The right that's being violated is Amendment X. Any power not specifically granted to the federal government by the US Constitution is reserved to the states and the people. Now, admittedly, I've heard that Florida funded the company that set this up but that still doesn't give the feds the power to use it just because it's there.
Of course all of this is preempted by Article I Section 8 of the US Constitution which gives the federal Congress the right to borrow money on the credit of the USA. This means that they can rack up huge loans and pass the savings onto the taxpayers in general. Once the loans are signed then its only a short step until they overstep their legally authorized powers in the interest of paying back the creditors. This perfectly explains why, while we're taxed at the lowest (or near lowest) rate in the modern world, in all reality by the end of the year we're surcharged, feed, fined and taxed to death. Nickel and dime, as it were.
----- Secure all zippers, buttons, tie clips, etc. Wardrobe Malfunction isn't funny anymore, it's subversive ----- Amen to that. I have this old leather jacket from Wilson's that I bought nearly ten years ago. It was a $300 lambskin leather jacket at the time. Now it's been through enough rainstorms to make it look like a $5 Salvation Army pickup even though I kept it well oiled and water protected. Anyways, the threads holding the zipper onto the left breast pocket were snapped from keeping my cigarettes in there and reaching in to retrieve them, straining the threads over a number of years. I had to be extra careful unzipping the pocket because, if I led the zipper too far, it would slide right off the end of the track.
I went through the airport a few months back with my jacket. When they searched my jacket at the checkpoint they unzipped the pocket. They weren't kind enough to put the zipper inside the pocket so that I could reattach it. They threw it away. I didn't think to check until I was in the terminal. I went back and asked about it but received nothing but blank stares and,"We can give you a claim form to fill out."
Right. I'm going to spend 15 minutes filling out a claim form to have my name added to a list over a $2 zipper that I'll probably never be able to find the original match for anyways.
I guess it's just part of life. No matter how well you take care of your stuff someone else is eventually going to break it for you and there's nothing that you can do about it.
Freedom does not give you the freedom to enslave others. GPL is on the correct path by mandating that its products cannot be used in nonfree conglomerations. No free state should support a slavery state. The BSD license is granting legitimacy to slavery states.
----- Isn't everything remotely associated with the government? ----- Yes, and the darnable misery is that this sort of system is called "communism". The misery is that we live in a nation that denies the association vehemently.
----- Can you point to any study that shows this, or are you just pulling this out of the air? ----- Oh please. Don't be naive. It's about business and economics. If discounts are given to one sector of a business then, in order to keep the profit margin the same or increasing from year to year, other sectors need to be charged more. The reason you don't find this sort of speech on a Google search is that no business in their right mind is going to tell the general public that,"We're screwing you to give those others a break." That'd be nothing short of business suicide.
If you live in a sequestered locale of Mom'n'Pop shops where everyone is playing fair then I apologize for bursting your bubble about the way the rest of the world works.
As an avid user of IRC I had always tried to keep virtual social networks loosely defined in my head but never enlisted a 'bot to help me with it. There are a number of reasons for this, mostly because I never felt compelled to circumvent the "single connection" rule no matter how loosely enforced it really is.
My thought is this: Do local or even federal monitors make use of these types of programs to map the citizenry. If they're not then why not? If they are then why and how is it benefitting the citizenry? Could social network tracking be used to harass an individual if the wrong people become privy to social networking data which has been compiled, filtered, and prepared? For example, looking at a bare network log of TCP connections from a one month period is pretty useless until it's filtered and prepared to identify the proper patterns. If some teenage script-kiddie has stumbled across a running archive of prepared social networking data which describes people in his physical locale then...
Well... the possibilities are endless, aren't they?
As an aside: Are you paranoid if they really are out to get you and, with 'bots like PieSpy around, aren't they really out to get you?
This is probably the best argument that I've seen both for and against M$ and it points out some very legitimate questions which are typically glossed over in American law and business. It would be extraordinarily interesting to conduct an analysis of not just M$, but the entire software industry from this perspective. Essentially it leads to something like the Debian vs. RedHat issue. RedHat is trying to become Microsoft and, if it succeeds, will eventually face these monopoly issues. Debian is doing things the "correct" way by giving the end user maximum choice of all available products but this leaves the user with the requirement to learn about them.
Think of M$ as RedHat in a hypothetical world where RedHat has assimilated and profits from the use of, hypothetically, KDE over Gnome or UDE (udeproject.sourceforge.net). Or, hypothetically, Mplayer over VLM or XMMS. Or Apache over CERN. It stands to reason that the executives on top of the company will use any tactic possible to ensure that the end-user will use the packages most profitable to themselves. With that in mind, marketing is far easier than writing good code. Everyone knows that superior marketing will outsell superior technology each and every time. That's what marketing is about. Selling.
And once we're done hyperanalyzing the software industry and figuring out how to fix it we can move on to every other industry and find that the same underhanded business tactics are being used everywhere to push substandard products into the lives of unknowing inhabitants who, when they finally realize that they've been duped into paying double price for a substandard product, immediately whine "monopoly!" and expect their leviathan government to step in and fix the whole thing.
