For some reason, full employment creates a bond of loyalty from the employee, and sometimes from the company, which is never there as a contractor. More programmers got health care. It was a good thing.
That's the sunny side of the story.
The REAL motivation for the law was unpaid taxes. Individuals have a much higher rate of cheating on their employment taxes than corps do (and its no wonder, self-employed people like independent contractors have to pay both the employee and employer sides of the taxes - essentially doubling fica, medicare, etc, so they see just how big a chunk the IRS takes, most employees aren't even aware there is such a thing as employer-side taxes).
So the IRS loves to have everyone treated as an employee of some corp as it is just so much easier for them to get the biggest piece of the pie that way. In fact, when the IRS comes along and reclassifies a contractor as an employee, they keep any employer-side taxes that the 'contractor' paid and then they go and double-dip on the employer for back-taxes on employer side too. With fines even.
The game really is rigged against anyone trying to be self-employed in any highly-skilled industry, not just tech.
And furthermore, WTF is their problem with masturbation?
What are you talking about?
The kid wasn't choking kojak - he was eating candy. Dumbass on the other side of the camera thought a piece of Mike & Ike candy was an illegal drug. Who knows what kind 'zero-tolerance' befuddled mindset lets them decide that something that looks like a pill was "illegal" via just a webcam shot...
Fyi, pretty much any job working for the government or with children is much more invasive--you will actually have your prints submitted to a database for a background check, rather than simply having checksummed on the given machine. The latter doesn't seem that controversial to me.
However, there are a huge litany of rules and restrictions that protect you and the information you submit for a government background check. No such rules apply in a situation like this.
And with an inkjet printer and blank check paper, you can commit bank fraud. How is the fact that you CAN cheat relevant?
At literally every hourly job I have ever held in my life, people "clocking in" to cover for friends has been a huge problem. Its outright theft from the employer, yet people that would never steal physical property, will cheat a time clock without thinking twice.
Uhhhm, you asked the question and then answered it yourself - that was on purpose right?
The fact that you can cheat this system and that there is plenty of motivation to cheat it means it will be cheated.
Chances are the vendor selling the system promoted it as being cheat-proof. That's been my experience with these finger-print timeclocks. But if it is relatively simple to cheat than it has no benefit over the older system which was cheaper, just as prone to cheating but less invasive.
So who really wins here? Employer pays out a good chunk of money that, at best, only buys a temporary reprieve from cheating and may even create a false sense of confidence such that more cheating goes on without getting caught. Employees lose yet another piece of their privacy. Vendor sells another shiny new box and the salesman gets a big fat commission.
To state it again. This is not RAM memory you need, use or have purpose for. IF you do need it, it is zeroed-out and free'd to application in like 30ms (one frame in usual FPS games).
The problem with previous versions of windows (I haven't used anything newer than XP) is in how the OS decides that you do not "need, use or have a purpose for" certain types of memory.
The pathological, and yet all too common case with XP is the OS's decision that text pages should be dumped in favor of disk cache far too soon. The result being that if you have multiple apps open and a few that you haven't touched for roughly 10 minutes and then go to copy a couple of gigabytes of files around the text pages for those 'idle' applications are flushed out and the disk cache loaded with parts of those copied files (which you are unlikely to ever need). When you click on the iconbar to bring one of those formerly idle apps back to the foreground the system grinds away for a long time (obviously machine dependent but never instantly and frequently way beyond the point of annoying) as it reloads those text pages from disk before the application even starts to redraw itself much less starts becoming fully interactive again.
The worst part about that behavior is that, to the best of my knowledge, there are no knobs to tweak it. I can't specify how long a text page needs to be idle before it should be a candidate for flushing or even if it should be pinned down permanently so that is never paged out. I once went looking to see if there was a way to do it from within the application code itself - something like mlock()/mlockall() in posix - and I couldn't find an equivalent, which may just be a reflection of my own inexperience with the Windows API but I figured I would throw that out there anyway.
Actually, that seems to be your modus operandi in this discussion.
You've made statements that are unsupportable and when faced with your inability to support them, you retreat to righteousness instead of reevaluating your position.
The difference is that all of those behaviors are predictable according to the theory of gravity. You can precisely predict how that ball will bounce, and how that comet will travel through the solar system, given sufficient data.
