What is really slick was how this guy just milked several geniuses for idea, and he won't have to pay them for it. The whole "meeting" where he's asking top notch people in their field to come up with improvements on state of the art - this was his way of getting all the ideas to patent, and he doesn't have to reward any of it back to the people who came up with the ideas since they probably, (and stupidly) gave it up to him by coming to his "innovation conference"."
From TFA:
The goal wasn't just incremental advances but multibillion-dollar lightning bolts that could change the world and, not incidentally, make all of the participants rich.
Presumably, "all of the participants" include the people who came up with the ideas. I'm sure they were compensated for their time in one way or another and I'm also sure that every one of them knew what the purpose of the conference was. If they agreed to come and give ideas, that is their business.
So, this guy, by patenting ideas, no matter how bogus they may be, will gain a lot of ability to stop anyone and everyone from practicing anything he comes up with. In effect - he'll be rich without every actually producing any working product - just patenting all sorts of new potential ideas that may or may not come to be."
Typically when you file a patent you also have to provide an embodiment of the best way to implement the thing being patented. This is one reason why recently a patent for a "warp drive" was rejected by the USPTO - no workable implementation was provided ( http://patentlaw.typepad.com/patent/2006/02/pto_re quests_mo.html ). It is thus not sufficient to just toss out cool ideas and get patents on them. You have to provide some documentation on how to actually build the thing.
Even if let's say he does allow the person who was in the room who came up with the idea - I guarentee that the patent will be assigned to his corporation since he "reimbursed" that "inventor" for their time with payment - i.e. whatever he paid them to come to his innovation conference."
This is typical. As an engineer, every company I have ever worked for has had me sign an intellectual property agreement as part of the condition of employement - that every idea I come up with belongs to my employer. Though my name is listed on the patents I have, they belong to my employers. I voluntarily agreed to this so that I could get the job. I'm sure all participants invited to the conference were made aware of what the purpose of the conference was, and the participants either volunteered or were or will be compensated in some way.
So if you invented the lightbulb, but lacked the capital to do anything about it, would it be OK if someone else came along and invented it after you who did have the capital to bring it to market? If you invented it, why shouldn't you get the benefits for your hard work and insight?
If only the people with the means to fully develop ideas have the right to Intellectual Property protection, the little guy with new ideas will perpetually be screwed.
You know that Congress, Senate and the President are all gunning for greater IP protection and longevity...
Look, our Congress, Senate, and President all realize that Intellectual Property is all that we have left to bring to the global market. We cannot compete globally in manufacturing anymore - our labor force is just too expensive. One of the last products we can create and sell are [b]ideas[/b]. Of [b]course[/b] they are going to protect this - it is our last marketable asset! You could even argue that it is their [b]duty[/b] to protect our interests in this.
>As it happens, we use inequality to motivate people, but the downside to this inequality is that when the owners of wealth end up deciding
>to "reallocate" it they have no guidance or requirements to do it in the way the people who originally made the wealth would want.
>That's why having competition in charities is important and why I find their extremely tight focus on health and US education concerning.
>What about disaster relief? Oh, right, the Gates' can only do so much at once so tough luck.
Well, see, that's the nice thing about being the owner of the wealth - you don't even have an obligation to reallocate it the way anyone wants but yourself.
I don't understand this hand-wringing that says somehow the will of all who helped create the wealth have some say in its dispersement. Everyone who helped make the wealth traded away their say in what happens to the fruits of their labors for a paycheck - just like you and I do voluntarily every day.
If someone has the talent to orhestrate an empire by getting people to voluntarily contribute to that empire, by God, the fruit is theirs, and theirs to do with what they will.
Thus if Warren Buffet wanted to take 100% of his fortune and donate it to one-legged polka-dotted red-headed African sheep herders, or any other incredibly narrow-focused venue, that is entirely his right. It doesn't matter a whit what the millions of employees and customers who made the fortune think about it - they already got fairly compensated for their efforts.
