Science Fiction is full of authors using other more famous authors "universes" and there don't seem to be lawsuits springing up all over the place from that. Philip Jose Farmers Riverworld and Dungeon series spring to mind. There are many others. Maybe there were licensing fees paid in these cases?
What he's doing is the equivalent of selling a product called Pepsi Snacks because it's easier to sell something if you associate it with an already popular product. If you just sold "Bob's Snacks", it doesn't have any immediate appeal.
And what of all the time and effort that went into the creation of these Pepsi Snacks, which undoubtedly had some effect to increase the sale of Pepsi products? Isn't it kind of like the illegal downloads that lead to a purchase not being figured into the numbers? Not to misconstrue my position on that debate, as I think both sides of that one are deplorable as well. But in this case, a lot of people have put a lot of hard work into something that undoubtedly had some positive effect on HP book sales. Which Rowling apparently had no problem with. But now that they want to make some money off of a derivative work, then its a problem.
And what would be the point of adding profit to your income just to turn around and deduct it again by giving it away?
Well, since it is charity, she gets to look good for donating, but since it is her charity, she gets the perks of traveling around for free, eating for free and enjoying a host of other benefits buried into the administrative costs of the charity. I was not able to quickly find the administrative costs of her organization, unfortunately.
But it is not really so much about her making money in this case. It is more to prevent someone else from making money.
I thank you for this comment. I was looking at the review and not sure if he was speaking of a single player focused game, or a multiplayer focused game. I have no interest in multiplayer games, so thanks to your comment, I will give this a pass. $50 for 5-6 hours of campaign time? No thanks. I've got over a hundred hours into GT4 and I am less than 10% done with it. I have probably 30 into GTA Vice City stories, and am only 20% complete. Now I understand many these days want to buy a $50 game, look up the cheat codes for unlimited weapons, blow through the game in 5 hours and then go on to the next $50 game, but I look for much more reward for my money.
For the US, the only way to 'win' now is not to play.
The U.S. has never been in a position where staying out of the middle East would net us a win. If we don't get involved, people hate us because we won't get involved. If we do get involved, people hate us because we won't butt out. There is no way to win.
I've been in love with technology since I first started programming on my TRS-80 CoCo in 4th grade. I've written hundreds of thousands of lines of code for the sheer enjoyment of it. I've worked in IT as a programmer, a system administrator, a Database Administrator, IT Management, Datawarehousing, and many other roles. I've made and/or saved companies hundreds of millions of dollars during my career. However, with each passing day, I find IT less and less of a rewarding area in which to work. Employment contracts that force you to give up rights or be fired, diminishing benefits, diminishing salaries, no cost-of-living adjustments, no pay for overtime. Overtime required or you're fired. All of these things added up have managed to destroy what used to be my greatest desire: To work on exciting new technology; to create; to invent; to surmount obstacles; to overcome through the power of technology. Now my main focus is to get enough rental income so that I can get out of the business. Are you hearing what I am saying? I LOVE IT and technology, I want to be creative and solve problems, but the IT business world has crushed my dreams such that my strongest desire now is to GET OUT and do RENTALS. What a waste of my passion and abilities. But I can't take the demoralizing, crushing BS any longer.
Another good question is how enforceable is an employment contract after you are no longer an employee? If you agree to not hire anyone from company X during your employment for X and for one year thereafter, and then X fires you, is that employment contract still valid? I wouldn't think so (but then I am not a lawyer, and law doesn't subscribe to logic). I would think they would have to ask you to sign another agreement stating that you will not hire from their pool, and I suspect that there would be nothing they could do except offer you money to get you to sign it.
What do you get in return for signing this? More money? I'd guess not.
When I started with a small startup a few years back, we had no agreement like this. But like everything else in the universe, everything gets worse with age. After about 10 months with the company, they came up with an agreement and said everybody had to sign it by Friday if they wanted to continue working there. I kept trying to get an appointment with my boss to discuss this since I felt that they had not lived up to their promise of stock and raises in the 10 months that I had been there, and now I was being asked to sign away rights. I finally managed to get ahold of him on Friday which was lucky because I was not going to sign it before talking to him. He told me that they would be doing raises very soon, and the stock agreement was almost complete (this is 7 months ago), and that we had to have this agreement in place in order to meet the requirements of their business agreement with $big_client, which required it for HIPAA. Like an idiot, I signed it, and I have no raise, no stock, and no rights.
