Here we (still) have quite strong "restraint of trade" laws which prevent the vast majority of non-compete clauses. I have had legal advice on it. Hasn't stopped a good number of companies asking me to agree to them though.
Sounds to me like they're just trying it on. Almost every contract I've received has had something really unreasonable in it. Every one is different too, but they're all "just the standard contract". If you do contracting for any amount of time you'll hear those weasel words a *lot*.
My advice is strike it, explain that it's unreasonable and they'll very likely back down. Good luck.
There's not a snowball's chance in hell they'll extract it. It's over 1000 kilometers down. To put that in perspective I think the deepest well ever drilled (Oil well in the North Sea IIRC) was 20kms deep - 2% of the distance. The depth for most oil and gas wells is between 3 and 5 kms and just getting that far takes some serious engineering and costs a fortune.
Unsurprisingly, there's not a lot of research into drilling wells deeper than that "oil and gas window". It's a pity though, the amount of heat energy in that water would be staggering.
Has anyone ever stopped to consider just how incredibly stupid this is? You're converting a digital signal to analog via a very slow modem over a simulated voice line running over a much faster digital network.
Fax machines would have to be the most redundant technology since the floppy. Why isn't there an IP transmission option for faxes?
I'm on the beta for Windows Live Mail desktop and it's actually quite good. Decent search, rss, automatic syncing of contacts with the online version and none of the full Outlook bloat. As someone else said, you get 2GB of storage now so that's not a big deal.
But the big feature for me with Hotmail has always been the ability to download mail to a local mail client via WebDav. I've been contracting for 5 years and most companies block POP3 and SMTP connections. GMail doesn't do WebDav and I don't care what anyone says, a local client is *always* superior to a web interface.
So until Google do WebDav syncing I'll stick with Hotmail.
If they can really synthesise jet fuel they'll make a bucket load of money. Pure biodiesel is too viscous to be used at high altitude, ethanol's energy density is too low, liquid hydrogen's volume too great. There really just aren't many alternatives to good old kerosene.
The US DoD recently had a successful trial of synfuel on a B52 but it was synthesised from natural gas, which is also finite. Successful production of kerosene from sugar would be a great achievement.
The problem with "real democracy" is that there are a lot of ignorant people.
Sure as hell are. Here in Western Australia we've had daylight saving (Summer Time) rejected 3 times by referendum. Objections included worries that daylight saving would fade people's curtains, turn cow's milk sour and increase the incidence of skin cancer.
Despite the "no" votes, WA is currently undergoing a "trial" of daylight saving. 2 weeks ago, when the stunning Comet McNaught was clearly visible on the southern horizon at dusk, several people wrote to the local paper saying how much better it would have looked if the daylight saving trial hadn't occurred and the sky was darker. I shit you not.
Makes you wonder how these people tie their shoelaces in the morning.
Right now, you can buy music from iTunes, burn them to a CD or a CD-RW, then rip them in whatever format you want and that your musicplayer supports. Now, it's a hassle for consumers to go through this process [someone did write a script on the Mac to automatically do this process using a CD-RW], but it certainly works.
You can't do that without a potentially serious loss of quality though. Any music you purchase from the iTMS has already undergone lossy compression to the point that it's quite audible. If you burn it to CD and then re-rip to another lossy format the quality degrades further. So it's clearly an inferior product than the music you've bought. That's unacceptable IMHO.
For a couple grand more...
Pardon my ignorance but why are inverters so damn expensive? If you consider the electronic complexity of the average $1000 PC, stereo or LCD TV surely something that just monitors and regulates power should cost a lot less to make. Are there some crazy expensive components in there or is it more of a low volume/high margin economic reason?
Like a lot of people, I'm pretty sceptical about the claimed storage density and ability to hold charge for a long period of time.
However I think there's huge potential (excuse the pun) in coupling ultracapacitors with traditional batteries in hybrids. They can charge much more efficiently from regenerative braking or mains power, deliver big bursts of power back for acceleration and charge the batteries with any excess.
There was a comprehensive article on flow batteries in New Scientist a week ago (subscription only unfortunately). It said that flow batteries currently only have about half the storage density of lead acid batteries so right now there are better alternatives for vehicle applications. However they really shine for fixed locations that need to store large amounts of power such as wind farms. You can scale up the amount of storage capacity simply by adding additional chemicals and larger tanks.
Interesting. IANAL, but my understanding of consumer law here in Australia is that you always have a right of resale or, at the very least, transfer rights between machines.
