Thinking to the future here - either things posted on the web are going to move into public domain, or the entire world will creak to a halt due to copyright litigation.
Apparently Google gets away with "fair use" while profiting from serving up search results on my content, both in my own pages and in my forum posts. I don't think any search spider is smart enough to read a TOS, but they certainly have no problem finding non-linked directories on my site that have explicit robots.txt telling them to go away.
Increase their PITA factor to make it harder for you to gain this kind of access (captcha, graphic presentation of results, etc.)
Directly block your IP range
Send friendly notice requesting you stop
Send legal notice demanding you stop
Pushing criminal prosecution would be more costly and less effective than the above. Unless you happen to be pissing off lawyers, or the government, or worst of all government lawyers.
Calling this illegal is tantamount to calling the boss an idiot. I've never known bosses (idiots or not) to take kindly to being called out on their lack of mental prowess.
OTOH - he is the boss, and you're not, so, to navigate the larger political structure and avoid being trashed by him, CYA is a first step, albeit a lame one.
Far better is to get recognized by his boss as being more valuable than he is - some organizations make this inherently difficult.
If unemployment benefits come anywhere close to what you're making as salary, you need to get a new job immediately. If you've got sufficient "computer skills" to post on/., you should be making more than double what unemployment will pay you (at least, this is true in the great state of Florida, I believe it is similar across the US).
You obviously have different ethics from your boss. I'd start (quietly, very quietly) looking for another job NOW, while diligently working on the project you have been assigned to.
If it looks possible that your project will go live before you have another job, I would, as tactfully as possible, e-mail your boss with a clear statement of your concerns, and bcc your home account for permanent record. If he wants to proceed, you're just doing a job, I don't think it is incumbent upon programmers to start a crusade every time they see something that they think might be unethical (even though many programmers do this anyway.)
And, to reiterate, NOW is the time to find that next step in your career path. Try for better salary, benefits, etc., but if you find a straight lateral move, I'd be tempted to take it rather than continue working for a slimeball. What I see is that he values your time and effort less than the $2000/mo account - and, as other posters have said above, you're likely to be re-coding your page scraping very very often - which, when it happens, is going to make you look bad, i.e. boss says: "oh, he can't code anything that works for more than a few weeks...", which he either a) is a big enough moron that he actually believes himself (most likely), or b) he simply is giving you a rat-trap job to make you look bad.
My first boss after school hired me, then a few months later started to feel threatened by me and a couple of the other guys he brought in (yes, he really was that out of date and apparently unable to keep his skills up.) He started a campaign on me, giving me project after project and pulling me off before I could finish. After he had a pattern of 4 "unsuccessful" projects I had worked on, he pulled me in for a firing meeting. 5 years later I had his job, a few months after that, he retired. That was a unique situation where I had direct access to his boss, who recognized more or less what was going on. In a bigger place, I probably would have just moved on.
Re:blah the emporer has his new clothes on again.
on
The Walking House
·
· Score: 1
If you only want to have your house in the paved world. Legs give access to about 10x more homesite choices.
Clearly set before this audience to get a reaction.
Besides, when I was unemployed, I had nothing to do but:
Look for work
Play the unemployment reimbursement game
Play at speculative "hobby jobs" - my main one was real-estate sales, which wasn't a bad call in 2003 in Miami.
The unemployed have LOTS of time on their hands, and open source is one way to do something productive that may lead to some direct income, or at the very least demonstrate your skills to prospective employers.
I certainly would hire someone who could point to a dozen intelligently edited Wikipedia articles that they contributed to over another candidate who has nothing to show for their last 6 months.
I've had a couple of small teams over the last several years, and we don't have a lot of time to mess around with managing the version control system. trac was an attractive (and free) project management tool with nearly 100% painless svn integration - living with both for over 2 years now, the only thing the system asks of me is to copy off the.tar'ed backups once in awhile, and I suppose I could automate that too...
