If the job was moved to another state, at least you'd have the option to follow the job without any meaningful legal barriers. It's not so easy to follow your job to India though.
I like the concept of keeping all the files for each app fully contained in its own directory, even if it means some libraries will be redundantly duplicated across the disk. Disks nowadays have huge gobs of space and are cheap.
However, memory isn't so abundant. When loading up an app, is the system intelligent enough to recognize that a given library was already loaded into memory from a different directory, and therefore it won't load another copy of the same library?
" A butt ugly guy who gets laid by secure and attractive women is the best possible source of dating advice. They've never been able to rely on natural good looks, so they were forced to understand the true nature of the game."
Make that a butt ugly guy who doesn't have a lot of money or fame. Rich and famous guys can be butt ugly with no charm or skills, yet still get loads of hot women.
'You are right that the costs are high, but they are not prohibitive. Also, these costs are not created by the current "monopoly" but rather by the inherent fact that these things cost money.'
The costs are not created by the monopoly; it's that the revenue stream that paid for the costs was supported by a monopoly when the incumbent cable company was getting its presence in an area. They had a monopoly when they started up; competitors entering the scene now don't have that.
"Businesses are beholden to their shareholders. If shareholder valuation can be increased via protection of patents then the company has a fiduciary duty to pursue that course of action."
No business has a fudiciary duty to use unethical means to extort money from anybody. Some may choose to do so, but they don't have a duty to do so.
And yes, using bogus patents to extract license fees is unethical, even though it isn't illegal.
"Only a few years back the only reason I kept a TV was out of habit, for DVDs and the occasional documentary or Star Trek. Now I find myself cancelling dates (yes, I can get dates) to watch a great TV show."
Get a TiVo and make it record the shows while you're out, so you won't have to cancel dates in order to see the shows.
Or maybe you can even make watching a TiVo-recorded movie together as the date. TiVo can help you get laid in more ways than one!
"If it's so great in India, why do so many Indians try and come to the USA?"
It wasn't always so great in India. But things have changed, and now many Indians are moving back.
There are advantages to living for a few years in the US or UK even for those who eventually settle in India. Work as H-1B for 5 years, save $60K US dollars and you can buy a house and car in India with no more payments.
"Does the practices of a single franchise represent the entire chain?"
Not necessarily, but when the managers who control the chain do nothing to correct the rogue actions of a franchise, the practices then become representative of the entire chain. Better to do business with another chain or small shop that doesn't engage in such shady dealings (or at least those not known to be shady).
'Your condition that "patents should be limited to actual useful inventions," strikes me as incredibly impractical. I challenge you to spontaneously tell me which ideas I present to you are "actual useful inventions" and which ones aren't. Besides, why should that be the criteria?'
A person applying for a patent is making a very strong and far-reaching statement. Essentially they are claiming that none of the other six billion people in the world have created what they have, and that no other expert in the field would naturally create it when faced with the same problem.
By law patents are supposed to be useful and nonobvious; by definition such criteria are inherently subjective. But because of the blatant statement the patent applicant is making against the rest of the human race, a statement that cannot be proved but can only be disproved, and because of the restrictions a patent places on other people's freedoms, the burden of proof should be on the patent applicant to demonstrate what it is useful for and make an impressive case for the nonobviousness.
Such strict conditions will undoubtedly result in mistakenly denied patents; however, mistakenly granted patents cause much more harm than those mistakenly denied. A denied patent does not inherently prevent the creator from building and marketing the item or process; numerous complex and useful things are created and sold without the seller ever having held a patent on it (in fact it is often the case that somebody else has a patent on it but they don't know). However, mistakenly granted patents do have the likely effect of stopping things from being built, especially when the patent holder has no intention or means of building something but only plans to use it as a weapon or leaves it dormant for its chilling effect.
"There is a common misconception that patents == inventions which simply isn't the case. You patent a method for doing something AND that something doesn't even have to be truly useful to anyone (hard to prove utility) or work."
The point of my post was exactly that patents != inventions, which is why there are so many. My point is also that patents should be limited to actual useful inventions.
