You can draw up whatever kind of contract you want, but there will always be two issues to deal with:
1) No matter how the company defines "contractor," the IRS has it's own guidelines determining who is or isn't a contractor.
2) If your employer ever makes demands beyond what's outlined in the contract, then there's a rather severe power imbalance when it comes to negotiations.
A friend of mine ran into this problem. She was a contractor, and as her contract was approaching time for renewal, her employer began to demand that she be in the office during certain hours rather than working from home. Since her work didn't require her to be in the office, this was clearly illegal but the message was was quite clear: do this, or your contract doesn't get renewed. With contractors, a company can keep doing this until it finds someone willing to play ball.
I think lawsuits like this are a good thing because they provide some credible deterrent for this kind of behavior. Without the threat of such lawsuits, there's no serious disincentive against abusing the rules surrounding independent contractors, and the rules become effectively worthless.
There are far worse things the EU could do. A few suggestions:
-Since Microsoft refuses to abide by EU laws, declare that the EU will not enforce any of MS' patents or copyrights.
-Freeze and seize any MS assets in the EU.
-Issue warrants for the arrest of top MS executives. No more European vacations for Gates.
The EU still has plenty of options, should it have the guts to act upon them. I think holding company officers personally responsible for legal noncompliance is a big step. Losing millions and millions of money that isn't really theirs isn't nearly as frightening for the people running a massively profitable corporation.
That bit seems quite irrelevant to Joe User until the following situation arises:
1) User starts P2P app, which opens lots of network connections.
2) User opens web browser.
3) User curses WinSE, since from his point of view it looks like it can't run 2 networked apps at the same time.
You make a legitimate point. There are quite a few parallels.
We have not yet reached the point where anyone besides the political analog of hard core geeks is attempting to switch. Few people are leaving the country to flee the government, few are joinging militias or even actively participating in advocating alternatives to the current government policies.
I sat around bitching about IE for some time before I made the switch to Mozilla. I only recently started actively evaluating Linux for use on my desktop machine. As far as government is concerned, we're still in the stage where the lots of people are just bitching about it, but very few are taking action.
In short, it doesn't. People kinda get this backwards. It's not that FOSS software guarantees that there will always be support as long as there's demand. However, it does guarantee that if somebody wants to continue to maintain, update, and support the software, there's no way to prevent them from doing so. Microsoft controls VB, so if MS says VB is dead, then it's dead. If somebody finds a critical vulnerability in a VB runtime DLL and MS doesn't feel like fixing it then it won't be fixed. End of story.
It's possible that the bug would never be fixed even in a FOSS project, but that's highly unlikely for software that's widely used by developers and for which there's still a strong demand. But with VB under MS' control, it's certain that the bug will never be fixed. The source code isn't available, and even if you could hack the binary you don't have the right to redistribute the modified file.
Yes, indeed. As Netscape showed us, once you have a lock on the market the browser war is over and you don't have to improve your product at all.
By the way, IE had 90% of the market. It no longer does. The problem with the monopoly position is that it makes MS complacent. If your browser is free, installed on almost every PC sold, and is the standard that most developers code to (even when it violates the W3C spec), then you really have to suck before people besides hard core geeks switch to something else. Once that starts happening, it means you've been sucking hard for a good long time and you've got a lot of catching up to do in terms of features and good will.
The problem is that Big Media has shown that the price point they set for a product often has little to do with the cost of production and distribution.
iTunes is a good example. Despite the dramatically reduced production and distribution costs of licensing bits online when compared to pressing and shipping CDs, the total cost per song to the consumer hasn't changed much, and they're trying to push it right back up to CD levels.
The RIAA members have already decided how much they're going to charge me for a CD (*cough* price fixing *cough*), regardless of how much it costs them. If I let them use my bandwidth, they'll just pocket the savings without giving me a cut. Might as well stick with direct downloads.
I agree with your basic point, but you're leaving out one very important detail. Swiss men aren't simply handed an assault rifle at the age of 20. Each and every one of them also receives regular military training.
In America, the problem is that push tends to be for gun rights without responsibility from one side, and onerous, one-sided restrictions from the other. Personally, I don't have any problem with assault rifles being issued to any one who participates in a well regulated militia. Hey, that sounds familiar...
Although this flies in the face of my generally held theory that most people are idiots and assholes, I think that in this case it's that there are a large numebr of people who want to do the right thing in terms of acquiring music legitimately, and they will do so as long as they don't get thoroughly punished for following the rules.