>I have repeatedly asked this on forums where the consensus is largely pro-net-neutral, >and never get a good answer. I'll try again. > >If creating a tiered internet: >1. does not worsen my connection *at all* >2. does not cost me *any* more money (assuming I am not benefiting from it), either directly or indirectly >3. is *entirely* paid for by people or companies that can benefit from it > >why should I care?
Here's why:
First of all, it WILL worsen your connection. You just won't know why. You might notice that some web sites seem to load up faster than others, or that your service from one VOIP provider works well while from another it is slow. But you won't know why - you might just chaulk it up to a slow connection somewhere in the world. But eventually, you, and everyone else, will get tired of dealing with the slow web sites and services and start to patronize the faster ones.
What you and everyone else won't know is the reason the sites and services were slow was because they couldn't or didn't pay the extra toll to the pipleline owners to insure good quality of service for their data.
Secondly, it WILL cost you money, but again, you won't know it. But if you buy any service or product from any company that is being forced to pay extortion in order to do business on the 'net, then you will be paying that extortion fee in the form of higher prices for those products or services.
Lastly, sure it will be paid for by those who can afford to enjoy the benefits offered by the extortion. But as above, you and I will pay for it. But worse, you and I will lose speedy access to a lot of potentially new services and products that could have been put up on the web but, because they couldn't afford the extortion, never were. Or they will be gutted to such an unusable speed that they will wither on the vine.
And the hell of it is, even if you wanted to complain about it, you won't know who to complain to! If you call your local ISP and complain about the speed, all they will be able to say is, "Sorry, something upstream of us is slowing down the data." Unless you want to get geeky and start doing packet tracing, which most consumers don't have a clue about, they will never know why some things are slower than others. They'll just quit using them in favor of the speedy ones.
I was disappointed with the argument for the anti-neutrality stance, and disappointed with Craig's rebuttal.
Here's why:
First, the anti-neutrality Scott Cleland. He says,
"Net neutrality proponents worry that telecom, wireless and cable companies might one day favor their own content and applications over others. They want Congress to pass a new law to ban that practice by regulating the price of broadband service and the way it's sold."
As I understand the Net Neutrality argument, no one wants Congress to regulate the price of broadband service. I think most people are quite content with paying a competitive price (that is, a price driven by competition, not regulation) for access to the internet, with the price varying depending on how big a pipe you want to rent. This is true whether you are a consumer, paying $50/month for cable internet access, or Google, paying who knows how much per month for the bandwidth they consume. I don't hear anyone clammoring for Congress to regulate these prices.
What people do want, however, is for Congress to make it illegal for any middle man in between the content provider's ISP and the content consumer's ISP to charge an extra toll, a toll that is certain to be levied based on A) content type and B) the size of the pocketbook of the sender.
Cleland goes on to say:
"Now, net competition proponents, like me, believe that the best way to guard a free and open Internet is to maintain the free and open competition that exists today, not create a new government-monitored, socialized Internet.
The thing is, I think most people do want an internet like it exists today - a free market system where the phone company sells bandwidth to ISP's who in turn re-sell it on either end of the fat pipes. We all pay for access to the fat pipes through the fees we pay for the little pipes on either end.
What we don't want is for the owners of the fat pipes to be able to tripple-dip - collecting fees from the sender's end of the pipe, the receiver's end of the pipe, and collecting a fee based on what kind of content is being sent and who sent or received it.
Cleland also says:
"Did you know Microsoft, Google and Yahoo are lobbying for net neutrality? If they're successful, they'll get a special, low-government-set price for the bandwidth they use, while everyone else -- consumers, businesses and government -- will have to pay a competitive price for bandwidth. [It] doesn't sound very neutral to me."
This is news to me. I have never heard that Microsoft, Google, or anyone else is looking for regulated prices for their access to the internet. I think they are quite content to pay competitive prices for access to the Internet. What they don't want to do is pay a competitive price for access to the internet and then have their data being tolled again by every middle man who own's a piece of copper or fiber between them and their consumers.