Those of us that knew better all along are finally getting a little chuckle to compensate us for the severe social ridicule, backlash, and tarring/feathering that we've taken for years for saying,"Look. You really don't want to use that. I know all your friends are using it and it's new and cool and everything else, but it's crappy code, a crappy product, with lots of bugs and violations of basic rights like privacy."
While Percy makes a nice sales speech the fact of the matter is that anything even remotely associated with the government is not self-sustaining. There is overhead for the politicians to debate it, and overhead to write the contracts, and overhead to go out to interview and entertain competing providers or subcontractors. With the government involved there will eventually be rules and regulations written and that doesn't happen for free. Then there's the separate appropriations committee and their new staff of secretaries and filing clerks.
The governmental aspect is only half of it. If a private *smirk* entity is seeking government backing then the authority issuing the bond is making up the difference somewhere else. Chances are the authority issuing the bonds is affiliated with banking and insurance. The returns on other bonds are sacrificed, home mortgage rates are increased, insurance premiums and deductibles are raised.
Nothing happens for free. It was a nice sales speech, though.:-)
This will lend an interesting spin to the American concept of democracy. The candidate who makes the biggest contribution to the local governing authority or network contractor will have the best spots in internet advertising. In years to come as a greater percentage of the overall population migrates from television and radio to the internet this will have increasing impact. Nothing really changes. Money rules and those who control it rule by proxy. Only a fool believes the pretty propaganda that is heard in public speeches. It is meant to appease the blissfully (and often vehemently) ignorant.
Voting in one form or another is among the oldest traditions known to man. Rigging the vote is the most obvious bald-faced secret.
----- something tells me that the same people who are willing to accept a basically unaccountable bill from the government are the same people who don't bother to vote ----- Voting doesn't matter. The democratic way of making decisions (ie. voting) has been around since the earliest days of human intellect. It's only logical that figuring out how to rig voting has been around just as long.
----- or pay attention to what bureaucrats are doing with our tax dollars. ----- Since voting is a moot point there's really nothing we can do about it.
I don't like to start new threads but I didn't see this: A general "Thank you for your time, effort, and a job well done" to all of the kernel hackers out there. They're fixing kernel level bugs that are almost at the hardware level while M$ is still patching their web browser. I don't think there's any doubt which system is ultimately more secure.
Can anyone take a guess how many low-level memory exploits are in Windows XP, 2k, or others? Perhaps it's irrelevant. Who needs to crack the low mem when there are so many ways into the system at the document level?
It's part of life. Either you're going to succeed or you won't. Either they're going to extend a job offer to you or not. Honestly, I think the decisions are made long before you even walk in the door.
I've tried everything. I've tried tailored resumes. I've tried semi-tailored resumes. I've tried generic resumes. I've tried sending out to hundreds of companies. I've tried sending out to a large set of specialized companies (a few years later). I've tried applying only to a particular class of position (most recently). I've tried being gently honest. I've tried being brutally honest. I've tried sweeping the unpleasantries under the rug. I've tried ignoring the fact that unpleasantries exist. I've tried being casually conversational. I've tried being strictly businesslike. I've tried a gentle mix of the two. I've tried the dedicated employee approach. I've tried the all-around human being looking for a life approach.
I think you get the point.
Honestly I really feel that, whatever the laws are (like, really, what are you going to do about it? hire a lawyer? if you're looking for a job you can't afford a lawyer), corporate human resource departments do all of their checking, cross-checking, contacting, counter interviewing, and astrological spreads the moment they see your resume. Once that piece of paper is in their hands they call anyone and everyone that they can.
Here's a tip: Human resource departments have national databases just like any other department or industry. It may be brutal but employees are a commodity. I wouldn't be surprised if, at a given level and in some form, employees are traded around like stocks and bonds. One could set up a system of brokers and distributers. Sometimes a broker will land a job for a known bad employee just to ship a block of more profitable employees someplace else.
So just be yourself. Show up at the interview prepared with the properly evasive answers. They ask what happened at the last job you look them straight in the eye, nonchalantly, and say "It didn't work out." No more, no less. The interviewer will try to stare you down. Stare back. Don't stare back antagonistically. Stare back like he could tell you to die on the spot and you wouldn't give a good g--d--n. Blink once or twice, about 15-20 seconds apart. If he presses the issue you need to have several properly evasive answers ready. Keep them at one line each to let him know that he's not going to get anywhere with the topic AND that he's not going to provoke an emotional response from you. Prove to them that you're willing to leave it all in the past and move forward.
So don't sweat it. If your last employer screwed you over big-time (*ahem* 46607 L460r4+0r|3s), you're broke, $50k in debt, homeless, and spent the last 3 months camping in the Yukon for lack of any better ideas, that's just the way life goes. I've been there. Financially, I'm still there. I have an employer again (finally) and if they piss me off, bust my balls, or if I don't meet their corporate standards then I have no problems walking down the highway with my thumb out again. That's the attitude you need to keep because, if you don't, you're going to spend the rest of your life jumping from one small company to the next where the CEO sees you as nothing more than a sack of meat to put his next product on the market. He gets fat, you get the shaft, and the next HR rep you interview with browbeats you with what you don't know.