Copyright laws give the labels near complete control, and so far they've shown no inclination to make any concessions to the market. They've used every opportunity to extend the right to copy to encompass the right to use. We're now in a situation where the legitimate customers often get reamed by oppressive DRM if we follow the rules, while the pirates get to listen to their music whenever, wherever, and however they want. The labels argue that these behaviors are connected and that nobody will pay if you give them the freedom to space/time/format shift, but clearly this isn't the case.
The FCC's lawyer, Jacob Lewis, acknowledged the agency never had exercised such ancillary power but maintained it was permitted by Congress since lawmakers didn't explicitly outlaw it.
Given the broad nature of the FCC's attempted power grab, mentioning washing machines is entirely appropriate.
Part of the problem is that it's his bedroom as well. In his own bedroom he has a reasonable expectation of privacy. And that privacy shouldn't be violated without due process of law.
How about if she taped her husband masturbating without his knowledge, and then distributed the tapes after their divorce to embarass him. Is that OK? At the time it was her house after all.
I look for reasons to dismiss every study. And usually I find them. Just ask a bunch of questions, regardless of whether you already agree with the study's conclusion.
Who paid for it? This will usually give you a good starting point for finding any biases.
Are the people who performed the study reasonably skilled in the area they're evaluating?
What are they really measuring?
Does the conclusion follow from their observations?
This will help separated the bullshit from the good data. Why is this important? Because if I'm going to use some study to make a case for using one system over another, I don't want to get smacked down by some PHB (or worse, another tech) because my data is crap. And with the above questions, you can deflect people who simply accept marketing packaged as research at face value.
"BigBadResearch Inc says Windows is more secure!"
"Oh really, who paid for that study?"
"They won't say."
"What did they measure in their testing?"
"I dunno, you have to pay to see the full study."
etc...
You're not forced to do anything. The library is available under certain licensing terms because the author(s) chose to license under those terms. You can either write the functionality yourself or find another product and abide by its license if you don't like the terms.
How about this example: I administer Windows Servers at work. Why should my employer be forced to hand over money to Microsoft when my work has nothing to do with developing operating systems?
I find it odd that a company can charge thousands of dollars for commercial software licenses and not be accused of coercion, but people will talk about the GPL "forcing" developers to do things.
1) Sensationalism. Some low-level bureaucrat suggested it sometime last year, and the story just won't die.
2) A probe. Some higher authorities who don't want their names attached to this should it blow up leak out info anonymously to try to figure out what the public reation will be.
3) It's advertising by the company that makes the tracking devices. If you're trying to sell a device that has to be installed in every car, California is the mother lode of U.S. markets. They try to pitch is as a solution to budget woes, emphasize who lots of people are looking at it right now, keep the idea in the public view, then send the lobbyists.
I'm betting on #3. Back when I first heard about this story, I did some rough math. From a financial standpoint, it makes no sense. You'd spend an entire year's worth of revenue just installing the transmitters, and more each time a new car was registered, and you also have to build in infrastructure to monitor the devices. The simplest solution is to just raise the gas tax by a few cents a gallon. It's California, that would be pretty easy to do, much easier than convincing people they need tracking devices on their cars. No new infrastructure, and you continue to encourage fuel efficiency and use of public transportation. This whole story smells funny.
Read the Orbitz TOS. In your case, you aren't strictly barring the use of profanity. From the Orbitz TOS:
"Linking to any page of the Site other than to the homepage is strictly prohibited in the absence of a separate linking agreement with Orbitz."
That's not "excessive linking" or "linking for commercial purposes". This is linking to any page besides the home page by anyone. And it's not that deep linking is "discouraged" or "frowned upon" or "tolerated only in moderation." It's "strictly prohibited."
We can only guess as to what Orbitz's intent is with this clause. But the reality is, can be applied to everyone, not just competitors. So today maybe it's just there to prevent hotlinking from competitors' sites, but it can be used against anyone should they choose to. What happens if I criticize Orbitz in my blog? Can they silence be because it's against the TOS?
I think it's quite obvious: Firefox's continued growth in popularity is based primarily on it not having 100% market share. Clearly this is not sustainable, and the insighful sages of Gartner have seen this. Bravo to them!