When patents are granted for trivial steps in a process or trivial items, they can prevent others from building full-fledged working inventions because the would-be inventor of the more complex and useful device now has to tangle with 50 different patent holders who each have a claim on some minor aspects of the proposed creation. Had those trivial patents not been granted, the stuff they describe likely would have been created anyway as a natural part of building the more complex and useful invention.
"The point I am making is: what's the point of registering a patent if you know that by some arbitrary decesion of the USPTO the patent can be recalled? Doesn't the USPTO know what is worthy of patenting and what is not? If it doesn't, it has no right to exist."
Patents are presumed valid when applied for, and are granted unless blatant prior art is found during the few hours the examiner takes to review the patent. In essence, they rubber-stamp patents and leave it up to the courts or re-examination procedures to make a real determination of validity.
You're correct; with this mode of operation they have no right to exist.
Generally, people with the aptitude and attitude to be successful in IT don't choose tech schools -- they choose a university with a genuine 4-year technical degree, or they get a computer and teach themselves real programming (not HTML creation with Frontpage). The tech schools then get left mostly with people who could do neither.
Of course, the weak curricula doesn't help them either. But it's the quality of the people they attract that is the deciding factor.
The concern is that steroids BOTH make people stronger AND are health risks. What they are trying to avoid is a situation that practically requires one to sacrifice one's health to be a champion.
Things like vitamins, ginseng, and creatine can provide a performance boost but aren't banned because there is little to no risk with using them (except in extreme overdoses). There are also a myriad of other substances that they don't care to test for because they don't help performance.
There are also concerns about things that would undermine the spirit of the sport -- for example, high jumpers using springed shoes or Tour de France cyclists using motors. If gene therapy could produce super-muscular athletes, it would undermine the spirit of competition in a similar way; competition would become more a contest of who has the better gene therapist than who trained the hardest and smartest.
Of course, innate genetic talent is a key factor to athletic success which allows some to win without the best training. However, such genetic differences are allowed not becuase they are desirable, but because they are unavoidable. In a perfectly fair competition everybody would have the same genetic talents; but that isn't possible so it's best to focus on leveling the playing field by reducing the impact of other differences that are unrelated to training.
"Uhm. I usually try to hold back in discussions of such religious zeal, but I feel compelled to point out that the US is actually a capitalist society. Things cost. Markets decide."
Exactly. Let the market decide. The government should not be imposing the purchase of a particular brand of operating system on the public if there are free alternatives available that can meet the requirements, because that would unnecessarily coerce people into paying for it. Market forces would then become irrelevant.
"In that case, let me put up this question for public debate: would the situation be better if the government used tax revenue to pay for an edition of Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office (and a Computer, ISP service and one mug of coffee per hour for everyone) as they do for the printing of the "free" tax forms?"
If there were individuals and corporations volunteering to supply the computers, ISP service, MS software and coffee, the government should choose that option instead of forcing taxpayers to pay for them. Similarly, they should seek to make use of the software that others have voluntarily donated to the public, rather than unnecessarily imposing the costs of proprietary software on the taxpayers.
Writing and performing isn't work after you have stopped doing it. Or if you are dead.
You are the imbecile if you think you deserve to keep collecting money for decades after your last performance, when everybody else has to work every single day to earn their next dollar.
I can also speak of thousands of carpenters and masons who died ill and destitute because the law wouldn't enable them to collect ongoing royalties on the houses they built. I can speak of teachers' children who are destitute because the law wouldn't enable them to collect royalties on the knowledge their parents imparted to school children who grew up and used the education to become rich.
Sorry, but there is no reason why the legal system should distort the market for the purpose of providing lifelong income and inheritances for artists and corporations on the basis of work that was performed many decades ago, when people in almost every other occupation have no such guarantee. Provide the 14 or 28 years as an incentive to create; nothing more is needed or deserved.
I know of people who fly to places like Belize or Jamaica to do surgery, paying for everything out of pocket at a cheaper rate than if they stayed in the US and paid the 20% their insurance companies required them to pay. Or their insurance doesn't cover the specific condition at all, so it works out much cheaper to fly overseas to get it done.
For the procedures offered, the care is usually quite good. Many of the doctors studied in the US. In fact, I'm surprised that more people don't take advantage of less expensive medical care overseas, rather than sitting in the US and dying because they can't afford it.