----- I don't belive for one second you are some poor schmuck that got screwed. Sorry ----- There is no such thing. If a bad situation comes about it's a conglomeration of participation by all parties involved. The point here is that companies tend to leave the full burden on the employee being dismissed similar to the concept of a scapegoat. Regardless of the way reality is it's not a pleasant prospect to be dumped off, denied unemployment, and told,"Good luck. We hope you die."
It's been my experience that lawyers serve only three types of people:
1) Those who have $10k for a retainer and research fee up front. Anyone who was fired from a job, and is bothered enough to talk about it, probably isn't in this category. 2) Members of a legally defined minority or disability group. This makes for an open-and-shut slam-dunk case providing for easy profit. 3) People they're sleeping with.
If you can't qualify in one of these three areas then an employment attorney will tell you,"I'm sorry. Because of the way the courts rule on these things companies are really free to hire, evaluate, and fire employees in any way that they choose."
Unless you're a member of a legally defined minority or disability group then lawyers do not want to talk to you. Lawyers want open-and-shut slam-dunk cases with easy turnaround. They don't want to try and prove the technical details behind a biased, and possibly malicious assessment, that takes too much time in terms of gathering witnesses and trying to educate the judge on the finer points of network security.
This is true of nearly every state in one form or another. As long as discrimination isn't a factor (ie. the employee is not covered as a minority or as a person with a disability) then state supreme courts have, time and again, upheld a companies' right to evaluate, hire, and fire employees' in any way they see fit.
If they don't like the janitor then it is now his goal to ensure that light bulb replacement numbers are decreased by 30%. He is promptly denied the authority to change the contract for the light bulbs to a more reliable manufacturer. At the end of the year it's good-bye to the janitor and it's all perfectly legal.
----- libel lawsuit... IANAL, but in the US, folks do sue and win for much less ----- People talk about suing all the time. As near as I can tell there are only three ways to even get a lawsuit started:
1) Be a member of a legally defined minority or disability group. 2) Be able to afford the $10k research and retainer fee up front. 3) Be bed-buddies with a lawyer who practices in the appropriate field.
Barring qualification in one of these three terms then the cold fact of the matter is: Lawyers do not want to talk to you.
Additionally lawyers and judges very rarely know the technical details involved. Assuming that the security risk assessment could be subpoenad as evidence it does not constitute libel. One must be able to prove that the assessment was biased. The vast majority of the time the lawyers and judges don't know (and don't care) enough about the topic to identify an unfair or malicious assessment.
HR departments work the same way. I saw it in the pharmaceutical industry.
You're entrusting the fate of your grandmother to Microsoft's idea of up to date security patch warnings?
I agree that pulling spammers off the 'net is a good idea but eggoeater's right. This could have some nasty side effects unless the government starts holding Microsoft liable for the shoddy coding in their OS.
I know this isn't going to be a popular opinion with many people but, whether you like it or not, it's the sane opinion.
I hate spam as much as the next guy. Spam is like being harassed by a horsefly when you just want to sit in the boat and go fishing. Spam is a terrible nuisance. That said I don't want to see this guy go to prison unless he was spamming for unsavory things like ridiculously immoral pr0n or predatory pyramid schemes. I just want him, and other people like him, to STOP SENDING SPAM.
At the same time I realize that while it would be nice to let the punishment fit the crime that's not the way our judicial system works. There are no alternative punishments like ensuring that this guy can't own a computer or be associated with marketing organizations. It would be impossible to prevent him from somehow getting back into the same business of spamming people to make money. Our judicial system provides for parole but, unless someone's watching this guy 24-7-365, he'll always be able to get back into the spam market. Aside from a horribly expensive parole system the only thing that we can do with spammers is put them in prison and hope that they don't start running spam rings from the inside (movie: Blood in Blood out).
----- What he meant was that the chemical structure of the new angiogenesis inhibitors resembled that of known angiogenesis inhibitors. And that it was hopeless to explain exactly how to you, since you admit to having zero biochemical knowledge ----- That's not what he meant at all.
The structure of the angiogenesis inhibitors in question did not resemble the structure of other known angiogenesis inhibitors. They would not be strong patentable candidates if they did as their structure would overlap with patents held by other companies. Additionally the structures of compounds which are used to treat one disease often resemble the structures of compounds used to treat an entirely different disease. That you think of pharmaceuticals in terms of structural classes being directly associated with diseases shows that you are terribly behind the times or know little to nothing above a layman's level in the field. Let me remind you that the basic backbone structure of cholesterol is modified to produce compounds which interact with nearly every biochemical pathway in all seven systems of the body. Marketing departments oversimplify their advertising to cater to the least common denominator of physicians who have forgotten nearly all of their chemistry and biochemistry. Furthermore I never admitted that I have no biochemical knowledge. That was the belittling accusation (representative of the manner in which I was treated over the course of four years) made by the department head in order to assert his authority with brute force. To the contrary I have quite a bit of biochemical knowledge and am fluent in methods of de novo molecular design to target biochemical pathways.