So what? The point I was making is that anyone can gloss over the details of a theory and make it appear to be false.
The fact that gravity is simpler and generally more predictable (at least in cases where there are only a handful of interacting bodies) actually reinforces the point that cherry-picking deliberately misleading examples can cast doubt not because of a bad theory but because of a lack of understanding by the person posing the questions.
So my question is this: For a theory to be Science it must be falsifiable; so what would it take for one of you True Believers to reconsider your theory?
If a ball falls down it is because of gravity. If it bounces back up it is because of gravity.
If comet flies into the solar system it is because of gravity. If the comet slingshots around jupiter and permanently exits the solar system it is because of gravity.
If the tide rises it is because of gravity. If the tide recedes it is because of gravity.
See how easy it is to gloss over the details and make something perfectly normal seem contradictory?
That's the kind of thing people have made up their mind and are only interested in promulgating their point of view do - not someone who is asking genuine questions.
When Phil Jones says there has been no warming for fifteen years, it doesn't mean anything. In fact, to date only the Moonies at the Wash. Times and Fox News consider his statement worthy of repeating. (He said it to the BBC, btw, not known as a bastion of Deniers.)
Except, that's not what he said:
BBC - Do you agree that from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming
PJ - Yes, but only just. I also calculated the trend for the period 1995 to 2009. This trend (0.12C per decade) is positive, but not significant at the 95% significance level. The positive trend is quite close to the significance level. Achieving statistical significance in scientific terms is much more likely for longer periods, and much less likely for shorter periods.
See now how that's nothing like the denial you spun it as? Or maybe you really didn't spin it, maybe you didn't even bother to go to first sources and just took the word of other spinmeisters - you know the ones who follow the mantra "if it bleeds, it leads!" Sucks not being able to apply critical thinking and google to do your own fact checking.
Gee - how about addressing what I said instead of demolishing your own strawmen?
Such as? You said christianity is the principal enemy of moral progress because (a) its mostly benign in the west (own strawman apparently demolished) and (b) it is just as regressive as islam in the 3rd world. So if that's true then how does affecting LESS people in an identical fashion make it MORE of an enemy?
Or do you think your throw-off about "re-fighting battles" means nothing else you say has to be congruent?
Gee - if christianity matters because it is just as regressive in 3rd world countries as islam is - then how can islam "not count" when there are more muslims in 3rd world countries than there are christians?
Sorry, I can't tell if you are disputing that distribution of a photograph of a building violates copyright on the building or if you are arguing about what kind of copyright is violated as in "design copyright" being some sort of specific sort of copyright. If the former - then you should read something like this page - if the later, well I'm not all that interested in nitpicking - suffice to say that photographs of a building can in many cases violate copyrights on the design of the building.
We've had proper reflowing UI in Web applications for ages now,
And yet, the web apps tend to reflow like crap too. Look at the nytimes website, or yahoo.com, even youtube.com - all basically fixed size and there are bazillions more. My experience is that reflowing websites are the exception, not the norm.
I dunno, maybe those desktop UI developers just need to relearn?
Lolz. The whole point of those examples is that "need to relearn" ain't enough motivation - and handhelds don't bring any new motivation. If anything, the limited number of resolutions will just encourage developers to code for a specific handful of resolutions and each time a new one becomes common enough, they'll hardcode that one in to their apps too.
can't help but notice that even on Windows, new UI toolkits go for reflowing-by-default
Just because the toolkit supports it doesn't mean the developer will implement it properly. Same problem with all the other toolkits already discussed.
We've had that on the desktop for decades (e.g. all Linux UI frameworks use this model by default).
And it's still a crapshoot whether stretching any particular application's window will cause it to reflow like crap or not. It seems to be one of those UI things that far too few developers care about. I doubt they'll be any more conscientious on handhelds/phones than they are anywhere else. For example - there are lots of 'themes' for firefox that don't reflow for crap and that's for themes - something that is 100% pure UI. If people who are only doing UI work can't get it right, then expecting developers of full blown applications to get it right seems like wishful thinking.
What's an "exact" model? Accurate down to individual atoms?
