Yes, you are not a lawyer and that's why your advice is wrong and legally worthless, why did you even decide to give a response, you're just wasting everyone's time? Even if it is not a registered trademark, there are provisions on unfair competition and passing off.
is really for tunes, movies and other "entertainment content" for mobiles and pda's. the problem with downloading this type of content over the air is that (a) it's costly, (b) the transfer rates are low. the vending machines can offer high transfer rates at low immediate cost. so, for example, you can waiting at the train station and decide to purchase a 1hr documentary to watch/listen to on the trip: you download it at local bluetooth/IR/usb rate in, say, no more than 1/2 minute. it's effectively the multimedia equivalent of the railway bookshop or newsstand, and surely profitable: it won't work so well for infrastructure/productivity/etc applications, but will for audio, video, tunes, etc. sounds like a great idea.
You should always have your eye on the horizon anyway: if you're asked to train up a new worker, just accept the mission and in the background, start looking for another job: if you find the other job before the training is complete, well that's a problem for your current employer, not for you: they set the wheels in motion.
To refuse to train someone else is really unprofessional: all of these comments about getting one over on the new guy, or refusing to do the job are just more reasons in the mind of your employer to get rid of uncooperative employees and replace them with more professional ones.
Knowing the bits about employment law that I do, I would say that even if it is not in your contract, you're obliged as a general condition of employment to transfer your job function to someone else if asked: that _doesn't_ mean you train someone in how to be a developer, or in a specific language, it just means that you impart the the tactical knowledge you have. In the same way that if your company is going through a quality process (ISO) you'll be asked to document the way you work. If you refuse, it really is grounds for dismissal.
I was speaking generally, and what you say is correct when looking in more detail.
how these work ...
on
Hack Your Ride
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
It's increasing complex business - I know someone that works in it - simply "rechipping" doesn't work in modern and complex engines.
The new devices effectively clamp around your Engine Control Unit (ECU) by intercepting it's inputs and outputs: the box modulates the signals coming to and from the real ECU: for example, the ECU will usually consider it an engine fault if (say) emission is too high, so the purpose of the device is to (a) alter the fuel mix ratio output on the one hand, but (b) fool the input back into the ECU that the emissions aren't as high as they really are. There are many variables, the ones I've seen take up to (say) 16 different variables that can be manipulated.
I'm told that the devices need to be tuned for the specific model of car, and preferably, the specific car itself: as individual cars each have different variances and tolerances within the scope of the model itself; and the tuning software isn't released to the public (even though it may escape...) on the principle that the makers of these devices don't want people to buy the device then try to home tune it and blow their engine up. The tuning is done inside a workshop with appropriate monitoring tools (e.g. analysers), so they can trim the tables in the software, and observe the outputs on the tools to ensure that the best results are obtained without going too far as to break the engine. Naturally, there are some people who do have their own tools and workshops and are competent do this themselves, but a lot of these modders don't.
This definitely voids your warranty, not to mention probably breaking environmental and other regulations, if you do it to street machines. That doesn't stop some people though. (there's a good analogy here to the issue over releasing drivers for 802.11g chips: because the software in the driver is part of the overall FCC emissions approval, so altering the software potentially voids the approval of the device -- similar concept here in that manipulating your ECU voids the grounds upon which various approvals were made)
However, it also has more legitimate applicability to track machines (based on stock cars) where it's not an infringement of the regulations because these are on private raceways and with specific exclusions and so on (and, these cars are usually modded beyond the limits of the warranty in the first place).
The manufacturers are getting wiser and building in measures to defeat the devices, but it seems to make these guys money, and in the same way that you can often safely overclock your CPU, you can often do it to your engine: just need to be aware that (a) it depends on the specific car itself, (b) it doesn't always work, (c) when you do it, you're taking a lot of risk as by definition you may be working outside of the engineering tolerances/limits of the engine [unless the engineering is there, but commerical and marketing considerations limited its scope].
Unfortunately this is a political problem that's quite bad, but the technical solution is as low tech as you can get: the system should produce a cheap-as-chips checkout-style paper receipt on clock in and clock out. Not only can you see the details straight away, but retain the receipts for any later dispute. This is exactly the reason the receipts come out of point-of-sale terminals, and I'm really surprised that it isnt the practice in the employment environment. It's one item of regulation by the authorities that I'd welcome.
(personally I've never worked in a pay-by-the-hour environment)
It's not really greed though: the series is so successful that it makes a lot of money: if the money doesn't go back to the actors, then where does it go - to the producers/owners ? Even though the figures are extremely high, it's fair that the actors get their fair cut rather than the money going into the fat pockets of execs. Let the actors use that money to do something else: they may pursue some beneficial creative activity as a result.
