If a government employee works with sensitive data and has his computer infected with malware due to his own mistake (esp. the types in cybersecurity), he should be fired and so should the networking guy who should have offloaded the sensitive data to a computer not connected to the Internet. This is what I consider unforgivable incompetence.
If I want to purchase services from a provider available to me that prioritizes YouTube and Netflix over Torrent traffic, why the heck shouldn't I be able to?
Precisely. So let me just get right on having all of the cities in the USA revoke the monopolies they've granted to various ISPs and grant any company equal access to the taxpayer-funded cable that has been laid.
Because, as it stands right now, I don't have choice between anything but ATT DSL (thinking about caps), Time Warner Cable (thinking about caps), or dial-up. And I live in one of the ten biggest cities in the country!
That's what I thought. I mean, I didn't think you'd have to lie about PJ's work to recognize her contributions to geekdom or whatever.
I think I should fish around on/. and use my legal contacts to find some people who'd be willing to co-blog with me in a (relatively) unbiased and informative manner about IP/cyberlaw issues. Maybe Slashdot would post an article about me giving mouth-to-mouth to save the last dodo on earth a century ago.
Another fun cost comparison is a realistic estimate of the sum of all local TV stations, at least a hundred million industry wide total to reach a million or so viewers
Only a million people in the US watch NBC, ABC, FOX, and CBS combined over a full year?
While you're (hopefully) still here, can you shed any light on the persistent urban legend we Austinites have regarding the city planners in the 90s intentionally keeping the major arteries of Mopac, 360, and I35 shitty in order to discourage people from moving to Austin and in hopes of keeping ATX small? (Obviously they failed miserably in everything except making commuting nearly unbearable).
I'd just love to find a method that has the other side's lawyer able to accept the entire contract within an hour.
You're never going to find a competent lawyer willing to approve a $30K contract in an hour. I think that fact alone would likely be grounds for a finding of malpractice if the contract ended up screwing over his client.
This scenario would really play out in under an hour if the other client forewent (what is the past tense of "forego"?) legal representation itself.
But yeah, I hear you. My professional interest as an attorney is in things being more complicated, so that I have more work. But my personal interest as a human being is in all things being easily done right.
You can't get that with boilerplate, because they aren't standard, well known, and tested.
No, it's pretty much definitional. "Boilerplate" is standard language everyone uses. It's practically guaranteed that it has become boilerplate because it is standard, well-known, and tested in court.
See if your local bar association provides free Westlaw access in their offices. If they do, you should know you can find a lot of good contract language on Westlaw that has been tested. I think they even have a forms database that is fully searchable. I'm not sure how much would be relevant, but you could check.
You'd then make a mint off of recommending the right combination of contract clauses.
There is already boilerplate out there. You can buy a book like http://www.amazon.com/Practical-Software-Licensing-Licensees-Licensors/dp/1604420901/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1293905895&sr=8-1 and run with it. It comes with forms you can use. In fact, this is what most lawyers do, even at the biggest law firms in the world. They go with language that has been litigated in court already, and change a bit to glue the clauses together. This is not really as easy as it sounds. Just like how an engineer can design a bridge, but modifications likely need to be made based on the soil, perhaps the saline content in the air, etc. Hell, if you're a programmer, you already know that programming once and deploying across Windows, OSX, and Linux is not even that easy. Want Python and curses? Well, give up your aspirations with Windows! When I was in undergrad in 2002, it was well known that Java's goal of cross-platformality (??) exceeded its reach. Why would the law be any different?
But good cut and paste cannot happen. There is too much interplay between language, structure, and clauses. You can make a decent contract, but you'd still need someone to look over the combination of clauses you made. It might be cheaper, but I just don't think you can have a "click the exes in the HTML form and get a great contract spat out."
If I were a business owner, I wouldn't risk a $30K contract if I could pay someone $1-2K to draft a K for me (I could). You won't find a big law firm that is that cheap. I had a software licenses professor in law school, and he told us point blank that there are probably only five or six software licenses lawyers in the US that are really any good (they all work for big shops and firms like Fish & Richardson and probably Knobbe). I'm inclined to agree that there are very few, but "five or six" is probably off by an order of magnitude. My experience working for a federal judge supports the assertion that most lawyers are not all that good at what they do. But then, most lawyers are inexpensive.
This is my just my opinion, though. And I don't expect to end up practicing software license law for a living, so I'm not trying to protect my livelihood here. I'm expressing my legitimate concern that such a goal is untenable. Get a form book like the one above if you want to save money. There are other books that take you line by line and explain how to change text.
