This sounds like a great boon to all mankind - a single judge gets to decide something that basically means the term of copyright is now three years.
It has nothing to do with the duration of the copyright, just the amount of time you can let pass without filing a lawsuit.
Personally, given what's going on in the copyright world right now, if the term was reduced to an effective three years that wouldn't particularly bother me.
Heh.. I've had a few people try to get me to sign crap like that, and the only argument they could make is "but it's the standard contract! Everyone here signed it!"
-jcr
Yeah. That's precisely what happened there, but as it happens I refused to sign it. It took about three months for personnel to notice that, and they came by and told me I'd forgotten to sign it. I said, no, I hadn't forgotten. A few days later, this secretary comes around with a stack of forms for me to sign (insurance stuff, etc.), with the signature line of that stupid employment agreement sticking out of the bottom. Nice try, I told her.
So then the personnel manager comes over and tries to convince me that I needed to sign it as a condition of my continued employment because, as you say, "everyone else signed it." I told him that was not made clear before I was hired so it simply did not count, and furthermore that everyone else here screwed up was no reason for me to do the same. I mean, did I look like a lemming? Of course, I was perfectly willing to leave if it was that important to them, but I didn't really think it was: somebody in personnel had made a boneheaded mistake and wanted me to give them an easy way out.
Ultimately it came down to the fact that they had some serious deadlines to meet and I was right in the middle of doing just that. So we came to a meeting of the minds, eventually.
So watch what you sign folks, because it can come back to bite you in the ass.
That's true; but, I can tell you from experience that driver support for DOS, or the lack thereof, is increasingly becoming a problem. Most of these embedded applications don't really care about performance. So, I suspect that's one of the primary reasons companies are moving to linux. (ex.: I have one box that clearly boots to DOS, and another box by the same vendor, in the same family of product but made a decade later, that boots to linux...)
No argument there. Hell, just getting LAN support is problematic nowadays.
And in fact "at all costs" is precisely the point an economist is most qualified to help address, is it not? We need to talk about all aspects of the issue if we want to come up with a solution that we all feel comfortable with.
Excellent point, and one that brings up another: this is not really about coming up with a. a correct diagnosis and b. an adequate solution. It is about the subjugation of science to international politics, with the ultimate purpose of decimating western industrial economies. The reality is this: even if America and its allies reduced their greenhouse emissions to ZERO (by eliminating all non-nuclear power production and all consumption of fossil fuels and going completely "green") the up-and-coming industrial nations aren't going to do a damn thing. They want the fruits of industrialization and they don't care how they get them, and furthermore they want us out of the way. We can flush ourselves down the tubes entirely and it won't make any difference.
So, if they try and tell you that China and India or, for that matter, Mexico, give a collective crap about global warming or the environmental consequences of their rapid industrialization, feel free to laugh in their faces. And don't get me going on Russia and the way they flare off cubic miles of natural gas because they won't spend the money on the cryogenics required to store and transport it. U.S. companies can't get away with that. Ha... and we're worried about our carbon footprint? If global warming is a truly important issue to those nations, I say this: you first. Clean up your own acts. Stop bitching about the United States and start leading by example. Otherwise you're just hypocrites, who want to use the issue of global warming to further damage your enemies.
That our elected officials are going along with this is stupid at best, treasonous at worst. In spite of surface appearances, much of the environmental movement and our current President's policies seem to leave little room for humanity. Sure, it all sounds good, but when we've shut down the last manufacturing plant, turned off the last powerhouse... will we really care about global warming anymore?
15 years and their disk partitioning utility still can't partition a disk properly. Guys, an MBR partition scheme is fucking simple, and you have every OS on the planet to test your results against. Please get it right.
It's probably because every other OS on the planet can do it that they don't feel the need to fix it.
I'm genuinely puzzled by the people who can't figure out what a DOS-compatible OS is good for. Don't you people ever need to apply BIOS updates? Or run hard drive diagnostic software?
That's a trivial application for an operating system. Where you'll find DOS-level OSes still being used is primarily in embedded systems of various sorts. DOS has a lot of advantages there, if you're running on Intel-compatible hardware. Lots of development tools and utilities, support for Flash-based devices, etc.
Here's a starting point for exploring some of this data. There's probably more places where this data is available from the NWS in very open formats, and I believe more is to come.