Never looked seriously at git due to team size (ranges from 3-6 depending on how you count...) and the utter painlessness of a trac-svn install. We did expend a few days effort to get trac-svn to run native under OS-X, but after that when it was time to set up a new system, we just got somebody's 10 year old PC and installed Debian and trac-svn on it, took less than a day and has worked like a champ ever since.
The svn access tools under Linux/OS-X/Windows are also pretty slick and easy.
The concept is this: 40,000 civilizations spread randomly across a disc 100,000 light-years in diameter. That establishes a certain density of civilizations. Man's "shell of space-time awareness" intersects the entire Milky Way, yes, but to assume that these 40,000 civilizations are permanent is awfully optimistic. Even if the longest lived of them have persisted 100,000 years, during what fraction of that time did they believe that radiating identifying energy was a good idea? That's the fraction that Arecibo is looking for - and if they succeed, I wouldn't be surprised if they find something that makes Earth re-think our current omnidirectional pattern radiating lifestyle.
Anyway - of more interest to me is who might be in the local neighborhood - I really don't care what civilizations halfway across the galaxy were doing when Cro-Magnon first appeared - but I might be interested if one were close enough for a round-trip message in a couple of lifetimes...
Well, even if ET was popping an unusual number of SuperNovae for some reason, there's a "shell of space-time" about 400ly thick in which the human race would have even noticed. It's still a pretty small percentage of the Milky Way, even at its maximal intersection. And, if ET is being subtle in the least, that shell is more like 40ly thick.
I believe there's a quote to the effect of "any sufficiently advanced civilization will conduct it's business in such a manner as to be undetectable by cretins like us."
It took about 25 years to go from the F-4 Phantom to the F-117 Stealth Nighthawk as the "most technologically advanced and tactically valuable" fighter aircraft. I suspect that if the planet were given credible proof of actual advanced ET civilizations and their ability to transform small rocky planets directly to energy, we'd learn how to live without broadcast television, and maybe even cellphone transmissions that escape the ionosphere, really quickly.
But, the diameter of the milky way is about 100,000 light years - so, if we assume that pre-Galileo civilization was oblivious to ET, we as a species are only aware of civilization signs within 400 light years or so.
So, if there are 40,000 civilizations within a 100,000ly diameter, then there are approximately 2.56 civilizations within a 800ly diameter.
Personally, I feel like Earth represents the.56 of a civilization in that scenario...
You want to read as many formats as possible, in as small a box as possible? What about those 8" floppies? But seriously, first identify what you must have, want to have, etc. and then buy a box that wraps that - I certainly wouldn't want a long lifetime project box like this to be implemented as a hydra of removable plug-ins that will get misplaced, dropped, or broken over then next decade. If you're really ambitious, the motherboard will likely need several ISA and PCI slots, as well as multiple IDE and SATA ports, and I would think that a Linux / Windows 98-SE / XP triple boot OS should cover most stuff in existence today that you would care about, but if you want to get really esoteric, you can also piggyback an Apple II on there....
Write programs, open source, hobby, whatever. Then, apply to those jobs that "require 2-5 years experience", and show projects you have worked on in the last 2-5 years.
If you're applying to work for me as a programmer, you will be performing a small programming test before being hired. I weigh 60% of my hiring decision based on that test - with strongest consideration given to communication skills, did you understand the problem before writing the code?
Lots of guys with 10 years programming experience leave the room frustrated after an hour (there's a sample program already written and compiling, all you have to do is write additional code to add a couple of features.) Kids with zero "real world" work experience tend to do better on the test for some reason, and they also seem to make more productive employees. We started giving the test when one of these $150/hr consultants with 12 years of experience (in a field that was 8 years old, but he had an explanation for that...) couldn't program his way out of a paper bag, given a month's time.
Actually, not. When researching prior art for the trolls (attys) they were very interested in academic and trade journal publications, or any other source that revealed prior art. Used this once to justify using EEPROM in our product, a competitor had a patent on it, but prior art invalidating the patent existed, so we went ahead and infringed them. There's a good chance they won't call on the infringement, and if they do we can throw the prior art at them and effectively nullify their ability to sue. Still, finding the patent(s), finding the prior art, having the meetings creating the "case file," and preparing the internal reports cost several hundred man hours in total.
