"Work for hire" is not the default if the person creating the object is not an employee of the person or company that did the hiring.
Apparently this guy was a contractor who was paid per Stormtrooper mask/suit, not an employee. So it would not be a work for hire unless a contract said so.
If the result of this case means that one can be punished for not providing the password, you could get in trouble for having anything that looks like encrypted data.
Before I upgraded my hard drive I ran a program to wipe the old one with random data. Now the old hard drive is sitting in a box. If my place got raided and they seized that hard drive, they might think it's encrypted (since strongly encrypted data is mathematically indistinguishable from random noise), but I would be absolutely unable to provide them with any password because there isn't any.
When I have to send very sensitive data through email, I'll encrypt it and tell the recipient the password through another means. Neither of us had any reason to continue to remember the password once the recipient extracted the data, so now we have encrypted files for which neither of us knows the password.
If one can be forced to reveal passwords, that could have very scary implications for law-abiding citizens who are unable to provide a password because they forgot it or because there never was one.
A drink may be a tiny amount of money, but one drink isn't enough.
It's more like 1 in 10 women will have sex after buying them 3 drinks (each)... that's 30 drinks and several hours of time. Pr0n and Pr0stitutes are much cheaper in time and money.
"Paying for sex in any shape or form has to be one of the silliest things, given how easy it is to find women who are more than willing if you just looked around."
90% of men are incapable of getting sex for free. At a minimum, they have to pay at least for a few drinks or dinner at a restaurant. Usually multiple times, and with no guarantee of their effort and expenditure resulting in sex. Not to mention the costs of marriage and divorce.
"Plus, if you're that desperate, just how hard is it to pick girls up at a bar (or if you're a geek Don Juan, Craigslist)?"
How hard? This is Slashdot, where understanding quantum cryptography is easier than picking up women at a bar. Random sluts on Craigslist or sex-only online dating sites?... can you say STDs?
"Ever see the game show "Who wants to be a millionaire?" If the contestant gets a difficult question, he/she can "Ask the audience", who then vote for the answer they think is right. This works well for questions about pop music and sport. It doesn't work so well for questions about history or particle physics, where people appear to vote randomly. If there are a few actual experts in the audience, their votes are still drowned out by the (random) votes of the masses."
It would work well if it wasn't multiple choice or one-word answers. If they asked the audience a question about ancient Greek history that would have required a 5-sentence answer, or a particle physics question that requires showing the calculations, the vast majority would write "I don't know" or spout obvious nonsense that can easily be discarded. The 2 or 3 experts wouldn't get drowned out, as they would be among the very few with plausible answers.
That's why if you use Dropbox or any other online storage with a closed-source client process, it should be used inside a virtual machine, with the virtual machine receiving encrypted files from the host OS. That way it can't sniff your password or any other data you don't want it to see.
"The only useful thing on the phone is photo and video, because they can already get a complete list of every number you have called or that has called you from your telco."
But they'll need some kind of probable cause or warrant to order the information from the telco. With this device they can bypass that requirement.
"People often don't realize that as a downside of the ability to return items, the stuff they purchase might actually have been previously sold and then returned."
That should never happen. Returned items should always be labeled USED when resold, except maybe for those where it's clear that the prior customer didn't open it.
"I'm curious as to why the project failed. They claim to have a much cheaper plan that they're going to try now; why didn't they try that in the first place?"
If they did that in the first place, the campaign contributors who benefit from those big government contracts wouldn't get much benefit.
"But in case of bigger things like causing someone's death, I feel there's no way a parent can be held responsible for something their kid did in such circumstances."
The parents shouldn't be hit with punitive damages, but they should have to pay the medical and funeral bills resulting from an accident caused by their child. If the parents don't pay, the victim's family or estate would have to pay, which is even more disastrous.
"The justice system doesn't give a crap whether he read the patents or not, just that his code is similar enough."
The system doesn't even care about the similarity of the code; merely having similar observable behavior is enough to get in trouble for software patent infringement, even if the underlying code is very different.
