He said his position is salary only, at the standard governmental pay class for his schedule. He doesn't get bonuses of any sort. He said the only people that get bonuses, are those in charge of their specific patent branches. AKA, those who give "Final Approval". He just does grunt work.
Hey, they are always looking for Engineers (double points for any law experience!) of practically any sort. You have the qualifications, go work there, make their money. Be warned, he said some of the biggest assholes you could ever meet are in there, and that one patent group manager is always trying to one-up the others (because those guys are the career PHBs and not actual engineer/law/etc guys). That is in combination with silly amounts of red-tape. Example: Having to submit formal requests for information via paper form, from other "patent officers" in other "fields", and some of them, being the assholes they are, making you wait for weeks on a response.
He's one of the guys who reviews patents that are challenged after they've already been granted, and the proper forms have been submitted, etc, etc, etc. His workload is way worse than examiners of origin. He gets one month to review evidence, and do further searching for information that the original officers had a few years to do to begin with.
I do as well. Gemstone was an awesomesauce MUD. I used to play that and Neverwinter Nights. I remember racking up the nice $400 monthly bills doing it too. My parents weren't too happy at the time, but when I started paying the entire phone bill when I turned 15, they stopped caring. The good-ole' pay-per-minute days, how I DON'T miss that billing method. It was $3 per minute then. Needless to say, I dropped AOL like a hot potato once I was able to sign up for Mindspring's dial-up service. They were the first real ISP in my area, but unfortunately crappy Earthlink bought them out and then dial-up died soon after because Comcrap and Verizon moved in and started offering "broadband".
Still, I miss having Mindspring's $15 for single, $30 for two bridged 56k lines, and $80 for ISDN (which was MUCH cheaper than AT&T or Sprint's offer of $30+ for single, no option for bridged, and $120-$160 ISDN, per month billing). Played a MUD called Dragonstone ever since I switched back in 1998.
He made the joke exactly because certain idiots who are paid to flap their gums over the airwaves accused him of having a disdain for freedom of the press/free speech.
He really is too smart for that, unlike certain Congressional members and "political commentators" on both sides of the aisle.
I always thought it amusing that V'ger was the Voyager 2 space probe finally returning to Earth. The "space whale" in Star Trek IV, was just called a space probe, so you're right about the species not being properly identified. They did make a few hints that it was in fact, a whale of some sort, attempting to communicate with it's Earth-bound cousins, much in the same manner as V'ger came back looking for "the creator". I always took it as an inside joke that one was referencing the other, and that this same theme was referenced again even later when Picard got to fight his clone in Nemesis, when it too, came looking for him. Maybe it was the creator of the whales?:D
I am sure there are other examples in the various series returning to this theme as well.
I always had the theory that V'ger was actually found and modified by The Borg, explaining the extensions, etc we see when it finally makes its appearance, and sent back out to possibly return home and then send the info it gathers back to Borg space. Those extensions were very Borg-like when you make a comparison between them and the ablative plating found on Borg Cube ships. The apparent, increased intelligence of V'ger could have directly resulted from a combination of centuries of data gathering and then interface with the Borg Collective for who knows how long afterwards. Even some of the questions it asks, and the manner in which they were phrased were very Borg-like in their structure.
Of course from what I've read, there were many inside jokes and references written into every series of Star Trek, including the original.
If you check their job listings, their salaries start at the high-60k range and go on up from there. Hardly "suck". I have a friend who works there and has two Mercedes and a BMW. I don't want to hear it about their pay sucking.
I don't understand why they would bother seeking to farm this out to a different contractor, just allow Google to do the entire thing and tack a nice link on to their main search engine website that everyone can access. I mean honestly, Google does this thing best, no need to complicate things with yet another overly-long and costly-to-the-taxpayer bidding/contract process.
