what work is considered related. Others may not, in which case it would be left up to the courts to decide. You could modify the contract to be more specific before signing it; just get the employer to initial the changes.
Many employment contracts claim ownership of any intellectual property you develop even after you leave the company, if it's related to work you did at the company. This way, they know you're not using company knowledge (which they paid you to gain) for your own work.
In this particular case, it sounds like the intellectual property may have been related to stuff he was doing at work, since Alcatel was interested in purchasing the idea from him. If he signed an employment contract giving up the idea, then it's a contractual obligation.
I don't want to sound like I'm on Alcatel's side, but I can see the legal reasons behind the court's decision.
IANAL, but note that the employment contract also details the employer's responsibilities towards you. If they come after you for an idea, and you claim "too bad, I didn't sign the employment contract," they could also probably say "okay, give us back the money we paid you, since that was in the contract too."
You're probably better off to edit the contract before signing it. Cross out and change parts you don't like, and you and the employer can initial each change before signing to make them official.
If the employer doesn't okay the changes, check the laws in your jurisdiction. Some of their contract demands may be unenforceable anyway. An earlier post mentioned that in California, any work you do on your own time is your own intellectual property. A contract generally can't override local law.
Your final option is to make a choice between accepting the chance that you might be forced to relinquish some of your intellectual property, or deciding not to take the job. But I wouldn't recommend not signing the contract.
Luckily, this particular issue doesn't (seem to) affect those who are already enrolled. However, they might try to push C# on upper-year students later. If so, it's a good thing they have the first-year students locked in now, because students will be more aware of what Microsoft is pushing. They won't get away with imposing it on current students, if students know what's coming.
When the CS Department became the School of CS, though, they messed something up for my class (I'm going into 2B in the fall). They're changing the concurrency and operating systems courses around, but only after I've taken one of them. So I end up seeing concurrency twice, and I already know that stuff. I don't know why they have to change things for people already in a program. It feels like a bait and switch.
How long will it be before employers start complaining that their UW co-op students don't know Linux or Java and can't work with non-Intel architectures?
Plus, in my experience, C# encourages bad programming style. I wrote a work report last fall (I'm a UW CS co-op) tearing it apart, but I'll leave a full discussion of that to someone else.
The point isn't so much that students won't know other languages, as that it obviously restricts their choice of platforms.
With C++ or Java, or most other programming languages out there, compilers (and interpreters if necessary) are available on virtually every platform imaginable. Not so with C#.
Because the course is in C# and is mandatory, students will be forced to buy Wintel machines and get the.NET tools.
Even if the.NET stuff is available for cheap, don't think that Microsoft isn't making money off it. UW probably just covers the cost so the students don't have to. Except that they do, in the form of higher tuition bills.
And when first-year students get roped into Wintel machines, they've just given M$ more money and market share, probably for their entire university career. Given the choice, though, they might have picked Linux on PPC or something else instead. And it probably would have been better.
Chess tournaments are generally time-limited, and this does prevent a computer from forseeing all possible sequences of moves.
At the start of a game, forseeing all possible sequences of moves means forseeing all possible games. There are trillions of possibilities. Computing them would take a while, and tracking them would take an obscene amount of memory.
What would take even longer is deciding which sequence of moves to make. Going with simple probability doesn't work; a path with "50% win chances" probably really means a loss unless the opponent does something stupid.
I'm not sure exactly how chess computers calculate their moves, but I do know that there's more to it than simply evaluating all possible sequences of moves. Sorry, I don't think Battle Chess was looking even 100 moves ahead to beat you, that would take far too much processing to be feasible on your old 286 (or whatever you were running it on). Even Deep Blue takes time to make its decisions (although its decisions will be a lot better).
Chess computers do concentrate on certain moves, and they perform complex processing to determine which of those moves to make. The decisions have to be based on the other player's style (and yes, some randomization) to be effective. Even so, I don't think a win could be guaranteed. Aren't chess games in NP?