He further says:
"Finally, net neutrality legislation would be a lousy trade off for consumers. The consumer benefits would be small, but the cost to consumers would be huge. Price regulation would destroy any economic incentive to innovate and invest in the private networks that make up the Internet. Over time, we would end up with a slower Internet and higher broadband prices and taxes for consumers, less broadband choice and slower broadband deployment to all Americans. And it would also mean less privacy for all Americans, as net neutrality would require more government monitoring and surveillance of Internet traffic."
This is just plain crap. No one is saying that the backbone owners, the phone companies, can't charge ISPs whatever they want to or need to for access to the pipes. These costs get passed on to the ISPs customers based on how much bandwidth they want. There will constantly be a demand for higher and higher speeds. The phone company can, and
>What is wrong with setting up websites which discuss the matter in an elevated manner >and then letting individuals use that information as they please instead of micromanaging >willing participants in schemes of dubious merit? Concentrating all the phone calls in one >day seems puerile at best and reminiscent of a DoS attack at worst.
In any conflict, action, whether of words or otherwise, is required to win. If you just go off and mumble in a corner, your foe will be delighted and continue to do just what they were doing all along.
>Has any one else noticed that if we reduce ourselves to >voting with our dollars, then ordinary people get about 37,000 votes a year if >they are lucky, while Corporations and the super rich get millions or billions of votes?
Ah, at last you see the light. This is precisely the way the world works.
>Everytime Mickey gets close to falling into PD congress will suddenly find it in their interest to extend copyright.
Disney and all the rest of the those with vested interestes in intellectual property have more money than anyone could possibly counter with enough votes to make a difference.
It's all about the cash. Votes are just something to make you feel like you have a representative government.
For that same $10 you can rent about 4 Netflix DVD's a month, burn them, play them on your DVD player, move them to any of your computers easily, and they are on par with current DVD quality.
>Senators are not necessarily more technically inclined than anybody else. > Believe me, honest misunderstanding, or just lack of understanding, can >account for FAR more than you think.
When I called my Congressman's office and asked his position on Net Neutrality, the aid I spoke to told me this:
She said that basically the "Net Neutrality" thing was just a small portion of the legislation and had been "blown out of proportion". She also said that their position was that the legislation was/really/ about allowing phone companies to break into the cable market, and that Net Neutrality could hurt them in this regard because if they could not prioritize traffic then they could not offer video services at competitive speeds with the cable companies.
So it sounds to me like the telcos want to become cable companies, and be able to prioritize the data on their networks so that their services get priority.
Well as we change the subject, I'll thank you for your tacit acknowlegement that in fact, luck is not what gave rise to advancements in civilized societies. Thank you.
So your hypothesis is now, then, that exploitation is what gives rise to advancements in civilization. I would say that that is only part of the story.
In my opinion, societies generally advance as they struggle through turmoil. Sometimes that turmoil is exploitation. Sometimes the turmoil is persecution. Sometimes it is natural disaster. Sometimes it is simply the development of new ways of thinking that displace old ways of thinking. Whatever the catalyst, however, it is not the catalyst that causes the advancement, because no doubt many societies have faced turmoil and failed to overcome it. Rather it is the/successful struggle/ of those in the midst of turmoil that causes the advancement. In the case of exploitation, it is not the exploitation that causes advancement, for there are probably many exploited socities that do not or did not advance. Rather, it is the the people struggling under the burden of the exploitation who summon up physical, moral, spiritual or intellectual fortitude to overcome who advance their societies.
In short, hard work, dedication, and talent are some, but certainly not all, of the virtues that cause advancements in civilization in the face of adversities. Societies that lack the necessary virtues won't advance regardless of what adversities they struggle under.
"Yes, well, I hope you recognize that for most people on this earth, nothing has changed. Lucky us."