In a case like this, I would define an "exact model" to be one in which the goal of constructing the model is to as closely replicate the design of the original as is possible given the various constraints of time, skill, available space, precision of instruments, etc. As long as the goal of the modeller is to attempt perfect replication then they are, by definition, avoiding creative work. And if they are explicitly trying not to be creative, then copyright's goal of encouraging creative work means copyright should not apply.
I think you have good chance for making it copyrightable because it is a separate work though based on an actual building (photographs of it are also copyrightable). You may even violate the copyright (if any such exist) on the very design of the building though as photographs are OK I think you're clear there.
You are confusing the copyright on the design of the building - which is held by the building's designer - with the copyrightability of a model of the building. The case under discussion is a list of facts - facts are not copyrightable themselves. The design of a building is copyrightable. If you make an exact model of a building which is still under design copyright then the exact model will violate the copyright on the building - it won't get its own new copyright just because it was hard.
No, he did not say there is "no single standardized format" he said there is "no standardized format."
There is nothing about standardization the requires there be only a single standard. An example of multiple standards is screw-heads where there are at least all of these different standards: phillips, slotted, pozidriv, square, robertson-square, hex, torx, tri-wing, torq-set, spanner-head, triple-square, polydrive, one-way, spline-drive, double-hex and bristol.
The arrangement of 3D data is neither "simple" nor "obvious" for the reasons I already stated. If you disagree ask an average adult to create a 3D model of a building.
An exact model would contain no creative component. Especially considering that said arrangement of 3D data is going to be in some standardized format which is the 3D equivalent of alphabetizing a list of names.
the fact that Asimov never came across a worthy script while he was alive,
On what, exactly, do you base that comment on?
It sure better not be "because they never made any movies of his books" because in a business so full of egos and bizarro complicated licensing, failure to make a movie or even acquire the rights to make a movie doesn't mean squat.
For example, Harlan Ellison actually did write a screen play back in the late 70's / early 80's. It was even published in the 90's as I, Robot: The Illustrated Screenplay. According to the forward, Asimov was very happy with the script.
H1B is not a temporary worker visa like some European countries have. It is a dual intent visa allowing an eventual transfer to full citizenship. After 5 years you apply for a Green Card and eventually convert to a citizen or you go back.
It is only "dual intent" in that they don't make you wait in your home country while your green card application processes. But because the only entity that can practically sponsor your green card application is your H1B employer - you can't change employers without resetting the application process.
No. I think you are missing the point. You want to argue that more people than just Obama have responsibility. The point here is that in a subthread about Obama's responsibility, it is no surprise that Obama's responsibility is the topic of discussion.
Either you'll have more HB1s inside America, or you'll have competition from abroad. This is a binary decision.
Err, no.
A 3rd way would be to scrap the H1B visa program and replace it with a visa that is officially an immigration visa, not a temporary worker visa. The way it is now, H1B visa holders are at the mercy of their employers if they want to immigrate because switching employers means restarting the green card process and the green card process generally works out to about the same duration as an H1B visa + renewal. So, switch employers more than once or after a couple of years and you are essentially guaranteeing that you won't get a green card. A fix to the system like that puts visa holders on an even competitive field with citizens which will serve to increase the bargaining position of all employees.
Long-term, that's better for the country anyway. We need to encourage the brain-drain into the US to continue as it is now, we've become less hospitable to foreigners and at the same time their home countries have become a lot more hospitable to highly educated workers. Changing H1B into an official immigration-path visa would go a long way towards tilting the scales back in our favor.
The intro video doesn't say if it is possible to click multiple times on a Flattr button or pay larger chunks of "money", which would be needed if the scheme should be fair (blog post typed in a few minutes has a different value then a game that might have taken month or years to create).
"Fair" is in the eye of the customer. Sure, I agree that the customer should have the ability to control how much money goes where. I'm just disagreeing with your example and the assumption behind it that more effort going into the creation necessarily makes the creation more valuable. A 10 second twit that tells me what the powerball lotto numbers are going to be 1 hour beforehand is worth a lot more to me than all of the video games ever created combined.
Slashdot Mirror
For some reason, full employment creates a bond of loyalty from the employee, and sometimes from the company, which is never there as a contractor. More programmers got health care. It was a good thing.
That's the sunny side of the story.