I can see these phone ending up a pawn shops or wherever, it seems like Sony could just scatter real phones instead of spending the moolah to build fakes ones. A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, I'd rather have folks "find" a free phone and sign up for a service plan (and don't you think everyone would tell their friends about the new phone they found) rather than putting out dummy phones that only advertise.
I have to disagree with you for several reasons:
Ericsson doesn't provide the service, they just make the phone. So it doesn't make them any more money when someone signs up on a plan.
Re: scattering real phones, don't you think that the real ones would end up in pawn shops? Heck, you could just follow the Ericsson people as they dropped phones, and make a killing snatching them up before anyone else.
I think you misunderstand the idea behind the dummy phones. They don't do anything besides advertise a contest; finding a dummy phone doesn't guarantee you'll win a real one. There's no point in hoarding them (as in your pawn shop scenario).
Also, the cost of dummy phones is going to be a whole lot less than the real ones. Not to mention that these dummy phones won't have chargers, manuals, and the other things you'd expect to get when you buy a phone.
Finally, the dummy phones don't have electronics inside, which means they can be left anywhere; no worries about rain, etc.
Maybe/. should add an option to their subscriptions to funnel a buck or two each month toward a fund to lobby congress, donate to politicians who support our views, and bail people like Bruce and Dmitry out when they get in trouble. We could decide where the money goes by taking a vote, where 1 karma point gets 1 vote (meritocracy is generally preferable to democracy).
what if palladium breaks? and other thoughts
on
The Power of Palladium
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Okay, for the sake of argument, let's just say Microsoft doesn't have an ulterior motive for introducing Palladium. Not that I believe that for a second, but bear with me.
What if someone cracks the security on it? There will be millions of people who were trained into thinking "Palladium will protect my data, I don't have to worry about it." Suddenly, they'll have all their data exposed to some script kiddie, because "it's fine to share your entire hard drive on the internet; Palladium means nobody will be able to read it anyway."
Also, what about the extra cost we'll have paid all along for Palladium-enabled hardware? What a waste! Wait for the lawsuits.
I can only hope that Apple doesn't join in; right now, it's the only other "mainstream" option out there (i.e. I doubt I could convince my mom that she needs a Sun box). We need to keep a non-Palladium option open, one that regular users won't be afraid of. That's the only way we have any hope of avoiding Palladium (if M$/Intel/AMD keep pushing ahead with it).
How long before an undernet develops, with just open-source non-Palladium software and hardware? It'll be the Internet for the/. crowd.
A lot of dorms won't allow cooking appliances in the rooms. Fire hazard, I guess. Check beforehand, but if it's okay, then yes, this is definitely useful.
I recommend the Hamilton Beach grill instead, though. I've used both, and they're the same basic concept, but the Hamilton Beach grills seem better-thought-out than the George Foreman ones.
There's a timer, so unlike the George Foreman, you don't have to unplug it to turn it off. Also, the place won't burn down if you forget about the food.
Grill surfaces come off for easy cleaning. This is prolly the biggest pain with the George Foreman grills.
Grease catcher fits into the main unit, instead of sitting on the counter, able to conveniently get nudged out of alignment, etc.
At the University of Waterloo, the steam tunnels used to be open, but they closed them a decade or two ago. Of course, that which is forbidden is all the more tempting.
So once they realized some students were breaking in, they apparently put motion detectors and everything in there. Now, fine, you can break in if you want, but you're going to be caught if you don't get back out quickly. It's a tunnel; they'd have you surrounded pretty easily.
This may be just a pack of lies, designed to make us fear the tunnels, but I'd imagine that if there weren't security there, enough people would try to break in that I'd hear of successful attempts.
Anyway, just be careful what you're using lockpicks for. Just because you can into somewhere doesn't mean you're in the clear.
First, the idea was that this was supposed to be art, not vandalism. If you steal a sign, that's criminal. Technically, so is modifying the overhead sign, but it wasn't destructive.