This implies that nothing has changed (with regards to advancement of civilized societies) for most people on this earth, and for those that it/has/ changed (where societies/have/ advanced), it is due to luck.
I am questioning the role of luck in the advancement of civilized societies, not the role of luck as to where people are born.
Yes, you may be lucky to be born into a civilized society. It was not luck, however, that lead to the civilized society.
>Not me. Any company that would rate me based on the number of hours I worked >and not my productivity is not a company that I would want to work for. Anyone >can put in long hours doing nothing, and that doesn't help the company at all.
You'll notice that nowhere did I say or imply that I would not want or expect to also be rated on my productivity, or that I would want or expect to be rated soley based on the number of hours I worked. That should have been a given.
If I could telecommute, I would gladly keep an "always on" webcam available so anyone who wanted could peer in if they wanted. I'd even let it record so it could be reviewed.
I'm not one to usually do so, but I'd trade that bit of liberty for the convenience of telecommuting. I don't mind if people want to watch me work.
>He hired me to assist in rewriting the software - only catch is, he's stuck on having it re-written >in VisualBasic. This scares me, but I honestly can't make a good argument against VB because I'm >not familiar enough with it.
So if you were hired to do this job, wasn't it made plain up front that it was to be done in VB? If this scares you now, didn't it scare you then? Why did you take the job? If you're not very familiar with VB, why would someone hire you to re-write a program using VB?
Slashdot Mirror
What is really slick was how this guy just milked several geniuses for idea, and he won't have to pay them for it. The whole "meeting" where he's asking top notch people in their field to come up with improvements on state of the art - this was his way of getting all the ideas to patent, and he doesn't have to reward any of it back to the people who came up with the ideas since they probably, (and stupidly) gave it up to him by coming to his "innovation conference"."
e quests_mo.html ). It is thus not sufficient to just toss out cool ideas and get patents on them. You have to provide some documentation on how to actually build the thing.
From TFA:
The goal wasn't just incremental advances but multibillion-dollar lightning bolts that could change the world and, not incidentally, make all of the participants rich.
Presumably, "all of the participants" include the people who came up with the ideas. I'm sure they were compensated for their time in one way or another and I'm also sure that every one of them knew what the purpose of the conference was. If they agreed to come and give ideas, that is their business.
So, this guy, by patenting ideas, no matter how bogus they may be, will gain a lot of ability to stop anyone and everyone from practicing anything he comes up with. In effect - he'll be rich without every actually producing any working product - just patenting all sorts of new potential ideas that may or may not come to be."
Typically when you file a patent you also have to provide an embodiment of the best way to implement the thing being patented. This is one reason why recently a patent for a "warp drive" was rejected by the USPTO - no workable implementation was provided ( http://patentlaw.typepad.com/patent/2006/02/pto_r
Even if let's say he does allow the person who was in the room who came up with the idea - I guarentee that the patent will be assigned to his corporation since he "reimbursed" that "inventor" for their time with payment - i.e. whatever he paid them to come to his innovation conference."
This is typical. As an engineer, every company I have ever worked for has had me sign an intellectual property agreement as part of the condition of employement - that every idea I come up with belongs to my employer. Though my name is listed on the patents I have, they belong to my employers. I voluntarily agreed to this so that I could get the job. I'm sure all participants invited to the conference were made aware of what the purpose of the conference was, and the participants either volunteered or were or will be compensated in some way.
Steve
So if you invented the lightbulb, but lacked the capital to do anything about it, would it be OK if someone else came along and invented it after you who did have the capital to bring it to market? If you invented it, why shouldn't you get the benefits for your hard work and insight?
If only the people with the means to fully develop ideas have the right to Intellectual Property protection, the little guy with new ideas will perpetually be screwed.
Steve
You know that Congress, Senate and the President are all gunning for greater IP protection and longevity...
