Right and everyone is rational individual who's too sensible risk libel cases, no one is power crazed, vindictive prick.
I dunno about you but I'd much rather leave on good terms than bad ones. If someone does call them and they hate you they can say "Yes, he worked here from date x to date y as an (engineer/manager/whatever)". If they like you they'll say "Oh yeah? He worked here and was very good in these areas/ was a good laugh to go out for a drink with/ worked hard/ some other positive thing".
and tell your boss, as well as the IP attorneys working on it within/for your company, in a paper-trail-setting medium like email, dressed up as a question of an inquisitive techno-geek wanting to satisfy his curiosity:
"So, on this flux capacitor patent thing: What do you guys make of this Heisenberg compensator design I found at this URL here? I kind of derived my design from that, is that something that would go in the prior art list we talked about during the IP attorney meeting the other day?"
Poison that well.
Umm, really bad idea. They'll just fire him for 'stealing paperclips' or some such pretext in week's time.
Result: Dishonourable discharge, i.e. fired + bad reference. No one respects a weasel.
Another possibility is going to your boss and expressing your concerns. Bosses respect that shit, but they won't know what the hell he is talking about. There is a risk of a blazing row.
Result: Honourable discharge, i.e. let go with a glowing reference (best case) dishonourable discharge (worst case).
Better but still not good. And they'll just ask someone else to file the patent anyway.
I'd take the patent and try to get them to offer to license free for non commercial use. Talk about laptops for African orphans or whatever your concern is. It's the best chance of not hosing your career. Plus there's the opportunity to have a serious talk with the boss, and they absolutely love that shit. And they can spin it as corporate social responsibility, laptops for photogenic smiling African orphans, file photos of which can be put on the website. Hell, offer to do that webpage too.
In the end, I suspect this will mostly be hot air. As long as their are profits to be made in China, US companies will be there regardless of how they have to "bend" their values to operate.
Actually if the US embargoed China US companies would not do business. And a sort of 'embargo lite' like making it illegal for companies to shop dissidents and thus comply with Chinese law will hopefully make them do use Taiwan companies as a proxy. Which is a good thing - the money goes to a small democracy, rather than a large dictatorship which in the long run will be a potent competitor to the US.
And I mean competitor in the sense of Japan in WWII, not Japan now. It's short sighted to give crypto fascist dictatorships enough money and industrial capacity to challenge you.
I have heard that the large popularity of the death metal in a region is a symptom of a "depressive" culture (along the huge alcohol consumption) brought by the little exposure to the Sun during the year - Winter Blues?
Black clothes are also an evolutionary adaption to living in a snowy environment. In prehistoric times, humans who showed a preference for dark clothes were easier to find when they were lost in the snow. Evolution thus selected for this trait.
Moshing is also an efficient way for humans to stay warm in a confined environment like an igloo.
Humans who had the genes for moshing and wearing black clothes thus outbred those who did not.
Also, in most human societies with a harsh climate religion, in this case Satanism, acts as an agent to bind communities together.
It sort of makes me wonder if producing "well-rounded human beings" as our high school and college and admissions system attempts to do (load up on extracurriculars, etc) causes our graduates to be less competitive..
"Well rounded human beings" = emo faggotry. I sit in a client sites and code and debug all week and most of the weekend fuelled by coffee and greed. My only attempt at social interaction is trolling slashdot and lying to the people around me to make them back off so I've got some chance of finishing and heading off to another identical project in a different country. I love my life, but I'm not well rounded. Hell I'm not even a human being.
It was smaller than I thought, and is quite light. My girlfriend says it's ugly, but I'm fine with the look of it. Besides being a GSM-phone, it comes with some nice gimmics: GPS, accelerometer, WLAN. The touchscreen works fine, although I don't have anything to compare it with.