The REAL motivation for the law was unpaid taxes. Individuals have a much higher rate of cheating on their employment taxes than corps do (and its no wonder, self-employed people like independent contractors have to pay both the employee and employer sides of the taxes - essentially doubling fica, medicare, etc, so they see just how big a chunk the IRS takes, most employees aren't even aware there is such a thing as employer-side taxes).
So the IRS loves to have everyone treated as an employee of some corp as it is just so much easier for them to get the biggest piece of the pie that way.
In fact, when the IRS comes along and reclassifies a contractor as an employee, they keep any employer-side taxes that the 'contractor' paid and then they go and double-dip on the employer for back-taxes on employer side too. With fines even.
The game really is rigged against anyone trying to be self-employed in any highly-skilled industry, not just tech.
And furthermore, WTF is their problem with masturbation?
What are you talking about?
The kid wasn't choking kojak - he was eating candy.
Dumbass on the other side of the camera thought a piece of Mike & Ike candy was an illegal drug.
Who knows what kind 'zero-tolerance' befuddled mindset lets them decide that something that looks like a pill was "illegal" via just a webcam shot...
Fyi, pretty much any job working for the government or with children is much more invasive--you will actually have your prints submitted to a database for a background check, rather than simply having checksummed on the given machine. The latter doesn't seem that controversial to me.
However, there are a huge litany of rules and restrictions that protect you and the information you submit for a government background check.
No such rules apply in a situation like this.
And with an inkjet printer and blank check paper, you can commit bank fraud. How is the fact that you CAN cheat relevant?
At literally every hourly job I have ever held in my life, people "clocking in" to cover for friends has been a huge problem.
Its outright theft from the employer, yet people that would never steal physical property, will cheat a time clock without thinking twice.
Uhhhm, you asked the question and then answered it yourself - that was on purpose right?
The fact that you can cheat this system and that there is plenty of motivation to cheat it means it will be cheated.
Chances are the vendor selling the system promoted it as being cheat-proof. That's been my experience with these finger-print timeclocks.
But if it is relatively simple to cheat than it has no benefit over the older system which was cheaper, just as prone to cheating but less invasive.
So who really wins here? Employer pays out a good chunk of money that, at best, only buys a temporary reprieve from cheating and may even create a false sense of confidence such that more cheating goes on without getting caught. Employees lose yet another piece of their privacy. Vendor sells another shiny new box and the salesman gets a big fat commission.
Not many winners in that scenario.
To state it again. This is not RAM memory you need, use or have purpose for. IF you do need it, it is zeroed-out and free'd to application in like 30ms (one frame in usual FPS games).
The problem with previous versions of windows (I haven't used anything newer than XP) is in how the OS decides that you do not "need, use or have a purpose for" certain types of memory.
The pathological, and yet all too common case with XP is the OS's decision that text pages should be dumped in favor of disk cache far too soon. The result being that if you have multiple apps open and a few that you haven't touched for roughly 10 minutes and then go to copy a couple of gigabytes of files around the text pages for those 'idle' applications are flushed out and the disk cache loaded with parts of those copied files (which you are unlikely to ever need). When you click on the iconbar to bring one of those formerly idle apps back to the foreground the system grinds away for a long time (obviously machine dependent but never instantly and frequently way beyond the point of annoying) as it reloads those text pages from disk before the application even starts to redraw itself much less starts becoming fully interactive again.
The worst part about that behavior is that, to the best of my knowledge, there are no knobs to tweak it. I can't specify how long a text page needs to be idle before it should be a candidate for flushing or even if it should be pinned down permanently so that is never paged out. I once went looking to see if there was a way to do it from within the application code itself - something like mlock()/mlockall() in posix - and I couldn't find an equivalent, which may just be a reflection of my own inexperience with the Windows API but I figured I would throw that out there anyway.
Whatever helps you sleep at night.
Actually, that seems to be your modus operandi in this discussion.
You've made statements that are unsupportable and when faced with your inability to support them, you retreat to righteousness instead of reevaluating your position.
The difference is that all of those behaviors are predictable according to the theory of gravity. You can precisely predict how that ball will bounce, and how that comet will travel through the solar system, given sufficient data.
So what? The point I was making is that anyone can gloss over the details of a theory and make it appear to be false.