I also seem to recall a few occations of similar stuff where workers stuff was claimed by their employers, also tended to go in favour of the employer, usually especially so because it was stated in whatever contract
There are, however, limits on those kinds of shenanigans. I worked as a developer back in the eighties for an outfit whose employment contract not only entitled them to ownership of any software or intellectual property that I developed while on company time (obviously I had no problem with that) but ANYTHING I did outside of work, even if in a completely unrelated field, for a period of FIVE YEARS after I left their employment. Naturally I refused to sign that little bastard until they fixed it to my (and my attorney's) satisfaction. Even so, I have the feeling there aren't many courts that would have upheld that contract, but I felt it was best to have the worst portions excised.
The place was run by chimpanzees anyway, with a couple of orangutans in the head office. Yeah, it was a game company, and as employers go they made Electronic Arts look good.
Look at the outfits that monetize the NOAA's data: that's public information as well. The NOAA was "publishing" this information in a very complicated binary format, and these outfits were making a ton of money in converting it to other purposes. I remember reading here on Slashdot a couple years ago that the government was thinking of making weather data available in XML or some other standard format, and that a couple of these outfits went after them in court to try and prevent it (thereby preserving their distribution lock.) I don't know what the eventual outcome of that was.
Unless that would involve breaking or circumventing any encryption, for any reason (at least in the USA)...stupid DMCA.
More specifically, you cannot traffic in tools that make it possible for others to do that. It's also not true that it is disallowed for any reason... there are exceptions and that list gets updated from time to time. It's still bullshit, but it's not absolute.
At ten times the energy output, it may be 10x more dangerous.
It's not ten times the energy output, it's ten times the energy density (e.g. watt hours per pound), and that means you can have a device powered by a battery that's of similar capacity to current designs but ten times smaller. That's what this is all about, when it comes to microelectronics. Dick Tracy video watch, anyone?
Hell, if we had a lithium ion battery that's ten times more energy dense, it means my laptop would run for ten hours (yeah yeah, time for a new battery pack.)
Yeah right. It's pretty much a given, that an the first week, someone will drop his coffee on it. And what about the air itself. There is humidity in it, you know. ^^
Not a problem unless you hold the damn thing next to your balls while driving and pour McDonald's coffee on it.
You meant your post as a joke and a satire, but it's already reality.
Yes, and frankly it makes me want to throw up. This is NOT the America I grew up in, no sirree, not at all. I'm at far more risk of having my life disrupted or destroyed by errant Federal officials than I am any actual terrorists. And that bothers me.
That's simply not true. TNT is less energy dense than aluminum. Which one would you rather be standing next to when a blasting cap is fired on them?
Never heard of aluminum dust explosions? There's all kinds of ordinarily innocuous materials that are absolutely not safe around flame if powdered and disbursed in the air...even flour or rubber dust can be made to explode
Yes, and to support your example, grain silos have a similar issue. They have to take great pains to make sure that critical mixture is not achieved or the slightest spark and your silo is now an incised black spot on the ground.
Unless you are referring to cars fueled by propane, you have been watching too many movies. Neither gasoline nor diesel fuel are explosive in their liquid state.
Correct, and diesel is even harder to ignite. Matter of fact, liquid fuel doesn't explode: only volatile vapors at critical mixture... fact is, you're far safer when your tank is full, displacing all the fuel/air mixture.
Or you can seal it properly, instead of just leaving on you back seat.
You can't guarantee that a seal will be maintained during a collision. Hell, take that Hawker battery I mentioned above and crush it as might happen in a bad accident. Foom! That's one reason that hybrids (and electric cars in general) have no interest for me. A tank of gas is comparatively safe compared to a massive battery pack.
Chuck, as in, Chuck Norris?? Damn it, I should've listened to you and voted for Huckabee.
No kidding. But there's still time. If he'll deliver a roundhouse kick to Congress' collective head, maybe it'll knock some sense into those blathering idiots.
USA is a democracy. It makes sense, to some degree, to blame the American people for letting someone like Bush come to power, and to make them, to some degree, responsible for the foreign policies of same.
Then you don't really understand our form of government. First off, we're a democratic republic: we are not a direct democracy as many seem to assume. Furthermore, we can influence our government's policies to a certain degree, but as the level of corruption and overall unconcern with the Will of the People has increased, that ability has been reduced proportionately. Blaming the average citizen of this country for the actions of a George Bush is insane: our political system presents us with two candidates every four years, invariably forcing us to choose between the lesser of two evils. Obviously, given that there are almost 300 million of us, I'm sure we could find better... but the two parties would have us believe that they, and only they, have the power to choose wisely.