For those not familiar with HIPAA, it says precious little about the details of keeping healthcare information secure. So everybody makes up their own rules and pretends like it is a government mandate. Our company always bends to the whim of every client's rules of meeting their HIPAA regulations, even when they hinder productivity, or, as is bound to be the case with non-defined rules, directly contradict OTHER clients HIPAA regulations.
The company I worked for before got bought out by a larger company, and as a condition of continued employment, we were forced to sign an agreement with them as well. So it seems, just about everybody is doing it.
If you come up with something really sweet, they don't want you to leave, start your own company and get rich.
What is it with companies and not wanting their employees to get rich? They write these contracts so that you can't go make money off your own idea, yet they won't pay you enough to get rich by giving them ideas. My guess is that they know a rich employee may leave and retire and stop making the company richer. I have a feeling that is why CEO salaries spiral out of control. Most fortune 500 CEOs have enough money to last them the rest of their lives. The only way to get one to work for your company is to offer them truly obscene and nearly unusable amounts of money. If you paid all your creative employees what they were worth, then employee costs would probably spiral out of control in the same way.
so what stops me from doing my damage before I put in a notice? putting in a notice is a courtesy to the company, not an indication that you are any more or less trustworthy than you were before.
This gives them an opportunity to lock up the barn door so that if the horses return, they won't be able to get back in.
simply say to your manager on the last hour of your last day "I quit, effective immediately. I'm not coming back tomorrow, and I did not give notice because of the poor way this company responds to those who resign (e.g. "perp walk"). Goodbye and good luck."
I did this at my last job. They lied to me about giving me stock in the company and raises. Then they fired about 8 of my best friends with no notice. I figured that a company that would do that deserves no notice. But they had the last laugh. They said since I quit, i was no longer an employee and not entitled to the several thousand dollars in unused vacation that they owed me. Never work for a company whose president is a lawyer.
I guess I'll have to rethink my strategy when I leave my current company that lied to me about giving me stock and raises.
And on top of all that, non-competition clauses are growing downright exploitative. A friend of mine is working under a contract stipulation that basically says "if you quit your job, you'll never work in IT in this state again."
Luckily for him, such a contract is all-but unenforceable. You can not be deprived of the right to work in your area of expertise.
The 2 week thing is a general courtesy understood throughout the workforce, but not required by law.
It used to be required on a lot of the employment contracts that I had, but now that at-will is around, the company tells you that they can't put wording like that into your contract.
However, they do request the "courtesy" of a two week notice. If you don't give one when you quit, you are being unprofessional. However, when they fire you with no notice, supposedly that is not unprofessional. In my opinion, if you treat the employee with respect, you can have respect back.
Yes, but I am not willing to pay money for a service to stop people from calling me. This is like giving the bully your lunch money so he won't pester you on the schoolyard. Instead, I would want the telcos to let me quote a price for how many dollars per minute I will charge to talk to an incoming caller. The telco can keep a small percentage of this amount, and by pushing a button on the phone on incoming calls, I can waive the fee. If they falsify their incoming caller ID, I can push a button to bump the per minute fee up by a magnitude of three, and blocked caller ID automatically results in a multiple of three per minute fee.
Make sure you also tell your congress critter to extend the DNC list to include congress critters and charities, as those were 90% of the problem ( and now thanks to the DNC list, are 100% minus iota of the problem).
I'm surprised to find no mention of Frank Gehry associated with the abominations all over the University of Illinois at Chicago campus. Cold and stark, crazy angles creating lots of unusable space, huge three foot thick slabs of concrete walkway creating dangerous dark and wet (because the huge slabs are ill-fitting) walkways underneath. As horrible as it looks and functions it simply MUST be nominated for some sort of accolade.
According to his foreward in another book I read (Everythings Eventual), he said that he happily experiments with various forms of release, but really prefers the plain old paper novel.
It was interesting to hear him tell of how with his books, his interviewers question him on the books themselves, but on "The Plant", his interviewers questioned him on the "success" of the book, and the distribution method and nothing about the book itself. He talked about how he used to run into guys in airports that recognized him and had never read his books themselves, but always wanted an autograph for their wives who had every one of his books. Now, he bumps into guys in airports who he feels downloaded and paid for the book, but didn't read it. He seems saddened by this, as he seems to genuinely just want to tell stories. He feels "The Plant" was a commercial success because it made a lot of money, but a literary failure, because few people actually read it. It was more the novelty of the book being online, so people felt like they wanted to be futuristic, so they downloaded it, but didn't bother to read it. It's kind of like the people who go through the effort of downloading dozens of games, and then only ever play one or two of them.
