One thing I noticed was that the one publicaiton said that only their editors went to the events but that their writers could not. Who actually decides which reviews get published and which placement? The editors of course. If anything journalistic integrity is MORE important to an editor than a writer. Or maybe it was a matter that if the writers couldn't go to the junkets there would be more spaces available to the editors? "You guys can't go on these biasing publicity events" the editor says as his bags are packed for the airport.
I agree, I didn't really get throught the article much past the idea of strings just being lists. We have been down the path of loosely typed languages like VB4 and had a bad time of it not because they were inefficient (although that was a complaint) but because they were error prone. Whether it technically is a list or a structure is somewhat irrelevant. A string is a type of information which you expect to be able to do some things with and you expect it to be impossible to do other things with. Just because you could call all data just one thing doesn't mean that you think of and work with all data as one thing. That was the lesson we learned, badly, with variants.
The broad evolution of languages (from binary, to assembly to high level languages to prebuilt function libraries to structured programming to object oriented programming) has exhibited a consistent trend away to greater abstraction of the machine and having the language represent the concepts of the task at hand rather than the concepts of the hardware. But calling everything a list rather than a string abstracts away from the task at hand (I want to find the first word in a sentence, for example)
Parallel with this there has been a pendulum effect between languages that are terse and symbolic and those that tend to use descriptive words. A typical example is Pascal using BEGIN and END statements and C just using curly braces {}. The most popular mix right now seems to be terse logic but wordy object, function, and method names, but that will change too.
Why really did DBMS come about? It was not because of a need for secure transactions or to store a lot of data, although obviously those are necessary qualities of a DBMS.
Before dbms applications stored their data in very efficient data stores designed just for that application but were worthless for anything else and hard to upgrade or extend without breaking or rewriting the existing application.
DBMS were developed so that data could be stored in an application independent store that could be used and extended for new applications without breaking everything that went before.
DBMS were never designed to be more efficient than the application specific data stores that they replaced, so that somebody saying that they can build a custom data store just for a particular application that is faster is missing the point entirely.
Actually the thing that bothers me about Crichton is that so many of his books follow the same predictable science-out-of-control-creates-a-monster formula, starting with Andromeda Strain and continuing with just about everyting else thereafter. The only difference is that this is a nanobot and not a bacteria from outerspace or dinosaur dna or genetically engineered chimps or....
Actually the best approach for Microsoft is to let Mono go forth exactly as it is doing now.
If Microsoft were to try to create a.NET for linux they would have to: spend a lot of money (who is going to volunteer to do anything for Microsoft); deal with an operatins system that they are not that familiar with; handle an embarrasing PR situation; deal with constant accusations that they are not supporting the Linux version as well; and wind up with something that would not be widely accepted or trusted since the Linux community is deeply distrustfull of anything that is Microsoft, not GPL, and not from 'the community.
On the other hand if Mono creates a credible.NET implementation Microsoft looks like they are accepting of standards without having to waste any money and they chip at Java's dominance, and one thing that really irritates Microsoft is having the language standard be under the control of Sun.
A school booster organization that I am a part of runs a weekend swap meet at our school, which is in California. I guess you might regard ebay as kind of like a swap meet.
The state requires that we check that every vendor that rents a space in our swap meet has a seller's permit. Actually there is an exception for limited sale of used personal property but these people are fairly regular sellers so we require that they all show us a sellers permit.
However we do not check whether the sellers actually pay tax to the state (contrary to popular belief it is the business, not the buyer, that pays sales tax. The business usually reimburses themselves on the price of the item, but they pay it.)
Now the question of fictitions business statements is interesting. For many e-bay sellers you can make the case that their account names are truly acting as the name of their business, and the fictitious business name filing is a way of protecting consumers by allowing them to know who is really behind a business name. But we have never been required to see that if a seller's permit is made out to a business whether that name has been registered.
Listen, if a liquor store sells alchohol to a minor, do you blame the parent? If a mininart sells tobacco to a minor do you blame the parent? If a drug pusher sells illegal drugs to a minor do you blame the parent?
Video game producers tried to buy some relief from political pressure, much of it from parents, by creating a self-imposed rating system, much like the movie industry did. But although the movie theateres made at least a visible effort toward enforcing the ratings the video game stores just looked the other way and took the profits. So since they did not voluntarily enforce the ratings that they voluntarily placed on themselves I am supposed to feel sorry for them?
No, they made this mess and now they are going to have to live with it.