Except many Iranians hold the US responsible, at least in part, for their many government problems they currently experience.
The question is, do they blame the average American citizen, or do they blame an errant Administration? I don't believe that all Iranians are evil, I certainly don't hate them... but I really don't like their government. Hopefully they can make the same distinction.
Yes, and he said "Linux Desktop" which is pretty damned specific. I, for one, had no problem understanding that he was NOT referring to the kernel: the world "Desktop" was a dead giveaway.
Actually, it's not that the various Linux desktops innovate too much (that would be like saying that Microsoft innovates too much.) It's more a matter that they aren't ripping off anything with better ideas than Microsoft Windows. I mean, all Windows has been since its inception is a weak sister to the Macintosh, originally giving DOS users with Mac envy a mouse pointer to push around so their collective penis didn't feel so small. At least Microsoft set their sights reasonably high: they stole all their best ideas from a GUI layer that, at the time, was superior in pretty much every way (granted, that gap has narrowed in recent years.) The Linux desktop crowd is so afraid of losing ground to Windows (and of being considered out of touch) that they aren't, so far as I can see, really willing to innovate all that much.
The reality, of course, is that the "desktop metaphor" has been stretched about as far is can be, there really isn't all that much more room to innovate, because the technology and underlying precepts have largely matured. Windowing systems, pointing devices, cut&paste... all the basics have been around for decades, and all the major GUIs have them. What will come next is open question, of course, but I wouldn't expect it to come from the KDE or Gnome folks. They're still playing catchup.
And there's this: when you get right down to it, do we want major innovations at this point? Do we want things to change just for the sake of change? Hell, the Office Ribbon was the latest "innovation" from Microsoft, and it can hardly be called a smashing success because what was there before was good enough.
Slashdot Mirror
This sounds like a great boon to all mankind - a single judge gets to decide something that basically means the term of copyright is now three years.
It has nothing to do with the duration of the copyright, just the amount of time you can let pass without filing a lawsuit.
Personally, given what's going on in the copyright world right now, if the term was reduced to an effective three years that wouldn't particularly bother me.
You are the person who invented sending four line comments in powerpoints aren't you.
Yes. And he also invented the hold button. Take him down!
Heh.. I've had a few people try to get me to sign crap like that, and the only argument they could make is "but it's the standard contract! Everyone here signed it!"
-jcr
Yeah. That's precisely what happened there, but as it happens I refused to sign it. It took about three months for personnel to notice that, and they came by and told me I'd forgotten to sign it. I said, no, I hadn't forgotten. A few days later, this secretary comes around with a stack of forms for me to sign (insurance stuff, etc.), with the signature line of that stupid employment agreement sticking out of the bottom. Nice try, I told her.
So then the personnel manager comes over and tries to convince me that I needed to sign it as a condition of my continued employment because, as you say, "everyone else signed it." I told him that was not made clear before I was hired so it simply did not count, and furthermore that everyone else here screwed up was no reason for me to do the same. I mean, did I look like a lemming? Of course, I was perfectly willing to leave if it was that important to them, but I didn't really think it was: somebody in personnel had made a boneheaded mistake and wanted me to give them an easy way out.
Ultimately it came down to the fact that they had some serious deadlines to meet and I was right in the middle of doing just that. So we came to a meeting of the minds, eventually.
So watch what you sign folks, because it can come back to bite you in the ass.
I suppose you can throw a Roadrunner into a black hole, to squeeze the space...just keep it on a leash so it stops before crossing the horizon...
Nah. Just build it inside a TARDIS. Problem solved.
That's true; but, I can tell you from experience that driver support for DOS, or the lack thereof, is increasingly becoming a problem. Most of these embedded applications don't really care about performance. So, I suspect that's one of the primary reasons companies are moving to linux. (ex.: I have one box that clearly boots to DOS, and another box by the same vendor, in the same family of product but made a decade later, that boots to linux...)
No argument there. Hell, just getting LAN support is problematic nowadays.
And in fact "at all costs" is precisely the point an economist is most qualified to help address, is it not? We need to talk about all aspects of the issue if we want to come up with a solution that we all feel comfortable with.
Excellent point, and one that brings up another: this is not really about coming up with a. a correct diagnosis and b. an adequate solution. It is about the subjugation of science to international politics, with the ultimate purpose of decimating western industrial economies. The reality is this: even if America and its allies reduced their greenhouse emissions to ZERO (by eliminating all non-nuclear power production and all consumption of fossil fuels and going completely "green") the up-and-coming industrial nations aren't going to do a damn thing. They want the fruits of industrialization and they don't care how they get them, and furthermore they want us out of the way. We can flush ourselves down the tubes entirely and it won't make any difference.