This is a question of specificity and it was never addressed but rather beaten down with the highly questionable argument of "might makes right". The question was not poorly informed. The research methods were knowingly extrapolated to produce results outside of the scope of the experimental model. The postulate was that the compounds in question would inhibit angiogenesis. The compounds in question do cause cessation of proliferation of endothelial cells in purified cell culture. The compounds in question do cause the mass of a tumor in a mouse model to decrease. There is no factual link, however, to prove that the tumors decreased in size due to a lack of endothelial proliferation. That conclusion was assumed from purified cell culture. To give perspective: these same compounds cause many other cell types to display apoptotic, necrotic, or stasis behavior. The action was not specific to cells involved with the formation of vasculature.
The patent, as submitted by the company, will state that these compounds act by inhibiting the growth of vasculature in tumor models. The supporting evidence, however, will have nothing to do with the growth of endothelial cells inside of a tumor. The supporting evidence will be gleaned entirely from purified cell cultures. When the tumors themselves are examined the only observation made will be the mass of the tumor. The observations will have little to do with the pathology of the tissues.
----- is to require that a company holding a patent actually be using that patent in a product ----- The upside: Many more jobs are created to keep people using systems which do nothing but secure the holding on a patent.
The downside: The cost of legitimate goods and services is raised to cover the business cost of maintaining the unneeded processes.
The parallels: Governments work this way. They sell overpriced goods and services ("who will build roads?") in order to mask the money that politicians and businessment shove into their own pockets. Banks do the same. Insurance companies do the same.
Patents are big business. The cost of pharmaceuticals (and other useful products) is not so high because of the outright cost of research. The cost of products is high because you're paying the premium to provide high-paying busywork jobs for the executives' sons, daughters, neices and nephews--especially in lucrative positions in the legal departments hunting down anyone who may be infringing on their useless patents.
Most patent auditors have little or no technical experience with the patent that they are auditing. They are not required to replicate experiments or scientifically evaluate the supporting arguments. As long as there is enough contact back and forth with the patent lawyers pushing the application then all they really do is rubber stamp the bottom line.
A patent on a concrete life preserver will only prevent other people from manufaturing the product. It will not guarantee that a concrete life preserver will save lives.
Since when are patent auditors "skilled in the art"? I suppose you believe that all system administrators are intimately familiar with all aspects of their system as opposed to walking robots with certifications and social connections.
----- Pharma (15 years) - A chemical composition for curing a specific ailment or modifying a biological process. All Pharma patents must be vetted. ----- Background...
----- That is, the research must be done showing that it actually does what it CLAIMS it does ----- Have you heard of angiogenesis inhibitors? They are chemical compounds which battle cancer by preventing tumours from growing additional blood vessels. If the tumour cannot grow more blood vessels then it, theoretically, will starve itself into remission.
I was at a project meeting one time where the department head was singing the praises of the latest round of developmental angiogenesis inhibitors. He was pointing specifically to data from mouse models which showed that, after the compound had been introduced to a mouse with a tumour, the tumour decreased in size and entered remission as opposed to mice who had been given a placebo. The size of the tumour was determined by cutting it out of the mouse and using a balance to determine its mass.
To verify that the compound was doing what it was supposed to be doing I asked if anyone checked the vasculature in the tumour. Were the veins and arteries smaller or thinner? Was there evidence that the tumour decreased in size due to reduced vasculature? Was there any evidence that the compound was working as an "angiogenesis inhibitor" and not by another mechanism? The department head looked like a fish out of water for five seconds and then began a 30 second rant about how I was an incompetent fool that needed to go to graduate school before I understood anything about biochemistry.
Needless to say the company was still pursuing filing a patent for the new "angiogenesis inhibitors" when I left. It never ends.
----- Why is it when a bug is found in software it's fixed (with notable exceptions), but when bad laws are written, they're left to afflict everyone? ----- Laws make money by invoking fines or providing clients for the incarceration system. Freedom makes no money.
Capitalism is great. Government regulated capitalism is communism. If the government passes additional regulations on social behavior then it's socialism. If the government tells you that it's for your own protection and good then it's facism. It's all about making money by skewing the laws in favor of those writing them.
----- It is a well-known fact that you have to take the chemical patent literature with a huge grain of salt (no pun intended!) because many times, the reaciton simply doesn't work the way it is reported to work ----- Would you be willing to write this down in official testimony to an attorney for me? I worked for an old German manager at a large pharmaceutical company in Chicago. He would give me procedures from patents or from minor journals and then tell me to make it work. Often I would not be using the same reactants as the published procedure but similar reactants with analogous reactive centers. If the reaction protocol would not work he had absolutely no problem with calling me an incompetent fool (to my face) and writing me up as such in my annual performance reviews. HR was no help. They know nothing of chemistry and, from their vantage point of ignorance, the word of a PhD with 14 years of experience ("this should work!") was much better than the explanation of the FNG ("the substrates are different, it's not the same reaction, and he knows it.") After four years of this kind of professional harassment I quit my job but was in a state of psychological mayhem. I landed in eight months of unemployment and find myself unable to secure another career. HR departments at large pharma companies will frequently fax along copies of the last performance review as references. There was no way for me to fend off the blackballing of this self-important German schmuck.
What does this have to do with bad patents? At the core the patent office is like the HR department at a large company. They have almost no understanding of the technical material involved and, as long as the paperwork is filled out correctly and the credentials are acceptable, then the patent auditor does little more than cross the Ts and dot the Is.
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You, Mr. A. Coward, are a troll.
