Such is the result of treating the stock market as a means of short-term legalized gambling instead of real investment. People are putting money into stocks with the sole expectation of flipping it and with no concern for or knowledge of the company that the stock represents. I have slightly less sympathy for those folks than I do for the people that bought houses they couldn't afford with interest-only loans with the expectation of selling them right away, were unable to unload them, and are now looking at impending foreclosure as a result. You play with fire, you run the risk of getting burned.
I'm currently in the process of returning it as they would not advance ship the correct product
I can't stand it when companies do that - they have your money, but you don't have the product you paid for. If they tried to charge me for the return shipping, I'd fight it to the point of getting the state AG involved - you already paid the shipping charge, didn't get what you ordered, and shouldn't have to pay for their mistake. They really should be sending UPS or someone to pick it up instead of making you take time out of your day because they can't get their act together.
[makes note to self about Buy.com's customer service]
All of this stuff is creeping into hardware daily, and it's getting to where you can't buy computer hardware WITHOUT this shit.
I'm quite sure MS is content to encourage things to continue down that path. Eventually, it will mean you will have critical parts of any computer that won't have open-source drivers available (I'm talking stuff like fundamental bus control hardware, not just video/audio cards), and without which the computer simply will not run. MS will have dealt with that pesky Linux annoyance once and for all.
I don't get it either, but it's certainly not surprising to see the music industry completely fail to apply common sense and go out of their way to shoot themselves in the foot yet again.
On the other hand, I'm reasonably sure this move is going to end up costing Sony and Universal money, so there's that to be happy about.
It just occurs to me that I've written three damn replies to the same post instead of consolidating all of them together. This is what happens when you use the Internet right after waking up - don't do it kids!
I realise the US has a different outlook, that's your perogative and your's alone
Would you *please* tell Rebecca Peters that? Even though I disagree with the current situation, I'm quite content to let the Australians decide what their own gun policy should be, and I'd appreciate it if she'd extend the same courtesy to the US.
The purpose of making guns and ammunition is to be able to shoot things. I will venture to say (my assumption) that most of the time these things are living things.
I applaud the fact that you accurately represented the purpose of a gun. However, I respectfully disagree with the assumption that followed. I own two rifles, a shotgun, and three pistols, all of which are the evil "semi-automatic" variety. Between all of them, I've burned through a few thousand rounds of ammunition in the last year. Somehow through all of that, I've managed to not aim at, kill, or injure a single living thing with any of them. This pattern has repeated itself for several years. I know lots of other people that shoot more than I do, and while they've killed living things during the course of hunting, the vast majority of their ammo has been sent downrange to inflict grave harm on large sheets of paper. Of the hundred or so other gun owners that I know in my local area, I know of none of them that have used any of their weapons against a person.
To a large degree this is true, but in fairness there weren't too many muskets made in the late 1700s that could put five shots within 1" of each other at 100 yards, whereas that's performance one could expect from a hunting rifle that they'd pick up at Wal-Mart for $500 today.
Having said that, you only need to fast forward to the 1850s to find muskets that you *could* do that with, and it was only about 50 years later that semi-auto and full-auto weapons began to become available to the public. As dangerous as we're told semi-auto rifles are, I guess it's a fricking miracle that the U.S. managed to avoid total carnage for the next 100+ years after that. [rolls eyes]
NFA Title 2 gear (fully automatic rifles, silencers, shotguns with barrels less than 18", etc.) isn't particularly difficult to get as long as you have a clean record and a chief of police that doesn't have a boner against people exercising their Second Amendment rights - you need $200 for the appropriate tax stamp, the approval of your local chief of police or sheriff, and you have to submit photographs and fingerprints to the ATF. You don't need to have a dealer's license, just the tax stamp. Where things become difficult is the prices of the weapons themselves. Because of the Firearms Owners' Protection Act, it's illegal to manufacture for purchase by the public, to buy, or possess any automatic weapon made after May 19, 1986. "Automatic weapon" also is construed to mean any parts that may be used to convert a semi-automatic weapon to fully automatic. Because of the artificial scarcity, something like an H&K MP5 that should normally cost $2000 or so now costs $15-20K *if* you can find someone willing to sell one, and the gun will be at least 21 years old. Of course, this was a main unstated purpose behind the legislation, as FOPA itself does little to nothing to protect firearm owners.