... and we're worried about our carbon footprint? If global warming is a truly important issue to those nations, I say this: you first. Clean up your own acts. Stop bitching about the United States and start leading by example. Otherwise you're just hypocrites, who want to use the issue of global warming to further damage your enemies.
... will we really care about global warming anymore?
So, if they try and tell you that China and India or, for that matter, Mexico, give a collective crap about global warming or the environmental consequences of their rapid industrialization, feel free to laugh in their faces. And don't get me going on Russia and the way they flare off cubic miles of natural gas because they won't spend the money on the cryogenics required to store and transport it. U.S. companies can't get away with that. Ha
That our elected officials are going along with this is stupid at best, treasonous at worst. In spite of surface appearances, much of the environmental movement and our current President's policies seem to leave little room for humanity. Sure, it all sounds good, but when we've shut down the last manufacturing plant, turned off the last powerhouse
15 years and their disk partitioning utility still can't partition a disk properly. Guys, an MBR partition scheme is fucking simple, and you have every OS on the planet to test your results against. Please get it right.
It's probably because every other OS on the planet can do it that they don't feel the need to fix it.
I'm genuinely puzzled by the people who can't figure out what a DOS-compatible OS is good for. Don't you people ever need to apply BIOS updates? Or run hard drive diagnostic software?
That's a trivial application for an operating system. Where you'll find DOS-level OSes still being used is primarily in embedded systems of various sorts. DOS has a lot of advantages there, if you're running on Intel-compatible hardware. Lots of development tools and utilities, support for Flash-based devices, etc.
Even so, I have the feeling there aren't many courts that would have upheld that contract, but I felt it was best to have the worst portions excised.
Better a few billable hours up front than hundreds of billable hours in a court case later.
Yep, that was my attitude as well.
(I imagine that is the discussion you mentioned, but who knows).
Could be. I had just remembered a little about it, and it kinda seemed relevant.
They lost, and they lost rather completely.
Here's a starting point for exploring some of this data. There's probably more places where this data is available from the NWS in very open formats, and I believe more is to come.
http://www.weather.gov/rss/
You know, that's exactly what I wanted to hear. Thanks for that.
I also seem to recall a few occations of similar stuff where workers stuff was claimed by their employers, also tended to go in favour of the employer, usually especially so because it was stated in whatever contract
There are, however, limits on those kinds of shenanigans. I worked as a developer back in the eighties for an outfit whose employment contract not only entitled them to ownership of any software or intellectual property that I developed while on company time (obviously I had no problem with that) but ANYTHING I did outside of work, even if in a completely unrelated field, for a period of FIVE YEARS after I left their employment. Naturally I refused to sign that little bastard until they fixed it to my (and my attorney's) satisfaction. Even so, I have the feeling there aren't many courts that would have upheld that contract, but I felt it was best to have the worst portions excised.
The place was run by chimpanzees anyway, with a couple of orangutans in the head office. Yeah, it was a game company, and as employers go they made Electronic Arts look good.
Look at the outfits that monetize the NOAA's data: that's public information as well. The NOAA was "publishing" this information in a very complicated binary format, and these outfits were making a ton of money in converting it to other purposes. I remember reading here on Slashdot a couple years ago that the government was thinking of making weather data available in XML or some other standard format, and that a couple of these outfits went after them in court to try and prevent it (thereby preserving their distribution lock.) I don't know what the eventual outcome of that was.
Unless that would involve breaking or circumventing any encryption, for any reason (at least in the USA)...stupid DMCA.
More specifically, you cannot traffic in tools that make it possible for others to do that. It's also not true that it is disallowed for any reason ... there are exceptions and that list gets updated from time to time. It's still bullshit, but it's not absolute.
At ten times the energy output, it may be 10x more dangerous.
It's not ten times the energy output, it's ten times the energy density (e.g. watt hours per pound), and that means you can have a device powered by a battery that's of similar capacity to current designs but ten times smaller. That's what this is all about, when it comes to microelectronics. Dick Tracy video watch, anyone?
Hell, if we had a lithium ion battery that's ten times more energy dense, it means my laptop would run for ten hours (yeah yeah, time for a new battery pack.)