If I was buying Vista, I'd want to know that I could sell or transfer the license just as easily with a downloaded version as a boxed copy. Say 6 months later I belatedly see the light, decide to upgrade my machine to Ubuntu and sell my Vista license on eBay. I imagine that it'll be a lot harder to convince people it's genuine without a box, a physical DVD and a holographic sticker. Plus, I have to pay for a blank DVD to burn the download on.
Regardless of the software you're buying that's a terrible value proposition. It doesn't make sense to me unless they're offering a substantial discount.
On the other hand, I think this will actually be a good thing in countries like the UK where retail prices never reflect a fair currency conversion. (You poor Poms really do get screwed) A guess a lot of that mark up is tax, which for the moment most governments don't seen to have caught onto yet...
Not yet. I think the Slashdot crowd massively underestimates the impact that experienced producers and recording techs have on music quality and popularity (not that the 2 always go together). Then of course there's good management and yes, marketing.
Of course there will be times when a band/artist gets enough right to make the charts (or even just a decent living) independently. However, there's an obvious problem with this idea that bands should just record their own music, put it out there and then allow market forces to pick the best stuff.
What if they can't afford a decent studio, or don't have the discipline to do enough takes until the sound is right, or the drummer sucks? Good production has turned a lot of bad music into good. An artist can be incredibly gifted musically but that doesn't mean they know the best way to record their music, or the point where a guitar solo stretches from cool to self indulgent wankery.
I think the tide will turn, but it needs to involve more people than just the artists themselves. I think we'll need to see a bunch of small to medium level labels dedicated to talent scouting, production, recording tech, management and marketing before the biggies start to get squeezed.
If you read through the keynote, you can see that their goal is to take 1% of the phone market (USA, IIRC)
Actually they're after 1% of the global phone market which is 10 million units out of a *billion* expected handset sales this year from all manufacturers. When it comes to phones, the European and Asian markets dwarf that of the US.
So in this context, claiming that the iPhone is 5 years ahead of all its (global) competitors is a real stretch. They've absolutely nailed the interface, no doubt. I love what they've done with call management and voicemail too. But it's currently a 2G phone that doesn't do video calls/recording or direct content downloads from the network. It doesn't even look like you can wirelessly sync it to iTunes on your own network. (Interesting how everyone panned the Zune about that but nobody seems to have noticed this time)
IMHO the iPhone is a masterpiece in the making. It needs to be 3G or better. It needs to work without a computer. My guess is that's why the US is getting it first. Europe and Asia are way ahead in terms of 3G rollouts. I'd be astonished if the iPhone's still 2G in 2008.
I wonder if that was in response to the nuts who created the Republic of Minerva.
Always loved this one. In 1971, some crazy bastard from Vegas with more dollars than sense rolls up at a partially submerged atoll in the Pacific with several barge loads of sand, creates a small island and declares independence. Various Pacific nations find this a bit of a worry and about 6 months later, they get conquered and annexed by Tonga. Apparently the Tongan King himself came along with a few troops and a brass band!
Anyway, the "government in exile" is still trying to get the joint back. My guess is that UN Convention was drafted to prevent more "nations" popping up like this.
It'll be interesting to see what they find in Lake Vostok, which is a freshwater lake as big as Lake Ontario and has been sealed under Antarctic ice for up to a million years.
FTFFAQ: What if my CD has copy protection applied to it?
You cannot circumvent an access control technological protection measure (TPM) on a CD or music file to make a format-shift copy. However, most CDs and all vinyl records, do not have TPMs. Most record manufacturers still do not apply TPMs to their CDs.
So it's quite clear where the Aust government's loyalties lie. You only have the right to make a copy if the manufacturer allows it. So it looks like we now have an Aussie DMCA, where it's technically illegal to hold down the shift key when inserting a CD into your PC.
I'm pretty much with you on this one, but I think it's more important to concentrate on music quality and DRM restrictions than physical media. There's nothing wrong with lossless FLAC files on a hard drive rather than CDs if you can still listen to an album as it was intended.
Like you, I have never and will never buy from the iTMS because the audio quality is lower and I'm locked into Apple. I would happily buy online if the music was CD quality (or better), compressed with a lossless codec and not restricted to Apple software/hardware.
As far as DRM goes I've already had the frustration of buying CDs that I can't easily rip for my own use. I'd put up with DRM if it didn't restrict how I can listen to music I own, but the companies that impose it (and Apple are actually the worst offenders at this point) do so for their own greedy purposes.
