If you don't like the contract, don't sign it. Take your work somewhere else. Bus tables to satisfy your addiction to food and shelter until you can get a better deal...
...and think about forming a union. "United we stand, divided we fall" and all that. If an entire class of people is getting shafted, that's one possible way to fight back.
I think you got it wrong buddy. We keep Sales people employed.
I came to a recent realization with the latest product I've been working on that we really could have used the input of the sales and marketing guys. It may be that the last couple years of my life have been spent largely on something that really didn't make a big difference to most of our customers, whereas something I did in a week or less has been much more well-received. I would have preferred to have spent more of that last two years doing a number of those week-long projects, rather than the other. And marketing might have been able to help point out this focus problem.
I can see wanting to do something like this, but exploring dirigibles first, or even gliders, would have made sense!
I think both have serious problems with high winds; I think crashes did more damage to the dirigible business than the Hindenberg did. Airplanes have been known to fly into hurricanes, in comparison. And at the given altitude, the jetstream is, what, 100 mph?
However, I have read plans for unmanned flights to do this. I suppose the problem is that you need a powerful aircraft to survive a high percentage of weather and thus keep your service almost always available.
Rest assured that computer -> svideo (or better) of decent quality will become a popular item
Decent wireless transmitters would also be a possibility. But really, if there's a stock format, a reasonably low-cost player will soon follow. If I can cut a CD-R on my PC and then play it on the standalone player, I'm happy.
Also, Pioneer's DVD-writer is ~$1000 today. I remember working with an $8,000 CD writer back in 1995, that wasn't as good as today's $150 machines. You should be able to get a DVD writer for $200 by, say, January 2003.
So just rename your technology something else and call it revolutionary...
Worked for MS
It must be said positively of Microsoft that they have never (to my knowledge) chosen to pursue patents as a way of eliminating competition or to generate extortionate licensing fees.
How would all you clever hackers out there hide a function in an open source system in a way that it can escape detection even if all the source is read?
Because without things like fonts and headers, most people are less productive.
For throwaway documents, perhaps, but really specifying specific fonts and sizes is the wrong approach. Got some titles that should be in a different font than the main body? ID them as titles, don't change the font for each one individually so they look like titles. But that's how most people do word processing.
Not once has Windows of any variety given me any trouble on install
I went to bed one night convinced the 95->98 upgrade had trashed my computer. Overnight it apparently timed out from what I thought was a hang (my fourth try), and in the morning I was able to complete the install. That was just an upgrade, and a relatively minor one, of an existing OS.
I've never had trouble installing Linux. getting certain things working afterwards I've found to be more difficult, but the installations themselves have been cake.
The criminal inanity of this whole thing is that Ellison settled with the actual perpetrator, and now is going after ISPs. Why? Deeper pockets. It's not about copyrights, it's about money -- and not about recompense from damages, but just "we've been wronged and they've got the money to make it right." So whatever moral justification Ellison might have had is long lost.
By this logic, if some guy hits me with a car, I should sue Ford.
But if you give the copy to someone else when they would otherwise have bought their own, that's one less sale.
But so often that's not the case. Music copying isn't new, just somewhat more convenient than when Metallica's Lars was copying his friend's heavy metal. When a kid with a two dollar allowance has a $5,000 music collection, the music companies aren't losing out. Generally it's the wealthier, honest people who have the conscience to buy copyrighted materials, and are they going to go the Napster route? You hope not, but the more inconvenient and expensive the copyright vendors make it for them, the more you're going to turn away even the honest folk.
So the fact that it's easy to flout a law means the law shouldn't exist?
I don't know about you, but generally my behavior is predicated on what is right and wrong, not the law, and the law doesn't define this for me. In the case of copyright, right and wrong are defined by the social bargain we make, creating licensing rights in order to encourage content creation. And if I've paid for a license for X, I should be able to use X in a fairly general way; I don't feel it's wrong for me to ignore restrictions you try to place as long as they don't generally violate the bargain. So, if I purchase a book from you and then someone makes an electronic version available, you're not hurt if I possess the electronic version as well. I've already bought the license, and whether I scanned it or someone else did is really irrelevant to you.
In this situation, we have someone making scans generally available, even to people who haven't licensed the content. It's wrong, but in this case it should be noted that this has little influence on the license sales in general. (None of this "death of copyright" melodrama nonsense.) Once e-books are practical devices, Harlan's publishers should make electronic versions available; only at that point is someone making free versions going to matter. In my 15 years of net access, I've never read a book online, so I doubt it's a particularly widespread phenomenon.
