Some meetings seem like college classes where everyone is copying down pages of notes about what is being displayed instead of listening to what is being said or actually trying to comprehend the subject matter.
These days, most college classes seem to be like business meetings where everyone sits around and listens to the prof instead of taking notes.
When I went back for another degree, I was surprised that in many classes, I was the only one taking notes.
Listening to what is said helps with learning, but writing it down strongly reinforces it. And then reading through it later or referring to it for specific information helps, too.
It might be a lot better if the profs quit using power point or projecting slides on the screen and went back to regular lectures instead. I think that handing out copies of their power point or their slides just encourages students to think there is no reason to take notes.
I think the gap between DVD+R and set top players is pretty much decreased to the point that there isn't much difference between DVD-R and DVD+R compatibility with them.
I saw some figures showing the percentage of "modern" DVD players and the difference in the number of models that could handle DVD+R and those that could handle DVD-R but not DVD+R was only something like 2% to 4%.
Prior art should really cover just about anything written in any source that may pertain to the patent, not just to research journals and previous patents.
That is, to me, one of the most wrong-headed parts of the patent system.
It could work if there were extremely severe penalties for everyone involved in the filing, especially the applicants and attorneys, if prior art was later found. That means any prior art, not just that which they could have found with a moderate effort.
If it should be discovered in conjunction with a court trial, then how about immediate revocation of the patent, the applicants and all attorneys and anyone else involved being personally liable for all of the defendant's legal fees in the matter, and none of the involved would be able to be involved in any patent process for a period of at least ten years.
If the prior art is not discovered until after a court trial, treble damages including the greater of the award or the amount requested, if any, whether or not the defendant was even able to pay it. So if someone filed suit asking for one billion dollars for a patent infringement and after the trial you found prior art that invalidated the patent, they would have to pay you three billion dollars plus treble legal fees and other damages even if you were unable to pay a dime.
And we need a much wider definition of "prior art". The current definition is too restrictive and clearly allows patents that had been invented by others earlier.
I do understand what SPF is supposed to do, but what I am saying is that what it does combined with the way people set up their records, it is pretty much useless to me.
Consider the panix.com SPF record above. Assuming that the IP addresses covered include their whole domain and the presence of the "?all", what they are saying is that any e-mail with a return address of panix.com should be treated as legitimate.
Then there is the "~all" SOFTFAIL. So you might reject those or you might not, depending on how hard-assed you want to be about it.
If the only option was "-all" and only known, identified, legitimate SMTP servers could be listed, I'd be more impressed. If you're going to use "~all" or "?all" in the record, then you might as well not even bother creating the record. And listing your entire address block or blocks is just plain silly.
For what it's worth, we do have SPF records with "-all". It doesn't seem to have cut down on bounces of spams with forged e-mail addresses at all.
I don't trust SPF enough to rely on it much. The only thing I use it for is to look up specific domains and find out what e-mail servers they use so I can whitelist those to skip the graylisting.
But any so-called legitimate marketeer can create an SPF record for their domains.
If you want to see how badly spf can be abused by regular ISPs, look at the SPF record for panix.com:
panix.com text = "v=spf1 ip4:166.84.0.0/16 ip4:198.7.7.0/24 ?all"
I assume they just added their entire IP blocks to the SPF record which totally defeats the purpose as far as I'm concerned. Their SPF record is worse than useless.
So any customer of panix.com in those net blocks can have a trojan on their computer using an e-mail address from panix.com and trick you into thinking it is legitimate.
Nope. For those domains that we receive legitimate e-mail from, I'll use their SPF record to find out what their addresses are and add them to the whitelist. But that is as far as it goes.
He will have far greater options with a regular degree.
An on-line degree is unlikely to open the doors that a degree from a regular college or university will.
Even from a regular college or university, the choice of the school can make a big difference. Years ago, I sent in an application to one company in New York City but never heard back. I mentioned that to someone who was familiar with that company. According to him, it is nearly impossible for anyone without a degree from an Ivy League School to get any kind of development job there.
So the choice of school does matter. A degree from an on-line school won't open near as many doors as from a regular school.
People who like particular songs may only find one song on an album that they like.
But people who like music, not just a particular song, often enjoy all or nearly all the songs on the album, the ones that got air play and the ones that didn't.
Sure, there may be one or more songs on the album that are well known because of their air play, but that doesn't mean that the rest of the songs are filler. In fact, if they are just filler, than the music group is just filler and you've been duped by the record companies into liking the one song.
I have very few albums that have only one good song. In fact, I can't think of any. But I have plenty of albums where every song on the album is a real gem.