Yeah right. It's pretty much a given, that an the first week, someone will drop his coffee on it. And what about the air itself. There is humidity in it, you know. ^^
Not a problem unless you hold the damn thing next to your balls while driving and pour McDonald's coffee on it.
You meant your post as a joke and a satire, but it's already reality.
Yes, and frankly it makes me want to throw up. This is NOT the America I grew up in, no sirree, not at all. I'm at far more risk of having my life disrupted or destroyed by errant Federal officials than I am any actual terrorists. And that bothers me.
That's simply not true. TNT is less energy dense than aluminum. Which one would you rather be standing next to when a blasting cap is fired on them?
Never heard of aluminum dust explosions? There's all kinds of ordinarily innocuous materials that are absolutely not safe around flame if powdered and disbursed in the air...even flour or rubber dust can be made to explode
Yes, and to support your example, grain silos have a similar issue. They have to take great pains to make sure that critical mixture is not achieved or the slightest spark and your silo is now an incised black spot on the ground.
Unless you are referring to cars fueled by propane, you have been watching too many movies. Neither gasoline nor diesel fuel are explosive in their liquid state.
Correct, and diesel is even harder to ignite. Matter of fact, liquid fuel doesn't explode: only volatile vapors at critical mixture ... fact is, you're far safer when your tank is full, displacing all the fuel/air mixture.
Or you can seal it properly, instead of just leaving on you back seat.
You can't guarantee that a seal will be maintained during a collision. Hell, take that Hawker battery I mentioned above and crush it as might happen in a bad accident. Foom! That's one reason that hybrids (and electric cars in general) have no interest for me. A tank of gas is comparatively safe compared to a massive battery pack.
Smartphones Get "Reality Overlay" App
Reality overlay? Ha ... I'm guessing Steve Jobs is behind this one.
Chuck, as in, Chuck Norris?? Damn it, I should've listened to you and voted for Huckabee.
No kidding. But there's still time. If he'll deliver a roundhouse kick to Congress' collective head, maybe it'll knock some sense into those blathering idiots.
USA is a democracy. It makes sense, to some degree, to blame the American people for letting someone like Bush come to power, and to make them, to some degree, responsible for the foreign policies of same.
Then you don't really understand our form of government. First off, we're a democratic republic: we are not a direct democracy as many seem to assume. Furthermore, we can influence our government's policies to a certain degree, but as the level of corruption and overall unconcern with the Will of the People has increased, that ability has been reduced proportionately. Blaming the average citizen of this country for the actions of a George Bush is insane: our political system presents us with two candidates every four years, invariably forcing us to choose between the lesser of two evils. Obviously, given that there are almost 300 million of us, I'm sure we could find better ... but the two parties would have us believe that they, and only they, have the power to choose wisely.
Except many Iranians hold the US responsible, at least in part, for their many government problems they currently experience.
The question is, do they blame the average American citizen, or do they blame an errant Administration? I don't believe that all Iranians are evil, I certainly don't hate them ... but I really don't like their government. Hopefully they can make the same distinction.
When you say "Linux" I think Linux kernel.
Yes, and he said "Linux Desktop" which is pretty damned specific. I, for one, had no problem understanding that he was NOT referring to the kernel: the world "Desktop" was a dead giveaway.
... all the basics have been around for decades, and all the major GUIs have them. What will come next is open question, of course, but I wouldn't expect it to come from the KDE or Gnome folks. They're still playing catchup.
Actually, it's not that the various Linux desktops innovate too much (that would be like saying that Microsoft innovates too much.) It's more a matter that they aren't ripping off anything with better ideas than Microsoft Windows. I mean, all Windows has been since its inception is a weak sister to the Macintosh, originally giving DOS users with Mac envy a mouse pointer to push around so their collective penis didn't feel so small. At least Microsoft set their sights reasonably high: they stole all their best ideas from a GUI layer that, at the time, was superior in pretty much every way (granted, that gap has narrowed in recent years.) The Linux desktop crowd is so afraid of losing ground to Windows (and of being considered out of touch) that they aren't, so far as I can see, really willing to innovate all that much.
The reality, of course, is that the "desktop metaphor" has been stretched about as far is can be, there really isn't all that much more room to innovate, because the technology and underlying precepts have largely matured. Windowing systems, pointing devices, cut&paste
And there's this: when you get right down to it, do we want major innovations at this point? Do we want things to change just for the sake of change? Hell, the Office Ribbon was the latest "innovation" from Microsoft, and it can hardly be called a smashing success because what was there before was good enough.