It is true that Microsoft can stretch out the process through an appeal that may take years while they continue to act as before.
However, if the appeal fails and they are required to comply, they cannot avoid the obligation: if they do, the company directors can be criminally charged and put into goal.
I'm using this port as a firewall and spam filter between my GPRS mobile and my headset: last thing I want is spam on my face. When I meet up with friends we use CARP and pfsync to share our rules and state. Who shares vCards anymore ? We share firewall states and rulesets.
Not paying you is not theft. It's entire a contract dispute, or (if you can prove that he intended to not pay you) fraud and deception. It is not theft.
Illegally copying music is not theft either.
I think the problem is that you haven't got a good grasp of how the entire landscape of law works. You can't simply apply these terms into new areas because doing so brings along a host of ther issues. It's fine for the media and other people to misrepresent the terminology, in the same way they do it for technical terms as well. But in the particular profession, the terminology can only be applied when the circumstance meet all of the criteria. They don't in the case of "abusing someones rights" rather than "unlawfully taking their property".
You seem a little confused. The copyright holder does lose his right: he loses the right to decide upon the fate of that individual work such as charging you a fee for using the work.
OTOH, I don't think that means that it qualifies to be called stealing though, technically nothing has been stolen. It would be stealing if the copyright owner had made the copy, and then you took that copy: but it's not stealing when you make the copy yourself. That's the distinction.
This is certainly interesting news, but nothing new if you are familiar with marketing tactics. Any succesful organisation with a good sales and marketing setup will produce this sort of 'collateral' targetted to specific competitors aimed to help win across deals.
That's certainly a nice bit of law, but I'm not sure those "groundless threats" provisions will apply here. For them to apply, you really have to show that the organisation concerned was reasonably knowledgeable that it had no grounds to make the claims, and it made the claims in a clearly threatening way. It doesn't seem as though SCO could meet that test, despite the fact they might use stronly worded letters, and eventually lose the dispute in the US.
What should occur is that if anyone does pay for licenses, then keep a record of all costs involved: when SCO does lose, then a class action to recover those costs would work nicely (assuming they aren't bankrupt by then).
If anyone is serious about taking an issue with this, then try making a complaint to the relevant authorities. Considering recent activities by Verisign, they are annoying too many people.
It is possible that the consumer / competition commissions would take an issue with their activity, as 100 years is plainly too silly: even trademarks (which are intertwined with domain names) have re-registration periods that are not more than 10 or 15 years. This is certainly more appropriate. There examples of these commissions (e.g. the OFT in the UK) in other fields of activity requesting that terms of contracts are shortened.
100 year is plainly to the advantage of verisign and to the annoyance of everyone else for all the hassle with dealing with gunk of unused domains around the place and so on.
The US is only as free as your cheapest law suit. Once you understand this you'll realise that both the EU and the US have their own unique problems and neither is really better than each other: they're both broken or good in different ways. Recently both were run by goons too: Bush on one side, Bertolusconi on the other.
Where do you get this idea? The authorities have a variety of remedies at their disposal and there is no requirement that they waste everyone's time by applying increasingly more painful wrist slaps. They are entirely allowed to get straight to the point and make the problem go away now and for the future.
You don't understand the "doctrine of effects": quite certainly the EU can impose a structural remedy upon Microsoft even though it is a foreign based organisation. The remedy may only _apply_ to Microsoft's operations in the EU, but to be honest that's all the EU cares about.
It could require that Microsoft products put onto the market by Microsoft in the EU meet specific unbundling requirements. In this case you could grey import the more restrictive version of Windows if you wanted to:-).
In point of note: this is exactly what happened with GE and Honeywell. The US FTC allowed the merger to go ahead, but the EC DGCOMP blocked it unless certain conditions were met. This caused an absolute political uproar in the US, yet it's entirely justified. If the companies in question don't like the deal, then they can get out of the EU. If the EU acts too restrictively and drives away to many organisations, well that's to its own loss. There's got to be a meeting in the middle (and hopefully it's not the Azores).
The good news is that it doesn't matter whether it's the stores fault, AMD's or the sticker-guy who may be acting out of employment contract - the fact is that it's someone elses fault, and not yours, yet it is damaging you, and therefore you're entitled to some remedy.
The bad news is that it can be a mess trying get it sorted out. However, likely that the store owners are more interested in being on your (or the WIFI) guys side more than they care about some distint and irrelevant microprocessor company.
Fines are a weak response, as it has been stated over again, this is piss in a pond to the likes of Microsoft.