Second, the overhead signage is (I'm pretty sure) larger than the signs on the side of the road. It would look out of proportion. Also, it wouldn't be possible to get the NORTH part of the sign from the roadside signage.
Third, it's art because it was so perfectly executed, and because it was a challenge to the artist. Any jerk can steal a sign from the roadside. It takes skill to make your own that will perfectly conform to specs, and install it without anyone even noticing.
Actually, Windows Media Player does support ripping and burning, and it's included with Windows these days. Thing is, though, it can only rip into Windows Media format, and it does a lousy job of the burning.
Or conversely, apply the proposed GPS tolling system to cell phones. Tolls will be higher on chronically busy roads in an attempt to ease congestion. Maybe in the future, as more and more people use cell phones (and RIM pagers, and wireless modems, etc.), service providers will boost prices based on the call traffic at the cell tower you're connecting to. There's only so much bandwidth available; supply and demand.
This was covered in a/. story a week or two ago. Fine, EQ players may earn an average wage of $3.42 per hour by auctioning items, but the only people buying the items are other EQ players. Therefore, they also spend an average of $3.42 per hour, and it remains in the EQ player community. The average player makes no profit by playing, and so I think the article is deceptive.
I guess it all depends on how you look at it, though. If you consider a life in EQ on the same level with real life, fine, maybe you can split it up into income and expenses (the $3.42 in and out per hour). But if EQ is just part of your life, you're more likely to just consider it an expense of $0 (on average). So the "average wage" is mostly meaningless.
One final thing, I'm a little rusty on my economics, but going back to the "no money comes in from outside the player community", wouldn't that just produce a gross domestic product per capita of $2,666? I thought gross national product was the amount of money coming in from outside.
I hope I'm safe in assuming that when the PS2 LinuxKit is available in the US, we'll be able to get it up here in Canada too. I mean, worst case scenario is that I have to get it thru a friend in the States (yay! no region issues), but has anyone heard if they're going to formally release it in all the Region 1 countries at once?
I know when the PS2 LinuxKit came out in Japan, they limited it to a release of something like 1000 copies (at least originally; they may have released more by now). Any word on whether something similar will happen in the US? I'll fight* you for a copy!
In related news,/. erupted in a religious war today as its users tried to plan a tournament to determine who of us would get the PS2 LinuxKits. Seems nobody could agree on whether it should be fought in Counter-Strike, Unreal Tournament, or Tux Racer.:)
To my knowledge, PBS doesn't receive government funding, though. Some of my Canadian tax dollars help pay for the CBC. In the UK, the TV licence fees pay for the BBC. I think when Ubergrendle said "public broadcaster," he meant funded by the government.
Really, the only difference between PBS and the other networks is that PBS gets its money by begging its viewers. Thanks, but I actually find commercials less annoying.
Slashdot Mirror
Vasiga saves the day! :)
Well, I guess other ppl helped, too.
For the time period, some contracts may specify a definite time period, some may claim rights indefinitely. Local law may supercede some claims though.
Some contracts specify what work is considered related. Others may not, in which case it would be left up to the courts to decide. You could modify the contract to be more specific before signing it; just get the employer to initial the changes.
In this particular case, it sounds like the intellectual property may have been related to stuff he was doing at work, since Alcatel was interested in purchasing the idea from him. If he signed an employment contract giving up the idea, then it's a contractual obligation.
I don't want to sound like I'm on Alcatel's side, but I can see the legal reasons behind the court's decision.
You're probably better off to edit the contract before signing it. Cross out and change parts you don't like, and you and the employer can initial each change before signing to make them official.
If the employer doesn't okay the changes, check the laws in your jurisdiction. Some of their contract demands may be unenforceable anyway. An earlier post mentioned that in California, any work you do on your own time is your own intellectual property. A contract generally can't override local law.
Your final option is to make a choice between accepting the chance that you might be forced to relinquish some of your intellectual property, or deciding not to take the job. But I wouldn't recommend not signing the contract.