The software
The system it comes with, even after upgrading, is still very rough. It mostly works for doing phone calls and SMSs, but there are a number of unsolved quirks that prevent me from using the Freerunner as my sole phone for now. The suspend mode is left too often, resulting in a battery life of about eight hours, and there are issues with the audio for the conversation partners, who will hear static and echoes. But, as this is free software, there is hope that this will be fixed eventually
It's ok if you bring a Lauterbach and a laptop with you when you carry it. And TALK LOUDLY to make sure people can here you over the static and echoes. Echoes. echoes. ec...
watch patch get rejected for using 4 spaces per tab instead of 2
4 spaces per tab? You vile subhuman vermin. Death is too good for you. I hope you roast in Linux hell with your 72 (male) virgins arguing about naming conventions and software licensing for all eternity.
12 tab characters per tab has always been the standard, just do a s/\t/\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t/g on your code before you commit.
Cocaine fucks up your sense of right and wrong though. I've lost two friends because once they started using it regularly they turned into selfish assholes when they were on it and total emotional cripples when they were trying to scrounge the cash for another hit or wait for their dealer.
Some drug that makes you think you're God almighty for 10 minutes is not a good thing. Especially as it's expensive and you need another hit soon to keep going.
When people mess up words like "your"/"you're" or "its"/"it's" (or "de"/"dem" in my native language, Swedish ("they"/"them" in English)), that takes me completely out of any reading rhythm I might have had, because the entire sentence need to be reparsed once I realize that it was a mistake I read, rather than a predicate (or the other way around). The same thing goes for bad punctuation.
If I were to guess, I'd say its the same kind of difference as there is between visually and audially* oriented people. Some people read the words for their pronunciation value, and parse the sentence from that, while others read words for their pictographical value, and parse the sentence from that. If so, it's not so much a matter of skill, but of one's dominant sense.
* Yes, I know that's not an accepted English word, but I'd like to introduce it.
But when you read stuff written by slashdotards you know that your and you're and its and it's are used interchangeably. Just like when you get a txtspk SMS you know that it will be full of errors to save some cretin a few seconds of their time when they waste their whole lives on trivia. But once you've worked out how to rd the msg once it becomes second nature. It's like a filter I think, to protect your pristine mind from the chimpanzee jabbering of the brute masses. Once it is in place, it's almost like talking to real people, at least syntactically. They will perceive you as one of them too, since your erudite prose will be reduced to an appropriately brutish register on the way out.
I once dated a Chinese girl in the UK who'd arrived from China and learned English very quickly, in two years. I found out that just after she woke up she had great difficulty speaking English. But once she was awake she spoke it very fluently, though it was clear that it wasn't her native language because she never used chavisms like slightly thuggish English people I knew then would pepper their sentences with. It's like her English translator software was an application rather than part of her 'OS' and thus booted a bit late.
I've read that there's some strange process where you go from thinking in your native language and translating it to thinking in a foreign language. Personally, I've never got past the stage where I can buy stuff in shops in (Swedish, used to be able to do it in French at school). I doubt I'll ever get to the point where I'm properly bilingual. Let alone in a language like Chinese.
Mind you if your native language is not English you're exposed to English from a very early age, so I think non English speakers have an advantage. Certainly if I were Swedish or Chinese I would have made sure I learned English.
The problem is that build and built are both words and so a computer spell checker can't tell if you get them mixed up.
Actually, I can't tell if someone else gets them mixed up unless I force myself - the bizarre thing about reading is that if you're reading for meaning rather than spelling, errors like this get 'error corrected' away at some level beneath the conscious one, particularly if you're reading stuff on the internet where most people are pretty sloppy.
I suppose 'Grammar Nazis' just never learn this skill.
Three edits later, and it still makes no sense. I obviously meant to say "If not even the editor posting a stroy is interested".
[Goes to hide in a corner until he's able to type again.]
Hvae you seen taht rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy taht syas it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.
First, note how Marx calls the current government as "dictatorship of the bourgeoisie". Germany was at that time a parliamentary democracy. Similar to Anarchists (which at that time were a bit more common than they are today), they argue, that since a state has a military and a police to enforce its rules on the people, is repressive, a "dictatorship",("maintain its rule by means of the terror").