Look, our Congress, Senate, and President all realize that Intellectual Property is all that we have left to bring to the global market. We cannot compete globally in manufacturing anymore - our labor force is just too expensive. One of the last products we can create and sell are [b]ideas[/b]. Of [b]course[/b] they are going to protect this - it is our last marketable asset! You could even argue that it is their [b]duty[/b] to protect our interests in this.
Steve
How cool it would be to fly like superman. :)
Steve
>As it happens, we use inequality to motivate people, but the downside to this inequality is that when the owners of wealth end up deciding >to "reallocate" it they have no guidance or requirements to do it in the way the people who originally made the wealth would want. >That's why having competition in charities is important and why I find their extremely tight focus on health and US education concerning. >What about disaster relief? Oh, right, the Gates' can only do so much at once so tough luck.
Well, see, that's the nice thing about being the owner of the wealth - you don't even have an obligation to reallocate it the way anyone wants but yourself.
I don't understand this hand-wringing that says somehow the will of all who helped create the wealth have some say in its dispersement. Everyone who helped make the wealth traded away their say in what happens to the fruits of their labors for a paycheck - just like you and I do voluntarily every day.
If someone has the talent to orhestrate an empire by getting people to voluntarily contribute to that empire, by God, the fruit is theirs, and theirs to do with what they will.
Thus if Warren Buffet wanted to take 100% of his fortune and donate it to one-legged polka-dotted red-headed African sheep herders, or any other incredibly narrow-focused venue, that is entirely his right. It doesn't matter a whit what the millions of employees and customers who made the fortune think about it - they already got fairly compensated for their efforts.
Steve
>I have repeatedly asked this on forums where the consensus is largely pro-net-neutral,
>and never get a good answer. I'll try again.
>
>If creating a tiered internet:
>1. does not worsen my connection *at all*
>2. does not cost me *any* more money (assuming I am not benefiting from it), either directly or indirectly
>3. is *entirely* paid for by people or companies that can benefit from it
>
>why should I care?
Here's why:
First of all, it WILL worsen your connection. You just won't know why. You might notice that some web sites seem to load up faster than others, or that your service from one VOIP provider works well while from another it is slow. But you won't know why - you might just chaulk it up to a slow connection somewhere in the world. But eventually, you, and everyone else, will get tired of dealing with the slow web sites and services and start to patronize the faster ones.
What you and everyone else won't know is the reason the sites and services were slow was because they couldn't or didn't pay the extra toll to the pipleline owners to insure good quality of service for their data.
Secondly, it WILL cost you money, but again, you won't know it. But if you buy any service or product from any company that is being forced to pay extortion in order to do business on the 'net, then you will be paying that extortion fee in the form of higher prices for those products or services.
Lastly, sure it will be paid for by those who can afford to enjoy the benefits offered by the extortion. But as above, you and I will pay for it. But worse, you and I will lose speedy access to a lot of potentially new services and products that could have been put up on the web but, because they couldn't afford the extortion, never were. Or they will be gutted to such an unusable speed that they will wither on the vine.
And the hell of it is, even if you wanted to complain about it, you won't know who to complain to! If you call your local ISP and complain about the speed, all they will be able to say is, "Sorry, something upstream of us is slowing down the data." Unless you want to get geeky and start doing packet tracing, which most consumers don't have a clue about, they will never know why some things are slower than others. They'll just quit using them in favor of the speedy ones.
Steve
I was disappointed with the argument for the anti-neutrality stance, and disappointed with Craig's rebuttal.
Here's why:
First, the anti-neutrality Scott Cleland. He says,
"Net neutrality proponents worry that telecom, wireless and cable companies might one day favor their own content and applications over others. They want Congress to pass a new law to ban that practice by regulating the price of broadband service and the way it's sold."
As I understand the Net Neutrality argument, no one wants Congress to regulate the price of broadband service. I think most people are quite content with paying a competitive price (that is, a price driven by competition, not regulation) for access to the internet, with the price varying depending on how big a pipe you want to rent. This is true whether you are a consumer, paying $50/month for cable internet access, or Google, paying who knows how much per month for the bandwidth they consume. I don't hear anyone clammoring for Congress to regulate these prices.