The fact that gravity is simpler and generally more predictable (at least in cases where there are only a handful of interacting bodies) actually reinforces the point that cherry-picking deliberately misleading examples can cast doubt not because of a bad theory but because of a lack of understanding by the person posing the questions.
So my question is this: For a theory to be Science it must be falsifiable; so what would it take for one of you True Believers to reconsider your theory?
If a ball falls down it is because of gravity.
If it bounces back up it is because of gravity.
If comet flies into the solar system it is because of gravity.
If the comet slingshots around jupiter and permanently exits the solar system it is because of gravity.
If the tide rises it is because of gravity.
If the tide recedes it is because of gravity.
See how easy it is to gloss over the details and make something perfectly normal seem contradictory?
That's the kind of thing people have made up their mind and are only interested in promulgating their point of view do - not someone who is asking genuine questions.
When Phil Jones says there has been no warming for fifteen years, it doesn't mean anything. In fact, to date only the Moonies at the Wash. Times and Fox News consider his statement worthy of repeating. (He said it to the BBC, btw, not known as a bastion of Deniers.)
Except, that's not what he said:
BBC - Do you agree that from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming
PJ - Yes, but only just. I also calculated the trend for the period 1995 to 2009. This trend (0.12C per decade) is positive, but not significant at the 95% significance level. The positive trend is quite close to the significance level. Achieving statistical significance in scientific terms is much more likely for longer periods, and much less likely for shorter periods.
See now how that's nothing like the denial you spun it as? Or maybe you really didn't spin it, maybe you didn't even bother to go to first sources and just took the word of other spinmeisters - you know the ones who follow the mantra "if it bleeds, it leads!" Sucks not being able to apply critical thinking and google to do your own fact checking.
Gee - how about addressing what I said instead of demolishing your own strawmen?
Such as? You said christianity is the principal enemy of moral progress because (a) its mostly benign in the west (own strawman apparently demolished) and (b) it is just as regressive as islam in the 3rd world. So if that's true then how does affecting LESS people in an identical fashion make it MORE of an enemy?
Or do you think your throw-off about "re-fighting battles" means nothing else you say has to be congruent?
Gee - if christianity matters because it is just as regressive in 3rd world countries as islam is - then how can islam "not count" when there are more muslims in 3rd world countries than there are christians?
That has never happened, because an alternate number suffices.
Like what? A driver's license number, credit card number or a passport number?
All one hop away from your SSN in a multitude of databases.
Sorry, I can't tell if you are disputing that distribution of a photograph of a building violates copyright on the building or if you are arguing about what kind of copyright is violated as in "design copyright" being some sort of specific sort of copyright. If the former - then you should read something like this page - if the later, well I'm not all that interested in nitpicking - suffice to say that photographs of a building can in many cases violate copyrights on the design of the building.
We've had proper reflowing UI in Web applications for ages now,
And yet, the web apps tend to reflow like crap too.
Look at the nytimes website, or yahoo.com, even youtube.com - all basically fixed size and there are bazillions more. My experience is that reflowing websites are the exception, not the norm.
I dunno, maybe those desktop UI developers just need to relearn?
Lolz. The whole point of those examples is that "need to relearn" ain't enough motivation - and handhelds don't bring any new motivation. If anything, the limited number of resolutions will just encourage developers to code for a specific handful of resolutions and each time a new one becomes common enough, they'll hardcode that one in to their apps too.
can't help but notice that even on Windows, new UI toolkits go for reflowing-by-default
Just because the toolkit supports it doesn't mean the developer will implement it properly. Same problem with all the other toolkits already discussed.
We've had that on the desktop for decades (e.g. all Linux UI frameworks use this model by default).
And it's still a crapshoot whether stretching any particular application's window will cause it to reflow like crap or not. It seems to be one of those UI things that far too few developers care about. I doubt they'll be any more conscientious on handhelds/phones than they are anywhere else. For example - there are lots of 'themes' for firefox that don't reflow for crap and that's for themes - something that is 100% pure UI. If people who are only doing UI work can't get it right, then expecting developers of full blown applications to get it right seems like wishful thinking.
What's an "exact" model? Accurate down to individual atoms?
In a case like this, I would define an "exact model" to be one in which the goal of constructing the model is to as closely replicate the design of the original as is possible given the various constraints of time, skill, available space, precision of instruments, etc. As long as the goal of the modeller is to attempt perfect replication then they are, by definition, avoiding creative work. And if they are explicitly trying not to be creative, then copyright's goal of encouraging creative work means copyright should not apply.