As a highly specialized tech-employee, there are only a handful of places I can work within reasonable travel time of my home (telecommuting has not yet become a reality in my niche.) Having lived in 3 major markets now, I have never had the choice of working for a firm which shared their IP spoils so generously. Best I have ever experienced personally is $2000 per patent, most places promise $1 on paper and don't even deliver that.
I did work for a place that had a "standard" employee stock purchase program that amounted to more or less an average 15% extra income - depending on market conditions. That program was arbitrarily terminated just as capriciously as the $2K patent awards were instated. I did leave in response to those conditions, but changing jobs takes several months, at best - and if I would feel foolish to move across the country to chase a promise of patent equity sharing, which can be terminated at a whim - or more likely administered in such a fashion as to not reward the true inventors, which will probably take you more than a year to determine after you start working there.
As an employer, if you've got a superstar who's likely to jump ship, you might try to entice them to stay with a big carrot - but I'd be shocked to see this implemented as "policy," and the superstar might jump ship anyway when a competitor offers a bigger "signing carrot." In my experience, the signing carrots are almost always more attractive than the retention carrots.
Good point, but as the system works right now, novelty is a small part - there's a healthy dose of requiring sufficient assets to do the development and launch built into the way things work in patents and trademarks. It's happening in a semi-uncontrolled way via lax examinations and litigation, but the net effect is that a big company can stake out less than novel turf and defend it 'legally.' The bigger the company, the more sketchy claims they can afford, and the better they can defend them.
I've heard dozens of "I thought of that first" sob stories, complete with valid and legal patents, which are flaunted to various degrees by companies that can actually implement the idea.
They depend on bar-codes for their own checkout and inventory tracking... by the time they get over that hurdle, you'll have enough computing power in your phone to optically recognize and identify items without the barcodes.
The killer portion of this is in the number of people that (might) use it... if it's only in the hands of nerds carrying Palm-Symbols, it's as interesting and useful as a ham radio - great if you're a ham-nerd yourself, big yawn for the other 99.7% of the population.
Regardless of how '1990s' bar codes are, if this phone will allow me to walk into a store, scan an item, and within seconds tell me the price of that item at competing local and online retailers... that is a killer app.
There was a post above about cheaper beer, and not only will this enable you to find cheaper beer, if 10% of people carry these things, they'll inform 80% of the shopping public that cheaper beer is available down the street - which should make the beer cheaper where you are standing in a very short time, if the retailer doesn't want to lose a lot of volume.
It may be a while for 10% market penetration, but I bet it's less than 10 years, think where cellphones were 10 years ago....
In an ideal world, I'd look for something on the order of:
$1K for submitting an invention disclosure that is later developed into a patent submission, paid at time of filing
$1K for significantly contributing toward a patent submission, either as a named inventor, or any other person who puts forth significant effort outside their "normal duties", also paid at time of filing
$3K to each named inventor upon patent grant, paid at time of grant, and
Some sort of downstream recognition such as breaking company revenue down based on IP protection, each patent is deemed to contribute a certain percentage of overall revenue. Named inventors might receive the sum of all their patents' contributions as a percentage bonus on their salary (so, if they are named on all of the company's profit generating patents, they might receive double salary)
Dollar amounts and percentages may be adjusted to taste, but one thing I think makes sense would be to give the recipient an option to take:
a straight cash award
for pre-IPO companies, double the cash value in shares
or, for public companies, double the cash value as long term options at the current market price
Somehow, places I have worked are typically very tight with their shares and options when the engineers come around. It makes a certain amount of sense, most engineers I know understand cash quite well, but wouldn't know how to price a long term option if you gave it to them.
This still depends to a large extent on which space you are playing in. If you are trying to be a startup in a field of multi-billion dollar players, sure, you'll lose the patent war, regardless of whether or not you choose to play.
On the other hand, if you are entering a field that represents a small current market with a scattering of small players, the patent could be all it takes to get you some breathing room. In round numbers, it enables a $10M capitalized startup to compete in a field populated by companies with $300M market caps.