The problem with this is that the author assigns his copyright to the publisher, and the publisher, unlike the author, has no reason ever to give it up.
First of all sales tax is already charged based on the buyer. For example our business location is in Los Angeles. We have to give to the state one rate based on whether the customer is in Los Angeles County and another if they are in the rest of the state. A San Francisco or Orange County firm that did mail orders would also have to do the same. Just filling out the California Sales Tax form is a pain about as difficult as a simple individual individual income tax. Now imagine being a small guy selling stuff on ebay and having to fill out 50 of those and keeping track of every single state, locality, school district or whatever taxing district out there?
The problem is not just rates. Different states have different standards as to what is and is not taxable merchandise and different standards as to reporting dates. Just keeping track of whether the shipping and handling is taxed is a pain. (In California shipping and handling is taxed if it is a single item. If it is separate items the shipping can be tax free if it is a simple pass-through of actual costs but the handling must be taxed.) And of course they all have their own forms.
That is why job one of actually being able to collect intrastate sales tax is to come up with a single set of regulations and a single reporting form. If they did that then most mail order retailers would go along with it.
You have it mostly correct. Sales tax IS charged to the business. It is just that the business is allowed to add the tax to the sale price. The reason that sales tax is not levied on interstate sales is that the Supreme Court has rules that without some enabling federal legislation the states do not have the authority to cross state lines to collect taxes.
Frankly the person who griped about how the state did not provide anything to deserve the tax seems to think that the package somehow myseriously appears on his doorstep and did not have to travel on roads and infrastructure that his city and state provides.
Frankly the old name gave the impression that it was somehow specifically related to serving.net applications rather than being the next generation of the entire server platform (which it is)
My guess is that the next thing that will nappen is that.NET Passport and.NET Services will get name and positioning changes, leaving.NET to be the one thing that it really was supposed to be in the first place, the common language runtime, framework, and development tools.
I think that the reason why so many things got the.NET moniker was internal politics. For a while the mandate in Redmond was that the entire focus on the company was on internet development. So product managers, in the battle for upper management attention, and funding, decided that they had to somehow show that their product was part of the internet initiative and as part of that they slapped the.NET moniker to everyting.
Online enterptises have had no problem coming up with cool things, what they have had is trouble making money off them.
So what is the business model here? There might be some money to be made off of product placement (such as nike paying for the placement of their virtual goods) but product placement/advertizing has never solely been able to float an enterprize. Otherwise you could get into James Bond films for free. What is implied is that you pay real dollars for your There Dollars which you then use to buy particular virtual world stuff. In other words they plan on people giving them money in the absolutely purest expression of conspicuous consumption...Look at the money I must have in order to blow it on making my character look good.
That is an iffy proposition, particularly since in trim economic times it might be viewed not as cool but the ultimate in stupidity.
Now certainly, for example, there is a robust underground economy in selling EQ characters and items, but those have more than viaual utility in the game challenge and, despite the great publicity given it, would not generate enough net to pay for Verant's cost of maintaining the necessary servers and bandwidth and personnel to keep EQ running. There was another mmorpg, Project Entropia, that took the business model of giving the game away for free and selling the better stuff, but it has been mostly rejected by users and can only generously be considered a limited success.
Another advantage of rooftop solar is that it puts the source and the use of the electricity nearby. Put it way out in the desert and you have miles of transmission infrastructure and loss. If they were able to get that promised 80% efficiency at current prices per foot then every homeowner and most businesses would be able to become self-sufficient in a sunny city.
If you have ever worked in a corporate sales environment none of these memos seems particularly unusual or alarming. This is standard competitive practice in sales and marketing. They tend to use dramatic language and analogies because that is the business that they are in.
In the commentaries not only does he show him self to be shrill but also not understanding of the environment of corporate competitive marketing and public relations.
The memo just says that they have to act calmly, coherently, and proactively when major announcements of OSS products occur. So? You expect them to act like a bunch of uncoordinated volunteers because that would be fairer?
Well, what I would like to see is a lot of european bands doing their own versions of the songs as they no longer have to have permission of the original copyright holders. Many copyright holders of those older songs have been very reluctant and restrictive to allow other artists to record and publish them. so I predict a wave of creativity in ways of making updated 50's tunes from european bands. It may be quite interesting what they come up with.
That's like saying the guy that throws a brick through your window is doing you a favor by showing you how vulnerable your window is to having a brick thrown through it, and if he didn'nt do it somebody else would eventually.
This to me seems like one of those 'losses' that is really a win.