But keep in mind that if you screw up you have no one to sue for malpractice!
Actually, I take everything above back after reading a bit more about your situation. You could do it if there were no negotiation between the two parties, but you just gave a client a contract and said, "Take it or leave it." Alternatively, next time, don't use a lawyer. Have the contract be a "work for hire" and keep the copyright for the contract yourself. Then just change it to fit your needs.
But yeah, again, no one to sue for malpractice if you do that and something screws up.
Just asked my wife: She said her hospital has a rule that a doctor cannot accept patients after being awake 24 hours. Instead, someone else has to see the patient.
It would really solve the whole negotiating a contract challenge of any large project.
While it's a neat-o concept, my opinion as a lawyer who has worked in software/copyright licenses before, having a "GPL" for "large [business] projects" is most likely a spectacularly terrible idea.
Well, as a lawyer, I'd love to be asked to work on any litigation arising out of such a deal, as I would make a mint off the years of subsequent court battles. With large projects, you ought to draft a new contract every time because the needs of the parties are just plain going to be different every time. If not, then the project is probably not as large as you think it is. Or maybe our definitions of "large" are not the same.
Bear in mind the GPL, for example, is the product of years of discussions between academics, lawyers, and programmers, and it still has had to be updated twice because of loopholes.
Interesting. Nearly 100% of the courses at my law school were graded on a curve (seminars and very small classes were the exception), and this is the norm at top law schools in the US. My engineering friends in undergrad (I was pure math) told me their classes tended to be on a curve. Mine tended to be on a curve in proof-based classes (think real analysis, algebraic structures, number theory) and not on a curve in homework/procedure-based classes (think applied complex analysis, PDEs, linear algebra).
College is a choice, if students decide to squander it, banning laptops won't fix it.
Unfortunately, when classes are graded on a curve, you're going to have unqualified people getting Bs and graduating without learning much, since everyone is harming their learning with laptops except a few of the top students.
One reason I'm against grading on a curve is because you run the risk of getting something engineered by a guy who skated by on the backs of his more lazy classmates.
And why exactly is the US gov using Boeing?They can't even handle their own fighter jet construction? What does that say about technical competence of those employed by the military?
This isn't really all that true. The most prestigious investment banks in the US recruit way more heavily from Harvard English undergrad programs than they do from applied mathematics programs at top state schools like The University of Texas.
I was in Uni in a precisely dated "last of the old" time slots - 1993-1997. A typical undergrad course = 2 textbooks, "40 podcasts" and your choice of "2 answers per podcast + 1 office hour". Thanks to the RIAA's screaming, we now know that 40 podcasts =... $0! And now the Two-Questions can be answered on the net. So the real price of the class is a $50/hour "consulting hour" plus the rent for the dorm + meal ticket.
Then you absolutely didn't do it right. My four years were filled with running student organizations myself, teaching a class, networking with professors over a game of raquetball (who subsequently made calls for me when I needed them made), building the closest relationships I have outside of my family and a couple childhood friends, and spending many hours every day learning from other students in my dorms and classes. And I did this at Big State U--that's right: personal attention from professors at Big State U.
Anyone who thinks college is about "sit in lecture, learn to code an OS, graduate" is missing out on tremendous opportunities there.
I'm looking to build a family tree for a holiday gift. Do the Slashdotters of the world have any recommendations on open source genealogy software? I did try a 14-day free trial of Ancestry.com. What a scam! I submitted the personal information for my parents, grandparents, and me. Then, I received a pop-up telling me that if I would like to get information on my family, I would have to upgrade my subscription for $29.95 U.S. So, I took the chance. Turns out that the only information they had was my previous addresses for the past 20 years.
If you are paying for Ancestry and it does not have any information on your family except previous addresses for the past 20 years, then you're not doing your research properly (or you don't live in the US, UK, or a couple other countries).
At a minimum, they have basically every birth record in the US for who knows how long. You should have at least been able to find that. Then, if you're including anyone who lived in the United States in 1930 or prior to that, then you can also find all federal census records showing siblings, ages, race, frequently the type of job the person had, parents or parents' nation/state of birth, etc.
I could go on about it (Ancestry has been so helpful to me and others I know), but the long and short of it is, if you're doing a family tree, you paid Ancestry, and can only find residence locations, then you're either (1) not in the US; (2) the first immigrant to the US from your family; or (3) not doing it right. Considering Ancestry had your residence locations, it's most likely (3).
Well, I suppose there's a fourth: you've already got an encyclopedic knowledge of your family history, so no amount of research would turn up anything new.