Sorry to double-post, but the last post is not the entirety of my view on the GPL, or software licenses in general (there shouldn't be any licenses at all unless you want to take full financial liability for what your software does and how it performs, thanks, nor any software patents, since software is math), but I was trying to provide you with the explanation you asked for, and no, I am not the person you responded to.
Probably because in the 2nd, there is no tit-for-tat $ exchanging hands, and the company in question can freely ignore the author until they possibly receive a court summons from the FSF some year in the future, all the while making bank. Money talks, and nobody but an extremely small segment of society knows about or gives two shits about the GPL.
There are just some situations in which I shake my head at GPL stuff, even though I know it's supposed to be a "good thing". I mean seriously, what the heck is the FSF really going to do for you if enough companies ignore the GPL? (Mind you, the larger corporations will just stall-tactic the author into financial oblivion, even if they end up losing the judgement.)
Nothing but go broke themselves, that's what (providing some judge doesn't take it upon himself to find the entire notion of a "free" license to be a silly concept and throw the case right out, since "free" is what Public Domain is for.)
A note on sending DMCA takedowns to Swedish companies: It ought to work, legally speaking. Not because Sweden has DMCA, but because a Swedish entity becomes liable when they "become aware or should become aware" that they host or link to infringing content. Whether that awareness comes in the form of a DMCA takedown or by smoke signals doesn't matter.
Think about what you just said, then remember that Sweden is not the United States, not a Territory of the United States, and is not in any way, shape, or form, beholden to the laws of the United States.
The DMCA is a US-only law. It does not apply outside of the US and its Territories, no matter how much the public domain thieves might wish it to.
Not to nitpick, but Microsoft implemented a version of ATI's VPU Recovery function into Vista and Win7, and -that- is why it can recover without a total BSOD (most of the time, look up "ati gray screen of death"). You can't disable it either, although you can tweak certain settings via registry for it to give it a bit more time before it kicks in; This in case it was stuttering due to bottlenecking or timing issues and not an actual recovery situation where the driver improperly accessed 0 byte memory or something.
Actually, there is, it falls under TVRip on pretty much every torrent site that I've ever visited, and I've seen scene group.nfo files along with the releases there.
Reason #1: It's well-known that many cracking teams use demo copies of games to create their cracks for the full retail version that gets released later. This will put a big dent into that because those guys won't give these companies a financial link to what they do (many of the newer ip/anti-cracking laws require a financial transaction to take place for penalties to apply) - meaning there will be significant delays now in 3rd-party DRM removal.
Reason #2: Now Internet Joe won't be putting up any more game reviews on his website (and quite possibly giving early negative press) based on demos: Those are now restricted to the realm of "Approved" "Professional" (i.e.- bought and paid for with advertising dollars + free gear/software) "Game Site" "Reviewers".
Actually, my cable company never included such a term in any of their agreements. Lucky me!
I still won't do it though, because I do have consideration for my neighbors - that bandwidth is split between me and like five other apartments here, and the Red Cross building that is next door.
I really wish they offered more than a measly 512 kb/s upstream though, and I've been asking them once per month when they are going to increase the limit since they are running DOCSIS 3.0 anyhow. For my needs, 5 mbit/s down has been more than plenty, even though they offer more at a higher price tier (at least I am not stuck on one of the two bottom tiers - 1.5 mb/s down/512 kb/s up and 120/120 kb/s, the last one is only $10 per month though and perfect for granny who just sends emails).
An independent telco is building out a new fiber plant in a town only 30 minutes away, with plans to run fiber out to every town in the this part of the county at least, so at least that will spur some upgrading on the part of the cableco.
As for the topic at hand...if you play games/watch movies with your PS3, who cares. If you use it to program with, also, who cares, since you are using it to program with and not play games/watch movies with and in most cases, won't be connecting to either the PSN or anything else outside of your realm. It's pretty obvious the terms were there since the beginning, and also that you are dealing with Sony. Sony has problems dealing with their media division, just like other tech companies that have branched into media. ATRAC, "rootkit", etc are all the fault of the media division. Most issues I've had with Sony hardware period can be laid directly at the feet of onerous requirements/demands by their media division on that of the hardware division.
