Well yes, but this is about the original company removing the link. Had they removed the links to their own website as well as their competitors they could have cited wikipedia guidelines as justification for their removal and not gotten sued. Removing their competitor's only got them in trouble.
Except the remove of judicial involvement is the entire reason the PATRIOT act is both problematic and unconstitutional.
Very few sane people really object to the government being able to tap your phone or search your house or examine your library records or any of those sorts of things. The constitution has no problem with them doing that. The issue is with letting them do that WITHOUT A WARRANT.
Judicial oversight was put in place for a reason and only the most dire and immediate of circumstances should override(someone screaming for help for instance) it even if it is generally a rubber stamp for what law enforcement want to do.
If you or I had removed a company from this list nothing much would have happened aside the usual 60 page argument about the Wikipedia notoriety standards which happens whenever any controversial edit occurs on Wikipedia. Someone probably would have edited it back eventually and a very interesting flame war could have been started, but no one would have been sued and if they had it would have been laughed out of court.
The issue in this case is about anti-competitive behavior and probably to a lesser extent false advertising and it exists because an agent of a competitor was the person doing the edit. I personally can claim that the product from company X is a steaming pile of crap which doesn't work with no proof whatsoever, but competitor Y cannot. In the same way I can claim that company X doesn't offer service Z, but competitor Y cannot. In a very real sense the defendant in this case is making a claim they know to be false about a competitor, which is grounds for a lawsuit in most countries.
Those are the breaks. You make a settlement because you aren't sure of the outcome and the risks of trying to find out aren't worth it. It's a lot like poker, you don't get to find out if you really would have won unless you put your money on the line to find out.
That would be great if the Tea Party were really about overseeing the government and ensuring that it acts appropriately. However the tea party is more about napalming the whole forest than doing some pruning, and "government is always bad" is as idiotic a statement as "government is always good". The tea party is letting the Republican party gut every even remotely good thing that government does while doing absolutely nothing at all about anything like this.
We blame Telstra because the government isn't forcing them. They may be pressuring them(though I haven't heard much publicly since Rudd got knifed a year ago), but they haven't and can't make it law.
For those of you who haven't left the states much, "septic" is short for "septic tank" which rhymes with "yank" ie, a septic is an American(of the living in the US variety as opposed to general continent inhabitant).
Yes the Brittish are strange and think they're ever so clever.
Scripting languages work, they just don't scale in complexity very well. You can make very complex things with them, but the more complex the thing becomes and the more changes you make to it the more likely it is to turn into a tangled mess of garbage. Disciplined programmers can keep that from happening, but it takes a lot of work to do so.
Wikipedia is both relatively simple and relatively static in terms of features and presumably also has very disciplined programmers.
Actually that's not true. This lawsuit isn't really about the fact that Google rolled their own version of Java without a license or even that they're making money off Java. If that were all that was going on here the lawsuit probably wouldn't exist because either Oracle wouldn't care or Google would just have paid a license fee and been done with it.
The issue here is that Davlik is NOT Java. Now most of the reason it's not java is that Sun was incredibly unrealistic about JME and wouldn't let anyone but Sun create a licensed version, Google also felt JME was a bit bloated and didn't want to implement the whole spec, but that's probably neither here nor there.
Sun before and now Oracle now, cannot afford to have Java forked. The JVM sure, the JDK again not a huge problem, but forking the language itself is pretty much a death sentence. That's why they're going at this so hard, because for all intents and purposes this will kill Java if they don't do something about it. If anyone blinks in this confrontation it won't be Oracle. So far Google hasn't either, but Google still has an out which doesn't destroy android so they may still do so.
The law is pretty black and white on these terms. There aren't even half as many loopholes as you think there are.
If one company provides the vast majority of your income for more than a year you are probably an employee of someone as far as the IRS is concerned. If he didn't meet those criteria it wouldn't be even remotely plausible for him to be asking for equity so we have to presume he does or is a complete and utter tool. He also describes himself as their main IT guy, which heavily implies he's doing more than just one thing.
Yes, he could be an employee of his own contracting agency, but that's only if he actually pays himself properly as an employee of said contracting company, and again if that were the case he'd have no grounds for asking for equity.
The reality of this situation is that either he doesn't have any right at all to equity or he's an employee as far as the IRS is concerned.
It's not really about either necessarily. We don't know what his rates are, or what his working conditions were over the last year. We don't know how much of a contribution he made to the company and its success. He may be perfectly justified in wanting some equity in the company.
Is he legally entitled to said equity? No. Is it unreasonable for him to ask for some equity as pat of his next contract renegotiation? Again, no.