The remedy essentially costs MS nothing. They were going to be burning the CD's anyway. I am sure that there were a few extra bytes available on them.
It means that MS can skip trying to make a good JVM and put those resources elsewhere and nobody will have cause to complain.
If the JVM for Windows is buggy or slow it is Sun that catches the flak, not MS. Nobody can claim (as it is essentially was done in the suit) that MS is intentionally making the JVM bad because it is no longer Microsoft's JVM. On the other hand MS will no longer have to worry about having to jump through hoops when Sun ammends the Java Specification.
If then Microsoft makes their.NET clr run rings around Sun's JVM then it will be a matter of the products winning on their own merits, not a matter of MS putting more resources to one than the other. And frankly the odds are pretty good that MS could outprogram Sun. Dislike their business practices all you want but the programmers there are a fairly sharp bunch.
Well it seems to me that their strategy needs to be to build airplanes that the airlines want to buy. I know that sounds simplistic but that is really what this decision boils down to. The airlines that used to be all excited about it went absolutely cold.
Frankly considering that the future promises nothing but higher fuel costs as the world supply diminishes lower cost is probably the sure winner.
I think the blended body aircraft are where the money could really be at. Their areodynamic efficiendy is obvious and the 'disadvantage' of no window seats is minimal. On long flights nobody looks out the windows and a blended body aircraft could compensate with skylights and selectable view cams. Price is the number one determinant of why people fly one airline over another (presuming of course that there is more than one airline flying the route they are traveling)
Because it isn't FINISHED? After all we are speaking about Office 11, a product that is not itself released either. I am at least willing to reserve judgement until I see what the thing really is. I don't expect to be really surprizedl but I could be wrong.
And bear in mind that XMLDocs are not likely to be simple because word processing documents are not simple. People grouse about Word HTML docs but most of that complexity was necessary to create a HTML document that accually looked like the original word document. XML docs are unlikey to be all that concise because users are going to be unwilling to sacrifice layout and formatting features just in order to have the resulting document be pretty looking XML
You could create a word processor that simplified and structured its features toward creating nicely structured HTML but then it would be FrontPage and not Word.
I think that there are several things. The first is that while price is easy to see, quality is very hard to see. From the outside what can you reall tell between a high quality and low quality DVD player?
Then there is the kleenex factor. If it breaks then throw it away. Most stuff is just too hard to fix even if you can find someone with the skill and parts. Even if it is under warranty the trouple of getting the item to an authorized repair center and the time that you will be without use of the item is too much for most consumers. So consumers feel less angry at having to replace a $50 DVD than a $500 one.
Even if you were living in a cave before this thread should convince you that gun control is a very polarizing issue in the USA.
Why? I believe that it is the NRA.
I have the right to drive a car. I suspect that unless you are young or have been very irresponsible you have the right to drive a car too.
It is a right that most americans cherish
I had to prove before I could have my right that I knew how to drive and understood the many laws of the road. I needed a minumum number of hours of actual practice before obtaining my ability. I have to register my car, pay taxes on it, and insure it for liability againt the harm that I may cause others. I may not drive my car while intoxicated. There are limits to the kind of car I can drive.
But despite all that nobody is claiming that I do not have the right to drive a car!
The Auto Club is not sending me mailers every time someone wants to put up a stop light saying that the government is trying to take away my right to drive a car! (Moreover here is where to send your money to help us protect your right to drive a car!)
But the NRA, to bolster its own political power base and to increase its fundraising has created this atmosphere of fear and crisis and persecution. It is only in cases where their position is completely bankrupt (teflon coated bullets, undetectable plastic handguns) do they ever seem to move from this tactic and in each case their initial reaction is allways the same 'they are trying to take away your right own a gun'.
To bring this back to the original question the reason that there is no unbiased studies is that there is no room for an unbiased conclusion. You look at everything and it is 'well they are from the NRA' or 'they are from Handgun Control' or 'they were funded by' and so on. Everything must be tossed into one camp or the other because the sides, particularly the NRA, has delineated everything in the starkest division of black or white. You are either 'pro second ammendment' or you are planning on 'taking honest citizens guns away'.
Most of these predictins are fairly safe. One of the most interesting is the self-checkout store. It might be hard to get the tags tamper proof. Remember that they would not merely have to get them tamper proof in terms of being to sneakily remove them, but tamper proof in the sense of preventing them from transmitting or tamperproof in the sense of having the recievers not get the signals, such as good old fashioned jamming. Some real challenges, but not out of the question entirely.