Having said that, US insurance companies should not be in the business of demanding that their customers go overseas before they'll pay for treatment. US insurance rates are based on the costs of treatment in the United States, so that's what policyholders should be given.
It it is true that other countries can provide cheaper medical care partly because their laws don't allow you to file large malpractice lawsuits. Very often in the US, half of the cost you pay for a surgery is just to cover the risk of a malpractice suit. That is something we need to work on here in the US if we don't want to see the health care system reduced to nothing but emergency care and plastic surgery for the rich. Shakespeare said "let's kill all the lawyers", but the lawyers are killing us by driving medical costs out of the reach of millions of Americans.
What do you mean something cannot be patented and also be a trade secret?
Our store-bought legislators have allowed software to be patented, copyrighted, trademarked, and be a trade secret all at the same time!
The algorithms in a patent may not actually work as described, because there is no requirement to prove them for correctness or submit a working program. There may be subtle modifications required to get it to actually work. However, if you implement a working program that does the the same thing you can be sued for infringement.
Second, the patent language is usually so obfuscated with legalese, redundancy and excess verbosity that the patent is of little use to someone who wants to build a working program.
The lack of a requirement to publish source code, combined with the obfuscated patent language, allows software to effectively remain a trade secret even after it has been patented.
"First of all, I understand that there are two types of outsourcing:
1) Outsourcing jobs that otherwise would not have been created because they weren't cost-effective if filled by North Americans 2) Firing somebody who was doing a perfectly good job EXCLUSIVELY to save money."
There is 3rd type, which is the worst type and probably the most common type:
3) Firing somebody who was doing a perfectly good job to create the APPEARANCE of saving money, while losing money in reality.
The large salary differences can create the illusion of huge savings; however the total cost of outsourcing a programming job to India is multiples of the Indian programmer's salary. Although the labor costs might be around 1/10 of what American programmers earn, just about every other part of the equation is equal or MORE expensive than in the US.
There is a premium on office real estate that is well-equipped enough to support outsourced programming jobs (reliable electricity, Internet connectivity, etc), to the point that a square foot of office space in Bombay is now more expensive than one in Boston. Internet bandwidth in India is 2-4X more expensive. Computer and networking hardware is about the same, or slightly more expensive. On top of that, offshore projects generally require a number of technical leads and/or managers to be at the US client site (at US-level salaries)... they are liasons that would not be needed if the developers were in the same building.
After you add up everything, you only save about 20-25% if things go right, and they often go wrong. It can be a very bad mistake for the company to fire programmers who have proven themselves for years, in order to pursue a shaky chance at 25% savings.
"If it were about free trade, I could freely follow my outsourced job to wherever it is sent."
Precisely. And the Indians could also freely follow the money to the place where the work is coming from, i.e. they could move the the US, UK and other developed countries for higher pay. If they were as free to cross borders as the product of their work, salaries would have to be raised in India to keep them from fleeing, which would reduce the advantage of outsourcing there.
How come "Free Trade" is only free for the corporations? When you a consumer try to take enjoy free trade by moving to another country or buying DVDs or pharmaceuticals from another country, the corporations and governments do their best to bitch-slap you till you stop trying that.
'As somebody else pointed out, software is the only "creation" that can be both copyrighted and patented. Doesn't this seem, well, a bit ridiculous?'
Not only that, but a piece of software can be copyrighted, patented, AND be a trade secret at the same time!
Getting a software patent doesn't require the source code to be revealed, and the wording of the patent is usually so obfuscated and convoluted that it is of little or no use to someone else who wants to create an implementation of the same thing.
Once you use the store card, they already know what you purchased. Notifying a customer doesn't violate any privacy unless they use a third party to print the notices.
If you gave me your email password, you should already assume that I can see whatever messages you have received. If I choose to use the information I saw in your email to warn you about something (without disclosing anything to a third party), the fact that I give you that warning isn't a violation of your privacy.
Slashdot Mirror
If the job was moved to another state, at least you'd have the option to follow the job without any meaningful legal barriers. It's not so easy to follow your job to India though.
Some of them get bonuses for keeping costs down. So they do have incentives to minimize the reported overtime.