On the other hand, the European Commission has the power under Article 81 and 82 of the EC Treaty (which where anti-competitive behaviour is prohibited) to impose structural remedies: to insist upon corporate re-organisation or say an order to disclose information or to unbundle software. This would be a far more appropriate remedy that would actually be economically useful rather than a bit more cash in the bank for EU.
If the commission really has spine, it will seek this type of remedy rather than the easy way out. It may in fact seek a combination of fines and structural remedy, so we'll just have to wait and see.
You maintain that it their right to refuse to server up pages because the referrer header contains something that they don't approve of; and it's their server to do with as they please.
Sorry, by taking the step to engage with the public in such a way you automatically take on certain responsibilities and obligations, and those include obligations to not be discriminatory.
You think a bus company would get away with refusing passengers because they came from the bad side of town, even if the passengers were polite, well dressed and could pay the fair. Hardly. And if you're the bus company and you don't like this social obligation, then you can choose to close up and do something else with your life: there are plenty of other people who would fulfill the service.
When you engage with others, you give up some of your freedom in order to uphold the freedom of others. This is called your obligation to society.
That sounds like a good argument but smells bad to me. It might make economic sense to block a "class of users" because they aren't likely to "provide acceptable revenue", but it's the antithesis to the open web that we all fostered. The more appropriate approach is to allow referral, but to use the referrer string to tailor the advertisements (or turn them off, perhaps) to the particular class of user.
It seems to me that controlling deep linking is entirely justifiable, as deep links can make unfair use of your site or misrepresent your site and deprive you (e.g. by avoiding advertising and appropriate attribution for materials or terms and conditions of use).
You could make a good argument that your "web page" is the work, and a deep link effectively misappropriates that work causing a substantial part of it to be rendered as a new work: clearly an infringement of your copyright.
Employing some form of anti-slashdot mechanism is entirely justified: the issue here is that you're legitimately addressing an economic/cost/resource problem (although, your approach is a little weak: you should employ some form of request rate limiting as the slashdot effect can occur from other sources). You have a right to do this.
However, simply blocking references by origin with no specific justification, especially when that origin is pursing a similar field of operation sounds very anti-trust: i.e. refusal to supply.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, you are not a lawyer and that's why your advice is wrong and legally worthless, why did you even decide to give a response, you're just wasting everyone's time? Even if it is not a registered trademark, there are provisions on unfair competition and passing off.
is really for tunes, movies and other "entertainment content" for mobiles and pda's. the problem with downloading this type of content over the air is that (a) it's costly, (b) the transfer rates are low. the vending machines can offer high transfer rates at low immediate cost. so, for example, you can waiting at the train station and decide to purchase a 1hr documentary to watch/listen to on the trip: you download it at local bluetooth/IR/usb rate in, say, no more than 1/2 minute. it's effectively the multimedia equivalent of the railway bookshop or newsstand, and surely profitable: it won't work so well for infrastructure/productivity/etc applications, but will for audio, video, tunes, etc. sounds like a great idea.
You should always have your eye on the horizon anyway: if you're asked to train up a new worker, just accept the mission and in the background, start looking for another job: if you find the other job before the training is complete, well that's a problem for your current employer, not for you: they set the wheels in motion.
To refuse to train someone else is really unprofessional: all of these comments about getting one over on the new guy, or refusing to do the job are just more reasons in the mind of your employer to get rid of uncooperative employees and replace them with more professional ones.
Knowing the bits about employment law that I do, I would say that even if it is not in your contract, you're obliged as a general condition of employment to transfer your job function to someone else if asked: that _doesn't_ mean you train someone in how to be a developer, or in a specific language, it just means that you impart the the tactical knowledge you have. In the same way that if your company is going through a quality process (ISO) you'll be asked to document the way you work. If you refuse, it really is grounds for dismissal.
I was speaking generally, and what you say is correct when looking in more detail.
It's increasing complex business - I know someone that works in it - simply "rechipping" doesn't work in modern and complex engines.
...) on the principle that the makers of these devices don't want people to buy the device then try to home tune it and blow their engine up. The tuning is done inside a workshop with appropriate monitoring tools (e.g. analysers), so they can trim the tables in the software, and observe the outputs on the tools to ensure that the best results are obtained without going too far as to break the engine. Naturally, there are some people who do have their own tools and workshops and are competent do this themselves, but a lot of these modders don't.