I think you have good chance for making it copyrightable because it is a separate work though based on an actual building (photographs of it are also copyrightable). You may even violate the copyright (if any such exist) on the very design of the building though as photographs are OK I think you're clear there.
You are confusing the copyright on the design of the building - which is held by the building's designer - with the copyrightability of a model of the building. The case under discussion is a list of facts - facts are not copyrightable themselves. The design of a building is copyrightable. If you make an exact model of a building which is still under design copyright then the exact model will violate the copyright on the building - it won't get its own new copyright just because it was hard.
So he's right - there are several standards.
No, he did not say there is "no single standardized format" he said there is "no standardized format."
There is nothing about standardization the requires there be only a single standard. An example of multiple standards is screw-heads where there are at least all of these different standards: phillips, slotted, pozidriv, square, robertson-square, hex, torx, tri-wing, torq-set, spanner-head, triple-square, polydrive, one-way, spline-drive, double-hex and bristol.
There is no standardized format for 3D models.
Sure there is - each application has its own format. There is no creativity involved in using the format that your application uses.
The arrangement of 3D data is neither "simple" nor "obvious" for the reasons I already stated. If you disagree ask an average adult to create a 3D model of a building.
An exact model would contain no creative component. Especially considering that said arrangement of 3D data is going to be in some standardized format which is the 3D equivalent of alphabetizing a list of names.
the fact that Asimov never came across a worthy script while he was alive,
On what, exactly, do you base that comment on?
It sure better not be "because they never made any movies of his books" because in a business so full of egos and bizarro complicated licensing, failure to make a movie or even acquire the rights to make a movie doesn't mean squat.
For example, Harlan Ellison actually did write a screen play back in the late 70's / early 80's. It was even published in the 90's as I, Robot: The Illustrated Screenplay. According to the forward, Asimov was very happy with the script.
It seems that a sub-thread about the Presidents' responsibilities (Bush and Obama) is an appropriate place to suggest that Congress has its share.
To you it does. Got your original point, didn't care. tl;dr
H1B is not a temporary worker visa like some European countries have. It is a dual intent visa allowing an eventual transfer to full citizenship. After 5 years you apply for a Green Card and eventually convert to a citizen or you go back.
It is only "dual intent" in that they don't make you wait in your home country while your green card application processes. But because the only entity that can practically sponsor your green card application is your H1B employer - you can't change employers without resetting the application process.
Everyone sure is missing the point.
No. I think you are missing the point. You want to argue that more people than just Obama have responsibility.
The point here is that in a subthread about Obama's responsibility, it is no surprise that Obama's responsibility is the topic of discussion.
Either you'll have more HB1s inside America, or you'll have competition from abroad. This is a binary decision.
Err, no.
A 3rd way would be to scrap the H1B visa program and replace it with a visa that is officially an immigration visa, not a temporary worker visa. The way it is now, H1B visa holders are at the mercy of their employers if they want to immigrate because switching employers means restarting the green card process and the green card process generally works out to about the same duration as an H1B visa + renewal. So, switch employers more than once or after a couple of years and you are essentially guaranteeing that you won't get a green card. A fix to the system like that puts visa holders on an even competitive field with citizens which will serve to increase the bargaining position of all employees.
Long-term, that's better for the country anyway. We need to encourage the brain-drain into the US to continue as it is now, we've become less hospitable to foreigners and at the same time their home countries have become a lot more hospitable to highly educated workers. Changing H1B into an official immigration-path visa would go a long way towards tilting the scales back in our favor.
The intro video doesn't say if it is possible to click multiple times on a Flattr button or pay larger chunks of "money", which would be needed if the scheme should be fair (blog post typed in a few minutes has a different value then a game that might have taken month or years to create).
"Fair" is in the eye of the customer. Sure, I agree that the customer should have the ability to control how much money goes where. I'm just disagreeing with your example and the assumption behind it that more effort going into the creation necessarily makes the creation more valuable. A 10 second twit that tells me what the powerball lotto numbers are going to be 1 hour beforehand is worth a lot more to me than all of the video games ever created combined.