The preciction that your family, etc will allways know where you are may well prove to be possible but unwanted (as may be the prediction about having your washing machine tell the company how often you are washing clothes). This is just an extension of the electronic name tags in the 1992 article. People want some privacy. It is a bit like universal picture phones. The first picture phone was demonstrated in a demonstration between AT&T headquarters and the Secretary of the Treasury in Washington. The Secretary of the Treasury was Herbert Hoover (yes, that Herbert Hoover, the technology is really that old).
Do pretty much what you have already done here. Make some lists.
What You Will Provide Them
What You Require of Them.
What They Can Do With What You Give Them
What They Can't Do With What You Give Them
What You Can Do With the Knowledge Gained From Doing This.
...And so forth. Then sit down with the customer and work out these terms. Then once you have an agreement about what will be the terms of the contract then go to the lawyer who could probably have one of his paralegals whip up an acceptable contract. On the other hand if you go to the attorney first you will wind up with a contract that is 90% boilerplate and hard to discern what the key terms are in order to work it out.
Maybe as a middle ground this could be a good use for a Tablet PC, particularly since it would give you a bigger screen and interface for seeing and marking the text as it is input
Slashdot Mirror
One thing I noticed was that the one publicaiton said that only their editors went to the events but that their writers could not. Who actually decides which reviews get published and which placement? The editors of course. If anything journalistic integrity is MORE important to an editor than a writer. Or maybe it was a matter that if the writers couldn't go to the junkets there would be more spaces available to the editors? "You guys can't go on these biasing publicity events" the editor says as his bags are packed for the airport.
I agree, I didn't really get throught the article much past the idea of strings just being lists. We have been down the path of loosely typed languages like VB4 and had a bad time of it not because they were inefficient (although that was a complaint) but because they were error prone. Whether it technically is a list or a structure is somewhat irrelevant. A string is a type of information which you expect to be able to do some things with and you expect it to be impossible to do other things with. Just because you could call all data just one thing doesn't mean that you think of and work with all data as one thing. That was the lesson we learned, badly, with variants. The broad evolution of languages (from binary, to assembly to high level languages to prebuilt function libraries to structured programming to object oriented programming) has exhibited a consistent trend away to greater abstraction of the machine and having the language represent the concepts of the task at hand rather than the concepts of the hardware. But calling everything a list rather than a string abstracts away from the task at hand (I want to find the first word in a sentence, for example) Parallel with this there has been a pendulum effect between languages that are terse and symbolic and those that tend to use descriptive words. A typical example is Pascal using BEGIN and END statements and C just using curly braces {}. The most popular mix right now seems to be terse logic but wordy object, function, and method names, but that will change too.
Before dbms applications stored their data in very efficient data stores designed just for that application but were worthless for anything else and hard to upgrade or extend without breaking or rewriting the existing application.
DBMS were developed so that data could be stored in an application independent store that could be used and extended for new applications without breaking everything that went before.
DBMS were never designed to be more efficient than the application specific data stores that they replaced, so that somebody saying that they can build a custom data store just for a particular application that is faster is missing the point entirely.
Actually the thing that bothers me about Crichton is that so many of his books follow the same predictable science-out-of-control-creates-a-monster formula, starting with Andromeda Strain and continuing with just about everyting else thereafter. The only difference is that this is a nanobot and not a bacteria from outerspace or dinosaur dna or genetically engineered chimps or....
If Microsoft were to try to create a .NET for linux they would have to: spend a lot of money (who is going to volunteer to do anything for Microsoft); deal with an operatins system that they are not that familiar with; handle an embarrasing PR situation; deal with constant accusations that they are not supporting the Linux version as well; and wind up with something that would not be widely accepted or trusted since the Linux community is deeply distrustfull of anything that is Microsoft, not GPL, and not from 'the community.
On the other hand if Mono creates a credible .NET implementation Microsoft looks like they are accepting of standards without having to waste any money and they chip at Java's dominance, and one thing that really irritates Microsoft is having the language standard be under the control of Sun.
The state requires that we check that every vendor that rents a space in our swap meet has a seller's permit. Actually there is an exception for limited sale of used personal property but these people are fairly regular sellers so we require that they all show us a sellers permit.
However we do not check whether the sellers actually pay tax to the state (contrary to popular belief it is the business, not the buyer, that pays sales tax. The business usually reimburses themselves on the price of the item, but they pay it.)