I'm the go-to geek for many in my circle of friends. Strangely enough, while I've fielded many a tech support request for help fixing an IE mess, I've never had to support Firefox. I know some of them are using it, I converted them myself:)
Of course, if I ever told this to Gartner they'd probably publish a report claiming that Firefox doesn't really exist.
True though that may be, it won't matter unless Microsoft does some rebranding.
MSN isn't a seach engine. It's a portal site (oh, how I despise that term). Search is just one of its features. You're never going to say "MSN it," and Microsoft wouldn't want you to. Google is the search engine, so you "Google it."
If you tell someone "Look it it up on Google," they'll go to google.com and get a very fast, lightweight page to search from. If you say "Look it up on MSN," they'll go to msn.com and instantly be overwhelmed by a site that isn't focused on search.
HP makes printers in the same way Pepsi makes cans. Yeah, they make 'em, but they're just a vehicle for dispensing the main money maker.
The most profitable application for this new technology will be the creation of control chips for toner cartridges that will be impossible for third-party manufacturers emulate using ordinary transistors.
I've never even been asked for a last name. They always just ask for a telephone number. The phone associated with my card is the number I had in college, 8 years ago. My roommate used to use his girlfriend's phone number, which always came up under the name of the guy who used to live at his girlfriend's address.
Back when I got the card, they did zero verification of the information you put down. It would have been trivial for me to sign up as my neighbor. I doubt they do much more now.
I'm amazed they were able to pin anything on this guy based on his Safeway card purchases.
Actually, you can't just forget about it in offline mode. I tried playing Half-Life 2 in offline mode since I'm paranoid and told ZoneAlarm to block it. After a few gaming sessions, the software kindly told me that it needed to connect to the Steam servers, and I wouldn't be able to play the game until it had a chance to update.
Slashdot Mirror
You can draw up whatever kind of contract you want, but there will always be two issues to deal with:
1) No matter how the company defines "contractor," the IRS has it's own guidelines determining who is or isn't a contractor.
2) If your employer ever makes demands beyond what's outlined in the contract, then there's a rather severe power imbalance when it comes to negotiations.
A friend of mine ran into this problem. She was a contractor, and as her contract was approaching time for renewal, her employer began to demand that she be in the office during certain hours rather than working from home. Since her work didn't require her to be in the office, this was clearly illegal but the message was was quite clear: do this, or your contract doesn't get renewed. With contractors, a company can keep doing this until it finds someone willing to play ball.
I think lawsuits like this are a good thing because they provide some credible deterrent for this kind of behavior. Without the threat of such lawsuits, there's no serious disincentive against abusing the rules surrounding independent contractors, and the rules become effectively worthless.
They're just dismissed for now. After a month passes and this is no longer news, they'll start going "missing."
There are far worse things the EU could do. A few suggestions:
-Since Microsoft refuses to abide by EU laws, declare that the EU will not enforce any of MS' patents or copyrights.
-Freeze and seize any MS assets in the EU.
-Issue warrants for the arrest of top MS executives. No more European vacations for Gates.
The EU still has plenty of options, should it have the guts to act upon them. I think holding company officers personally responsible for legal noncompliance is a big step. Losing millions and millions of money that isn't really theirs isn't nearly as frightening for the people running a massively profitable corporation.
That bit seems quite irrelevant to Joe User until the following situation arises:
1) User starts P2P app, which opens lots of network connections.
2) User opens web browser.
3) User curses WinSE, since from his point of view it looks like it can't run 2 networked apps at the same time.
You make a legitimate point. There are quite a few parallels.
We have not yet reached the point where anyone besides the political analog of hard core geeks is attempting to switch. Few people are leaving the country to flee the government, few are joinging militias or even actively participating in advocating alternatives to the current government policies.
I sat around bitching about IE for some time before I made the switch to Mozilla. I only recently started actively evaluating Linux for use on my desktop machine. As far as government is concerned, we're still in the stage where the lots of people are just bitching about it, but very few are taking action.
In short, it doesn't. People kinda get this backwards. It's not that FOSS software guarantees that there will always be support as long as there's demand. However, it does guarantee that if somebody wants to continue to maintain, update, and support the software, there's no way to prevent them from doing so. Microsoft controls VB, so if MS says VB is dead, then it's dead. If somebody finds a critical vulnerability in a VB runtime DLL and MS doesn't feel like fixing it then it won't be fixed. End of story.