The new devices effectively clamp around your Engine Control Unit (ECU) by intercepting it's inputs and outputs: the box modulates the signals coming to and from the real ECU: for example, the ECU will usually consider it an engine fault if (say) emission is too high, so the purpose of the device is to (a) alter the fuel mix ratio output on the one hand, but (b) fool the input back into the ECU that the emissions aren't as high as they really are. There are many variables, the ones I've seen take up to (say) 16 different variables that can be manipulated.
I'm told that the devices need to be tuned for the specific model of car, and preferably, the specific car itself: as individual cars each have different variances and tolerances within the scope of the model itself; and the tuning software isn't released to the public (even though it may escape
This definitely voids your warranty, not to mention probably breaking environmental and other regulations, if you do it to street machines. That doesn't stop some people though. (there's a good analogy here to the issue over releasing drivers for 802.11g chips: because the software in the driver is part of the overall FCC emissions approval, so altering the software potentially voids the approval of the device -- similar concept here in that manipulating your ECU voids the grounds upon which various approvals were made)
However, it also has more legitimate applicability to track machines (based on stock cars) where it's not an infringement of the regulations because these are on private raceways and with specific exclusions and so on (and, these cars are usually modded beyond the limits of the warranty in the first place).
The manufacturers are getting wiser and building in measures to defeat the devices, but it seems to make these guys money, and in the same way that you can often safely overclock your CPU, you can often do it to your engine: just need to be aware that (a) it depends on the specific car itself, (b) it doesn't always work, (c) when you do it, you're taking a lot of risk as by definition you may be working outside of the engineering tolerances/limits of the engine [unless the engineering is there, but commerical and marketing considerations limited its scope].
Unfortunately this is a political problem that's quite bad, but the technical solution is as low tech as you can get: the system should produce a cheap-as-chips checkout-style paper receipt on clock in and clock out. Not only can you see the details straight away, but retain the receipts for any later dispute. This is exactly the reason the receipts come out of point-of-sale terminals, and I'm really surprised that it isnt the practice in the employment environment. It's one item of regulation by the authorities that I'd welcome.
(personally I've never worked in a pay-by-the-hour environment)
It's not really greed though: the series is so successful that it makes a lot of money: if the money doesn't go back to the actors, then where does it go - to the producers/owners ? Even though the figures are extremely high, it's fair that the actors get their fair cut rather than the money going into the fat pockets of execs. Let the actors use that money to do something else: they may pursue some beneficial creative activity as a result.
It is true that Microsoft can stretch out the process through an appeal that may take years while they continue to act as before.
However, if the appeal fails and they are required to comply, they cannot avoid the obligation: if they do, the company directors can be criminally charged and put into goal.
I'm using this port as a firewall and spam filter between my GPRS mobile and my headset: last thing I want is spam on my face. When I meet up with friends we use CARP and pfsync to share our rules and state. Who shares vCards anymore ? We share firewall states and rulesets.
Not paying you is not theft. It's entire a contract dispute, or (if you can prove that he intended to not pay you) fraud and deception. It is not theft.
Illegally copying music is not theft either.
I think the problem is that you haven't got a good grasp of how the entire landscape of law works. You can't simply apply these terms into new areas because doing so brings along a host of ther issues. It's fine for the media and other people to misrepresent the terminology, in the same way they do it for technical terms as well. But in the particular profession, the terminology can only be applied when the circumstance meet all of the criteria. They don't in the case of "abusing someones rights" rather than "unlawfully taking their property".
The only issue now seems to be rechargability, as I don't believe that this is possible with a fuel cell.
Fuel cells are designed to be cheap and disposable, not rechargable. You would carry or purchase them as required.
You seem a little confused. The copyright holder does lose his right: he loses the right to decide upon the fate of that individual work such as charging you a fee for using the work.
OTOH, I don't think that means that it qualifies to be called stealing though, technically nothing has been stolen. It would be stealing if the copyright owner had made the copy, and then you took that copy: but it's not stealing when you make the copy yourself. That's the distinction.
This is certainly interesting news, but nothing new if you are familiar with marketing tactics. Any succesful organisation with a good sales and marketing setup will produce this sort of 'collateral' targetted to specific competitors aimed to help win across deals.
I live in the EU and I simply can't wait until Microsoft has to pay more ``taxes`` as a result of this :-).
That's certainly a nice bit of law, but I'm not sure those "groundless threats" provisions will apply here. For them to apply, you really have to show that the organisation concerned was reasonably knowledgeable that it had no grounds to make the claims, and it made the claims in a clearly threatening way. It doesn't seem as though SCO could meet that test, despite the fact they might use stronly worded letters, and eventually lose the dispute in the US.
What should occur is that if anyone does pay for licenses, then keep a record of all costs involved: when SCO does lose, then a class action to recover those costs would work nicely (assuming they aren't bankrupt by then).