The right that's being violated is Amendment X. Any power not specifically granted to the federal government by the US Constitution is reserved to the states and the people. Now, admittedly, I've heard that Florida funded the company that set this up but that still doesn't give the feds the power to use it just because it's there.
Of course all of this is preempted by Article I Section 8 of the US Constitution which gives the federal Congress the right to borrow money on the credit of the USA. This means that they can rack up huge loans and pass the savings onto the taxpayers in general. Once the loans are signed then its only a short step until they overstep their legally authorized powers in the interest of paying back the creditors. This perfectly explains why, while we're taxed at the lowest (or near lowest) rate in the modern world, in all reality by the end of the year we're surcharged, feed, fined and taxed to death. Nickel and dime, as it were.
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Secure all zippers, buttons, tie clips, etc. Wardrobe Malfunction isn't funny anymore, it's subversive
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Amen to that. I have this old leather jacket from Wilson's that I bought nearly ten years ago. It was a $300 lambskin leather jacket at the time. Now it's been through enough rainstorms to make it look like a $5 Salvation Army pickup even though I kept it well oiled and water protected. Anyways, the threads holding the zipper onto the left breast pocket were snapped from keeping my cigarettes in there and reaching in to retrieve them, straining the threads over a number of years. I had to be extra careful unzipping the pocket because, if I led the zipper too far, it would slide right off the end of the track.
I went through the airport a few months back with my jacket. When they searched my jacket at the checkpoint they unzipped the pocket. They weren't kind enough to put the zipper inside the pocket so that I could reattach it. They threw it away. I didn't think to check until I was in the terminal. I went back and asked about it but received nothing but blank stares and,"We can give you a claim form to fill out."
Right. I'm going to spend 15 minutes filling out a claim form to have my name added to a list over a $2 zipper that I'll probably never be able to find the original match for anyways.
I guess it's just part of life. No matter how well you take care of your stuff someone else is eventually going to break it for you and there's nothing that you can do about it.
Freedom does not give you the freedom to enslave others. GPL is on the correct path by mandating that its products cannot be used in nonfree conglomerations. No free state should support a slavery state. The BSD license is granting legitimacy to slavery states.
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Isn't everything remotely associated with the government?
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Yes, and the darnable misery is that this sort of system is called "communism". The misery is that we live in a nation that denies the association vehemently.
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Can you point to any study that shows this, or are you just pulling this out of the air?
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Oh please. Don't be naive. It's about business and economics. If discounts are given to one sector of a business then, in order to keep the profit margin the same or increasing from year to year, other sectors need to be charged more. The reason you don't find this sort of speech on a Google search is that no business in their right mind is going to tell the general public that,"We're screwing you to give those others a break." That'd be nothing short of business suicide.
If you live in a sequestered locale of Mom'n'Pop shops where everyone is playing fair then I apologize for bursting your bubble about the way the rest of the world works.
As an avid user of IRC I had always tried to keep virtual social networks loosely defined in my head but never enlisted a 'bot to help me with it. There are a number of reasons for this, mostly because I never felt compelled to circumvent the "single connection" rule no matter how loosely enforced it really is.
My thought is this: Do local or even federal monitors make use of these types of programs to map the citizenry. If they're not then why not? If they are then why and how is it benefitting the citizenry? Could social network tracking be used to harass an individual if the wrong people become privy to social networking data which has been compiled, filtered, and prepared? For example, looking at a bare network log of TCP connections from a one month period is pretty useless until it's filtered and prepared to identify the proper patterns. If some teenage script-kiddie has stumbled across a running archive of prepared social networking data which describes people in his physical locale then...
Well... the possibilities are endless, aren't they?
As an aside: Are you paranoid if they really are out to get you and, with 'bots like PieSpy around, aren't they really out to get you?
This is probably the best argument that I've seen both for and against M$ and it points out some very legitimate questions which are typically glossed over in American law and business. It would be extraordinarily interesting to conduct an analysis of not just M$, but the entire software industry from this perspective. Essentially it leads to something like the Debian vs. RedHat issue. RedHat is trying to become Microsoft and, if it succeeds, will eventually face these monopoly issues. Debian is doing things the "correct" way by giving the end user maximum choice of all available products but this leaves the user with the requirement to learn about them.
Think of M$ as RedHat in a hypothetical world where RedHat has assimilated and profits from the use of, hypothetically, KDE over Gnome or UDE (udeproject.sourceforge.net). Or, hypothetically, Mplayer over VLM or XMMS. Or Apache over CERN. It stands to reason that the executives on top of the company will use any tactic possible to ensure that the end-user will use the packages most profitable to themselves. With that in mind, marketing is far easier than writing good code. Everyone knows that superior marketing will outsell superior technology each and every time. That's what marketing is about. Selling.
And once we're done hyperanalyzing the software industry and figuring out how to fix it we can move on to every other industry and find that the same underhanded business tactics are being used everywhere to push substandard products into the lives of unknowing inhabitants who, when they finally realize that they've been duped into paying double price for a substandard product, immediately whine "monopoly!" and expect their leviathan government to step in and fix the whole thing.