The majority of his income has come from a single source for more than a year, and isn't working on a single long term deliverable, he's an employee, as in likelihood is everyone else at the startup, at least as far as the IRS is concerned(and pretty much every other western taxation industry as well).
Nokia are and were failing because Symbian is a steaming pile of horse shit. It's slow, buggy, feature poor and generally an abomination. They made great simple phones and still do, but their smart phone line is awful. Symbian 60 phones aren't as powerful or reliable or feature rich as the iOS,Android,WIn7 phones and they're not as simple or reliable as Nokia's old phones. The only reason they sell at all is that they're a third of the price of their competition. The company was mismanaged, the code base was mismanaged and they fell for the sunk costs fallacy and held onto a dog of an operating system for far too long. If Meego had come out before Android and actually appeard on more than a couple of phones there might not be an android phone, but it didn't do either of those things so it's a case of too little too late.
I don't know if Microsoft is going to be able to do anything positive for Nokia, but they were heading to bankruptcy before the deal so there's not much they can do to make them worse.
The movie rental industry is based on a very simple arrangement actually.
I agree to sell you a copy of a movie which I own(this is still legal for movies even if you can't do it for all media). As part of the terms of sale I agree to buy the movie back from you at a set price within a set period of time given certain constraints.
The movie companies back in those days weren't quite as arrogant as they are today and decided if you can't beat em join em, so they sold movies to the rental places at extremely high prices before they released them to the general public. To the best of my knowledge the price isn't as high now, but that's more because the movie industry needs video rental now.
Best value for money training I've ever had was brining in a consultant to work with me on a real project. Sort of like the old on the job training people used to do but with expertise from outside the company. Not the cheapest thing mind you, but not really much more expensive than outsourcing the project to a consulting firm. Doesn't get you a cert of course, but it does get you actual knowledge which is more valuable most of the time.
Of course how viable this is depends a lot on your current level of expertise, the more experienced you are the harder it is to make it work, but it does work well.
Other training courses I've been on tend to be more about little productivity gains. You've always done something in a certain way but on the course you see someone do it another way which is better and more effficient.
The cost to society from people losing their jobs(be it through welfare payments, increased crime rates, or merely decreased overall productivity) is an externality to the business transaction which caused them to lose their jobs. If a company moves jobs offshore they do not pay the costs incurred by the loss of those jobs domestically directly. The cost is external to the transaction
I don't think that very many of their users actually modify open source programming tools, the vast majority of users of all open source tools don't actually modify them and programmers aren't all that different.
What is however true is that the people who do modify them, tend to also use them. Eclipse is written in Eclipse, the people who make subversion store their source code in it, etc. Annoying glitches and blatantly missing features get ironed out because they directly affect the people who write the software.
This state of affairs is pretty much unique in the open source world and it's why the tools are so good and why they're used so often. It's certainly hard to beat the money which Microsoft pours into their products, and eclipse and its ilk will probably never have the polish which VS has, but a lot of the concepts which transformed VS from the steaming pile of crap it used to be into what it is today were pioneered in open source tools.
There's a few things in eclipse which VS still can't touch. Mylin for instance is pretty incredible. There's also an awful lot of things in VS which should be included by default but which are instead left to third parties(Resharper for instance is lovely but shouldn't exist). Eclipse has also come up with a few features which VS has then copied.
VS is definitely more polished, and there's some things that particularly the higher level subscriptions can do which are pretty fantastic(intellitrace for instance is pretty damned awesome, but it also costs 10 grand per year per user). That said, once you work out how to use it, eclipse is pretty damned good, it's got a god awful slow start up time because everything running on java has a god awful slow start up time, but for free it's pretty fantastic.
Programmers use open source tools because they're good and they're free, no one uses work time to modify programming tools because it's not cost effective or sane.
However, unlike a lot of open source software, development tools are actually used by their developers so they're pretty much always good. They fit into a programmers workflow, and they're free. Eclipse may be a memory hungry pig, but Visual Studio tends to copy from it rather than the other way around.
In reality however, because they're economists it won't be "I regret that my actions cost a million people their jobs and left them homeless and destitute", it will be "I regret that I didn't make an extra.00000001% profit". Economists are shit at taking externalities into account.
Personally I'd rather economists just acknowledge that all the little numbers on their graphs are living, breathing, feeling people and all that that implies. For one it might mean they'd stop expecting them to act rationally and for another it might mean that they're definition of the "best possible result" was a little different.
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Well yes, but this is about the original company removing the link. Had they removed the links to their own website as well as their competitors they could have cited wikipedia guidelines as justification for their removal and not gotten sued. Removing their competitor's only got them in trouble.