If anyone is serious about taking an issue with this, then try making a complaint to the relevant authorities. Considering recent activities by Verisign, they are annoying too many people.
It is possible that the consumer / competition commissions would take an issue with their activity, as 100 years is plainly too silly: even trademarks (which are intertwined with domain names) have re-registration periods that are not more than 10 or 15 years. This is certainly more appropriate. There examples of these commissions (e.g. the OFT in the UK) in other fields of activity requesting that terms of contracts are shortened.
100 year is plainly to the advantage of verisign and to the annoyance of everyone else for all the hassle with dealing with gunk of unused domains around the place and so on.
The US is only as free as your cheapest law suit. Once you understand this you'll realise that both the EU and the US have their own unique problems and neither is really better than each other: they're both broken or good in different ways. Recently both were run by goons too: Bush on one side, Bertolusconi on the other.
Where do you get this idea? The authorities have a variety of remedies at their disposal and there is no requirement that they waste everyone's time by applying increasingly more painful wrist slaps. They are entirely allowed to get straight to the point and make the problem go away now and for the future.
You don't understand the "doctrine of effects": quite certainly the EU can impose a structural remedy upon Microsoft even though it is a foreign based organisation. The remedy may only _apply_ to Microsoft's operations in the EU, but to be honest that's all the EU cares about.
It could require that Microsoft products put onto the market by Microsoft in the EU meet specific unbundling requirements. In this case you could grey import the more restrictive version of Windows if you wanted to
In point of note: this is exactly what happened with GE and Honeywell. The US FTC allowed the merger to go ahead, but the EC DGCOMP blocked it unless certain conditions were met. This caused an absolute political uproar in the US, yet it's entirely justified. If the companies in question don't like the deal, then they can get out of the EU. If the EU acts too restrictively and drives away to many organisations, well that's to its own loss. There's got to be a meeting in the middle (and hopefully it's not the Azores).
The good news is that it doesn't matter whether it's the stores fault, AMD's or the sticker-guy who may be acting out of employment contract - the fact is that it's someone elses fault, and not yours, yet it is damaging you, and therefore you're entitled to some remedy.
The bad news is that it can be a mess trying get it sorted out. However, likely that the store owners are more interested in being on your (or the WIFI) guys side more than they care about some distint and irrelevant microprocessor company.
Fines are a weak response, as it has been stated over again, this is piss in a pond to the likes of Microsoft.
On the other hand, the European Commission has the power under Article 81 and 82 of the EC Treaty (which where anti-competitive behaviour is prohibited) to impose structural remedies: to insist upon corporate re-organisation or say an order to disclose information or to unbundle software. This would be a far more appropriate remedy that would actually be economically useful rather than a bit more cash in the bank for EU.
If the commission really has spine, it will seek this type of remedy rather than the easy way out. It may in fact seek a combination of fines and structural remedy, so we'll just have to wait and see.
You maintain that it their right to refuse to server up pages because the referrer header contains something that they don't approve of; and it's their server to do with as they please.
Sorry, by taking the step to engage with the public in such a way you automatically take on certain responsibilities and obligations, and those include obligations to not be discriminatory.
You think a bus company would get away with refusing passengers because they came from the bad side of town, even if the passengers were polite, well dressed and could pay the fair. Hardly. And if you're the bus company and you don't like this social obligation, then you can choose to close up and do something else with your life: there are plenty of other people who would fulfill the service.
When you engage with others, you give up some of your freedom in order to uphold the freedom of others. This is called your obligation to society.
That sounds like a good argument but smells bad to me. It might make economic sense to block a "class of users" because they aren't likely to "provide acceptable revenue", but it's the antithesis to the open web that we all fostered. The more appropriate approach is to allow referral, but to use the referrer string to tailor the advertisements (or turn them off, perhaps) to the particular class of user.
It seems to me that controlling deep linking is entirely justifiable, as deep links can make unfair use of your site or misrepresent your site and deprive you (e.g. by avoiding advertising and appropriate attribution for materials or terms and conditions of use).
You could make a good argument that your "web page" is the work, and a deep link effectively misappropriates that work causing a substantial part of it to be rendered as a new work: clearly an infringement of your copyright.
Employing some form of anti-slashdot mechanism is entirely justified: the issue here is that you're legitimately addressing an economic/cost/resource problem (although, your approach is a little weak: you should employ some form of request rate limiting as the slashdot effect can occur from other sources). You have a right to do this.
However, simply blocking references by origin with no specific justification, especially when that origin is pursing a similar field of operation sounds very anti-trust: i.e. refusal to supply.