It all comes down to whether you think for yourself or you allow the music industry to think for you.
Not long ago, after watching too many movies that take place in New York City over the years, I got curious what housing expenses in New York would be like and so I looked up some realtos on the Internet and looked through their listings.
After seeing that, it would take an enormous pay increase to induce me to move to New York City.
I don't know that I could take the crowds there, anyway.
If I was going to move to the East Coast, I think I'd rather head for Maine, Vermont, or New Hampshire.
All we know is that it will blow up again someday.
How do we know that?
Because it has erupted before?
In fact, we have no idea whether or not it will erupt again. It may or it may not -- the only way to know is to wait for it to happen. All we can say is that going by past eruptions, it is likely to erupt again at some time in the future.
Even if it does erupt again, it might not be a supervolcano the next time around.
One problem I've had when dealing with customers is that I try to explain why something is like it is.
Most customers don't want that. All they really want to know is whether or not it can do what they want. When you try to explain how it works, they just think you are either trying to snow them or that you think they are dumb.
If I thought they were dumb, I'd just tell them that it does what they want. I only try to explain anything to those who I think can easily understand the issue.
I don't know about all states, but around here, Texas, I understand that non-competes are pretty much enforceable if the employee has not received information that is clearly of a confidential and propietary nature after signing the non-compete.
The rule for years was that you had to be given the confidential information at the time you signed the non-compete for it to be enforceable. A waiting period of even a few hours made them unenforceable.
A recent court decision has changed that. As I understand it, the confidential information may now be provided a reasonable time after the signing of the agreement.
Employers still require employees to sign the agreements. I really think that the purpose is to discourage them from leaving to work for a competitor by a clear threat to file suit if they do.
This is off the top of my head, so there may be an error in it.
Until last fall, non-compete contracts were very hard to enforce in Texas.
First of all, the reason for the non-compete agreement is that the employee is provided with confidential information that should not be given to the competition. If the employee has not been provided with confidential information, then the non-compete agreement is not enforceable since without that information, there is no reason to prohibit him from working for a competitor.
Prior to a recent court decision, the confidential information had to be provided to the employee at the time he signed the non-compete agreement. Even a waiting period of a few hours later the same day was enough to render the agreement unenforceable. Now, the agreement is enforceable as long as the employee was provided with the confidential information. Even then, it is best for the confidential information to be given to the employee soon after signing th eagreement, the sooner the better.
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer so don't even think about considering this to be legal advice.
I'm having serious doubts about eMachines computers.
I know two people who lost their power supplies within a couple of weeks of each other. In one case, the failure of the power supply apparently wiped out the motherboard and in the other case, the failur eof the power supply appears to have wiped out the CPU.
I'm not at all sure that it is worth replacing the motherboard or CPU.
I appreaciate learning this because it certainly increases the cost of getting it back up and running.
For the typical home user, I think the COA is mainly there to give a slight psychological effect. They're not very likely to file a lawsuit against someone for installing the OS on two different computers. But the home user sees the pretty little intricately done certificate and is supposed to think "I have two computers so I'd better buy another pretty little intricately done certificate".
That is probably why they now make the COA so that it is stuck permanently to one computer. The user is supposed to think that he can't move the OS from the computer after it fails and put it on another computer since he won't have a pretty little intricately done certificate to stick to that computer.
Of course, that can backfire. I've bought a number of used computers from a leasing company after the lease expired that had no OS but did have the pretty little intricately done certificate attached to the side. If I had wanted to run Windows on them instead of Linux or OpenBSD, all I would need to do is install the proper version and use the key from that sticker.
Of course, the BSA would not accept the pretty little intricately done certificate as meaning anything significant. Of course, they might see the stickers on the side and think that when I heard they were coming, I took a pirated copy of Windows off the computer and installed Linux. After all, the presence of a COA without a valid invoice for the license must mean that piracy is running rampant.
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These days, most college classes seem to be like business meetings where everyone sits around and listens to the prof instead of taking notes.
When I went back for another degree, I was surprised that in many classes, I was the only one taking notes.
Listening to what is said helps with learning, but writing it down strongly reinforces it. And then reading through it later or referring to it for specific information helps, too.
It might be a lot better if the profs quit using power point or projecting slides on the screen and went back to regular lectures instead. I think that handing out copies of their power point or their slides just encourages students to think there is no reason to take notes.
I think the gap between DVD+R and set top players is pretty much decreased to the point that there isn't much difference between DVD-R and DVD+R compatibility with them.
I saw some figures showing the percentage of "modern" DVD players and the difference in the number of models that could handle DVD+R and those that could handle DVD-R but not DVD+R was only something like 2% to 4%.