They simply argue, that for a translational phase, communists are in need of such a state, which can defend itself, the same way the current one can.
It's a good deal more cynical than that. Lenin and Stalin did indeed argue that parliamentary democracy was a concealed dictatorship, but that was so that they could claim their dictatorship which replaced it was the same thing.
But actually Communist dictatorships were much more oppressive than even the Tsar's absolute monarchy. E.g. look at the staggering numbers of people which were killed, imprisoned or starved to death due to collectivisation following the revolution.
Marx: "...When the workers replace the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie by their revolutionary dictatorship... to break down the resistance of the bourgeoisie... the workers invest the state with a revolutionary and transitional form... Engels: "...And the victorious party" (in a revolution) "must maintain its rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionaries. Would the Paris Commune have lasted more than a day if it had not used the authority of the armed people against the bourgeoisie? Cannot we, on the contrary, blame it for having made too little use of that authority?... Engels: "As, therefore, the state is only a transitional institution which is used in the struggle, in the revolution, to hold down one's adversaries by force, it is sheer nonsense to talk of a 'free people's state'; so long as the proletariat still needs the state, it does not need it in the interests of freedom but in order to hold down its adversaries, and as soon as it becomes possible to speak of freedom the state as such ceases to exist....
This reminds me of the Fight Club when Ed Norton's character is explaining to the woman on the plane that if the total legal liability is less than the cost of recalling all the defective cars, a recall is not issued. There is just no other way to say it... that is some nefarious heinous shit. If laws are really meant to protect and nurture society then this is EXACTLY the kind of crap that needs to be stopped.
No, if that were the case the solution is to make the legal liability for defective products killing someone higher. And in the US, legal liability is higher than almost anyone else. This should make US products safer.
Certainly companies go to greater lengths to avoid being sued for injuring someone in the US than elsewhere. Of course, the price for all this is eventually paid for by the consumer in terms of more expensive stuff.
That only works because most Japanese people won't break the law even if the fines are rather low, because they have principles. If there were more people like your friend parking fines would have to increase.
I've always thought that Communism was actually a trick. It was described as socialism, i.e. moving power from bosses to workers, but actually it was about rolling back progress in workers rights.
E.g. in the Soviet Union it essentially ended up essentially reinstating Serfdom
Some economic and political thinkers have argued that centrally-planned economies, especially the Soviet collective farm system and other systems based on Soviet-style Communist economics, amount to a return to government-owned serfdom. This view was put most powerfully by Friedrich Hayek in The Road to Serfdom as early as 1944 and has since been adopted by others including Mikhael Gorbachev. In certain Communist countries, farmers were tied to their farms, either kolkhoz which were theoretically collectives, or sovkhoz which were state-owned, through a system of internal passports and household registration. They had to plant crops according to instructions from the central authorities, especially if they were on state-run farms. These authorities would then "buy" their agricultural produce at vastly reduced prices and use the surplus to invest in heavy industry.
This de facto serfdom persisted in Russia till as late as 1974 (with a brief break during the Civil War), when the Soviet Government Decree #667 was put in effect. This decree granted peasants identification documents, with an unrestricted right to move within the country â" thus detaching them from the piece of land where they had worked for generations, for the first time in Russian history.
Slashdot Mirror
As do many packages that begin with 'G', I have to say...
GNUrd?
Right and everyone is rational individual who's too sensible risk libel cases, no one is power crazed, vindictive prick.
I dunno about you but I'd much rather leave on good terms than bad ones. If someone does call them and they hate you they can say "Yes, he worked here from date x to date y as an (engineer/manager/whatever)". If they like you they'll say "Oh yeah? He worked here and was very good in these areas/ was a good laugh to go out for a drink with/ worked hard/ some other positive thing".