Well, this is the first major call I have seen back to mainframes, but it does seem that every 5 years the trend switches from centralization to decentralization and back again. I've often said that if you could master both sides of the trend, you could be one rich consultant, you just have to know when to preach which mantra.
a mobile phone that can browse the web and access e-mail
And don't forget the 21" monitor. It's gotta have one of those. And a full keyboard and a mouse.
Maybe I don't know enough about the Wii, but isn't the Wiimote just a remote control for the Wii? If a cluless soccer mom looking for a Wii was dumb enough to just but the remote for it, then she'd actually be a step up by buying this thing which is designed to look like the wiimote, as it actually can be played all by itself.
You're already losing by buying the ticket.
The multi-state Powerball odds of winning the jackpot is 1 in 146,107,962. I used to figure that their one time payout number was something like half the prize total, so if you wanted a $1 per $1 expected return, you should only buy the tickets when the jackpot is over $290 million. But that is assuming a single winner.
Now, most likely, when you start to get that big of a jackpot, a lot more people will play, so you end up usually having on average about 2 winners. So this would say that in order to get a $1 per $1 return, you should not play unless the jackpot is over $580 million.
Where have you been for the last 20 years? Ever since people started learning how to code HTML (read: Click on widgets in Frontpage), the world has preferred presentation to content. It's like driving a soapbox racer, the presenter is essentially ballast.
Well, you've read my experience. Basically, they deny there is anything they can do and will tell you to deal with the company which you have no business relationship with. But if you show them that you know they are lying and there is something they can do to block these things, then they give in and do them. But their first story is to try to blow you off, because they make money off of every person the third parties scam.
My hope is Google will not allow the parent companies to work with third party scam companies that blind text kids with messages which if they reply to it automatically sign them up for monthly subscription plans to lame jokes and crap like that.
If you don't know what I'm talking about, see my journal.
Slashdot Mirror
Science Fiction is full of authors using other more famous authors "universes" and there don't seem to be lawsuits springing up all over the place from that. Philip Jose Farmers Riverworld and Dungeon series spring to mind. There are many others. Maybe there were licensing fees paid in these cases?
What he's doing is the equivalent of selling a product called Pepsi Snacks because it's easier to sell something if you associate it with an already popular product. If you just sold "Bob's Snacks", it doesn't have any immediate appeal.
And what of all the time and effort that went into the creation of these Pepsi Snacks, which undoubtedly had some effect to increase the sale of Pepsi products? Isn't it kind of like the illegal downloads that lead to a purchase not being figured into the numbers? Not to misconstrue my position on that debate, as I think both sides of that one are deplorable as well. But in this case, a lot of people have put a lot of hard work into something that undoubtedly had some positive effect on HP book sales. Which Rowling apparently had no problem with. But now that they want to make some money off of a derivative work, then its a problem.
And what would be the point of adding profit to your income just to turn around and deduct it again by giving it away?
Well, since it is charity, she gets to look good for donating, but since it is her charity, she gets the perks of traveling around for free, eating for free and enjoying a host of other benefits buried into the administrative costs of the charity. I was not able to quickly find the administrative costs of her organization, unfortunately.
But it is not really so much about her making money in this case. It is more to prevent someone else from making money.
I thank you for this comment. I was looking at the review and not sure if he was speaking of a single player focused game, or a multiplayer focused game. I have no interest in multiplayer games, so thanks to your comment, I will give this a pass. $50 for 5-6 hours of campaign time? No thanks. I've got over a hundred hours into GT4 and I am less than 10% done with it. I have probably 30 into GTA Vice City stories, and am only 20% complete. Now I understand many these days want to buy a $50 game, look up the cheat codes for unlimited weapons, blow through the game in 5 hours and then go on to the next $50 game, but I look for much more reward for my money.
For the US, the only way to 'win' now is not to play.
The U.S. has never been in a position where staying out of the middle East would net us a win. If we don't get involved, people hate us because we won't get involved. If we do get involved, people hate us because we won't butt out. There is no way to win.