It's possible that the bug would never be fixed even in a FOSS project, but that's highly unlikely for software that's widely used by developers and for which there's still a strong demand. But with VB under MS' control, it's certain that the bug will never be fixed. The source code isn't available, and even if you could hack the binary you don't have the right to redistribute the modified file.
Yes, indeed. As Netscape showed us, once you have a lock on the market the browser war is over and you don't have to improve your product at all.
By the way, IE had 90% of the market. It no longer does. The problem with the monopoly position is that it makes MS complacent. If your browser is free, installed on almost every PC sold, and is the standard that most developers code to (even when it violates the W3C spec), then you really have to suck before people besides hard core geeks switch to something else. Once that starts happening, it means you've been sucking hard for a good long time and you've got a lot of catching up to do in terms of features and good will.
The problem is that Big Media has shown that the price point they set for a product often has little to do with the cost of production and distribution.
iTunes is a good example. Despite the dramatically reduced production and distribution costs of licensing bits online when compared to pressing and shipping CDs, the total cost per song to the consumer hasn't changed much, and they're trying to push it right back up to CD levels.
The RIAA members have already decided how much they're going to charge me for a CD (*cough* price fixing *cough*), regardless of how much it costs them. If I let them use my bandwidth, they'll just pocket the savings without giving me a cut. Might as well stick with direct downloads.
I agree with your basic point, but you're leaving out one very important detail. Swiss men aren't simply handed an assault rifle at the age of 20. Each and every one of them also receives regular military training.
In America, the problem is that push tends to be for gun rights without responsibility from one side, and onerous, one-sided restrictions from the other. Personally, I don't have any problem with assault rifles being issued to any one who participates in a well regulated militia. Hey, that sounds familiar...
Although this flies in the face of my generally held theory that most people are idiots and assholes, I think that in this case it's that there are a large numebr of people who want to do the right thing in terms of acquiring music legitimately, and they will do so as long as they don't get thoroughly punished for following the rules.
Copyright laws give the labels near complete control, and so far they've shown no inclination to make any concessions to the market. They've used every opportunity to extend the right to copy to encompass the right to use. We're now in a situation where the legitimate customers often get reamed by oppressive DRM if we follow the rules, while the pirates get to listen to their music whenever, wherever, and however they want. The labels argue that these behaviors are connected and that nobody will pay if you give them the freedom to space/time/format shift, but clearly this isn't the case.
Given the broad nature of the FCC's attempted power grab, mentioning washing machines is entirely appropriate.
A few questions come to mind:
If it costs so much money to create ink, then why are third-party ink vendors able to do it for so much cheaper?
If there's really that much innovation going into the ink R&D, why not just patent the ink?
Do ink formulations really change that much from printer to printer?
IANAL, etc.
Part of the problem is that it's his bedroom as well. In his own bedroom he has a reasonable expectation of privacy. And that privacy shouldn't be violated without due process of law.
How about if she taped her husband masturbating without his knowledge, and then distributed the tapes after their divorce to embarass him. Is that OK? At the time it was her house after all.
- Who paid for it? This will usually give you a good starting point for finding any biases.
- Are the people who performed the study reasonably skilled in the area they're evaluating?
- What are they really measuring?
- Does the conclusion follow from their observations?
This will help separated the bullshit from the good data. Why is this important? Because if I'm going to use some study to make a case for using one system over another, I don't want to get smacked down by some PHB (or worse, another tech) because my data is crap. And with the above questions, you can deflect people who simply accept marketing packaged as research at face value."BigBadResearch Inc says Windows is more secure!"
"Oh really, who paid for that study?"
"They won't say."
"What did they measure in their testing?"
"I dunno, you have to pay to see the full study."
etc...
You're not forced to do anything. The library is available under certain licensing terms because the author(s) chose to license under those terms. You can either write the functionality yourself or find another product and abide by its license if you don't like the terms.
How about this example: I administer Windows Servers at work. Why should my employer be forced to hand over money to Microsoft when my work has nothing to do with developing operating systems?
I find it odd that a company can charge thousands of dollars for commercial software licenses and not be accused of coercion, but people will talk about the GPL "forcing" developers to do things.
Quite likely. I figure it's either:
1) Sensationalism. Some low-level bureaucrat suggested it sometime last year, and the story just won't die.
2) A probe. Some higher authorities who don't want their names attached to this should it blow up leak out info anonymously to try to figure out what the public reation will be.