Now the question of fictitions business statements is interesting. For many e-bay sellers you can make the case that their account names are truly acting as the name of their business, and the fictitious business name filing is a way of protecting consumers by allowing them to know who is really behind a business name. But we have never been required to see that if a seller's permit is made out to a business whether that name has been registered.
Video game producers tried to buy some relief from political pressure, much of it from parents, by creating a self-imposed rating system, much like the movie industry did. But although the movie theateres made at least a visible effort toward enforcing the ratings the video game stores just looked the other way and took the profits. So since they did not voluntarily enforce the ratings that they voluntarily placed on themselves I am supposed to feel sorry for them?
No, they made this mess and now they are going to have to live with it.
This is exactly how I wish that they had done it.
The problem with this is that the author assigns his copyright to the publisher, and the publisher, unlike the author, has no reason ever to give it up.
The problem is not just rates. Different states have different standards as to what is and is not taxable merchandise and different standards as to reporting dates. Just keeping track of whether the shipping and handling is taxed is a pain. (In California shipping and handling is taxed if it is a single item. If it is separate items the shipping can be tax free if it is a simple pass-through of actual costs but the handling must be taxed.) And of course they all have their own forms.
That is why job one of actually being able to collect intrastate sales tax is to come up with a single set of regulations and a single reporting form. If they did that then most mail order retailers would go along with it.
Frankly the person who griped about how the state did not provide anything to deserve the tax seems to think that the package somehow myseriously appears on his doorstep and did not have to travel on roads and infrastructure that his city and state provides.
My guess is that the next thing that will nappen is that .NET Passport and .NET Services will get name and positioning changes, leaving .NET to be the one thing that it really was supposed to be in the first place, the common language runtime, framework, and development tools.
I think that the reason why so many things got the .NET moniker was internal politics. For a while the mandate in Redmond was that the entire focus on the company was on internet development. So product managers, in the battle for upper management attention, and funding, decided that they had to somehow show that their product was part of the internet initiative and as part of that they slapped the .NET moniker to everyting.
So what is the business model here? There might be some money to be made off of product placement (such as nike paying for the placement of their virtual goods) but product placement/advertizing has never solely been able to float an enterprize. Otherwise you could get into James Bond films for free. What is implied is that you pay real dollars for your There Dollars which you then use to buy particular virtual world stuff. In other words they plan on people giving them money in the absolutely purest expression of conspicuous consumption...Look at the money I must have in order to blow it on making my character look good.
That is an iffy proposition, particularly since in trim economic times it might be viewed not as cool but the ultimate in stupidity.
Now certainly, for example, there is a robust underground economy in selling EQ characters and items, but those have more than viaual utility in the game challenge and, despite the great publicity given it, would not generate enough net to pay for Verant's cost of maintaining the necessary servers and bandwidth and personnel to keep EQ running. There was another mmorpg, Project Entropia, that took the business model of giving the game away for free and selling the better stuff, but it has been mostly rejected by users and can only generously be considered a limited success.
Another advantage of rooftop solar is that it puts the source and the use of the electricity nearby. Put it way out in the desert and you have miles of transmission infrastructure and loss. If they were able to get that promised 80% efficiency at current prices per foot then every homeowner and most businesses would be able to become self-sufficient in a sunny city.
In the commentaries not only does he show him self to be shrill but also not understanding of the environment of corporate competitive marketing and public relations.
The memo just says that they have to act calmly, coherently, and proactively when major announcements of OSS products occur. So? You expect them to act like a bunch of uncoordinated volunteers because that would be fairer?
Well, what I would like to see is a lot of european bands doing their own versions of the songs as they no longer have to have permission of the original copyright holders. Many copyright holders of those older songs have been very reluctant and restrictive to allow other artists to record and publish them. so I predict a wave of creativity in ways of making updated 50's tunes from european bands. It may be quite interesting what they come up with.
That's like saying the guy that throws a brick through your window is doing you a favor by showing you how vulnerable your window is to having a brick thrown through it, and if he didn'nt do it somebody else would eventually.
The remedy essentially costs MS nothing. They were going to be burning the CD's anyway. I am sure that there were a few extra bytes available on them.
It means that MS can skip trying to make a good JVM and put those resources elsewhere and nobody will have cause to complain.
If the JVM for Windows is buggy or slow it is Sun that catches the flak, not MS. Nobody can claim (as it is essentially was done in the suit) that MS is intentionally making the JVM bad because it is no longer Microsoft's JVM. On the other hand MS will no longer have to worry about having to jump through hoops when Sun ammends the Java Specification.