As far as I'm concerned, the perfect desktop is Windowmaker.
I use it on OpenBSd and Linux and it works nearly perfect.
Prior art should really cover just about anything written in any source that may pertain to the patent, not just to research journals and previous patents.
That is, to me, one of the most wrong-headed parts of the patent system.
It could work if there were extremely severe penalties for everyone involved in the filing, especially the applicants and attorneys, if prior art was later found. That means any prior art, not just that which they could have found with a moderate effort.
If it should be discovered in conjunction with a court trial, then how about immediate revocation of the patent, the applicants and all attorneys and anyone else involved being personally liable for all of the defendant's legal fees in the matter, and none of the involved would be able to be involved in any patent process for a period of at least ten years.
If the prior art is not discovered until after a court trial, treble damages including the greater of the award or the amount requested, if any, whether or not the defendant was even able to pay it. So if someone filed suit asking for one billion dollars for a patent infringement and after the trial you found prior art that invalidated the patent, they would have to pay you three billion dollars plus treble legal fees and other damages even if you were unable to pay a dime.
And we need a much wider definition of "prior art". The current definition is too restrictive and clearly allows patents that had been invented by others earlier.
Think that might work?
I do understand what SPF is supposed to do, but what I am saying is that what it does combined with the way people set up their records, it is pretty much useless to me.
Consider the panix.com SPF record above. Assuming that the IP addresses covered include their whole domain and the presence of the "?all", what they are saying is that any e-mail with a return address of panix.com should be treated as legitimate.
Then there is the "~all" SOFTFAIL. So you might reject those or you might not, depending on how hard-assed you want to be about it.
If the only option was "-all" and only known, identified, legitimate SMTP servers could be listed, I'd be more impressed. If you're going to use "~all" or "?all" in the record, then you might as well not even bother creating the record. And listing your entire address block or blocks is just plain silly.
For what it's worth, we do have SPF records with "-all". It doesn't seem to have cut down on bounces of spams with forged e-mail addresses at all.
I don't trust SPF enough to rely on it much. The only thing I use it for is to look up specific domains and find out what e-mail servers they use so I can whitelist those to skip the graylisting.
But any so-called legitimate marketeer can create an SPF record for their domains.
If you want to see how badly spf can be abused by regular ISPs, look at the SPF record for panix.com:
panix.com text = "v=spf1 ip4:166.84.0.0/16 ip4:198.7.7.0/24 ?all"
I assume they just added their entire IP blocks to the SPF record which totally defeats the purpose as far as I'm concerned. Their SPF record is worse than useless.
So any customer of panix.com in those net blocks can have a trojan on their computer using an e-mail address from panix.com and trick you into thinking it is legitimate.
Nope. For those domains that we receive legitimate e-mail from, I'll use their SPF record to find out what their addresses are and add them to the whitelist. But that is as far as it goes.
He will have far greater options with a regular degree.
An on-line degree is unlikely to open the doors that a degree from a regular college or university will.
Even from a regular college or university, the choice of the school can make a big difference. Years ago, I sent in an application to one company in New York City but never heard back. I mentioned that to someone who was familiar with that company. According to him, it is nearly impossible for anyone without a degree from an Ivy League School to get any kind of development job there.
So the choice of school does matter. A degree from an on-line school won't open near as many doors as from a regular school.
People who like particular songs may only find one song on an album that they like.
But people who like music, not just a particular song, often enjoy all or nearly all the songs on the album, the ones that got air play and the ones that didn't.
Sure, there may be one or more songs on the album that are well known because of their air play, but that doesn't mean that the rest of the songs are filler. In fact, if they are just filler, than the music group is just filler and you've been duped by the record companies into liking the one song.
I have very few albums that have only one good song. In fact, I can't think of any. But I have plenty of albums where every song on the album is a real gem.
It all comes down to whether you think for yourself or you allow the music industry to think for you.
Never?
Then why do they typically specify "earned degrees" in the position announcements?
Not sarcastic, just interjecting a bit of humor.
Not long ago, after watching too many movies that take place in New York City over the years, I got curious what housing expenses in New York would be like and so I looked up some realtos on the Internet and looked through their listings.
After seeing that, it would take an enormous pay increase to induce me to move to New York City.
I don't know that I could take the crowds there, anyway.
If I was going to move to the East Coast, I think I'd rather head for Maine, Vermont, or New Hampshire.
New York City without a job?
That doesn't sound so bad. After all, how much can it cost to live there?
Find a $50 / month apartment (probably have to settle for a single bedroom at that price) across the street from Central Park and have a great time.