What people do want, however, is for Congress to make it illegal for any middle man in between the content provider's ISP and the content consumer's ISP to charge an extra toll, a toll that is certain to be levied based on A) content type and B) the size of the pocketbook of the sender.
Cleland goes on to say:
"Now, net competition proponents, like me, believe that the best way to guard a free and open Internet is to maintain the free and open competition that exists today, not create a new government-monitored, socialized Internet.
The thing is, I think most people do want an internet like it exists today - a free market system where the phone company sells bandwidth to ISP's who in turn re-sell it on either end of the fat pipes. We all pay for access to the fat pipes through the fees we pay for the little pipes on either end.
What we don't want is for the owners of the fat pipes to be able to tripple-dip - collecting fees from the sender's end of the pipe, the receiver's end of the pipe, and collecting a fee based on what kind of content is being sent and who sent or received it.
Cleland also says:
"Did you know Microsoft, Google and Yahoo are lobbying for net neutrality? If they're successful, they'll get a special, low-government-set price for the bandwidth they use, while everyone else -- consumers, businesses and government -- will have to pay a competitive price for bandwidth. [It] doesn't sound very neutral to me."
This is news to me. I have never heard that Microsoft, Google, or anyone else is looking for regulated prices for their access to the internet. I think they are quite content to pay competitive prices for access to the Internet. What they don't want to do is pay a competitive price for access to the internet and then have their data being tolled again by every middle man who own's a piece of copper or fiber between them and their consumers.
He further says:
"Finally, net neutrality legislation would be a lousy trade off for consumers. The consumer benefits would be small, but the cost to consumers would be huge. Price regulation would destroy any economic incentive to innovate and invest in the private networks that make up the Internet. Over time, we would end up with a slower Internet and higher broadband prices and taxes for consumers, less broadband choice and slower broadband deployment to all Americans. And it would also mean less privacy for all Americans, as net neutrality would require more government monitoring and surveillance of Internet traffic."
This is just plain crap. No one is saying that the backbone owners, the phone companies, can't charge ISPs whatever they want to or need to for access to the pipes. These costs get passed on to the ISPs customers based on how much bandwidth they want. There will constantly be a demand for higher and higher speeds. The phone company can, and
>What is wrong with setting up websites which discuss the matter in an elevated manner
>and then letting individuals use that information as they please instead of micromanaging
>willing participants in schemes of dubious merit? Concentrating all the phone calls in one
>day seems puerile at best and reminiscent of a DoS attack at worst.
In any conflict, action, whether of words or otherwise, is required to win. If you just go off and mumble in a corner, your foe will be delighted and continue to do just what they were doing all along.
Steve
>Has any one else noticed that if we reduce ourselves to
>voting with our dollars, then ordinary people get about 37,000 votes a year if
>they are lucky, while Corporations and the super rich get millions or billions of votes?
Ah, at last you see the light. This is precisely the way the world works.
Steve
These don't look like RIAA executive numbers to me...these look like the numbers of elected officials in washington?
Steve
Don't worry, someone will post them here. :)
Steve
>Everytime Mickey gets close to falling into PD congress will suddenly find it in their interest to extend copyright.
Disney and all the rest of the those with vested interestes in intellectual property have more money than anyone could possibly counter with enough votes to make a difference.
It's all about the cash. Votes are just something to make you feel like you have a representative government.
Steve
>There are songs in catalog that actually have a value approaching zero.
All digital data has a value approaching zero.
It can be infinitely reproduced for virtually no cost.
Steve
For that same $10 you can rent about 4 Netflix DVD's a month, burn them, play them on your DVD player, move them to any of your computers easily, and they are on par with current DVD quality.
Netflix is just sneakernet file sharing.
Steve
>Senators are not necessarily more technically inclined than anybody else.