If then Microsoft makes their .NET clr run rings around Sun's JVM then it will be a matter of the products winning on their own merits, not a matter of MS putting more resources to one than the other. And frankly the odds are pretty good that MS could outprogram Sun. Dislike their business practices all you want but the programmers there are a fairly sharp bunch.
Frankly considering that the future promises nothing but higher fuel costs as the world supply diminishes lower cost is probably the sure winner.
I think the blended body aircraft are where the money could really be at. Their areodynamic efficiendy is obvious and the 'disadvantage' of no window seats is minimal. On long flights nobody looks out the windows and a blended body aircraft could compensate with skylights and selectable view cams. Price is the number one determinant of why people fly one airline over another (presuming of course that there is more than one airline flying the route they are traveling)
And bear in mind that XMLDocs are not likely to be simple because word processing documents are not simple. People grouse about Word HTML docs but most of that complexity was necessary to create a HTML document that accually looked like the original word document. XML docs are unlikey to be all that concise because users are going to be unwilling to sacrifice layout and formatting features just in order to have the resulting document be pretty looking XML
You could create a word processor that simplified and structured its features toward creating nicely structured HTML but then it would be FrontPage and not Word.
Then there is the kleenex factor. If it breaks then throw it away. Most stuff is just too hard to fix even if you can find someone with the skill and parts. Even if it is under warranty the trouple of getting the item to an authorized repair center and the time that you will be without use of the item is too much for most consumers. So consumers feel less angry at having to replace a $50 DVD than a $500 one.
Why? I believe that it is the NRA.
I have the right to drive a car. I suspect that unless you are young or have been very irresponsible you have the right to drive a car too.
It is a right that most americans cherish
I had to prove before I could have my right that I knew how to drive and understood the many laws of the road. I needed a minumum number of hours of actual practice before obtaining my ability. I have to register my car, pay taxes on it, and insure it for liability againt the harm that I may cause others. I may not drive my car while intoxicated. There are limits to the kind of car I can drive.
But despite all that nobody is claiming that I do not have the right to drive a car!
The Auto Club is not sending me mailers every time someone wants to put up a stop light saying that the government is trying to take away my right to drive a car! (Moreover here is where to send your money to help us protect your right to drive a car!)
But the NRA, to bolster its own political power base and to increase its fundraising has created this atmosphere of fear and crisis and persecution. It is only in cases where their position is completely bankrupt (teflon coated bullets, undetectable plastic handguns) do they ever seem to move from this tactic and in each case their initial reaction is allways the same 'they are trying to take away your right own a gun'.
To bring this back to the original question the reason that there is no unbiased studies is that there is no room for an unbiased conclusion. You look at everything and it is 'well they are from the NRA' or 'they are from Handgun Control' or 'they were funded by' and so on. Everything must be tossed into one camp or the other because the sides, particularly the NRA, has delineated everything in the starkest division of black or white. You are either 'pro second ammendment' or you are planning on 'taking honest citizens guns away'.
Most of these predictins are fairly safe. One of the most interesting is the self-checkout store. It might be hard to get the tags tamper proof. Remember that they would not merely have to get them tamper proof in terms of being to sneakily remove them, but tamper proof in the sense of preventing them from transmitting or tamperproof in the sense of having the recievers not get the signals, such as good old fashioned jamming. Some real challenges, but not out of the question entirely. The preciction that your family, etc will allways know where you are may well prove to be possible but unwanted (as may be the prediction about having your washing machine tell the company how often you are washing clothes). This is just an extension of the electronic name tags in the 1992 article. People want some privacy. It is a bit like universal picture phones. The first picture phone was demonstrated in a demonstration between AT&T headquarters and the Secretary of the Treasury in Washington. The Secretary of the Treasury was Herbert Hoover (yes, that Herbert Hoover, the technology is really that old).
What You Will Provide Them
What You Require of Them.
What They Can Do With What You Give Them
What They Can't Do With What You Give Them
What You Can Do With the Knowledge Gained From Doing This.
...And so forth. Then sit down with the customer and work out these terms. Then once you have an agreement about what will be the terms of the contract then go to the lawyer who could probably have one of his paralegals whip up an acceptable contract. On the other hand if you go to the attorney first you will wind up with a contract that is 90% boilerplate and hard to discern what the key terms are in order to work it out.
Maybe as a middle ground this could be a good use for a Tablet PC, particularly since it would give you a bigger screen and interface for seeing and marking the text as it is input