I did have a traffic accident Tuesday afternoone.
The other driver received a ticket for failure to control speed.
The last time I got a traffic citation was about 1990.
The one before that was about 1985
And before that about 1980.
Does that mean that there is a cycle of 5 years between citations and that I'm overdue for another citation?
How do we know that?
Because it has erupted before?
In fact, we have no idea whether or not it will erupt again. It may or it may not -- the only way to know is to wait for it to happen. All we can say is that going by past eruptions, it is likely to erupt again at some time in the future.
Even if it does erupt again, it might not be a supervolcano the next time around.
That bit about the lobotomy sounds about right.
One problem I've had when dealing with customers is that I try to explain why something is like it is.
Most customers don't want that. All they really want to know is whether or not it can do what they want. When you try to explain how it works, they just think you are either trying to snow them or that you think they are dumb.
If I thought they were dumb, I'd just tell them that it does what they want. I only try to explain anything to those who I think can easily understand the issue.
I don't know about all states, but around here, Texas, I understand that non-competes are pretty much enforceable if the employee has not received information that is clearly of a confidential and propietary nature after signing the non-compete.
The rule for years was that you had to be given the confidential information at the time you signed the non-compete for it to be enforceable. A waiting period of even a few hours made them unenforceable.
A recent court decision has changed that. As I understand it, the confidential information may now be provided a reasonable time after the signing of the agreement.
Employers still require employees to sign the agreements. I really think that the purpose is to discourage them from leaving to work for a competitor by a clear threat to file suit if they do.
I remember reading an article on this in Popular Science or Mechanics Illustrated back in the mid to late 60s.
I never did understand why noone else ever seemed to know of it. I figured maybe they didn't read Popular Science and Mechanics Illustrated.
It's been my theory all this time that PJ is really a pseudonym for Anna Nicole.
That theory will be disproven if SCO can manage to conduct a deposition of PJ without the help of a medium.
I don't remember ever seeing any FAA regulation that you can only fly direct lines between airports.
The DMCA is about copyrights. You cannot issue a takedown notice for material for which you do not own the copyright.
I have never seen anything that would make me believe that creating a dance move gives you some kind of copyright over that dance move.
My understanding is that your DMCA takedown notice requires that you swear under penalties of purjury that you won the copyright in question.
So what's the penalty for purjury?
This is off the top of my head, so there may be an error in it.
Until last fall, non-compete contracts were very hard to enforce in Texas.
First of all, the reason for the non-compete agreement is that the employee is provided with confidential information that should not be given to the competition. If the employee has not been provided with confidential information, then the non-compete agreement is not enforceable since without that information, there is no reason to prohibit him from working for a competitor.
Prior to a recent court decision, the confidential information had to be provided to the employee at the time he signed the non-compete agreement. Even a waiting period of a few hours later the same day was enough to render the agreement unenforceable. Now, the agreement is enforceable as long as the employee was provided with the confidential information. Even then, it is best for the confidential information to be given to the employee soon after signing th eagreement, the sooner the better.
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer so don't even think about considering this to be legal advice.
You undoubtedly encounter cheap machines much more often than I encounter them.
To the best of my knowledge, I never even laid eyes on one until maybe a year ago.
I'm having serious doubts about eMachines computers.
I know two people who lost their power supplies within a couple of weeks of each other. In one case, the failure of the power supply apparently wiped out the motherboard and in the other case, the failur eof the power supply appears to have wiped out the CPU.
I'm not at all sure that it is worth replacing the motherboard or CPU.
I appreaciate learning this because it certainly increases the cost of getting it back up and running.
For the typical home user, I think the COA is mainly there to give a slight psychological effect. They're not very likely to file a lawsuit against someone for installing the OS on two different computers. But the home user sees the pretty little intricately done certificate and is supposed to think "I have two computers so I'd better buy another pretty little intricately done certificate".
That is probably why they now make the COA so that it is stuck permanently to one computer. The user is supposed to think that he can't move the OS from the computer after it fails and put it on another computer since he won't have a pretty little intricately done certificate to stick to that computer.
Of course, that can backfire. I've bought a number of used computers from a leasing company after the lease expired that had no OS but did have the pretty little intricately done certificate attached to the side. If I had wanted to run Windows on them instead of Linux or OpenBSD, all I would need to do is install the proper version and use the key from that sticker.
Of course, the BSA would not accept the pretty little intricately done certificate as meaning anything significant. Of course, they might see the stickers on the side and think that when I heard they were coming, I took a pirated copy of Windows off the computer and installed Linux. After all, the presence of a COA without a valid invoice for the license must mean that piracy is running rampant.