/really/ about allowing phone companies to break into the cable market, and that Net Neutrality could hurt them in this regard because if they could not prioritize traffic then they could not offer video services at competitive speeds with the cable companies.
> Believe me, honest misunderstanding, or just lack of understanding, can
>account for FAR more than you think.
When I called my Congressman's office and asked his position on Net Neutrality, the aid I spoke to told me this:
She said that basically the "Net Neutrality" thing was just a small portion of the legislation and had been "blown out of proportion". She also said that their position was that the legislation was
So it sounds to me like the telcos want to become cable companies, and be able to prioritize the data on their networks so that their services get priority.
Steve
>No, that's not luck. It's exploitation.
/successful struggle/ of those in the midst of turmoil that causes the advancement. In the case of exploitation, it is not the exploitation that causes advancement, for there are probably many exploited socities that do not or did not advance. Rather, it is the the people struggling under the burden of the exploitation who summon up physical, moral, spiritual or intellectual fortitude to overcome who advance their societies.
Well as we change the subject, I'll thank you for your tacit acknowlegement that in fact, luck is not what gave rise to advancements in civilized societies. Thank you.
So your hypothesis is now, then, that exploitation is what gives rise to advancements in civilization. I would say that that is only part of the story.
In my opinion, societies generally advance as they struggle through turmoil. Sometimes that turmoil is exploitation. Sometimes the turmoil is persecution. Sometimes it is natural disaster. Sometimes it is simply the development of new ways of thinking that displace old ways of thinking. Whatever the catalyst, however, it is not the catalyst that causes the advancement, because no doubt many societies have faced turmoil and failed to overcome it. Rather it is the
In short, hard work, dedication, and talent are some, but certainly not all, of the virtues that cause advancements in civilization in the face of adversities. Societies that lack the necessary virtues won't advance regardless of what adversities they struggle under.
Steve
The original posting was:
/has/ changed (where societies /have/ advanced), it is due to luck.
"Yes, well, I hope you recognize that for most people on this earth, nothing has changed. Lucky us."
This implies that nothing has changed (with regards to advancement of civilized societies) for most people on this earth, and for those that it
I am questioning the role of luck in the advancement of civilized societies, not the role of luck as to where people are born.
Yes, you may be lucky to be born into a civilized society. It was not luck, however, that lead to the civilized society.
Steve
>Not me. Any company that would rate me based on the number of hours I worked
>and not my productivity is not a company that I would want to work for. Anyone
>can put in long hours doing nothing, and that doesn't help the company at all.
You'll notice that nowhere did I say or imply that I would not want or expect to also be rated on my productivity, or that I would want or expect to be rated soley based on the number of hours I worked. That should have been a given.
Steve
n/t.
My first thought was much more sinister.
Steve
If I could telecommute, I would gladly keep an "always on" webcam available so anyone who wanted could peer in if they wanted. I'd even let it record so it could be reviewed.
I'm not one to usually do so, but I'd trade that bit of liberty for the convenience of telecommuting. I don't mind if people want to watch me work.
Steve
Here's my idea of comedy in a video game:
/that/ is funny! :)
Bashing some unaware clod in the back of the head with the butt of my MP44!
Now
Steve
>He hired me to assist in rewriting the software - only catch is, he's stuck on having it re-written
>in VisualBasic. This scares me, but I honestly can't make a good argument against VB because I'm
>not familiar enough with it.
So if you were hired to do this job, wasn't it made plain up front that it was to be done in VB? If this scares you now, didn't it scare you then? Why did you take the job? If you're not very familiar with VB, why would someone hire you to re-write a program using VB?
Steve
>Bowing to changes in technology and pressure from taxpayers and phone companies
The deeper significance here is that taxpayers don't mean squat but phone companies can get things done.
I'm not surprised, I always knew dollars were stronger than votes. I just hate having my nose rubbed in it.
Steve
>I'll pay for three and donate two any day of the week.
I appreciate you doing that. 'Cause I'm gonna buy one of your two donated ones for $50 on eBay.
Steve