In fact, I'll go so far as to say that if you want my help during your 14-day trial, OP (or anyone else w/Ancestry), respond to this message or email me at ancestrymasterman@gmail.com (new semi-throwaway email addy).
I think the difference could possibly be that DADT represents a potential violation of civil rights (sexual orientation isn't clearly defined in the 14th Amendment as a protected class), while GTMO absolutely represents a violation of human and civil rights (no due process, torture, etc.) and international treaties.
One is morally wrong and legal. The other is morally wrong and illegal.
Slashdot Mirror
If a government employee works with sensitive data and has his computer infected with malware due to his own mistake (esp. the types in cybersecurity), he should be fired and so should the networking guy who should have offloaded the sensitive data to a computer not connected to the Internet. This is what I consider unforgivable incompetence.
Precisely. So let me just get right on having all of the cities in the USA revoke the monopolies they've granted to various ISPs and grant any company equal access to the taxpayer-funded cable that has been laid.
Because, as it stands right now, I don't have choice between anything but ATT DSL (thinking about caps), Time Warner Cable (thinking about caps), or dial-up. And I live in one of the ten biggest cities in the country!
Well that's just dumb. Is every person going to buy $300 worth of your product because of the commercial?
That's what I thought. I mean, I didn't think you'd have to lie about PJ's work to recognize her contributions to geekdom or whatever.
I think I should fish around on /. and use my legal contacts to find some people who'd be willing to co-blog with me in a (relatively) unbiased and informative manner about IP/cyberlaw issues. Maybe Slashdot would post an article about me giving mouth-to-mouth to save the last dodo on earth a century ago.
Only a million people in the US watch NBC, ABC, FOX, and CBS combined over a full year?
Since when did Groklaw do anything to save any patents? I thought it was a news reporting site that basically explained the SCO litigation to techies.
While you're (hopefully) still here, can you shed any light on the persistent urban legend we Austinites have regarding the city planners in the 90s intentionally keeping the major arteries of Mopac, 360, and I35 shitty in order to discourage people from moving to Austin and in hopes of keeping ATX small? (Obviously they failed miserably in everything except making commuting nearly unbearable).
You're never going to find a competent lawyer willing to approve a $30K contract in an hour. I think that fact alone would likely be grounds for a finding of malpractice if the contract ended up screwing over his client.
This scenario would really play out in under an hour if the other client forewent (what is the past tense of "forego"?) legal representation itself.
But yeah, I hear you. My professional interest as an attorney is in things being more complicated, so that I have more work. But my personal interest as a human being is in all things being easily done right.
Also, if you live near an area with a law school, many have law schools with great libraries that stock form books.
No, it's pretty much definitional. "Boilerplate" is standard language everyone uses. It's practically guaranteed that it has become boilerplate because it is standard, well-known, and tested in court.
See if your local bar association provides free Westlaw access in their offices. If they do, you should know you can find a lot of good contract language on Westlaw that has been tested. I think they even have a forms database that is fully searchable. I'm not sure how much would be relevant, but you could check.
There is already boilerplate out there. You can buy a book like http://www.amazon.com/Practical-Software-Licensing-Licensees-Licensors/dp/1604420901/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1293905895&sr=8-1 and run with it. It comes with forms you can use. In fact, this is what most lawyers do, even at the biggest law firms in the world. They go with language that has been litigated in court already, and change a bit to glue the clauses together. This is not really as easy as it sounds. Just like how an engineer can design a bridge, but modifications likely need to be made based on the soil, perhaps the saline content in the air, etc. Hell, if you're a programmer, you already know that programming once and deploying across Windows, OSX, and Linux is not even that easy. Want Python and curses? Well, give up your aspirations with Windows! When I was in undergrad in 2002, it was well known that Java's goal of cross-platformality (??) exceeded its reach. Why would the law be any different?
But good cut and paste cannot happen. There is too much interplay between language, structure, and clauses. You can make a decent contract, but you'd still need someone to look over the combination of clauses you made. It might be cheaper, but I just don't think you can have a "click the exes in the HTML form and get a great contract spat out."
If I were a business owner, I wouldn't risk a $30K contract if I could pay someone $1-2K to draft a K for me (I could). You won't find a big law firm that is that cheap. I had a software licenses professor in law school, and he told us point blank that there are probably only five or six software licenses lawyers in the US that are really any good (they all work for big shops and firms like Fish & Richardson and probably Knobbe). I'm inclined to agree that there are very few, but "five or six" is probably off by an order of magnitude. My experience working for a federal judge supports the assertion that most lawyers are not all that good at what they do. But then, most lawyers are inexpensive.