Those of us that knew better all along are finally getting a little chuckle to compensate us for the severe social ridicule, backlash, and tarring/feathering that we've taken for years for saying,"Look. You really don't want to use that. I know all your friends are using it and it's new and cool and everything else, but it's crappy code, a crappy product, with lots of bugs and violations of basic rights like privacy."
While Percy makes a nice sales speech the fact of the matter is that anything even remotely associated with the government is not self-sustaining. There is overhead for the politicians to debate it, and overhead to write the contracts, and overhead to go out to interview and entertain competing providers or subcontractors. With the government involved there will eventually be rules and regulations written and that doesn't happen for free. Then there's the separate appropriations committee and their new staff of secretaries and filing clerks.
:-)
The governmental aspect is only half of it. If a private *smirk* entity is seeking government backing then the authority issuing the bond is making up the difference somewhere else. Chances are the authority issuing the bonds is affiliated with banking and insurance. The returns on other bonds are sacrificed, home mortgage rates are increased, insurance premiums and deductibles are raised.
Nothing happens for free. It was a nice sales speech, though.
This will lend an interesting spin to the American concept of democracy. The candidate who makes the biggest contribution to the local governing authority or network contractor will have the best spots in internet advertising. In years to come as a greater percentage of the overall population migrates from television and radio to the internet this will have increasing impact. Nothing really changes. Money rules and those who control it rule by proxy. Only a fool believes the pretty propaganda that is heard in public speeches. It is meant to appease the blissfully (and often vehemently) ignorant.
Voting in one form or another is among the oldest traditions known to man. Rigging the vote is the most obvious bald-faced secret.
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something tells me that the same people who are willing to accept a basically unaccountable bill from the government are the same people who don't bother to vote
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Voting doesn't matter. The democratic way of making decisions (ie. voting) has been around since the earliest days of human intellect. It's only logical that figuring out how to rig voting has been around just as long.
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or pay attention to what bureaucrats are doing with our tax dollars.
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Since voting is a moot point there's really nothing we can do about it.
I don't like to start new threads but I didn't see this: A general "Thank you for your time, effort, and a job well done" to all of the kernel hackers out there. They're fixing kernel level bugs that are almost at the hardware level while M$ is still patching their web browser. I don't think there's any doubt which system is ultimately more secure.
Can anyone take a guess how many low-level memory exploits are in Windows XP, 2k, or others? Perhaps it's irrelevant. Who needs to crack the low mem when there are so many ways into the system at the document level?
It's part of life. Either you're going to succeed or you won't. Either they're going to extend a job offer to you or not. Honestly, I think the decisions are made long before you even walk in the door.
I've tried everything. I've tried tailored resumes. I've tried semi-tailored resumes. I've tried generic resumes. I've tried sending out to hundreds of companies. I've tried sending out to a large set of specialized companies (a few years later). I've tried applying only to a particular class of position (most recently). I've tried being gently honest. I've tried being brutally honest. I've tried sweeping the unpleasantries under the rug. I've tried ignoring the fact that unpleasantries exist. I've tried being casually conversational. I've tried being strictly businesslike. I've tried a gentle mix of the two. I've tried the dedicated employee approach. I've tried the all-around human being looking for a life approach.
I think you get the point.
Honestly I really feel that, whatever the laws are (like, really, what are you going to do about it? hire a lawyer? if you're looking for a job you can't afford a lawyer), corporate human resource departments do all of their checking, cross-checking, contacting, counter interviewing, and astrological spreads the moment they see your resume. Once that piece of paper is in their hands they call anyone and everyone that they can.
Here's a tip: Human resource departments have national databases just like any other department or industry. It may be brutal but employees are a commodity. I wouldn't be surprised if, at a given level and in some form, employees are traded around like stocks and bonds. One could set up a system of brokers and distributers. Sometimes a broker will land a job for a known bad employee just to ship a block of more profitable employees someplace else.
So just be yourself. Show up at the interview prepared with the properly evasive answers. They ask what happened at the last job you look them straight in the eye, nonchalantly, and say "It didn't work out." No more, no less. The interviewer will try to stare you down. Stare back. Don't stare back antagonistically. Stare back like he could tell you to die on the spot and you wouldn't give a good g--d--n. Blink once or twice, about 15-20 seconds apart. If he presses the issue you need to have several properly evasive answers ready. Keep them at one line each to let him know that he's not going to get anywhere with the topic AND that he's not going to provoke an emotional response from you. Prove to them that you're willing to leave it all in the past and move forward.
So don't sweat it. If your last employer screwed you over big-time (*ahem* 46607 L460r4+0r|3s), you're broke, $50k in debt, homeless, and spent the last 3 months camping in the Yukon for lack of any better ideas, that's just the way life goes. I've been there. Financially, I'm still there. I have an employer again (finally) and if they piss me off, bust my balls, or if I don't meet their corporate standards then I have no problems walking down the highway with my thumb out again. That's the attitude you need to keep because, if you don't, you're going to spend the rest of your life jumping from one small company to the next where the CEO sees you as nothing more than a sack of meat to put his next product on the market. He gets fat, you get the shaft, and the next HR rep you interview with browbeats you with what you don't know.
Sometimes that's just the way life goes.