Except the remove of judicial involvement is the entire reason the PATRIOT act is both problematic and unconstitutional.
Very few sane people really object to the government being able to tap your phone or search your house or examine your library records or any of those sorts of things. The constitution has no problem with them doing that. The issue is with letting them do that WITHOUT A WARRANT.
Judicial oversight was put in place for a reason and only the most dire and immediate of circumstances should override(someone screaming for help for instance) it even if it is generally a rubber stamp for what law enforcement want to do.
Which this company could have done, had they simultaneously removed their own abuse of Wikipedia to boost their own search engine ranking.
The issue isn't what was done, it was who did it.
If you or I had removed a company from this list nothing much would have happened aside the usual 60 page argument about the Wikipedia notoriety standards which happens whenever any controversial edit occurs on Wikipedia. Someone probably would have edited it back eventually and a very interesting flame war could have been started, but no one would have been sued and if they had it would have been laughed out of court.
The issue in this case is about anti-competitive behavior and probably to a lesser extent false advertising and it exists because an agent of a competitor was the person doing the edit. I personally can claim that the product from company X is a steaming pile of crap which doesn't work with no proof whatsoever, but competitor Y cannot. In the same way I can claim that company X doesn't offer service Z, but competitor Y cannot. In a very real sense the defendant in this case is making a claim they know to be false about a competitor, which is grounds for a lawsuit in most countries.
No one.
Those are the breaks. You make a settlement because you aren't sure of the outcome and the risks of trying to find out aren't worth it. It's a lot like poker, you don't get to find out if you really would have won unless you put your money on the line to find out.
That would be great if the Tea Party were really about overseeing the government and ensuring that it acts appropriately. However the tea party is more about napalming the whole forest than doing some pruning, and "government is always bad" is as idiotic a statement as "government is always good". The tea party is letting the Republican party gut every even remotely good thing that government does while doing absolutely nothing at all about anything like this.
We blame Telstra because the government isn't forcing them. They may be pressuring them(though I haven't heard much publicly since Rudd got knifed a year ago), but they haven't and can't make it law.
For those of you who haven't left the states much, "septic" is short for "septic tank" which rhymes with "yank" ie, a septic is an American(of the living in the US variety as opposed to general continent inhabitant).
Yes the Brittish are strange and think they're ever so clever.
They were also a fairly huge pain in the ass to code.
That said, using Javascript for this is a fairly stupid idea.
Scripting languages work, they just don't scale in complexity very well. You can make very complex things with them, but the more complex the thing becomes and the more changes you make to it the more likely it is to turn into a tangled mess of garbage. Disciplined programmers can keep that from happening, but it takes a lot of work to do so.
Wikipedia is both relatively simple and relatively static in terms of features and presumably also has very disciplined programmers.
Mono is a fully conformant implementation, Davlik is not, that's the real difference here.
Actually that's not true. This lawsuit isn't really about the fact that Google rolled their own version of Java without a license or even that they're making money off Java. If that were all that was going on here the lawsuit probably wouldn't exist because either Oracle wouldn't care or Google would just have paid a license fee and been done with it.
The issue here is that Davlik is NOT Java. Now most of the reason it's not java is that Sun was incredibly unrealistic about JME and wouldn't let anyone but Sun create a licensed version, Google also felt JME was a bit bloated and didn't want to implement the whole spec, but that's probably neither here nor there.
Sun before and now Oracle now, cannot afford to have Java forked. The JVM sure, the JDK again not a huge problem, but forking the language itself is pretty much a death sentence. That's why they're going at this so hard, because for all intents and purposes this will kill Java if they don't do something about it. If anyone blinks in this confrontation it won't be Oracle. So far Google hasn't either, but Google still has an out which doesn't destroy android so they may still do so.
The law is pretty black and white on these terms. There aren't even half as many loopholes as you think there are.
If one company provides the vast majority of your income for more than a year you are probably an employee of someone as far as the IRS is concerned. If he didn't meet those criteria it wouldn't be even remotely plausible for him to be asking for equity so we have to presume he does or is a complete and utter tool. He also describes himself as their main IT guy, which heavily implies he's doing more than just one thing.
Yes, he could be an employee of his own contracting agency, but that's only if he actually pays himself properly as an employee of said contracting company, and again if that were the case he'd have no grounds for asking for equity.
The reality of this situation is that either he doesn't have any right at all to equity or he's an employee as far as the IRS is concerned.
It's not really about either necessarily. We don't know what his rates are, or what his working conditions were over the last year. We don't know how much of a contribution he made to the company and its success. He may be perfectly justified in wanting some equity in the company.