This is my just my opinion, though. And I don't expect to end up practicing software license law for a living, so I'm not trying to protect my livelihood here. I'm expressing my legitimate concern that such a goal is untenable. Get a form book like the one above if you want to save money. There are other books that take you line by line and explain how to change text.
But keep in mind that if you screw up you have no one to sue for malpractice!
Actually, I take everything above back after reading a bit more about your situation. You could do it if there were no negotiation between the two parties, but you just gave a client a contract and said, "Take it or leave it." Alternatively, next time, don't use a lawyer. Have the contract be a "work for hire" and keep the copyright for the contract yourself. Then just change it to fit your needs.
But yeah, again, no one to sue for malpractice if you do that and something screws up.
Just asked my wife: She said her hospital has a rule that a doctor cannot accept patients after being awake 24 hours. Instead, someone else has to see the patient.
While it's a neat-o concept, my opinion as a lawyer who has worked in software/copyright licenses before, having a "GPL" for "large [business] projects" is most likely a spectacularly terrible idea.
Well, as a lawyer, I'd love to be asked to work on any litigation arising out of such a deal, as I would make a mint off the years of subsequent court battles. With large projects, you ought to draft a new contract every time because the needs of the parties are just plain going to be different every time. If not, then the project is probably not as large as you think it is. Or maybe our definitions of "large" are not the same.
Bear in mind the GPL, for example, is the product of years of discussions between academics, lawyers, and programmers, and it still has had to be updated twice because of loopholes.
Interesting. Nearly 100% of the courses at my law school were graded on a curve (seminars and very small classes were the exception), and this is the norm at top law schools in the US. My engineering friends in undergrad (I was pure math) told me their classes tended to be on a curve. Mine tended to be on a curve in proof-based classes (think real analysis, algebraic structures, number theory) and not on a curve in homework/procedure-based classes (think applied complex analysis, PDEs, linear algebra).
Unfortunately, when classes are graded on a curve, you're going to have unqualified people getting Bs and graduating without learning much, since everyone is harming their learning with laptops except a few of the top students.
One reason I'm against grading on a curve is because you run the risk of getting something engineered by a guy who skated by on the backs of his more lazy classmates.
Want to reconsider your comment?
*ahem* "Do not." In formal writing such as that on Slashdot, one should not use contractions.
Master Happosai begs to differ! (SFW, despite the unfortunately-named "spermio" domain
Because no one on /. can read Swedish.
There is no such field aside from politics, and not really even then--our current President sure doesn't have a good family pedigree.
This isn't really all that true. The most prestigious investment banks in the US recruit way more heavily from Harvard English undergrad programs than they do from applied mathematics programs at top state schools like The University of Texas.
Then you absolutely didn't do it right. My four years were filled with running student organizations myself, teaching a class, networking with professors over a game of raquetball (who subsequently made calls for me when I needed them made), building the closest relationships I have outside of my family and a couple childhood friends, and spending many hours every day learning from other students in my dorms and classes. And I did this at Big State U--that's right: personal attention from professors at Big State U.
Anyone who thinks college is about "sit in lecture, learn to code an OS, graduate" is missing out on tremendous opportunities there.
That "Scarlet Letter" is a "crimson H," buddy. :)
If you are paying for Ancestry and it does not have any information on your family except previous addresses for the past 20 years, then you're not doing your research properly (or you don't live in the US, UK, or a couple other countries).
At a minimum, they have basically every birth record in the US for who knows how long. You should have at least been able to find that. Then, if you're including anyone who lived in the United States in 1930 or prior to that, then you can also find all federal census records showing siblings, ages, race, frequently the type of job the person had, parents or parents' nation/state of birth, etc.
I could go on about it (Ancestry has been so helpful to me and others I know), but the long and short of it is, if you're doing a family tree, you paid Ancestry, and can only find residence locations, then you're either (1) not in the US; (2) the first immigrant to the US from your family; or (3) not doing it right. Considering Ancestry had your residence locations, it's most likely (3).
Well, I suppose there's a fourth: you've already got an encyclopedic knowledge of your family history, so no amount of research would turn up anything new.
In fact, I'll go so far as to say that if you want my help during your 14-day trial, OP (or anyone else w/Ancestry), respond to this message or email me at ancestrymasterman@gmail.com (new semi-throwaway email addy).
I think the difference could possibly be that DADT represents a potential violation of civil rights (sexual orientation isn't clearly defined in the 14th Amendment as a protected class), while GTMO absolutely represents a violation of human and civil rights (no due process, torture, etc.) and international treaties.
One is morally wrong and legal. The other is morally wrong and illegal.