Steven
+++ATHZ
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I don't belive for one second you are some poor schmuck that got screwed. Sorry
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There is no such thing. If a bad situation comes about it's a conglomeration of participation by all parties involved. The point here is that companies tend to leave the full burden on the employee being dismissed similar to the concept of a scapegoat. Regardless of the way reality is it's not a pleasant prospect to be dumped off, denied unemployment, and told,"Good luck. We hope you die."
That's just mean.
It's been my experience that lawyers serve only three types of people:
1) Those who have $10k for a retainer and research fee up front. Anyone who was fired from a job, and is bothered enough to talk about it, probably isn't in this category.
2) Members of a legally defined minority or disability group. This makes for an open-and-shut slam-dunk case providing for easy profit.
3) People they're sleeping with.
If you can't qualify in one of these three areas then an employment attorney will tell you,"I'm sorry. Because of the way the courts rule on these things companies are really free to hire, evaluate, and fire employees in any way that they choose."
Unless you're a member of a legally defined minority or disability group then lawyers do not want to talk to you. Lawyers want open-and-shut slam-dunk cases with easy turnaround. They don't want to try and prove the technical details behind a biased, and possibly malicious assessment, that takes too much time in terms of gathering witnesses and trying to educate the judge on the finer points of network security.
This is true of nearly every state in one form or another. As long as discrimination isn't a factor (ie. the employee is not covered as a minority or as a person with a disability) then state supreme courts have, time and again, upheld a companies' right to evaluate, hire, and fire employees' in any way they see fit.
If they don't like the janitor then it is now his goal to ensure that light bulb replacement numbers are decreased by 30%. He is promptly denied the authority to change the contract for the light bulbs to a more reliable manufacturer. At the end of the year it's good-bye to the janitor and it's all perfectly legal.
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libel lawsuit... IANAL, but in the US, folks do sue and win for much less
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People talk about suing all the time. As near as I can tell there are only three ways to even get a lawsuit started:
1) Be a member of a legally defined minority or disability group.
2) Be able to afford the $10k research and retainer fee up front.
3) Be bed-buddies with a lawyer who practices in the appropriate field.
Barring qualification in one of these three terms then the cold fact of the matter is: Lawyers do not want to talk to you.
Additionally lawyers and judges very rarely know the technical details involved. Assuming that the security risk assessment could be subpoenad as evidence it does not constitute libel. One must be able to prove that the assessment was biased. The vast majority of the time the lawyers and judges don't know (and don't care) enough about the topic to identify an unfair or malicious assessment.
HR departments work the same way. I saw it in the pharmaceutical industry.
You're entrusting the fate of your grandmother to Microsoft's idea of up to date security patch warnings?
I agree that pulling spammers off the 'net is a good idea but eggoeater's right. This could have some nasty side effects unless the government starts holding Microsoft liable for the shoddy coding in their OS.
I know this isn't going to be a popular opinion with many people but, whether you like it or not, it's the sane opinion.
I hate spam as much as the next guy. Spam is like being harassed by a horsefly when you just want to sit in the boat and go fishing. Spam is a terrible nuisance. That said I don't want to see this guy go to prison unless he was spamming for unsavory things like ridiculously immoral pr0n or predatory pyramid schemes. I just want him, and other people like him, to STOP SENDING SPAM.
At the same time I realize that while it would be nice to let the punishment fit the crime that's not the way our judicial system works. There are no alternative punishments like ensuring that this guy can't own a computer or be associated with marketing organizations. It would be impossible to prevent him from somehow getting back into the same business of spamming people to make money. Our judicial system provides for parole but, unless someone's watching this guy 24-7-365, he'll always be able to get back into the spam market. Aside from a horribly expensive parole system the only thing that we can do with spammers is put them in prison and hope that they don't start running spam rings from the inside (movie: Blood in Blood out).
I just don't know where it all goes anymore.
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What he meant was that the chemical structure of the new angiogenesis inhibitors resembled that of known angiogenesis inhibitors. And that it was hopeless to explain exactly how to you, since you admit to having zero biochemical knowledge
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That's not what he meant at all.
The structure of the angiogenesis inhibitors in question did not resemble the structure of other known angiogenesis inhibitors. They would not be strong patentable candidates if they did as their structure would overlap with patents held by other companies. Additionally the structures of compounds which are used to treat one disease often resemble the structures of compounds used to treat an entirely different disease. That you think of pharmaceuticals in terms of structural classes being directly associated with diseases shows that you are terribly behind the times or know little to nothing above a layman's level in the field. Let me remind you that the basic backbone structure of cholesterol is modified to produce compounds which interact with nearly every biochemical pathway in all seven systems of the body. Marketing departments oversimplify their advertising to cater to the least common denominator of physicians who have forgotten nearly all of their chemistry and biochemistry. Furthermore I never admitted that I have no biochemical knowledge. That was the belittling accusation (representative of the manner in which I was treated over the course of four years) made by the department head in order to assert his authority with brute force. To the contrary I have quite a bit of biochemical knowledge and am fluent in methods of de novo molecular design to target biochemical pathways.