I honestly don't even want to contemplate the internal agony some of those hardware guys must go through on a regular basis because some marketing twit in the media division totally ruins something really great that they spent years doing R&D on and had high expectations for - only to see it come out as a half-assed end product.
With the cost of the recent Ultimate Editions of Windows, it's to be argued that consumers do in fact, purchase Windows that happens to also include a PC in the cost. With the upper Windows tiers, the pricing model puts Windows ahead of the hardware costs, at least in the desktop space - when you can go purchase an HP, Dell, etc from Wal-Mart for $699, and the cost of Ultimate was running $399 in some areas of the country, well....
Correction. Selling their user's data to anyone who's willing to pay (spammers anyone?) is their primary revenue source. Any advertisement slots they sell on the site itself is just a secondary revenue stream, and considering the amount of people using ad-blocking of some sort, negligible.
I think they should. They should also all require signing by Microsoft and the software vendor, which can be revoked by Microsoft and locally by system administrators.
I for one, would welcome Steam as an integrated part of Windows 8.
Wow, if they did that, I would have an actual use for that TPM chip that's sitting on my motherboard.
Wait until you try loading Linux on a Toshiba laptop that has a widescreen lcd that is 1440x900 on an integrated Intel chipset. X dies a miserable death when it attempts to autodetect. VESA goes down in flames as well. Nothing but white, black and gray vertical lines the entire way across the screen when attempting to detect the proper resolution.
Adobe has had 7 years to release 64-bit Flash (WinXP 64-Bit, 64-Bit F/OSS operating systems have been around much longer). I don't care what the hell VM or JIT it does, that's freaking unacceptable. No wonder they're about to get their lunch eaten by an HTML upgrade.
In this day and age, it's a miracle when hard drives even make it to the extent of the measly warranty period, no matter who you purchase them from or what brand they are.
I don't see you volunteering to work an extra 30 hrs or more a week outside of your workplace for free. You apparently know jack-shit about what teachers have to put up with. If anything, they are underpaid.
It takes the average special education teacher 160 hrs per year to write just their IEPs for a rather small caseload of students. This includes having to hunt and peck for information, write letters, look up state test scores, send out student surveys to other teachers, etc. These same teachers are allotted an average of 120 hrs to do that 160 hrs worth of work by their district (what they get paid for), on top of writing their normal reports, filing, grading, copying, meeting with parents, etc meaning the extra 40 hrs spent writing just those IEPs is on their own time, and unpaid. This on top of having to also teach class, serve as detention monitors, test monitors, coaches, fulfill continuing education requirements, etc.
I should know this, because I am married to one. She hasn't had a day off from doing work for her school district since August of 2009, when she got a one week break before the school year started again. Many of the other teachers I know in the district are in the same boat, even regular ed. This is not unusual at all, and I have other friends who are in similar situations in other states.
An interesting side effect of the No Child Left Behind legislation - traditional class subjects such as English and History are being eliminated, and instead all teachers from Science to Arts (when Arts even exists - it was eliminated from our district after NCLB, we still have Music, however) are instead basically left to teach the material on-the-fly and have to find some way to relate to the material to what they are teaching.
Now consider all of this in light of the salaries of teachers topping out at an average of $45,000 per year, in the more affluent districts, and imply again that they make too much - mind you, quite a few of these people hold at least a Master's Degree and pay for certifications in subject areas out of their own pockets.
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He said his position is salary only, at the standard governmental pay class for his schedule. He doesn't get bonuses of any sort. He said the only people that get bonuses, are those in charge of their specific patent branches. AKA, those who give "Final Approval". He just does grunt work.