And what about when your CDs are scratched? If someone did music downloads right, you'd be able to register everything you'd bought and download it again whenever you wanted. You'd also be saving the huge amount of energy, material and fuel used to ship around a relatively small amount of data.
There's no inherent problem with paying for downloadable music, it's just not being done right yet.
In fact, it's beingdonenow. All your points are valid challenges, but the QoS and handover stuff has been worked out. Power is certainly an issue for Wi-Fi, but given that you're most likely to use that at home or at work where you can recharge it's a solvable issue. Alternatively, you could start connecting GSM Pico-cells to local networks as Boeing and Airbus are doing for in flight calling.
The enduring problem is, the carriers are still looking to route the entire call back through their network (and hence charge you for it). That's just not necessary and I look forward to the day they lose their grip.
Interesting to see that TFA is already predicting that the iPhone will bomb because it can't compete with subsidised handsets in the US. I really wish this meme would die.
For one thing, of course there's no such thing as a free phone. You just pay the cost over time through higher call plans. Admittedly, you may get some benefit of scale when the network buys handsets in bulk but there's no reason Apple couldn't do that too. More likely some company will just start offering much cheaper pre-paid SIM plans like everywhere else in the world.
Another thing, the US carrier market is only a minor fraction of the world market. There are 1.5 *billion* handsets in the world. There are around 300M US citizens. Do the math. The European and Asian markets are enormously larger and people there are used to buying unlocked handsets so that they can connect to any network they like. Here in Australia we've had number portability for years.
Lastly, independence from carriers is a *good* thing. We need to stop carriers dictating phone features. I'd like to see a phone that can switch to WiFi when it gets a signal, or peer to peer when I'm close to the person I'm calling. Think the carriers want that? There's no technical reason that phones can't do this today, but the longer the carriers control the phones people buy, the longer it'll take to happen.
Slashdot Mirror
Here we (still) have quite strong "restraint of trade" laws which prevent the vast majority of non-compete clauses. I have had legal advice on it. Hasn't stopped a good number of companies asking me to agree to them though.
Sounds to me like they're just trying it on. Almost every contract I've received has had something really unreasonable in it. Every one is different too, but they're all "just the standard contract". If you do contracting for any amount of time you'll hear those weasel words a *lot*.
My advice is strike it, explain that it's unreasonable and they'll very likely back down. Good luck.
I stand corrected! Great read.
There's not a snowball's chance in hell they'll extract it. It's over 1000 kilometers down. To put that in perspective I think the deepest well ever drilled (Oil well in the North Sea IIRC) was 20kms deep - 2% of the distance. The depth for most oil and gas wells is between 3 and 5 kms and just getting that far takes some serious engineering and costs a fortune.
Unsurprisingly, there's not a lot of research into drilling wells deeper than that "oil and gas window". It's a pity though, the amount of heat energy in that water would be staggering.
Has anyone ever stopped to consider just how incredibly stupid this is? You're converting a digital signal to analog via a very slow modem over a simulated voice line running over a much faster digital network.
Fax machines would have to be the most redundant technology since the floppy. Why isn't there an IP transmission option for faxes?
I'm on the beta for Windows Live Mail desktop and it's actually quite good. Decent search, rss, automatic syncing of contacts with the online version and none of the full Outlook bloat. As someone else said, you get 2GB of storage now so that's not a big deal.
But the big feature for me with Hotmail has always been the ability to download mail to a local mail client via WebDav. I've been contracting for 5 years and most companies block POP3 and SMTP connections. GMail doesn't do WebDav and I don't care what anyone says, a local client is *always* superior to a web interface.
So until Google do WebDav syncing I'll stick with Hotmail.
If they can really synthesise jet fuel they'll make a bucket load of money. Pure biodiesel is too viscous to be used at high altitude, ethanol's energy density is too low, liquid hydrogen's volume too great. There really just aren't many alternatives to good old kerosene.
The US DoD recently had a successful trial of synfuel on a B52 but it was synthesised from natural gas, which is also finite. Successful production of kerosene from sugar would be a great achievement.
The problem with "real democracy" is that there are a lot of ignorant people.
Sure as hell are. Here in Western Australia we've had daylight saving (Summer Time) rejected 3 times by referendum. Objections included worries that daylight saving would fade people's curtains, turn cow's milk sour and increase the incidence of skin cancer.