"The man who represents himself has a fool for counsel."
When the CS Department became the School of CS, though, they messed something up for my class (I'm going into 2B in the fall). They're changing the concurrency and operating systems courses around, but only after I've taken one of them. So I end up seeing concurrency twice, and I already know that stuff. I don't know why they have to change things for people already in a program. It feels like a bait and switch.
Plus, in my experience, C# encourages bad programming style. I wrote a work report last fall (I'm a UW CS co-op) tearing it apart, but I'll leave a full discussion of that to someone else.
With C++ or Java, or most other programming languages out there, compilers (and interpreters if necessary) are available on virtually every platform imaginable. Not so with C#.
Because the course is in C# and is mandatory, students will be forced to buy Wintel machines and get the .NET tools.
Even if the .NET stuff is available for cheap, don't think that Microsoft isn't making money off it. UW probably just covers the cost so the students don't have to. Except that they do, in the form of higher tuition bills.
And when first-year students get roped into Wintel machines, they've just given M$ more money and market share, probably for their entire university career. Given the choice, though, they might have picked Linux on PPC or something else instead. And it probably would have been better.
At the start of a game, forseeing all possible sequences of moves means forseeing all possible games. There are trillions of possibilities. Computing them would take a while, and tracking them would take an obscene amount of memory.
What would take even longer is deciding which sequence of moves to make. Going with simple probability doesn't work; a path with "50% win chances" probably really means a loss unless the opponent does something stupid.
I'm not sure exactly how chess computers calculate their moves, but I do know that there's more to it than simply evaluating all possible sequences of moves. Sorry, I don't think Battle Chess was looking even 100 moves ahead to beat you, that would take far too much processing to be feasible on your old 286 (or whatever you were running it on). Even Deep Blue takes time to make its decisions (although its decisions will be a lot better).
Chess computers do concentrate on certain moves, and they perform complex processing to determine which of those moves to make. The decisions have to be based on the other player's style (and yes, some randomization) to be effective. Even so, I don't think a win could be guaranteed. Aren't chess games in NP?
Hmm, so it deforests and probably wastes huge amounts of energy too (walking takes effort; see quote below). Nice. :P
X-Homer: They have chairs with wheels? And here I am, using my legs like a sucker!
I have to disagree with you for several reasons:
Ericsson doesn't provide the service, they just make the phone. So it doesn't make them any more money when someone signs up on a plan.
Re: scattering real phones, don't you think that the real ones would end up in pawn shops? Heck, you could just follow the Ericsson people as they dropped phones, and make a killing snatching them up before anyone else.
I think you misunderstand the idea behind the dummy phones. They don't do anything besides advertise a contest; finding a dummy phone doesn't guarantee you'll win a real one. There's no point in hoarding them (as in your pawn shop scenario).
Also, the cost of dummy phones is going to be a whole lot less than the real ones. Not to mention that these dummy phones won't have chargers, manuals, and the other things you'd expect to get when you buy a phone.
Finally, the dummy phones don't have electronics inside, which means they can be left anywhere; no worries about rain, etc.
If they're geek girls, maybe they'd just do it to get the cool phone. :)
Hello, lamppost. Whatcha knowin'? I've come to watch your... power flowin'.
Is there anything left that doesn't have a relevant Simpsons quote? ;)
Maybe /. should add an option to their subscriptions to funnel a buck or two each month toward a fund to lobby congress, donate to politicians who support our views, and bail people like Bruce and Dmitry out when they get in trouble. We could decide where the money goes by taking a vote, where 1 karma point gets 1 vote (meritocracy is generally preferable to democracy).
What if someone cracks the security on it? There will be millions of people who were trained into thinking "Palladium will protect my data, I don't have to worry about it." Suddenly, they'll have all their data exposed to some script kiddie, because "it's fine to share your entire hard drive on the internet; Palladium means nobody will be able to read it anyway."