Hey, they are always looking for Engineers (double points for any law experience!) of practically any sort. You have the qualifications, go work there, make their money. Be warned, he said some of the biggest assholes you could ever meet are in there, and that one patent group manager is always trying to one-up the others (because those guys are the career PHBs and not actual engineer/law/etc guys). That is in combination with silly amounts of red-tape. Example: Having to submit formal requests for information via paper form, from other "patent officers" in other "fields", and some of them, being the assholes they are, making you wait for weeks on a response.
He's one of the guys who reviews patents that are challenged after they've already been granted, and the proper forms have been submitted, etc, etc, etc. His workload is way worse than examiners of origin. He gets one month to review evidence, and do further searching for information that the original officers had a few years to do to begin with.
He puts in 12-16 hour days, every Mon-Fri.
I do as well. Gemstone was an awesomesauce MUD. I used to play that and Neverwinter Nights. I remember racking up the nice $400 monthly bills doing it too. My parents weren't too happy at the time, but when I started paying the entire phone bill when I turned 15, they stopped caring. The good-ole' pay-per-minute days, how I DON'T miss that billing method.
It was $3 per minute then. Needless to say, I dropped AOL like a hot potato once I was able to sign up for Mindspring's dial-up service. They were the first real ISP in my area, but unfortunately crappy Earthlink bought them out and then dial-up died soon after because Comcrap and Verizon moved in and started offering "broadband".
Still, I miss having Mindspring's $15 for single, $30 for two bridged 56k lines, and $80 for ISDN (which was MUCH cheaper than AT&T or Sprint's offer of $30+ for single, no option for bridged, and $120-$160 ISDN, per month billing). Played a MUD called Dragonstone ever since I switched back in 1998.
He made the joke exactly because certain idiots who are paid to flap their gums over the airwaves accused him of having a disdain for freedom of the press/free speech.
He really is too smart for that, unlike certain Congressional members and "political commentators" on both sides of the aisle.
[Totally Off-Topic to discussion of the article.]
I always thought it amusing that V'ger was the Voyager 2 space probe finally returning to Earth. The "space whale" in Star Trek IV, was just called a space probe, so you're right about the species not being properly identified. They did make a few hints that it was in fact, a whale of some sort, attempting to communicate with it's Earth-bound cousins, much in the same manner as V'ger came back looking for "the creator". I always took it as an inside joke that one was referencing the other, and that this same theme was referenced again even later when Picard got to fight his clone in Nemesis, when it too, came looking for him. Maybe it was the creator of the whales? :D
I am sure there are other examples in the various series returning to this theme as well.
I always had the theory that V'ger was actually found and modified by The Borg, explaining the extensions, etc we see when it finally makes its appearance, and sent back out to possibly return home and then send the info it gathers back to Borg space. Those extensions were very Borg-like when you make a comparison between them and the ablative plating found on Borg Cube ships. The apparent, increased intelligence of V'ger could have directly resulted from a combination of centuries of data gathering and then interface with the Borg Collective for who knows how long afterwards. Even some of the questions it asks, and the manner in which they were phrased were very Borg-like in their structure.
Of course from what I've read, there were many inside jokes and references written into every series of Star Trek, including the original.
If you check their job listings, their salaries start at the high-60k range and go on up from there. Hardly "suck". I have a friend who works there and has two Mercedes and a BMW. I don't want to hear it about their pay sucking.
I don't understand why they would bother seeking to farm this out to a different contractor, just allow Google to do the entire thing and tack a nice link on to their main search engine website that everyone can access. I mean honestly, Google does this thing best, no need to complicate things with yet another overly-long and costly-to-the-taxpayer bidding/contract process.
Sorry to double-post, but the last post is not the entirety of my view on the GPL, or software licenses in general (there shouldn't be any licenses at all unless you want to take full financial liability for what your software does and how it performs, thanks, nor any software patents, since software is math), but I was trying to provide you with the explanation you asked for, and no, I am not the person you responded to.