I guess that also means that we have to use manual printing presses instead of computers to disseminate our views to others? It's the same fricking argument.
Why don't you get back to me when the main use of a blog is to kill something?
How about getting back to us when you understand that the point the parent was trying to make is that it's hypocritical that people are making a big deal of this new proposed legislation, but don't seem to have a problem with making the exercise of another equally important and explicitly protected civil right subject to federal regulation.
At least it kept the speed readout consistent with the displayed graphics. I love the fact that when playing "TIE Fighter", you can be running at full throttle and it still takes 10 seconds or so to fly the length of a star destroyer. That works out to about 350 mph. How would any of these things ever be able to be in close proximity to a planet without falling to the ground?
Just being able to survive sharp turns at an assumed speed of thousands of miles per hour takes quite a willingness to discard physics altogether, so I pretty much discard any notion of accuracy and just concentrate on having fun.:-)
What the parent poster is getting at is that in union shops, there are usually *very* clearly defined areas of responsibilities for jobs that are covered under a collective bargaining agreement, and it's usually a violation of said agreement to assign an employee a task that falls outside his job description as stated in the contract. This is why you half to wait half an hour for an electrician to come change a light bulb rather than just doing it yourself - our people had to deal with that silliness at the shipyard all the time when I was contracting for the Navy years ago.
IANAL but I suspect all that will happen if the union pursues this angle is that they'll get told that there is still no question that the cop was acting as an employee, and if he wants to complain about the improper job assignment then he can file a grievance and they'll deal with it like any other labor contract violation.
Most work contracts for technical companies already stipulate this
Only if you let them. I won't work for a company that asserts ownership of stuff I develop using strictly my own resources, but fortunately no one has given me a difficult time about striking those clauses out of the contract. Okay, I lied - one did when they tried to unilaterally change my contract after I'd been there for two years, but when they tried to take me to the mat over it I told them I'd walk if they didn't strike it, and they finally agreed to it.
Absolutely, but it looks like he assumed that risk under a faulty set of assumptions, a near-total lack of awareness of the concept of "work for hire", and zero paperwork that would clarify and document everyone's expectations. As this guy has probably told others countless times in his career, "ignorance of the law is not an excuse."
US copyright law specifically lists "a work prepared by an employee within the scope of his or her employment" as a fundamental condition that establishes a "work for hire". Your statement holds true if you're an independent contractor, but if you're an employee the copyright goes to your employer unless there is an agreement stating otherwise. See 17 USC 101 for more details.
/not a lawyer, not legal advice //has had to deal with this crap before, unfortunately
The situation with small towns writing ridiculous numbers of unwarranted tickets got bad enough in Florida that the state passed a law a few years back whereby you *can't* be fined for going 5 mph or less over the speed limit - you can only receive a warning.
Having a speed limit of 25 mph in a residential area where kids are always out playing? Great idea, and I say "enforce the hell out of it". Limiting people to 70 mph on a highway that can safely handle traffic at 90 mph? Unreasonable, but good luck getting the state to change that law. The state legislature doesn't mind doing the right thing when it only limits the income of small towns/counties, but they'll be damned if they let their own income be affected.
Given that his employer provided space, a computer, and the time during his working day to work on this project, it sounds to me like option A has been fulfilled there and thus it's a work for hire. I don't think any of us know exactly what the situation is, so I'm hesitant to say whether I think he should or should not retain the copyright on his changes. At the very least, I'm sure he won't be writing any more software without the appropriate contracts in place. There's also the issue that he didn't write his own software from scratch - he modified existing software that belonged to the state of Iowa, so he may not even have had the legal right to distribute changes to it, much less try to sell those changes.
Part of me wants to see the guy be successful in his efforts, but another part says that he was foolish for assuming the best from such a nebulous situation. Yet another part of me notes that he wrote 2,000 traffic tickets in a year and wonders what kind of tool he must be to be ticketing more than one person up every hour during his shift every day that he works.
Slashdot Mirror
Such is the result of treating the stock market as a means of short-term legalized gambling instead of real investment. People are putting money into stocks with the sole expectation of flipping it and with no concern for or knowledge of the company that the stock represents. I have slightly less sympathy for those folks than I do for the people that bought houses they couldn't afford with interest-only loans with the expectation of selling them right away, were unable to unload them, and are now looking at impending foreclosure as a result. You play with fire, you run the risk of getting burned.