Is he legally entitled to said equity? No. Is it unreasonable for him to ask for some equity as pat of his next contract renegotiation? Again, no.
The majority of his income has come from a single source for more than a year, and isn't working on a single long term deliverable, he's an employee, as in likelihood is everyone else at the startup, at least as far as the IRS is concerned(and pretty much every other western taxation industry as well).
Nokia are and were failing because Symbian is a steaming pile of horse shit. It's slow, buggy, feature poor and generally an abomination. They made great simple phones and still do, but their smart phone line is awful. Symbian 60 phones aren't as powerful or reliable or feature rich as the iOS,Android,WIn7 phones and they're not as simple or reliable as Nokia's old phones. The only reason they sell at all is that they're a third of the price of their competition. The company was mismanaged, the code base was mismanaged and they fell for the sunk costs fallacy and held onto a dog of an operating system for far too long. If Meego had come out before Android and actually appeard on more than a couple of phones there might not be an android phone, but it didn't do either of those things so it's a case of too little too late.
I don't know if Microsoft is going to be able to do anything positive for Nokia, but they were heading to bankruptcy before the deal so there's not much they can do to make them worse.
The movie rental industry is based on a very simple arrangement actually.
I agree to sell you a copy of a movie which I own(this is still legal for movies even if you can't do it for all media). As part of the terms of sale I agree to buy the movie back from you at a set price within a set period of time given certain constraints.
The movie companies back in those days weren't quite as arrogant as they are today and decided if you can't beat em join em, so they sold movies to the rental places at extremely high prices before they released them to the general public. To the best of my knowledge the price isn't as high now, but that's more because the movie industry needs video rental now.
Best value for money training I've ever had was brining in a consultant to work with me on a real project. Sort of like the old on the job training people used to do but with expertise from outside the company. Not the cheapest thing mind you, but not really much more expensive than outsourcing the project to a consulting firm. Doesn't get you a cert of course, but it does get you actual knowledge which is more valuable most of the time.
Of course how viable this is depends a lot on your current level of expertise, the more experienced you are the harder it is to make it work, but it does work well.
Other training courses I've been on tend to be more about little productivity gains. You've always done something in a certain way but on the course you see someone do it another way which is better and more effficient.
The cost to society from people losing their jobs(be it through welfare payments, increased crime rates, or merely decreased overall productivity) is an externality to the business transaction which caused them to lose their jobs. If a company moves jobs offshore they do not pay the costs incurred by the loss of those jobs domestically directly. The cost is external to the transaction
I don't think that very many of their users actually modify open source programming tools, the vast majority of users of all open source tools don't actually modify them and programmers aren't all that different.
What is however true is that the people who do modify them, tend to also use them. Eclipse is written in Eclipse, the people who make subversion store their source code in it, etc. Annoying glitches and blatantly missing features get ironed out because they directly affect the people who write the software.
This state of affairs is pretty much unique in the open source world and it's why the tools are so good and why they're used so often. It's certainly hard to beat the money which Microsoft pours into their products, and eclipse and its ilk will probably never have the polish which VS has, but a lot of the concepts which transformed VS from the steaming pile of crap it used to be into what it is today were pioneered in open source tools.
There's a few things in eclipse which VS still can't touch. Mylin for instance is pretty incredible. There's also an awful lot of things in VS which should be included by default but which are instead left to third parties(Resharper for instance is lovely but shouldn't exist). Eclipse has also come up with a few features which VS has then copied.
VS is definitely more polished, and there's some things that particularly the higher level subscriptions can do which are pretty fantastic(intellitrace for instance is pretty damned awesome, but it also costs 10 grand per year per user). That said, once you work out how to use it, eclipse is pretty damned good, it's got a god awful slow start up time because everything running on java has a god awful slow start up time, but for free it's pretty fantastic.
Programmers use open source tools because they're good and they're free, no one uses work time to modify programming tools because it's not cost effective or sane.
However, unlike a lot of open source software, development tools are actually used by their developers so they're pretty much always good. They fit into a programmers workflow, and they're free. Eclipse may be a memory hungry pig, but Visual Studio tends to copy from it rather than the other way around.
Well yes, in theory.
In reality however, because they're economists it won't be "I regret that my actions cost a million people their jobs and left them homeless and destitute", it will be "I regret that I didn't make an extra .00000001% profit". Economists are shit at taking externalities into account.
Personally I'd rather economists just acknowledge that all the little numbers on their graphs are living, breathing, feeling people and all that that implies. For one it might mean they'd stop expecting them to act rationally and for another it might mean that they're definition of the "best possible result" was a little different.
Is there actually anyone out there who was willing to move to Vista but hasn't moved to Windows 7?