Find some prior art.
and tell your boss, as well as the IP attorneys working on it within/for your company, in a paper-trail-setting medium like email, dressed up as a question of an inquisitive techno-geek wanting to satisfy his curiosity:
"So, on this flux capacitor patent thing: What do you guys make of this Heisenberg compensator design I found at this URL here? I kind of derived my design from that, is that something that would go in the prior art list we talked about during the IP attorney meeting the other day?"
Poison that well.
Umm, really bad idea. They'll just fire him for 'stealing paperclips' or some such pretext in week's time.
Result: Dishonourable discharge, i.e. fired + bad reference. No one respects a weasel.
Another possibility is going to your boss and expressing your concerns. Bosses respect that shit, but they won't know what the hell he is talking about. There is a risk of a blazing row.
Result: Honourable discharge, i.e. let go with a glowing reference (best case) dishonourable discharge (worst case).
Better but still not good. And they'll just ask someone else to file the patent anyway.
I'd take the patent and try to get them to offer to license free for non commercial use. Talk about laptops for African orphans or whatever your concern is. It's the best chance of not hosing your career. Plus there's the opportunity to have a serious talk with the boss, and they absolutely love that shit. And they can spin it as corporate social responsibility, laptops for photogenic smiling African orphans, file photos of which can be put on the website. Hell, offer to do that webpage too.
Result: Your career is safe.
In the end, I suspect this will mostly be hot air. As long as their are profits to be made in China, US companies will be there regardless of how they have to "bend" their values to operate.
Actually if the US embargoed China US companies would not do business. And a sort of 'embargo lite' like making it illegal for companies to shop dissidents and thus comply with Chinese law will hopefully make them do use Taiwan companies as a proxy. Which is a good thing - the money goes to a small democracy, rather than a large dictatorship which in the long run will be a potent competitor to the US.
And I mean competitor in the sense of Japan in WWII, not Japan now. It's short sighted to give crypto fascist dictatorships enough money and industrial capacity to challenge you.
Damnit, I forgot this awesome link
"Stay still, ball sack!"
http://jwz.livejournal.com/913754.html
I have heard that the large popularity of the death metal in a region is a symptom of a "depressive" culture (along the huge alcohol consumption) brought by the little exposure to the Sun during the year - Winter Blues?
Black clothes are also an evolutionary adaption to living in a snowy environment. In prehistoric times, humans who showed a preference for dark clothes were easier to find when they were lost in the snow. Evolution thus selected for this trait.
Moshing is also an efficient way for humans to stay warm in a confined environment like an igloo.
Humans who had the genes for moshing and wearing black clothes thus outbred those who did not.
Also, in most human societies with a harsh climate religion, in this case Satanism, acts as an agent to bind communities together.
It sort of makes me wonder if producing "well-rounded human beings" as our high school and college and admissions system attempts to do (load up on extracurriculars, etc) causes our graduates to be less competitive..
"Well rounded human beings" = emo faggotry. I sit in a client sites and code and debug all week and most of the weekend fuelled by coffee and greed. My only attempt at social interaction is trolling slashdot and lying to the people around me to make them back off so I've got some chance of finishing and heading off to another identical project in a different country. I love my life, but I'm not well rounded. Hell I'm not even a human being.
http://www.joachim-breitner.de/blog/archives/297-guid.html
The hardware
It was smaller than I thought, and is quite light. My girlfriend says it's ugly, but I'm fine with the look of it. Besides being a GSM-phone, it comes with some nice gimmics: GPS, accelerometer, WLAN. The touchscreen works fine, although I don't have anything to compare it with.
The software
The system it comes with, even after upgrading, is still very rough. It mostly works for doing phone calls and SMSs, but there are a number of unsolved quirks that prevent me from using the Freerunner as my sole phone for now. The suspend mode is left too often, resulting in a battery life of about eight hours, and there are issues with the audio for the conversation partners, who will hear static and echoes. But, as this is free software, there is hope that this will be fixed eventually
It's ok if you bring a Lauterbach and a laptop with you when you carry it. And TALK LOUDLY to make sure people can here you over the static and echoes. Echoes. echoes. ec...