I'm currently in the process of returning it as they would not advance ship the correct product
I can't stand it when companies do that - they have your money, but you don't have the product you paid for. If they tried to charge me for the return shipping, I'd fight it to the point of getting the state AG involved - you already paid the shipping charge, didn't get what you ordered, and shouldn't have to pay for their mistake. They really should be sending UPS or someone to pick it up instead of making you take time out of your day because they can't get their act together.
[makes note to self about Buy.com's customer service]
All of this stuff is creeping into hardware daily, and it's getting to where you can't buy computer hardware WITHOUT this shit.
I'm quite sure MS is content to encourage things to continue down that path. Eventually, it will mean you will have critical parts of any computer that won't have open-source drivers available (I'm talking stuff like fundamental bus control hardware, not just video/audio cards), and without which the computer simply will not run. MS will have dealt with that pesky Linux annoyance once and for all.
I don't get it either, but it's certainly not surprising to see the music industry completely fail to apply common sense and go out of their way to shoot themselves in the foot yet again.
On the other hand, I'm reasonably sure this move is going to end up costing Sony and Universal money, so there's that to be happy about.
It just occurs to me that I've written three damn replies to the same post instead of consolidating all of them together. This is what happens when you use the Internet right after waking up - don't do it kids!
Superior? I disagree, but that's a subjective statement anyway. They're certainly more docile as regards subjecting themselves to authority though.
I realise the US has a different outlook, that's your perogative and your's alone
Would you *please* tell Rebecca Peters that? Even though I disagree with the current situation, I'm quite content to let the Australians decide what their own gun policy should be, and I'd appreciate it if she'd extend the same courtesy to the US.
(sorry, I just rewatched Napoleon Dynamite.)
:-)
Sweet!
And two (Alaska and Vermont) require no permits whatsoever, so take that to 74%.
The purpose of making guns and ammunition is to be able to shoot things. I will venture to say (my assumption) that most of the time these things are living things.
I applaud the fact that you accurately represented the purpose of a gun. However, I respectfully disagree with the assumption that followed. I own two rifles, a shotgun, and three pistols, all of which are the evil "semi-automatic" variety. Between all of them, I've burned through a few thousand rounds of ammunition in the last year. Somehow through all of that, I've managed to not aim at, kill, or injure a single living thing with any of them. This pattern has repeated itself for several years. I know lots of other people that shoot more than I do, and while they've killed living things during the course of hunting, the vast majority of their ammo has been sent downrange to inflict grave harm on large sheets of paper. Of the hundred or so other gun owners that I know in my local area, I know of none of them that have used any of their weapons against a person.
Muskets back then were as deadly as guns today
To a large degree this is true, but in fairness there weren't too many muskets made in the late 1700s that could put five shots within 1" of each other at 100 yards, whereas that's performance one could expect from a hunting rifle that they'd pick up at Wal-Mart for $500 today.
Having said that, you only need to fast forward to the 1850s to find muskets that you *could* do that with, and it was only about 50 years later that semi-auto and full-auto weapons began to become available to the public. As dangerous as we're told semi-auto rifles are, I guess it's a fricking miracle that the U.S. managed to avoid total carnage for the next 100+ years after that. [rolls eyes]
NFA Title 2 gear (fully automatic rifles, silencers, shotguns with barrels less than 18", etc.) isn't particularly difficult to get as long as you have a clean record and a chief of police that doesn't have a boner against people exercising their Second Amendment rights - you need $200 for the appropriate tax stamp, the approval of your local chief of police or sheriff, and you have to submit photographs and fingerprints to the ATF. You don't need to have a dealer's license, just the tax stamp. Where things become difficult is the prices of the weapons themselves. Because of the Firearms Owners' Protection Act, it's illegal to manufacture for purchase by the public, to buy, or possess any automatic weapon made after May 19, 1986. "Automatic weapon" also is construed to mean any parts that may be used to convert a semi-automatic weapon to fully automatic. Because of the artificial scarcity, something like an H&K MP5 that should normally cost $2000 or so now costs $15-20K *if* you can find someone willing to sell one, and the gun will be at least 21 years old. Of course, this was a main unstated purpose behind the legislation, as FOPA itself does little to nothing to protect firearm owners.
I guess that also means that we have to use manual printing presses instead of computers to disseminate our views to others? It's the same fricking argument.