I've been in love with technology since I first started programming on my TRS-80 CoCo in 4th grade. I've written hundreds of thousands of lines of code for the sheer enjoyment of it. I've worked in IT as a programmer, a system administrator, a Database Administrator, IT Management, Datawarehousing, and many other roles. I've made and/or saved companies hundreds of millions of dollars during my career. However, with each passing day, I find IT less and less of a rewarding area in which to work. Employment contracts that force you to give up rights or be fired, diminishing benefits, diminishing salaries, no cost-of-living adjustments, no pay for overtime. Overtime required or you're fired. All of these things added up have managed to destroy what used to be my greatest desire: To work on exciting new technology; to create; to invent; to surmount obstacles; to overcome through the power of technology. Now my main focus is to get enough rental income so that I can get out of the business. Are you hearing what I am saying? I LOVE IT and technology, I want to be creative and solve problems, but the IT business world has crushed my dreams such that my strongest desire now is to GET OUT and do RENTALS. What a waste of my passion and abilities. But I can't take the demoralizing, crushing BS any longer.
Another good question is how enforceable is an employment contract after you are no longer an employee? If you agree to not hire anyone from company X during your employment for X and for one year thereafter, and then X fires you, is that employment contract still valid? I wouldn't think so (but then I am not a lawyer, and law doesn't subscribe to logic). I would think they would have to ask you to sign another agreement stating that you will not hire from their pool, and I suspect that there would be nothing they could do except offer you money to get you to sign it.
What do you get in return for signing this? More money? I'd guess not.
When I started with a small startup a few years back, we had no agreement like this. But like everything else in the universe, everything gets worse with age. After about 10 months with the company, they came up with an agreement and said everybody had to sign it by Friday if they wanted to continue working there. I kept trying to get an appointment with my boss to discuss this since I felt that they had not lived up to their promise of stock and raises in the 10 months that I had been there, and now I was being asked to sign away rights. I finally managed to get ahold of him on Friday which was lucky because I was not going to sign it before talking to him. He told me that they would be doing raises very soon, and the stock agreement was almost complete (this is 7 months ago), and that we had to have this agreement in place in order to meet the requirements of their business agreement with $big_client, which required it for HIPAA. Like an idiot, I signed it, and I have no raise, no stock, and no rights.
For those not familiar with HIPAA, it says precious little about the details of keeping healthcare information secure. So everybody makes up their own rules and pretends like it is a government mandate. Our company always bends to the whim of every client's rules of meeting their HIPAA regulations, even when they hinder productivity, or, as is bound to be the case with non-defined rules, directly contradict OTHER clients HIPAA regulations.
The company I worked for before got bought out by a larger company, and as a condition of continued employment, we were forced to sign an agreement with them as well. So it seems, just about everybody is doing it.
If you come up with something really sweet, they don't want you to leave, start your own company and get rich.
What is it with companies and not wanting their employees to get rich? They write these contracts so that you can't go make money off your own idea, yet they won't pay you enough to get rich by giving them ideas. My guess is that they know a rich employee may leave and retire and stop making the company richer. I have a feeling that is why CEO salaries spiral out of control. Most fortune 500 CEOs have enough money to last them the rest of their lives. The only way to get one to work for your company is to offer them truly obscene and nearly unusable amounts of money. If you paid all your creative employees what they were worth, then employee costs would probably spiral out of control in the same way.
so what stops me from doing my damage before I put in a notice? putting in a notice is a courtesy to the company, not an indication that you are any more or less trustworthy than you were before.
This gives them an opportunity to lock up the barn door so that if the horses return, they won't be able to get back in.
simply say to your manager on the last hour of your last day "I quit, effective immediately. I'm not coming back tomorrow, and I did not give notice because of the poor way this company responds to those who resign (e.g. "perp walk"). Goodbye and good luck."
I did this at my last job. They lied to me about giving me stock in the company and raises. Then they fired about 8 of my best friends with no notice. I figured that a company that would do that deserves no notice. But they had the last laugh. They said since I quit, i was no longer an employee and not entitled to the several thousand dollars in unused vacation that they owed me. Never work for a company whose president is a lawyer.
I guess I'll have to rethink my strategy when I leave my current company that lied to me about giving me stock and raises.
And on top of all that, non-competition clauses are growing downright exploitative. A friend of mine is working under a contract stipulation that basically says "if you quit your job, you'll never work in IT in this state again."
Luckily for him, such a contract is all-but unenforceable. You can not be deprived of the right to work in your area of expertise.