Despite the "no" votes, WA is currently undergoing a "trial" of daylight saving. 2 weeks ago, when the stunning Comet McNaught was clearly visible on the southern horizon at dusk, several people wrote to the local paper saying how much better it would have looked if the daylight saving trial hadn't occurred and the sky was darker. I shit you not.
Makes you wonder how these people tie their shoelaces in the morning.
Right now, you can buy music from iTunes, burn them to a CD or a CD-RW, then rip them in whatever format you want and that your musicplayer supports. Now, it's a hassle for consumers to go through this process [someone did write a script on the Mac to automatically do this process using a CD-RW], but it certainly works.
You can't do that without a potentially serious loss of quality though. Any music you purchase from the iTMS has already undergone lossy compression to the point that it's quite audible. If you burn it to CD and then re-rip to another lossy format the quality degrades further. So it's clearly an inferior product than the music you've bought. That's unacceptable IMHO.
For a couple grand more...
Pardon my ignorance but why are inverters so damn expensive? If you consider the electronic complexity of the average $1000 PC, stereo or LCD TV surely something that just monitors and regulates power should cost a lot less to make. Are there some crazy expensive components in there or is it more of a low volume/high margin economic reason?
Like a lot of people, I'm pretty sceptical about the claimed storage density and ability to hold charge for a long period of time.
However I think there's huge potential (excuse the pun) in coupling ultracapacitors with traditional batteries in hybrids. They can charge much more efficiently from regenerative braking or mains power, deliver big bursts of power back for acceleration and charge the batteries with any excess.
There was a comprehensive article on flow batteries in New Scientist a week ago (subscription only unfortunately). It said that flow batteries currently only have about half the storage density of lead acid batteries so right now there are better alternatives for vehicle applications. However they really shine for fixed locations that need to store large amounts of power such as wind farms. You can scale up the amount of storage capacity simply by adding additional chemicals and larger tanks.
Interesting. IANAL, but my understanding of consumer law here in Australia is that you always have a right of resale or, at the very least, transfer rights between machines.
Ah, just saw that it's North America only. Back to zero value proposition then...
If I was buying Vista, I'd want to know that I could sell or transfer the license just as easily with a downloaded version as a boxed copy. Say 6 months later I belatedly see the light, decide to upgrade my machine to Ubuntu and sell my Vista license on eBay. I imagine that it'll be a lot harder to convince people it's genuine without a box, a physical DVD and a holographic sticker. Plus, I have to pay for a blank DVD to burn the download on.
Regardless of the software you're buying that's a terrible value proposition. It doesn't make sense to me unless they're offering a substantial discount.
On the other hand, I think this will actually be a good thing in countries like the UK where retail prices never reflect a fair currency conversion. (You poor Poms really do get screwed) A guess a lot of that mark up is tax, which for the moment most governments don't seen to have caught onto yet...
Is there really that much of an explosion/fire risk for very small and microbatteries?
Sure is
Not yet. I think the Slashdot crowd massively underestimates the impact that experienced producers and recording techs have on music quality and popularity (not that the 2 always go together). Then of course there's good management and yes, marketing.
Of course there will be times when a band/artist gets enough right to make the charts (or even just a decent living) independently. However, there's an obvious problem with this idea that bands should just record their own music, put it out there and then allow market forces to pick the best stuff.
What if they can't afford a decent studio, or don't have the discipline to do enough takes until the sound is right, or the drummer sucks? Good production has turned a lot of bad music into good. An artist can be incredibly gifted musically but that doesn't mean they know the best way to record their music, or the point where a guitar solo stretches from cool to self indulgent wankery.
I think the tide will turn, but it needs to involve more people than just the artists themselves. I think we'll need to see a bunch of small to medium level labels dedicated to talent scouting, production, recording tech, management and marketing before the biggies start to get squeezed.
If you read through the keynote, you can see that their goal is to take 1% of the phone market (USA, IIRC)
Actually they're after 1% of the global phone market which is 10 million units out of a *billion* expected handset sales this year from all manufacturers. When it comes to phones, the European and Asian markets dwarf that of the US.