I like the concept of keeping all the files for each app fully contained in its own directory, even if it means some libraries will be redundantly duplicated across the disk. Disks nowadays have huge gobs of space and are cheap.
However, memory isn't so abundant. When loading up an app, is the system intelligent enough to recognize that a given library was already loaded into memory from a different directory, and therefore it won't load another copy of the same library?
" A butt ugly guy who gets laid by secure and attractive women is the best possible source of dating advice. They've never been able to rely on natural good looks, so they were forced to understand the true nature of the game."
Make that a butt ugly guy who doesn't have a lot of money or fame. Rich and famous guys can be butt ugly with no charm or skills, yet still get loads of hot women.
'You are right that the costs are high, but they are not prohibitive. Also, these costs are not created by the current "monopoly" but rather by the inherent fact that these things cost money.'
The costs are not created by the monopoly; it's that the revenue stream that paid for the costs was supported by a monopoly when the incumbent cable company was getting its presence in an area. They had a monopoly when they started up; competitors entering the scene now don't have that.
"Businesses are beholden to their shareholders. If shareholder valuation can be increased via protection of patents then the company has a fiduciary duty to pursue that course of action."
No business has a fudiciary duty to use unethical means to extort money from anybody. Some may choose to do so, but they don't have a duty to do so.
And yes, using bogus patents to extract license fees is unethical, even though it isn't illegal.
"Only a few years back the only reason I kept a TV was out of habit, for DVDs and the occasional documentary or Star Trek. Now I find myself cancelling dates (yes, I can get dates) to watch a great TV show."
Get a TiVo and make it record the shows while you're out, so you won't have to cancel dates in order to see the shows.
Or maybe you can even make watching a TiVo-recorded movie together as the date. TiVo can help you get laid in more ways than one!
"If it's so great in India, why do so many Indians try and come to the USA?"
It wasn't always so great in India. But things have changed, and now many Indians are moving back.
There are advantages to living for a few years in the US or UK even for those who eventually settle in India. Work as H-1B for 5 years, save $60K US dollars and you can buy a house and car in India with no more payments.
"Does the practices of a single franchise represent the entire chain?"
Not necessarily, but when the managers who control the chain do nothing to correct the rogue actions of a franchise, the practices then become representative of the entire chain. Better to do business with another chain or small shop that doesn't engage in such shady dealings (or at least those not known to be shady).
'Your condition that "patents should be limited to actual useful inventions," strikes me as incredibly impractical. I challenge you to spontaneously tell me which ideas I present to you are "actual useful inventions" and which ones aren't. Besides, why should that be the criteria?'
A person applying for a patent is making a very strong and far-reaching statement. Essentially they are claiming that none of the other six billion people in the world have created what they have, and that no other expert in the field would naturally create it when faced with the same problem.
By law patents are supposed to be useful and nonobvious; by definition such criteria are inherently subjective. But because of the blatant statement the patent applicant is making against the rest of the human race, a statement that cannot be proved but can only be disproved, and because of the restrictions a patent places on other people's freedoms, the burden of proof should be on the patent applicant to demonstrate what it is useful for and make an impressive case for the nonobviousness.
Such strict conditions will undoubtedly result in mistakenly denied patents; however, mistakenly granted patents cause much more harm than those mistakenly denied. A denied patent does not inherently prevent the creator from building and marketing the item or process; numerous complex and useful things are created and sold without the seller ever having held a patent on it (in fact it is often the case that somebody else has a patent on it but they don't know). However, mistakenly granted patents do have the likely effect of stopping things from being built, especially when the patent holder has no intention or means of building something but only plans to use it as a weapon or leaves it dormant for its chilling effect.
"There is a common misconception that patents == inventions which simply isn't the case. You patent a method for doing something AND that something doesn't even have to be truly useful to anyone (hard to prove utility) or work."
The point of my post was exactly that patents != inventions, which is why there are so many. My point is also that patents should be limited to actual useful inventions.
When patents are granted for trivial steps in a process or trivial items, they can prevent others from building full-fledged working inventions because the would-be inventor of the more complex and useful device now has to tangle with 50 different patent holders who each have a claim on some minor aspects of the proposed creation. Had those trivial patents not been granted, the stuff they describe likely would have been created anyway as a natural part of building the more complex and useful invention.