The 2 week thing is a general courtesy understood throughout the workforce, but not required by law.
It used to be required on a lot of the employment contracts that I had, but now that at-will is around, the company tells you that they can't put wording like that into your contract.
However, they do request the "courtesy" of a two week notice. If you don't give one when you quit, you are being unprofessional. However, when they fire you with no notice, supposedly that is not unprofessional. In my opinion, if you treat the employee with respect, you can have respect back.
Yes, but I am not willing to pay money for a service to stop people from calling me. This is like giving the bully your lunch money so he won't pester you on the schoolyard. Instead, I would want the telcos to let me quote a price for how many dollars per minute I will charge to talk to an incoming caller. The telco can keep a small percentage of this amount, and by pushing a button on the phone on incoming calls, I can waive the fee. If they falsify their incoming caller ID, I can push a button to bump the per minute fee up by a magnitude of three, and blocked caller ID automatically results in a multiple of three per minute fee.
Make sure you also tell your congress critter to extend the DNC list to include congress critters and charities, as those were 90% of the problem ( and now thanks to the DNC list, are 100% minus iota of the problem).
I'm surprised to find no mention of Frank Gehry associated with the abominations all over the University of Illinois at Chicago campus. Cold and stark, crazy angles creating lots of unusable space, huge three foot thick slabs of concrete walkway creating dangerous dark and wet (because the huge slabs are ill-fitting) walkways underneath. As horrible as it looks and functions it simply MUST be nominated for some sort of accolade.
The 1936 Olympics were 71 years ago, 60 when Contact came out.
Shirley: you mean 49 years ago, as the book was published in 1985.
According to his foreward in another book I read (Everythings Eventual), he said that he happily experiments with various forms of release, but really prefers the plain old paper novel.
It was interesting to hear him tell of how with his books, his interviewers question him on the books themselves, but on "The Plant", his interviewers questioned him on the "success" of the book, and the distribution method and nothing about the book itself. He talked about how he used to run into guys in airports that recognized him and had never read his books themselves, but always wanted an autograph for their wives who had every one of his books. Now, he bumps into guys in airports who he feels downloaded and paid for the book, but didn't read it. He seems saddened by this, as he seems to genuinely just want to tell stories. He feels "The Plant" was a commercial success because it made a lot of money, but a literary failure, because few people actually read it. It was more the novelty of the book being online, so people felt like they wanted to be futuristic, so they downloaded it, but didn't bother to read it. It's kind of like the people who go through the effort of downloading dozens of games, and then only ever play one or two of them.
Well, this is the first major call I have seen back to mainframes, but it does seem that every 5 years the trend switches from centralization to decentralization and back again. I've often said that if you could master both sides of the trend, you could be one rich consultant, you just have to know when to preach which mantra.
a mobile phone that can browse the web and access e-mail
And don't forget the 21" monitor. It's gotta have one of those. And a full keyboard and a mouse.
Maybe I don't know enough about the Wii, but isn't the Wiimote just a remote control for the Wii? If a cluless soccer mom looking for a Wii was dumb enough to just but the remote for it, then she'd actually be a step up by buying this thing which is designed to look like the wiimote, as it actually can be played all by itself.
You're already losing by buying the ticket.
The multi-state Powerball odds of winning the jackpot is 1 in 146,107,962. I used to figure that their one time payout number was something like half the prize total, so if you wanted a $1 per $1 expected return, you should only buy the tickets when the jackpot is over $290 million. But that is assuming a single winner.
Now, most likely, when you start to get that big of a jackpot, a lot more people will play, so you end up usually having on average about 2 winners. So this would say that in order to get a $1 per $1 return, you should not play unless the jackpot is over $580 million.
Where have you been for the last 20 years? Ever since people started learning how to code HTML (read: Click on widgets in Frontpage), the world has preferred presentation to content. It's like driving a soapbox racer, the presenter is essentially ballast.
Well, you've read my experience. Basically, they deny there is anything they can do and will tell you to deal with the company which you have no business relationship with. But if you show them that you know they are lying and there is something they can do to block these things, then they give in and do them. But their first story is to try to blow you off, because they make money off of every person the third parties scam.
My hope is Google will not allow the parent companies to work with third party scam companies that blind text kids with messages which if they reply to it automatically sign them up for monthly subscription plans to lame jokes and crap like that.
If you don't know what I'm talking about, see my journal.