Without patent protection, the startup venture would be hopeless, and companies that don't even play in the field would "come take your lunch" just because they could.
One of my ex-CEO's was an ex-quarterback. He summed it up thusly:
How many patents did the competition file last year? 30? How many did we file? 2? You know what that means, Tim? (Tim is the patent attorney) We're 28 behind.Now get on it!
He then left the room and went off to appear on CNN and do some semi-pro race car driving. I'm sure the details would have been more than he could handle, anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
Thinking to the future here - either things posted on the web are going to move into public domain, or the entire world will creak to a halt due to copyright litigation.
Apparently Google gets away with "fair use" while profiting from serving up search results on my content, both in my own pages and in my forum posts. I don't think any search spider is smart enough to read a TOS, but they certainly have no problem finding non-linked directories on my site that have explicit robots.txt telling them to go away.
Pushing criminal prosecution would be more costly and less effective than the above. Unless you happen to be pissing off lawyers, or the government, or worst of all government lawyers.
Calling this illegal is tantamount to calling the boss an idiot. I've never known bosses (idiots or not) to take kindly to being called out on their lack of mental prowess.
OTOH - he is the boss, and you're not, so, to navigate the larger political structure and avoid being trashed by him, CYA is a first step, albeit a lame one.
Far better is to get recognized by his boss as being more valuable than he is - some organizations make this inherently difficult.
If unemployment benefits come anywhere close to what you're making as salary, you need to get a new job immediately. If you've got sufficient "computer skills" to post on /., you should be making more than double what unemployment will pay you (at least, this is true in the great state of Florida, I believe it is similar across the US).
You obviously have different ethics from your boss. I'd start (quietly, very quietly) looking for another job NOW, while diligently working on the project you have been assigned to.
If it looks possible that your project will go live before you have another job, I would, as tactfully as possible, e-mail your boss with a clear statement of your concerns, and bcc your home account for permanent record. If he wants to proceed, you're just doing a job, I don't think it is incumbent upon programmers to start a crusade every time they see something that they think might be unethical (even though many programmers do this anyway.)
And, to reiterate, NOW is the time to find that next step in your career path. Try for better salary, benefits, etc., but if you find a straight lateral move, I'd be tempted to take it rather than continue working for a slimeball. What I see is that he values your time and effort less than the $2000/mo account - and, as other posters have said above, you're likely to be re-coding your page scraping very very often - which, when it happens, is going to make you look bad, i.e. boss says: "oh, he can't code anything that works for more than a few weeks...", which he either a) is a big enough moron that he actually believes himself (most likely), or b) he simply is giving you a rat-trap job to make you look bad.
My first boss after school hired me, then a few months later started to feel threatened by me and a couple of the other guys he brought in (yes, he really was that out of date and apparently unable to keep his skills up.) He started a campaign on me, giving me project after project and pulling me off before I could finish. After he had a pattern of 4 "unsuccessful" projects I had worked on, he pulled me in for a firing meeting. 5 years later I had his job, a few months after that, he retired. That was a unique situation where I had direct access to his boss, who recognized more or less what was going on. In a bigger place, I probably would have just moved on.
If you only want to have your house in the paved world. Legs give access to about 10x more homesite choices.
Clearly set before this audience to get a reaction.
Besides, when I was unemployed, I had nothing to do but:
The unemployed have LOTS of time on their hands, and open source is one way to do something productive that may lead to some direct income, or at the very least demonstrate your skills to prospective employers.
I certainly would hire someone who could point to a dozen intelligently edited Wikipedia articles that they contributed to over another candidate who has nothing to show for their last 6 months.
I've had a couple of small teams over the last several years, and we don't have a lot of time to mess around with managing the version control system. trac was an attractive (and free) project management tool with nearly 100% painless svn integration - living with both for over 2 years now, the only thing the system asks of me is to copy off the .tar'ed backups once in awhile, and I suppose I could automate that too...