Suppose it costs the airline an average of $500 per flight to pay the copilot (all salary + benefits + overhead + per diem included), and the average flight has 100 passengers. That's average of $5 of each ticket going towards paying for the copilot.
Suppose they removed the copilot and passed on the half of the savings to passengers. That's just $2.50 cheaper per ticket, on average. While that may add up to millions of dollars per year across the airline, I'm sure that most passengers would not consider the $2.50 savings per ticket to be worth the added risk.
OK nitpicker, change that to "than policies set by monopolist or duopolist corporations."
"Government policies are policies set by monopolists, and infinitely more destructive than anything a private monopoly could accomplish."
I prefer my utilities to continue to be regulated by the government than to have the utility company charge whatever they want and do whatever they want with their monopoly power.
Many who work for the SEC later end up in jobs in big financial firms. So those at the SEC who hope to work on Wall Street have plenty of incentive to ignore evidence of fraud. They don't want to create a stir and damage their chances for future employment with one of the firms they regulate.
That's why Markopolous said the SEC should only hire people over 50 in positions that involve detecting and investigating fraud -- people who have already been on Wall Street and are towards the end of their careers, not people hoping to work on Wall Street.
The H1B is a subsidy in the sense that it artificially suppresses the wages of the H1B workers, due to the government-imposed barriers for changing jobs and the requirement to have a qualifying job in order to maintain legal status.
If the H1B visa weren't tied to a specific employer so they could change jobs freely without the next employer having to file a mountain of immigration paperwork, and there were a sufficient grace period (say 90 days) for a fired/laid off H1B worker to find new employment without being deportable, they would have more leverage to demand higher wages and wouldn't be so afraid of being fired for making such demands.
"So basically, if your granddad rigs up a machine that kills him depending on the quantum state of a particle, and then he leaves that particle in an indeterminate quantum state until he has your dad and your dad has you, and then you collapse that particle's waveform into the state that would have killed him, he will have died back then. And somehow paradox is avoided."
To use the analogy in the article with equations... for some equations you won't be able to postselect anything to get a result, because the equation is unsolvable no matter what values the variables are.
For example, 2x + 1 = 2x + 2.
So for similar reasons, you won't be able to postselect anything that involves your grandfather dying before your father was conceived.
"It's only as complex as I need it to be. The complexity of my code is driven by what I'm trying to do, not by the language itself. And for code maintainability, I try to keep things as simple as possible."
Are you a one-person programming team, never having to debug or modify other people's code?
If not, the complexity will often be forced upon you by others who wrote the code you have to maintain. Some of them like to use subtle or arcane nuances of the language just because they can.
"It costs money to fly you. It costs more money to fly your bags."
Then they should just build it into the price of the ticket. Everybody except for the rare oddball is going have at least one bag. Just like everybody who buys a car except for the rare oddball will want it to have 4 wheels; you can't go to a dealer and convince them to sell you a car with a missing wheel (and cut the price accordingly) because you don't want to pay for 4 wheels. Unless it's an old wreck.
Their survival rate is likely to be much higher than usual, because the eggs that are relocated in this project won't be dug up and eaten by animals, and the hatchlings also won't be killed by predators when making their way to the sea.
"Ok, but the company can (depending on the lease terms) sell the lease to someone else."
And in this case, the terms did not include the right to sell.
"No. Personal information is data, it isn't subject to lease. Little bits of personal information aren't even subject to copyright."
Ever heard of the word "analogy"? Of course it's not an actual lease. The point is if the company didn't have the right to sell or distribute a given asset, contract, patent, copyright, or whatever before going bankrupt, bankruptcy normally does not give them the right to sell or distribute it.
Slashdot Mirror
"Work for hire" is not the default if the person creating the object is not an employee of the person or company that did the hiring.
Apparently this guy was a contractor who was paid per Stormtrooper mask/suit, not an employee. So it would not be a work for hire unless a contract said so.
If the result of this case means that one can be punished for not providing the password, you could get in trouble for having anything that looks like encrypted data.