Probably because in the 2nd, there is no tit-for-tat $ exchanging hands, and the company in question can freely ignore the author until they possibly receive a court summons from the FSF some year in the future, all the while making bank. Money talks, and nobody but an extremely small segment of society knows about or gives two shits about the GPL.
There are just some situations in which I shake my head at GPL stuff, even though I know it's supposed to be a "good thing". I mean seriously, what the heck is the FSF really going to do for you if enough companies ignore the GPL? (Mind you, the larger corporations will just stall-tactic the author into financial oblivion, even if they end up losing the judgement.)
Nothing but go broke themselves, that's what (providing some judge doesn't take it upon himself to find the entire notion of a "free" license to be a silly concept and throw the case right out, since "free" is what Public Domain is for.)
A note on sending DMCA takedowns to Swedish companies: It ought to work, legally speaking. Not because Sweden has DMCA, but because a Swedish entity becomes liable when they "become aware or should become aware" that they host or link to infringing content. Whether that awareness comes in the form of a DMCA takedown or by smoke signals doesn't matter.
Think about what you just said, then remember that Sweden is not the United States, not a Territory of the United States, and is not in any way, shape, or form, beholden to the laws of the United States.
The DMCA is a US-only law. It does not apply outside of the US and its Territories, no matter how much the public domain thieves might wish it to.
Not to nitpick, but Microsoft implemented a version of ATI's VPU Recovery function into Vista and Win7, and -that- is why it can recover without a total BSOD (most of the time, look up "ati gray screen of death"). You can't disable it either, although you can tweak certain settings via registry for it to give it a bit more time before it kicks in; This in case it was stuttering due to bottlenecking or timing issues and not an actual recovery situation where the driver improperly accessed 0 byte memory or something.
Actually, there is, it falls under TVRip on pretty much every torrent site that I've ever visited, and I've seen scene group .nfo files along with the releases there.
Reason #1: It's well-known that many cracking teams use demo copies of games to create their cracks for the full retail version that gets released later. This will put a big dent into that because those guys won't give these companies a financial link to what they do (many of the newer ip/anti-cracking laws require a financial transaction to take place for penalties to apply) - meaning there will be significant delays now in 3rd-party DRM removal.
Reason #2: Now Internet Joe won't be putting up any more game reviews on his website (and quite possibly giving early negative press) based on demos: Those are now restricted to the realm of "Approved" "Professional" (i.e.- bought and paid for with advertising dollars + free gear/software) "Game Site" "Reviewers".
Welcome to the machine.
Actually, my cable company never included such a term in any of their agreements. Lucky me!
I still won't do it though, because I do have consideration for my neighbors - that bandwidth is split between me and like five other apartments here, and the Red Cross building that is next door.
I really wish they offered more than a measly 512 kb/s upstream though, and I've been asking them once per month when they are going to increase the limit since they are running DOCSIS 3.0 anyhow. For my needs, 5 mbit/s down has been more than plenty, even though they offer more at a higher price tier (at least I am not stuck on one of the two bottom tiers - 1.5 mb/s down /512 kb/s up and 120/120 kb/s, the last one is only $10 per month though and perfect for granny who just sends emails).
An independent telco is building out a new fiber plant in a town only 30 minutes away, with plans to run fiber out to every town in the this part of the county at least, so at least that will spur some upgrading on the part of the cableco.
As for the topic at hand...if you play games/watch movies with your PS3, who cares. If you use it to program with, also, who cares, since you are using it to program with and not play games/watch movies with and in most cases, won't be connecting to either the PSN or anything else outside of your realm. It's pretty obvious the terms were there since the beginning, and also that you are dealing with Sony. Sony has problems dealing with their media division, just like other tech companies that have branched into media. ATRAC, "rootkit", etc are all the fault of the media division. Most issues I've had with Sony hardware period can be laid directly at the feet of onerous requirements/demands by their media division on that of the hardware division.