"The point I am making is: what's the point of registering a patent if you know that by some arbitrary decesion of the USPTO the patent can be recalled? Doesn't the USPTO know what is worthy of patenting and what is not? If it doesn't, it has no right to exist."
Patents are presumed valid when applied for, and are granted unless blatant prior art is found during the few hours the examiner takes to review the patent. In essence, they rubber-stamp patents and leave it up to the courts or re-examination procedures to make a real determination of validity.
You're correct; with this mode of operation they have no right to exist.
"I can't believe that out of 4 million patents, only 151 of them were been invalidated since 1988. Scary."
And I can't believe that as many as 4 million patents have been granted since 1988. Scary.
There can't have been that many actual inventions in the last 16 years. Probably not even in the last 16 decades.
Generally, people with the aptitude and attitude to be successful in IT don't choose tech schools -- they choose a university with a genuine 4-year technical degree, or they get a computer and teach themselves real programming (not HTML creation with Frontpage). The tech schools then get left mostly with people who could do neither.
Of course, the weak curricula doesn't help them either. But it's the quality of the people they attract that is the deciding factor.
The concern is that steroids BOTH make people stronger AND are health risks. What they are trying to avoid is a situation that practically requires one to sacrifice one's health to be a champion.
Things like vitamins, ginseng, and creatine can provide a performance boost but aren't banned because there is little to no risk with using them (except in extreme overdoses). There are also a myriad of other substances that they don't care to test for because they don't help performance.
There are also concerns about things that would undermine the spirit of the sport -- for example, high jumpers using springed shoes or Tour de France cyclists using motors. If gene therapy could produce super-muscular athletes, it would undermine the spirit of competition in a similar way; competition would become more a contest of who has the better gene therapist than who trained the hardest and smartest.
Of course, innate genetic talent is a key factor to athletic success which allows some to win without the best training. However, such genetic differences are allowed not becuase they are desirable, but because they are unavoidable. In a perfectly fair competition everybody would have the same genetic talents; but that isn't possible so it's best to focus on leveling the playing field by reducing the impact of other differences that are unrelated to training.
"Uhm. I usually try to hold back in discussions of such religious zeal, but I feel compelled to point out that the US is actually a capitalist society. Things cost. Markets decide."
Exactly. Let the market decide. The government should not be imposing the purchase of a particular brand of operating system on the public if there are free alternatives available that can meet the requirements, because that would unnecessarily coerce people into paying for it. Market forces would then become irrelevant.
"In that case, let me put up this question for public debate: would the situation be better if the government used tax revenue to pay for an edition of Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office (and a Computer, ISP service and one mug of coffee per hour for everyone) as they do for the printing of the "free" tax forms?"
If there were individuals and corporations volunteering to supply the computers, ISP service, MS software and coffee, the government should choose that option instead of forcing taxpayers to pay for them. Similarly, they should seek to make use of the software that others have voluntarily donated to the public, rather than unnecessarily imposing the costs of proprietary software on the taxpayers.
"BTW.... There are entirely FREE Readers for ALL M$ Office Products at the their downloads section"
... which only work if you have paid for a certain operating system on which they can run.
Free MS Office file readers
Writing and performing isn't work after you have stopped doing it. Or if you are dead.
You are the imbecile if you think you deserve to keep collecting money for decades after your last performance, when everybody else has to work every single day to earn their next dollar.
I can also speak of thousands of carpenters and masons who died ill and destitute because the law wouldn't enable them to collect ongoing royalties on the houses they built. I can speak of teachers' children who are destitute because the law wouldn't enable them to collect royalties on the knowledge their parents imparted to school children who grew up and used the education to become rich.
Sorry, but there is no reason why the legal system should distort the market for the purpose of providing lifelong income and inheritances for artists and corporations on the basis of work that was performed many decades ago, when people in almost every other occupation have no such guarantee. Provide the 14 or 28 years as an incentive to create; nothing more is needed or deserved.
I know of people who fly to places like Belize or Jamaica to do surgery, paying for everything out of pocket at a cheaper rate than if they stayed in the US and paid the 20% their insurance companies required them to pay. Or their insurance doesn't cover the specific condition at all, so it works out much cheaper to fly overseas to get it done.