Why don't you get back to me when the main use of a blog is to kill something?
How about getting back to us when you understand that the point the parent was trying to make is that it's hypocritical that people are making a big deal of this new proposed legislation, but don't seem to have a problem with making the exercise of another equally important and explicitly protected civil right subject to federal regulation.
At least it kept the speed readout consistent with the displayed graphics. I love the fact that when playing "TIE Fighter", you can be running at full throttle and it still takes 10 seconds or so to fly the length of a star destroyer. That works out to about 350 mph. How would any of these things ever be able to be in close proximity to a planet without falling to the ground?
:-)
Just being able to survive sharp turns at an assumed speed of thousands of miles per hour takes quite a willingness to discard physics altogether, so I pretty much discard any notion of accuracy and just concentrate on having fun.
What the parent poster is getting at is that in union shops, there are usually *very* clearly defined areas of responsibilities for jobs that are covered under a collective bargaining agreement, and it's usually a violation of said agreement to assign an employee a task that falls outside his job description as stated in the contract. This is why you half to wait half an hour for an electrician to come change a light bulb rather than just doing it yourself - our people had to deal with that silliness at the shipyard all the time when I was contracting for the Navy years ago.
IANAL but I suspect all that will happen if the union pursues this angle is that they'll get told that there is still no question that the cop was acting as an employee, and if he wants to complain about the improper job assignment then he can file a grievance and they'll deal with it like any other labor contract violation.
Most work contracts for technical companies already stipulate this
Only if you let them. I won't work for a company that asserts ownership of stuff I develop using strictly my own resources, but fortunately no one has given me a difficult time about striking those clauses out of the contract. Okay, I lied - one did when they tried to unilaterally change my contract after I'd been there for two years, but when they tried to take me to the mat over it I told them I'd walk if they didn't strike it, and they finally agreed to it.
This guy did the majority of the risk
Absolutely, but it looks like he assumed that risk under a faulty set of assumptions, a near-total lack of awareness of the concept of "work for hire", and zero paperwork that would clarify and document everyone's expectations. As this guy has probably told others countless times in his career, "ignorance of the law is not an excuse."
It's not "in most states" - it's a part of federal Copyright law, specifically 17 USC 101. Here's the Copyright Office's take on it.
US copyright law specifically lists "a work prepared by an employee within the scope of his or her employment" as a fundamental condition that establishes a "work for hire". Your statement holds true if you're an independent contractor, but if you're an employee the copyright goes to your employer unless there is an agreement stating otherwise. See 17 USC 101 for more details.
/not a lawyer, not legal advice
//has had to deal with this crap before, unfortunately
It looks like the base program comes from Iowa, which gave the program to Wisconsin under the condition that it not be sold commercially
I'm so glad someone else actually read the article and noticed that too.
Also, the original code he modified was owned by the state of Iowa, so he quite possibly wouldn't have been able to assert copyright anyway.
Occasionally it's even worse once you're in the courtroom.
The situation with small towns writing ridiculous numbers of unwarranted tickets got bad enough in Florida that the state passed a law a few years back whereby you *can't* be fined for going 5 mph or less over the speed limit - you can only receive a warning.
Having a speed limit of 25 mph in a residential area where kids are always out playing? Great idea, and I say "enforce the hell out of it". Limiting people to 70 mph on a highway that can safely handle traffic at 90 mph? Unreasonable, but good luck getting the state to change that law. The state legislature doesn't mind doing the right thing when it only limits the income of small towns/counties, but they'll be damned if they let their own income be affected.
Given that his employer provided space, a computer, and the time during his working day to work on this project, it sounds to me like option A has been fulfilled there and thus it's a work for hire. I don't think any of us know exactly what the situation is, so I'm hesitant to say whether I think he should or should not retain the copyright on his changes. At the very least, I'm sure he won't be writing any more software without the appropriate contracts in place. There's also the issue that he didn't write his own software from scratch - he modified existing software that belonged to the state of Iowa, so he may not even have had the legal right to distribute changes to it, much less try to sell those changes.
Part of me wants to see the guy be successful in his efforts, but another part says that he was foolish for assuming the best from such a nebulous situation. Yet another part of me notes that he wrote 2,000 traffic tickets in a year and wonders what kind of tool he must be to be ticketing more than one person up every hour during his shift every day that he works.