I honestly don't even want to contemplate the internal agony some of those hardware guys must go through on a regular basis because some marketing twit in the media division totally ruins something really great that they spent years doing R&D on and had high expectations for - only to see it come out as a half-assed end product.
With the cost of the recent Ultimate Editions of Windows, it's to be argued that consumers do in fact, purchase Windows that happens to also include a PC in the cost. With the upper Windows tiers, the pricing model puts Windows ahead of the hardware costs, at least in the desktop space - when you can go purchase an HP, Dell, etc from Wal-Mart for $699, and the cost of Ultimate was running $399 in some areas of the country, well....
Correction. Selling their user's data to anyone who's willing to pay (spammers anyone?) is their primary revenue source. Any advertisement slots they sell on the site itself is just a secondary revenue stream, and considering the amount of people using ad-blocking of some sort, negligible.
I think they should. They should also all require signing by Microsoft and the software vendor, which can be revoked by Microsoft and locally by system administrators.
I for one, would welcome Steam as an integrated part of Windows 8.
Wow, if they did that, I would have an actual use for that TPM chip that's sitting on my motherboard.
Wait until you try loading Linux on a Toshiba laptop that has a widescreen lcd that is 1440x900 on an integrated Intel chipset. X dies a miserable death when it attempts to autodetect. VESA goes down in flames as well. Nothing but white, black and gray vertical lines the entire way across the screen when attempting to detect the proper resolution.
I've tried REHL, Puppy, DSL, Slackware, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, XUbuntu, Debian, Mint, Fedora, SuSE and Mandriva.
Failure every single time. I gave up and went back to using Vista.
And no, none of the Intel driver packages worked.
Since the Scientologists started absorbing lawyers with their many slimy tentacles.
You've obviously never heard of Monsanto then.
Adobe has had 7 years to release 64-bit Flash (WinXP 64-Bit, 64-Bit F/OSS operating systems have been around much longer). I don't care what the hell VM or JIT it does, that's freaking unacceptable. No wonder they're about to get their lunch eaten by an HTML upgrade.
In this day and age, it's a miracle when hard drives even make it to the extent of the measly warranty period, no matter who you purchase them from or what brand they are.
I don't see you volunteering to work an extra 30 hrs or more a week outside of your workplace for free. You apparently know jack-shit about what teachers have to put up with. If anything, they are underpaid.
It takes the average special education teacher 160 hrs per year to write just their IEPs for a rather small caseload of students. This includes having to hunt and peck for information, write letters, look up state test scores, send out student surveys to other teachers, etc. These same teachers are allotted an average of 120 hrs to do that 160 hrs worth of work by their district (what they get paid for), on top of writing their normal reports, filing, grading, copying, meeting with parents, etc meaning the extra 40 hrs spent writing just those IEPs is on their own time, and unpaid. This on top of having to also teach class, serve as detention monitors, test monitors, coaches, fulfill continuing education requirements, etc.
I should know this, because I am married to one. She hasn't had a day off from doing work for her school district since August of 2009, when she got a one week break before the school year started again. Many of the other teachers I know in the district are in the same boat, even regular ed. This is not unusual at all, and I have other friends who are in similar situations in other states.
An interesting side effect of the No Child Left Behind legislation - traditional class subjects such as English and History are being eliminated, and instead all teachers from Science to Arts (when Arts even exists - it was eliminated from our district after NCLB, we still have Music, however) are instead basically left to teach the material on-the-fly and have to find some way to relate to the material to what they are teaching.
Now consider all of this in light of the salaries of teachers topping out at an average of $45,000 per year, in the more affluent districts, and imply again that they make too much - mind you, quite a few of these people hold at least a Master's Degree and pay for certifications in subject areas out of their own pockets.
Any keyboard bearing the Microsoft brand comes with two Windows keys.
Your argument is moot. WOW is based on online-only play. AC2 is an 'offline' game.
Sorry, he had to xerox you off a copy of the link.