How do you pronounce that name? Ass tile?
watch patch get rejected for using 4 spaces per tab instead of 2
4 spaces per tab? You vile subhuman vermin. Death is too good for you. I hope you roast in Linux hell with your 72 (male) virgins arguing about naming conventions and software licensing for all eternity.
12 tab characters per tab has always been the standard, just do a s/\t/\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t/g on your code before you commit.
Memez are in ur brainz, eating ur intelligence.
It's called GNU/Fellatio in Debian. Fascist.
Cocaine fucks up your sense of right and wrong though. I've lost two friends because once they started using it regularly they turned into selfish assholes when they were on it and total emotional cripples when they were trying to scrounge the cash for another hit or wait for their dealer.
Some drug that makes you think you're God almighty for 10 minutes is not a good thing. Especially as it's expensive and you need another hit soon to keep going.
When people mess up words like "your"/"you're" or "its"/"it's" (or "de"/"dem" in my native language, Swedish ("they"/"them" in English)), that takes me completely out of any reading rhythm I might have had, because the entire sentence need to be reparsed once I realize that it was a mistake I read, rather than a predicate (or the other way around). The same thing goes for bad punctuation.
If I were to guess, I'd say its the same kind of difference as there is between visually and audially* oriented people. Some people read the words for their pronunciation value, and parse the sentence from that, while others read words for their pictographical value, and parse the sentence from that. If so, it's not so much a matter of skill, but of one's dominant sense.
* Yes, I know that's not an accepted English word, but I'd like to introduce it.
But when you read stuff written by slashdotards you know that your and you're and its and it's are used interchangeably. Just like when you get a txtspk SMS you know that it will be full of errors to save some cretin a few seconds of their time when they waste their whole lives on trivia. But once you've worked out how to rd the msg once it becomes second nature. It's like a filter I think, to protect your pristine mind from the chimpanzee jabbering of the brute masses. Once it is in place, it's almost like talking to real people, at least syntactically. They will perceive you as one of them too, since your erudite prose will be reduced to an appropriately brutish register on the way out.
I once dated a Chinese girl in the UK who'd arrived from China and learned English very quickly, in two years. I found out that just after she woke up she had great difficulty speaking English. But once she was awake she spoke it very fluently, though it was clear that it wasn't her native language because she never used chavisms like slightly thuggish English people I knew then would pepper their sentences with. It's like her English translator software was an application rather than part of her 'OS' and thus booted a bit late.
I've read that there's some strange process where you go from thinking in your native language and translating it to thinking in a foreign language. Personally, I've never got past the stage where I can buy stuff in shops in (Swedish, used to be able to do it in French at school). I doubt I'll ever get to the point where I'm properly bilingual. Let alone in a language like Chinese.
Mind you if your native language is not English you're exposed to English from a very early age, so I think non English speakers have an advantage. Certainly if I were Swedish or Chinese I would have made sure I learned English.
The problem is that build and built are both words and so a computer spell checker can't tell if you get them mixed up.
Actually, I can't tell if someone else gets them mixed up unless I force myself - the bizarre thing about reading is that if you're reading for meaning rather than spelling, errors like this get 'error corrected' away at some level beneath the conscious one, particularly if you're reading stuff on the internet where most people are pretty sloppy.
I suppose 'Grammar Nazis' just never learn this skill.
Damn it.
Three edits later, and it still makes no sense. I obviously meant to say "If not even the editor posting a stroy is interested".
[Goes to hide in a corner until he's able to type again.]
Hvae you seen taht rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy taht syas it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.
http://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/~mattd/Cmabrigde/
I think most Japanese people would want GP's friend to GTFO, i.e. the bureaucrats should sling him in jail for being an antisocial prick.