This is a question of specificity and it was never addressed but rather beaten down with the highly questionable argument of "might makes right". The question was not poorly informed. The research methods were knowingly extrapolated to produce results outside of the scope of the experimental model. The postulate was that the compounds in question would inhibit angiogenesis. The compounds in question do cause cessation of proliferation of endothelial cells in purified cell culture. The compounds in question do cause the mass of a tumor in a mouse model to decrease. There is no factual link, however, to prove that the tumors decreased in size due to a lack of endothelial proliferation. That conclusion was assumed from purified cell culture. To give perspective: these same compounds cause many other cell types to display apoptotic, necrotic, or stasis behavior. The action was not specific to cells involved with the formation of vasculature.
The patent, as submitted by the company, will state that these compounds act by inhibiting the growth of vasculature in tumor models. The supporting evidence, however, will have nothing to do with the growth of endothelial cells inside of a tumor. The supporting evidence will be gleaned entirely from purified cell cultures. When the tumors themselves are examined the only observation made will be the mass of the tumor. The observations will have little to do with the pathology of the tissues.
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is to require that a company holding a patent actually be using that patent in a product
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The upside: Many more jobs are created to keep people using systems which do nothing but secure the holding on a patent.
The downside: The cost of legitimate goods and services is raised to cover the business cost of maintaining the unneeded processes.
The parallels: Governments work this way. They sell overpriced goods and services ("who will build roads?") in order to mask the money that politicians and businessment shove into their own pockets. Banks do the same. Insurance companies do the same.
Patents are big business. The cost of pharmaceuticals (and other useful products) is not so high because of the outright cost of research. The cost of products is high because you're paying the premium to provide high-paying busywork jobs for the executives' sons, daughters, neices and nephews--especially in lucrative positions in the legal departments hunting down anyone who may be infringing on their useless patents.
I'm not convinced by poster child arguments.
Most patent auditors have little or no technical experience with the patent that they are auditing. They are not required to replicate experiments or scientifically evaluate the supporting arguments. As long as there is enough contact back and forth with the patent lawyers pushing the application then all they really do is rubber stamp the bottom line.
A patent on a concrete life preserver will only prevent other people from manufaturing the product. It will not guarantee that a concrete life preserver will save lives.
Since when are patent auditors "skilled in the art"? I suppose you believe that all system administrators are intimately familiar with all aspects of their system as opposed to walking robots with certifications and social connections.
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Pharma (15 years) - A chemical composition for curing a specific ailment or modifying a biological process. All Pharma patents must be vetted.
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Background...
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That is, the research must be done showing that it actually does what it CLAIMS it does
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Have you heard of angiogenesis inhibitors? They are chemical compounds which battle cancer by preventing tumours from growing additional blood vessels. If the tumour cannot grow more blood vessels then it, theoretically, will starve itself into remission.
I was at a project meeting one time where the department head was singing the praises of the latest round of developmental angiogenesis inhibitors. He was pointing specifically to data from mouse models which showed that, after the compound had been introduced to a mouse with a tumour, the tumour decreased in size and entered remission as opposed to mice who had been given a placebo. The size of the tumour was determined by cutting it out of the mouse and using a balance to determine its mass.
To verify that the compound was doing what it was supposed to be doing I asked if anyone checked the vasculature in the tumour. Were the veins and arteries smaller or thinner? Was there evidence that the tumour decreased in size due to reduced vasculature? Was there any evidence that the compound was working as an "angiogenesis inhibitor" and not by another mechanism? The department head looked like a fish out of water for five seconds and then began a 30 second rant about how I was an incompetent fool that needed to go to graduate school before I understood anything about biochemistry.
Needless to say the company was still pursuing filing a patent for the new "angiogenesis inhibitors" when I left. It never ends.
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Why is it when a bug is found in software it's fixed (with notable exceptions), but when bad laws are written, they're left to afflict everyone?
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Laws make money by invoking fines or providing clients for the incarceration system. Freedom makes no money.
Capitalism is great. Government regulated capitalism is communism. If the government passes additional regulations on social behavior then it's socialism. If the government tells you that it's for your own protection and good then it's facism. It's all about making money by skewing the laws in favor of those writing them.
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It is a well-known fact that you have to take the chemical patent literature with a huge grain of salt (no pun intended!) because many times, the reaciton simply doesn't work the way it is reported to work
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Would you be willing to write this down in official testimony to an attorney for me? I worked for an old German manager at a large pharmaceutical company in Chicago. He would give me procedures from patents or from minor journals and then tell me to make it work. Often I would not be using the same reactants as the published procedure but similar reactants with analogous reactive centers. If the reaction protocol would not work he had absolutely no problem with calling me an incompetent fool (to my face) and writing me up as such in my annual performance reviews. HR was no help. They know nothing of chemistry and, from their vantage point of ignorance, the word of a PhD with 14 years of experience ("this should work!") was much better than the explanation of the FNG ("the substrates are different, it's not the same reaction, and he knows it.") After four years of this kind of professional harassment I quit my job but was in a state of psychological mayhem. I landed in eight months of unemployment and find myself unable to secure another career. HR departments at large pharma companies will frequently fax along copies of the last performance review as references. There was no way for me to fend off the blackballing of this self-important German schmuck.
What does this have to do with bad patents? At the core the patent office is like the HR department at a large company. They have almost no understanding of the technical material involved and, as long as the paperwork is filled out correctly and the credentials are acceptable, then the patent auditor does little more than cross the Ts and dot the Is.