3) It's advertising by the company that makes the tracking devices. If you're trying to sell a device that has to be installed in every car, California is the mother lode of U.S. markets. They try to pitch is as a solution to budget woes, emphasize who lots of people are looking at it right now, keep the idea in the public view, then send the lobbyists.
I'm betting on #3. Back when I first heard about this story, I did some rough math. From a financial standpoint, it makes no sense. You'd spend an entire year's worth of revenue just installing the transmitters, and more each time a new car was registered, and you also have to build in infrastructure to monitor the devices. The simplest solution is to just raise the gas tax by a few cents a gallon. It's California, that would be pretty easy to do, much easier than convincing people they need tracking devices on their cars. No new infrastructure, and you continue to encourage fuel efficiency and use of public transportation. This whole story smells funny.
Read the Orbitz TOS. In your case, you aren't strictly barring the use of profanity. From the Orbitz TOS:
"Linking to any page of the Site other than to the homepage is strictly prohibited in the absence of a separate linking agreement with Orbitz."
That's not "excessive linking" or "linking for commercial purposes". This is linking to any page besides the home page by anyone. And it's not that deep linking is "discouraged" or "frowned upon" or "tolerated only in moderation." It's "strictly prohibited."
We can only guess as to what Orbitz's intent is with this clause. But the reality is, can be applied to everyone, not just competitors. So today maybe it's just there to prevent hotlinking from competitors' sites, but it can be used against anyone should they choose to. What happens if I criticize Orbitz in my blog? Can they silence be because it's against the TOS?
Luckily I wasn't around to hear it, so it never really happened.
I think it's quite obvious: Firefox's continued growth in popularity is based primarily on it not having 100% market share. Clearly this is not sustainable, and the insighful sages of Gartner have seen this. Bravo to them!
I'm the go-to geek for many in my circle of friends. Strangely enough, while I've fielded many a tech support request for help fixing an IE mess, I've never had to support Firefox. I know some of them are using it, I converted them myself :)
Of course, if I ever told this to Gartner they'd probably publish a report claiming that Firefox doesn't really exist.
- You can't pause or rewind them.
- Every 10 minutes, the file will stop playing and you'll have to sit through several minutes of popup ads.
- You don't get to choose when you watch it. You have to be sitting in front of the box at a particular time if you want to catch the show.
- You choose from a limited selection. Just imagine if there were only a hundred sites on the web.
- If you like something, but there aren't 10 million other people in U.S. who like it too, you'll never see it.
- If the old rich guys who run the studios don't like it, you'll never see it.
- If it's less than half an hour long (including popups) you'll never see it.
- If a thousand people don't like it and feel strongly enough to write letters about it, you'll never see it.
- You can't blame Microsoft when stuff sucks, and you can't install Firefox to make it better.
- Whenever someone tries to make a hardware or software upgrade to make it suck less, the people who provide the movie files try to have them shut down.
In short, you're not missing much.True though that may be, it won't matter unless Microsoft does some rebranding.
MSN isn't a seach engine. It's a portal site (oh, how I despise that term). Search is just one of its features. You're never going to say "MSN it," and Microsoft wouldn't want you to. Google is the search engine, so you "Google it."
If you tell someone "Look it it up on Google," they'll go to google.com and get a very fast, lightweight page to search from. If you say "Look it up on MSN," they'll go to msn.com and instantly be overwhelmed by a site that isn't focused on search.
HP makes printers in the same way Pepsi makes cans. Yeah, they make 'em, but they're just a vehicle for dispensing the main money maker.
The most profitable application for this new technology will be the creation of control chips for toner cartridges that will be impossible for third-party manufacturers emulate using ordinary transistors.
I've never even been asked for a last name. They always just ask for a telephone number. The phone associated with my card is the number I had in college, 8 years ago. My roommate used to use his girlfriend's phone number, which always came up under the name of the guy who used to live at his girlfriend's address.
Back when I got the card, they did zero verification of the information you put down. It would have been trivial for me to sign up as my neighbor. I doubt they do much more now.
I'm amazed they were able to pin anything on this guy based on his Safeway card purchases.
Actually, you can't just forget about it in offline mode. I tried playing Half-Life 2 in offline mode since I'm paranoid and told ZoneAlarm to block it. After a few gaming sessions, the software kindly told me that it needed to connect to the Steam servers, and I wouldn't be able to play the game until it had a chance to update.