First, note how Marx calls the current government as "dictatorship of the bourgeoisie". Germany was at that time a parliamentary democracy. Similar to Anarchists (which at that time were a bit more common than they are today), they argue, that since a state has a military and a police to enforce its rules on the people, is repressive, a "dictatorship",("maintain its rule by means of the terror").
They simply argue, that for a translational phase, communists are in need of such a state, which can defend itself, the same way the current one can.
It's a good deal more cynical than that. Lenin and Stalin did indeed argue that parliamentary democracy was a concealed dictatorship, but that was so that they could claim their dictatorship which replaced it was the same thing.
But actually Communist dictatorships were much more oppressive than even the Tsar's absolute monarchy. E.g. look at the staggering numbers of people which were killed, imprisoned or starved to death due to collectivisation following the revolution.
That was true communism. All the stuff about violent revolutions and dictatorships of the proletariat came directly from Marx.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictatorship_of_the_proletariat#Lenin
Marx: "...When the workers replace the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie by their revolutionary dictatorship ... to break down the resistance of the bourgeoisie ... the workers invest the state with a revolutionary and transitional form ... ....
Engels: "...And the victorious party" (in a revolution) "must maintain its rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionaries. Would the Paris Commune have lasted more than a day if it had not used the authority of the armed people against the bourgeoisie? Cannot we, on the contrary, blame it for having made too little use of that authority?...
Engels: "As, therefore, the state is only a transitional institution which is used in the struggle, in the revolution, to hold down one's adversaries by force, it is sheer nonsense to talk of a 'free people's state'; so long as the proletariat still needs the state, it does not need it in the interests of freedom but in order to hold down its adversaries, and as soon as it becomes possible to speak of freedom the state as such ceases to exist
There was a joke in Russia
"In Capitalism, man exploits man. In Communism it is the reverse"
This reminds me of the Fight Club when Ed Norton's character is explaining to the woman on the plane that if the total legal liability is less than the cost of recalling all the defective cars, a recall is not issued. There is just no other way to say it... that is some nefarious heinous shit. If laws are really meant to protect and nurture society then this is EXACTLY the kind of crap that needs to be stopped.
No, if that were the case the solution is to make the legal liability for defective products killing someone higher. And in the US, legal liability is higher than almost anyone else. This should make US products safer.
Certainly companies go to greater lengths to avoid being sued for injuring someone in the US than elsewhere. Of course, the price for all this is eventually paid for by the consumer in terms of more expensive stuff.
That only works because most Japanese people won't break the law even if the fines are rather low, because they have principles. If there were more people like your friend parking fines would have to increase.
News flash, all proprietary software vendors avoid admitting that there is anything wrong with the products they make.
And anyone who criticizes free software is a shill for some proprietary software vendor!
I've always thought that Communism was actually a trick. It was described as socialism, i.e. moving power from bosses to workers, but actually it was about rolling back progress in workers rights.
E.g. in the Soviet Union it essentially ended up essentially reinstating Serfdom
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serfdom#The_Alleged_Return_of_Serfdom
Some economic and political thinkers have argued that centrally-planned economies, especially the Soviet collective farm system and other systems based on Soviet-style Communist economics, amount to a return to government-owned serfdom. This view was put most powerfully by Friedrich Hayek in The Road to Serfdom as early as 1944 and has since been adopted by others including Mikhael Gorbachev. In certain Communist countries, farmers were tied to their farms, either kolkhoz which were theoretically collectives, or sovkhoz which were state-owned, through a system of internal passports and household registration. They had to plant crops according to instructions from the central authorities, especially if they were on state-run farms. These authorities would then "buy" their agricultural produce at vastly reduced prices and use the surplus to invest in heavy industry.
This de facto serfdom persisted in Russia till as late as 1974 (with a brief break during the Civil War), when the Soviet Government Decree #667 was put in effect. This decree granted peasants identification documents, with an unrestricted right to move within the country â" thus detaching them from the piece of land where they had worked for generations, for the first time in Russian history.