Never looked seriously at git due to team size (ranges from 3-6 depending on how you count...) and the utter painlessness of a trac-svn install. We did expend a few days effort to get trac-svn to run native under OS-X, but after that when it was time to set up a new system, we just got somebody's 10 year old PC and installed Debian and trac-svn on it, took less than a day and has worked like a champ ever since.
The svn access tools under Linux/OS-X/Windows are also pretty slick and easy.
The concept is this: 40,000 civilizations spread randomly across a disc 100,000 light-years in diameter. That establishes a certain density of civilizations. Man's "shell of space-time awareness" intersects the entire Milky Way, yes, but to assume that these 40,000 civilizations are permanent is awfully optimistic. Even if the longest lived of them have persisted 100,000 years, during what fraction of that time did they believe that radiating identifying energy was a good idea? That's the fraction that Arecibo is looking for - and if they succeed, I wouldn't be surprised if they find something that makes Earth re-think our current omnidirectional pattern radiating lifestyle.
Anyway - of more interest to me is who might be in the local neighborhood - I really don't care what civilizations halfway across the galaxy were doing when Cro-Magnon first appeared - but I might be interested if one were close enough for a round-trip message in a couple of lifetimes...
Well, even if ET was popping an unusual number of SuperNovae for some reason, there's a "shell of space-time" about 400ly thick in which the human race would have even noticed. It's still a pretty small percentage of the Milky Way, even at its maximal intersection. And, if ET is being subtle in the least, that shell is more like 40ly thick.
I believe there's a quote to the effect of "any sufficiently advanced civilization will conduct it's business in such a manner as to be undetectable by cretins like us."
It took about 25 years to go from the F-4 Phantom to the F-117 Stealth Nighthawk as the "most technologically advanced and tactically valuable" fighter aircraft. I suspect that if the planet were given credible proof of actual advanced ET civilizations and their ability to transform small rocky planets directly to energy, we'd learn how to live without broadcast television, and maybe even cellphone transmissions that escape the ionosphere, really quickly.
But, the diameter of the milky way is about 100,000 light years - so, if we assume that pre-Galileo civilization was oblivious to ET, we as a species are only aware of civilization signs within 400 light years or so.
So, if there are 40,000 civilizations within a 100,000ly diameter, then there are approximately 2.56 civilizations within a 800ly diameter.
Personally, I feel like Earth represents the .56 of a civilization in that scenario...
You want to read as many formats as possible, in as small a box as possible? What about those 8" floppies? But seriously, first identify what you must have, want to have, etc. and then buy a box that wraps that - I certainly wouldn't want a long lifetime project box like this to be implemented as a hydra of removable plug-ins that will get misplaced, dropped, or broken over then next decade. If you're really ambitious, the motherboard will likely need several ISA and PCI slots, as well as multiple IDE and SATA ports, and I would think that a Linux / Windows 98-SE / XP triple boot OS should cover most stuff in existence today that you would care about, but if you want to get really esoteric, you can also piggyback an Apple II on there....
Next, they'll designate their new "professional / server / high(er) margin" product with something nonsensical and confused with Vista like: Viewport
Write programs, open source, hobby, whatever. Then, apply to those jobs that "require 2-5 years experience", and show projects you have worked on in the last 2-5 years.
If you're applying to work for me as a programmer, you will be performing a small programming test before being hired. I weigh 60% of my hiring decision based on that test - with strongest consideration given to communication skills, did you understand the problem before writing the code?
Lots of guys with 10 years programming experience leave the room frustrated after an hour (there's a sample program already written and compiling, all you have to do is write additional code to add a couple of features.) Kids with zero "real world" work experience tend to do better on the test for some reason, and they also seem to make more productive employees. We started giving the test when one of these $150/hr consultants with 12 years of experience (in a field that was 8 years old, but he had an explanation for that...) couldn't program his way out of a paper bag, given a month's time.
Results count.
Actually, not. When researching prior art for the trolls (attys) they were very interested in academic and trade journal publications, or any other source that revealed prior art. Used this once to justify using EEPROM in our product, a competitor had a patent on it, but prior art invalidating the patent existed, so we went ahead and infringed them. There's a good chance they won't call on the infringement, and if they do we can throw the prior art at them and effectively nullify their ability to sue. Still, finding the patent(s), finding the prior art, having the meetings creating the "case file," and preparing the internal reports cost several hundred man hours in total.