Also, what about the extra cost we'll have paid all along for Palladium-enabled hardware? What a waste! Wait for the lawsuits.
I can only hope that Apple doesn't join in; right now, it's the only other "mainstream" option out there (i.e. I doubt I could convince my mom that she needs a Sun box). We need to keep a non-Palladium option open, one that regular users won't be afraid of. That's the only way we have any hope of avoiding Palladium (if M$/Intel/AMD keep pushing ahead with it).
How long before an undernet develops, with just open-source non-Palladium software and hardware? It'll be the Internet for the /. crowd.
What about Pluto and Charon? Aren't they closer in size to each other than Earth and the Moon?
Yes; check out Nine Planets (look at Earth, The Moon, Pluto and Charon). Here are the diameters:
__________ Diameter
Pluto _____ 2274 km
Charon ____ 1172 km
Earth ____ 12756 km
The Moon __ 3476 km
This is a diameter ratio of about 1/2 for Charon/Pluto and 1/4 for Moon/Earth.
I recommend the Hamilton Beach grill instead, though. I've used both, and they're the same basic concept, but the Hamilton Beach grills seem better-thought-out than the George Foreman ones.
So once they realized some students were breaking in, they apparently put motion detectors and everything in there. Now, fine, you can break in if you want, but you're going to be caught if you don't get back out quickly. It's a tunnel; they'd have you surrounded pretty easily.
This may be just a pack of lies, designed to make us fear the tunnels, but I'd imagine that if there weren't security there, enough people would try to break in that I'd hear of successful attempts.
Anyway, just be careful what you're using lockpicks for. Just because you can into somewhere doesn't mean you're in the clear.
First, the idea was that this was supposed to be art, not vandalism. If you steal a sign, that's criminal. Technically, so is modifying the overhead sign, but it wasn't destructive. Second, the overhead signage is (I'm pretty sure) larger than the signs on the side of the road. It would look out of proportion. Also, it wouldn't be possible to get the NORTH part of the sign from the roadside signage. Third, it's art because it was so perfectly executed, and because it was a challenge to the artist. Any jerk can steal a sign from the roadside. It takes skill to make your own that will perfectly conform to specs, and install it without anyone even noticing.
Actually, Windows Media Player does support ripping and burning, and it's included with Windows these days. Thing is, though, it can only rip into Windows Media format, and it does a lousy job of the burning.
Or conversely, apply the proposed GPS tolling system to cell phones. Tolls will be higher on chronically busy roads in an attempt to ease congestion. Maybe in the future, as more and more people use cell phones (and RIM pagers, and wireless modems, etc.), service providers will boost prices based on the call traffic at the cell tower you're connecting to. There's only so much bandwidth available; supply and demand.
I guess it all depends on how you look at it, though. If you consider a life in EQ on the same level with real life, fine, maybe you can split it up into income and expenses (the $3.42 in and out per hour). But if EQ is just part of your life, you're more likely to just consider it an expense of $0 (on average). So the "average wage" is mostly meaningless.
One final thing, I'm a little rusty on my economics, but going back to the "no money comes in from outside the player community", wouldn't that just produce a gross domestic product per capita of $2,666? I thought gross national product was the amount of money coming in from outside.
I hope I'm safe in assuming that when the PS2 LinuxKit is available in the US, we'll be able to get it up here in Canada too. I mean, worst case scenario is that I have to get it thru a friend in the States (yay! no region issues), but has anyone heard if they're going to formally release it in all the Region 1 countries at once?
In related news, /. erupted in a religious war today as its users tried to plan a tournament to determine who of us would get the PS2 LinuxKits. Seems nobody could agree on whether it should be fought in Counter-Strike, Unreal Tournament, or Tux Racer. :)
* in Tux Racer all the way baby.
Really, the only difference between PBS and the other networks is that PBS gets its money by begging its viewers. Thanks, but I actually find commercials less annoying.