Before I upgraded my hard drive I ran a program to wipe the old one with random data. Now the old hard drive is sitting in a box. If my place got raided and they seized that hard drive, they might think it's encrypted (since strongly encrypted data is mathematically indistinguishable from random noise), but I would be absolutely unable to provide them with any password because there isn't any.
When I have to send very sensitive data through email, I'll encrypt it and tell the recipient the password through another means. Neither of us had any reason to continue to remember the password once the recipient extracted the data, so now we have encrypted files for which neither of us knows the password.
If one can be forced to reveal passwords, that could have very scary implications for law-abiding citizens who are unable to provide a password because they forgot it or because there never was one.
A drink may be a tiny amount of money, but one drink isn't enough.
It's more like 1 in 10 women will have sex after buying them 3 drinks (each) ... that's 30 drinks and several hours of time. Pr0n and Pr0stitutes are much cheaper in time and money.
"Paying for sex in any shape or form has to be one of the silliest things, given how easy it is to find women who are more than willing if you just looked around."
90% of men are incapable of getting sex for free. At a minimum, they have to pay at least for a few drinks or dinner at a restaurant. Usually multiple times, and with no guarantee of their effort and expenditure resulting in sex. Not to mention the costs of marriage and divorce.
"Plus, if you're that desperate, just how hard is it to pick girls up at a bar (or if you're a geek Don Juan, Craigslist)?"
How hard? This is Slashdot, where understanding quantum cryptography is easier than picking up women at a bar. Random sluts on Craigslist or sex-only online dating sites? ... can you say STDs?
Free sex is often the most expensive kind of sex.
"Ever see the game show "Who wants to be a millionaire?" If the contestant gets a difficult question, he/she can "Ask the audience", who then vote for the answer they think is right. This works well for questions about pop music and sport. It doesn't work so well for questions about history or particle physics, where people appear to vote randomly. If there are a few actual experts in the audience, their votes are still drowned out by the (random) votes of the masses."
It would work well if it wasn't multiple choice or one-word answers. If they asked the audience a question about ancient Greek history that would have required a 5-sentence answer, or a particle physics question that requires showing the calculations, the vast majority would write "I don't know" or spout obvious nonsense that can easily be discarded. The 2 or 3 experts wouldn't get drowned out, as they would be among the very few with plausible answers.
That's why if you use Dropbox or any other online storage with a closed-source client process, it should be used inside a virtual machine, with the virtual machine receiving encrypted files from the host OS. That way it can't sniff your password or any other data you don't want it to see.
"The only useful thing on the phone is photo and video, because they can already get a complete list of every number you have called or that has called you from your telco."
But they'll need some kind of probable cause or warrant to order the information from the telco. With this device they can bypass that requirement.
"People often don't realize that as a downside of the ability to return items, the stuff they purchase might actually have been previously sold and then returned."
That should never happen. Returned items should always be labeled USED when resold, except maybe for those where it's clear that the prior customer didn't open it.
"I didn't hear any difference between the wav and mp3. But I was surprised to hear a difference with the original CD (even did a blind test)."
Were all 3 formats played with the same equipment? Or did you play WAV and MP3 with your computer, but the CD was played with an external CD player?
"So doesn't this mean that MS-Word is non-compliant and therefore the bias is actually ANTI-MS?"
No, the bias is for MS because other noncompliant software gets rejected, while MS Office is accepted despite being noncompliant.
"I'm curious as to why the project failed. They claim to have a much cheaper plan that they're going to try now; why didn't they try that in the first place?"
If they did that in the first place, the campaign contributors who benefit from those big government contracts wouldn't get much benefit.
If humans screw up the earth to the point where it becomes unlivable, our species deserves to just become extinct.
"But in case of bigger things like causing someone's death, I feel there's no way a parent can be held responsible for something their kid did in such circumstances."
The parents shouldn't be hit with punitive damages, but they should have to pay the medical and funeral bills resulting from an accident caused by their child. If the parents don't pay, the victim's family or estate would have to pay, which is even more disastrous.
"The justice system doesn't give a crap whether he read the patents or not, just that his code is similar enough."