As a highly specialized tech-employee, there are only a handful of places I can work within reasonable travel time of my home (telecommuting has not yet become a reality in my niche.) Having lived in 3 major markets now, I have never had the choice of working for a firm which shared their IP spoils so generously. Best I have ever experienced personally is $2000 per patent, most places promise $1 on paper and don't even deliver that.
I did work for a place that had a "standard" employee stock purchase program that amounted to more or less an average 15% extra income - depending on market conditions. That program was arbitrarily terminated just as capriciously as the $2K patent awards were instated. I did leave in response to those conditions, but changing jobs takes several months, at best - and if I would feel foolish to move across the country to chase a promise of patent equity sharing, which can be terminated at a whim - or more likely administered in such a fashion as to not reward the true inventors, which will probably take you more than a year to determine after you start working there.
As an employer, if you've got a superstar who's likely to jump ship, you might try to entice them to stay with a big carrot - but I'd be shocked to see this implemented as "policy," and the superstar might jump ship anyway when a competitor offers a bigger "signing carrot." In my experience, the signing carrots are almost always more attractive than the retention carrots.
Good point, but as the system works right now, novelty is a small part - there's a healthy dose of requiring sufficient assets to do the development and launch built into the way things work in patents and trademarks. It's happening in a semi-uncontrolled way via lax examinations and litigation, but the net effect is that a big company can stake out less than novel turf and defend it 'legally.' The bigger the company, the more sketchy claims they can afford, and the better they can defend them.
I've heard dozens of "I thought of that first" sob stories, complete with valid and legal patents, which are flaunted to various degrees by companies that can actually implement the idea.
They depend on bar-codes for their own checkout and inventory tracking... by the time they get over that hurdle, you'll have enough computing power in your phone to optically recognize and identify items without the barcodes.
The killer portion of this is in the number of people that (might) use it... if it's only in the hands of nerds carrying Palm-Symbols, it's as interesting and useful as a ham radio - great if you're a ham-nerd yourself, big yawn for the other 99.7% of the population.
Regardless of how '1990s' bar codes are, if this phone will allow me to walk into a store, scan an item, and within seconds tell me the price of that item at competing local and online retailers... that is a killer app.
There was a post above about cheaper beer, and not only will this enable you to find cheaper beer, if 10% of people carry these things, they'll inform 80% of the shopping public that cheaper beer is available down the street - which should make the beer cheaper where you are standing in a very short time, if the retailer doesn't want to lose a lot of volume.
It may be a while for 10% market penetration, but I bet it's less than 10 years, think where cellphones were 10 years ago....
In an ideal world, I'd look for something on the order of:
Dollar amounts and percentages may be adjusted to taste, but one thing I think makes sense would be to give the recipient an option to take:
Somehow, places I have worked are typically very tight with their shares and options when the engineers come around. It makes a certain amount of sense, most engineers I know understand cash quite well, but wouldn't know how to price a long term option if you gave it to them.
Not to the USPTO, in my experience.
This still depends to a large extent on which space you are playing in. If you are trying to be a startup in a field of multi-billion dollar players, sure, you'll lose the patent war, regardless of whether or not you choose to play.
On the other hand, if you are entering a field that represents a small current market with a scattering of small players, the patent could be all it takes to get you some breathing room. In round numbers, it enables a $10M capitalized startup to compete in a field populated by companies with $300M market caps.
Without patent protection, the startup venture would be hopeless, and companies that don't even play in the field would "come take your lunch" just because they could.
One of my ex-CEO's was an ex-quarterback. He summed it up thusly:
How many patents did the competition file last year? 30? How many did we file? 2? You know what that means, Tim? (Tim is the patent attorney) We're 28 behind. Now get on it!
He then left the room and went off to appear on CNN and do some semi-pro race car driving. I'm sure the details would have been more than he could handle, anyway.