For the procedures offered, the care is usually quite good. Many of the doctors studied in the US. In fact, I'm surprised that more people don't take advantage of less expensive medical care overseas, rather than sitting in the US and dying because they can't afford it.
Having said that, US insurance companies should not be in the business of demanding that their customers go overseas before they'll pay for treatment. US insurance rates are based on the costs of treatment in the United States, so that's what policyholders should be given.
It it is true that other countries can provide cheaper medical care partly because their laws don't allow you to file large malpractice lawsuits. Very often in the US, half of the cost you pay for a surgery is just to cover the risk of a malpractice suit. That is something we need to work on here in the US if we don't want to see the health care system reduced to nothing but emergency care and plastic surgery for the rich. Shakespeare said "let's kill all the lawyers", but the lawyers are killing us by driving medical costs out of the reach of millions of Americans.
What do you mean something cannot be patented and also be a trade secret?
Our store-bought legislators have allowed software to be patented, copyrighted, trademarked, and be a trade secret all at the same time!
The algorithms in a patent may not actually work as described, because there is no requirement to prove them for correctness or submit a working program. There may be subtle modifications required to get it to actually work. However, if you implement a working program that does the the same thing you can be sued for infringement.
Second, the patent language is usually so obfuscated with legalese, redundancy and excess verbosity that the patent is of little use to someone who wants to build a working program.
The lack of a requirement to publish source code, combined with the obfuscated patent language, allows software to effectively remain a trade secret even after it has been patented.
"First of all, I understand that there are two types of outsourcing:
... they are liasons that would not be needed if the developers were in the same building.
1) Outsourcing jobs that otherwise would not have been created because they weren't cost-effective if filled by North Americans
2) Firing somebody who was doing a perfectly good job EXCLUSIVELY to save money."
There is 3rd type, which is the worst type and probably the most common type:
3) Firing somebody who was doing a perfectly good job to create the APPEARANCE of saving money, while losing money in reality.
The large salary differences can create the illusion of huge savings; however the total cost of outsourcing a programming job to India is multiples of the Indian programmer's salary. Although the labor costs might be around 1/10 of what American programmers earn, just about every other part of the equation is equal or MORE expensive than in the US.
There is a premium on office real estate that is well-equipped enough to support outsourced programming jobs (reliable electricity, Internet connectivity, etc), to the point that a square foot of office space in Bombay is now more expensive than one in Boston. Internet bandwidth in India is 2-4X more expensive. Computer and networking hardware is about the same, or slightly more expensive. On top of that, offshore projects generally require a number of technical leads and/or managers to be at the US client site (at US-level salaries)
After you add up everything, you only save about 20-25% if things go right, and they often go wrong. It can be a very bad mistake for the company to fire programmers who have proven themselves for years, in order to pursue a shaky chance at 25% savings.
"If it were about free trade, I could freely follow my outsourced job to wherever it is sent."
Precisely. And the Indians could also freely follow the money to the place where the work is coming from, i.e. they could move the the US, UK and other developed countries for higher pay. If they were as free to cross borders as the product of their work, salaries would have to be raised in India to keep them from fleeing, which would reduce the advantage of outsourcing there.
How come "Free Trade" is only free for the corporations? When you a consumer try to take enjoy free trade by moving to another country or buying DVDs or pharmaceuticals from another country, the corporations and governments do their best to bitch-slap you till you stop trying that.
'As somebody else pointed out, software is the only "creation" that can be both copyrighted and patented. Doesn't this seem, well, a bit ridiculous?'
Not only that, but a piece of software can be copyrighted, patented, AND be a trade secret at the same time!
Getting a software patent doesn't require the source code to be revealed, and the wording of the patent is usually so obfuscated and convoluted that it is of little or no use to someone else who wants to create an implementation of the same thing.
Once you use the store card, they already know what you purchased. Notifying a customer doesn't violate any privacy unless they use a third party to print the notices.
If you gave me your email password, you should already assume that I can see whatever messages you have received. If I choose to use the information I saw in your email to warn you about something (without disclosing anything to a third party), the fact that I give you that warning isn't a violation of your privacy.