The system doesn't even care about the similarity of the code; merely having similar observable behavior is enough to get in trouble for software patent infringement, even if the underlying code is very different.
I don't have a problem with them selling something advertised as X when it secretly has X+2 capability.
My problem is if they decide to take legal action against you when you find a way to enable the +2 part without the seller's help.
Suppose it costs the airline an average of $500 per flight to pay the copilot (all salary + benefits + overhead + per diem included), and the average flight has 100 passengers. That's average of $5 of each ticket going towards paying for the copilot.
Suppose they removed the copilot and passed on the half of the savings to passengers. That's just $2.50 cheaper per ticket, on average. While that may add up to millions of dollars per year across the airline, I'm sure that most passengers would not consider the $2.50 savings per ticket to be worth the added risk.
OK nitpicker, change that to "than policies set by monopolist or duopolist corporations."
"Government policies are policies set by monopolists, and infinitely more destructive than anything a private monopoly could accomplish."
I prefer my utilities to continue to be regulated by the government than to have the utility company charge whatever they want and do whatever they want with their monopoly power.
...than policies set by monopolists or duopolists.
Many who work for the SEC later end up in jobs in big financial firms. So those at the SEC who hope to work on Wall Street have plenty of incentive to ignore evidence of fraud. They don't want to create a stir and damage their chances for future employment with one of the firms they regulate.
That's why Markopolous said the SEC should only hire people over 50 in positions that involve detecting and investigating fraud -- people who have already been on Wall Street and are towards the end of their careers, not people hoping to work on Wall Street.
The H1B is a subsidy in the sense that it artificially suppresses the wages of the H1B workers, due to the government-imposed barriers for changing jobs and the requirement to have a qualifying job in order to maintain legal status.
If the H1B visa weren't tied to a specific employer so they could change jobs freely without the next employer having to file a mountain of immigration paperwork, and there were a sufficient grace period (say 90 days) for a fired/laid off H1B worker to find new employment without being deportable, they would have more leverage to demand higher wages and wouldn't be so afraid of being fired for making such demands.
"So basically, if your granddad rigs up a machine that kills him depending on the quantum state of a particle, and then he leaves that particle in an indeterminate quantum state until he has your dad and your dad has you, and then you collapse that particle's waveform into the state that would have killed him, he will have died back then. And somehow paradox is avoided."
To use the analogy in the article with equations ... for some equations you won't be able to postselect anything to get a result, because the equation is unsolvable no matter what values the variables are.
For example, 2x + 1 = 2x + 2.
So for similar reasons, you won't be able to postselect anything that involves your grandfather dying before your father was conceived.
"It's only as complex as I need it to be. The complexity of my code is driven by what I'm trying to do, not by the language itself. And for code maintainability, I try to keep things as simple as possible."
Are you a one-person programming team, never having to debug or modify other people's code?
If not, the complexity will often be forced upon you by others who wrote the code you have to maintain. Some of them like to use subtle or arcane nuances of the language just because they can.
"It costs money to fly you. It costs more money to fly your bags."
Then they should just build it into the price of the ticket. Everybody except for the rare oddball is going have at least one bag. Just like everybody who buys a car except for the rare oddball will want it to have 4 wheels; you can't go to a dealer and convince them to sell you a car with a missing wheel (and cut the price accordingly) because you don't want to pay for 4 wheels. Unless it's an old wreck.
Their survival rate is likely to be much higher than usual, because the eggs that are relocated in this project won't be dug up and eaten by animals, and the hatchlings also won't be killed by predators when making their way to the sea.
"Ok, but the company can (depending on the lease terms) sell the lease to someone else."
And in this case, the terms did not include the right to sell.
"No. Personal information is data, it isn't subject to lease. Little bits of personal information aren't even subject to copyright."
Ever heard of the word "analogy"? Of course it's not an actual lease. The point is if the company didn't have the right to sell or distribute a given asset, contract, patent, copyright, or whatever before going bankrupt, bankruptcy normally does not give them the right to sell or distribute it.