So in this context, claiming that the iPhone is 5 years ahead of all its (global) competitors is a real stretch. They've absolutely nailed the interface, no doubt. I love what they've done with call management and voicemail too. But it's currently a 2G phone that doesn't do video calls/recording or direct content downloads from the network. It doesn't even look like you can wirelessly sync it to iTunes on your own network. (Interesting how everyone panned the Zune about that but nobody seems to have noticed this time)
IMHO the iPhone is a masterpiece in the making. It needs to be 3G or better. It needs to work without a computer. My guess is that's why the US is getting it first. Europe and Asia are way ahead in terms of 3G rollouts. I'd be astonished if the iPhone's still 2G in 2008.
I wonder if that was in response to the nuts who created the Republic of Minerva.
Always loved this one. In 1971, some crazy bastard from Vegas with more dollars than sense rolls up at a partially submerged atoll in the Pacific with several barge loads of sand, creates a small island and declares independence. Various Pacific nations find this a bit of a worry and about 6 months later, they get conquered and annexed by Tonga. Apparently the Tongan King himself came along with a few troops and a brass band!
Anyway, the "government in exile" is still trying to get the joint back. My guess is that UN Convention was drafted to prevent more "nations" popping up like this.
Pretty soon. Possibly even next year. Hopefully the Russians won't proceed until all the contamination risks have been averted.
From the FAQ:
Q: What does XNA stand for?
A: XNA's Not Acronymed
Seems even the Evil Empire has a sense of humour.
It'll be interesting to see what they find in Lake Vostok, which is a freshwater lake as big as Lake Ontario and has been sealed under Antarctic ice for up to a million years.
Could be the perfect test for a Cryobot mission to Europa
is here
FTFFAQ:
What if my CD has copy protection applied to it?
You cannot circumvent an access control technological protection measure (TPM) on a CD or music file to make a format-shift copy. However, most CDs and all vinyl records, do not have TPMs. Most record manufacturers still do not apply TPMs to their CDs.
So it's quite clear where the Aust government's loyalties lie. You only have the right to make a copy if the manufacturer allows it. So it looks like we now have an Aussie DMCA, where it's technically illegal to hold down the shift key when inserting a CD into your PC.
I'm pretty much with you on this one, but I think it's more important to concentrate on music quality and DRM restrictions than physical media. There's nothing wrong with lossless FLAC files on a hard drive rather than CDs if you can still listen to an album as it was intended.
Like you, I have never and will never buy from the iTMS because the audio quality is lower and I'm locked into Apple. I would happily buy online if the music was CD quality (or better), compressed with a lossless codec and not restricted to Apple software/hardware.
As far as DRM goes I've already had the frustration of buying CDs that I can't easily rip for my own use. I'd put up with DRM if it didn't restrict how I can listen to music I own, but the companies that impose it (and Apple are actually the worst offenders at this point) do so for their own greedy purposes.
And what about when your CDs are scratched? If someone did music downloads right, you'd be able to register everything you'd bought and download it again whenever you wanted. You'd also be saving the huge amount of energy, material and fuel used to ship around a relatively small amount of data.
There's no inherent problem with paying for downloadable music, it's just not being done right yet.
I didn't say it was easy. I said it was possible.
In fact, it's being done now. All your points are valid challenges, but the QoS and handover stuff has been worked out. Power is certainly an issue for Wi-Fi, but given that you're most likely to use that at home or at work where you can recharge it's a solvable issue. Alternatively, you could start connecting GSM Pico-cells to local networks as Boeing and Airbus are doing for in flight calling.
The enduring problem is, the carriers are still looking to route the entire call back through their network (and hence charge you for it). That's just not necessary and I look forward to the day they lose their grip.
Interesting to see that TFA is already predicting that the iPhone will bomb because it can't compete with subsidised handsets in the US. I really wish this meme would die.
For one thing, of course there's no such thing as a free phone. You just pay the cost over time through higher call plans. Admittedly, you may get some benefit of scale when the network buys handsets in bulk but there's no reason Apple couldn't do that too. More likely some company will just start offering much cheaper pre-paid SIM plans like everywhere else in the world.
Another thing, the US carrier market is only a minor fraction of the world market. There are 1.5 *billion* handsets in the world. There are around 300M US citizens. Do the math. The European and Asian markets are enormously larger and people there are used to buying unlocked handsets so that they can connect to any network they like. Here in Australia we've had number portability for years.
Lastly, independence from carriers is a *good* thing. We need to stop carriers dictating phone features. I'd like to see a phone that can switch to WiFi when it gets a signal, or peer to peer when I'm close to the person I'm calling. Think the carriers want that? There's no technical reason that phones can't do this today, but the longer the carriers control the phones people buy, the longer it'll take to happen.