Its very likely that the new set manufacturers will simply not implement this technology into their sets, precisely because it will allow the existence of old sets along with new.
Most of the current crop of HDTVs don't come with a tuner, the tuner is a separate add-on. This tech affects the tuner, not the base tube. By making digital TV signals more practical (it could work with cable without stealing channels, so cable systems wouldn't be reluctant to carry digital channels), this could help them sell *more* sets, not fewer.
Heck, you could even have a tuner box that creates the digital picture and then converts it back to analog, with the result probably a little higher quality than the original.
As far as I can see, the studios currently have enough control over distribution
You use the record company's recording facilities, video producers, etc. If you want shelf space at major retailers, you have to pay -- especially for shelf end positions.
Read Courtney Love's bit on the rape of musicians, it's on Salon. Whatever you may think of copyrights in general, the RIAA has set up a monopolistic system that makes anything Microsoft has done seem amateurish.
I plan to begin an immediate hands on approach to discovering if this guys technique is valid and patentable...
No, no, don't fight this patent! Without a license to use the patent, you can't use a tape measure to size bras. So about the only way to measure cup size is by cupping 'em in your hands and figuring the weight. Hmm, perhaps I should switch careers to bra salesman...
Year after year, governments of different flavours repeat that they will *not* bow to Terrorist demands.
When Iran released the U.S. hostages (I hope at least some of you know history back as far as 1981), the U.S. freed up a few billion in Iranian assets.
The Iran-Contra scandal involved the U.S. selling missiles to that same Iranian government.
Yasser Arafat was not a flower salesman. (Nor was Yitzhak Shamir, for that matter.)
Err, I hope nobody interprets this as me wanting to have sex with Marge Simpson, because she's NOTHING compared to Wilma Flintstone.
Lister: This is crazy. Why are we talking about going to bed with Wilma Flintstone?
CAT: You're right. We're nuts. This is an insane conversation.
LISTER: She'll never leave Fred, and we know it.
The Death Star II was not 500 miles wide, as they state at the start of the Endor Holocaust site
If you surf around that website, which has been around a while, you'll find further bases for that claim: the size of the Executor when it crashes into DSII, for example.
Regardless, there are several holes in the evidence, as far as I can tell.
1) You don't have to provide direct escape velocity to any fragments, just divert 'em enough to use a gravitational slingshot. Not too close, though, or you'll pull off atmosphere.
2) As far as I can tell, there's no real indication of just how large the Ewok population is. It could be small enough that they all could fit on the available transports.
3) Star Wars tech might include some equivalent to the Star Trek Genesis device, a combination of tech that can make an uninhabitable planet inhabitable again in short order.
3) The Alliance has already been seen to have shielding technology sufficient to survive a bombardment from a fleet of Imperial Battlecruisers. It's possible they may have had such a device following the fleet in hyperspace ready for just this purpose. (Although the Imperials were able to land somehow, so such a shield isn't impervious to matter.)
Clearly this whole website is simply Imperial propoganda.
You cannot declare that X has affected Y to degree Z, unless you can observe Y in the absence of X.
Indeed. You can't say the Unabomber killed anyone, they might have spontaneously exploded even without his bombs being there.
However, you *can* measure correlations. If CD sales go up in the presence of Napster, that's pretty strong evidence Napster isn't destroying the music industry.
Is there any real incentive for a tech startup to locate here?
Michigan winters. It's too d---ed cold to do anything other than code then, anyway. Look what Finnish winters did for Linux...
Actually, the Pacific Northwest probably wins best coding weather. Rain doesn't keep you from going to the office, but it does keep you from wanting to be outside. I've said before that basing Microsoft in Redmond is Mr. Gates' smartest decision ever...
Slashdot Mirror
If you don't like the contract, don't sign it. Take your work somewhere else. Bus tables to satisfy your addiction to food and shelter until you can get a better deal...
...and think about forming a union. "United we stand, divided we fall" and all that. If an entire class of people is getting shafted, that's one possible way to fight back.
I think you got it wrong buddy. We keep Sales people employed. I came to a recent realization with the latest product I've been working on that we really could have used the input of the sales and marketing guys. It may be that the last couple years of my life have been spent largely on something that really didn't make a big difference to most of our customers, whereas something I did in a week or less has been much more well-received. I would have preferred to have spent more of that last two years doing a number of those week-long projects, rather than the other. And marketing might have been able to help point out this focus problem.
I don't think the miniseries was well received.
It apparently wasn't that badly received, as the ratings for the second part were only slightly lower than those of the first (4.6 vs. 4.4).
For me, the worst "special effects" were the "outdoor" desert ones.
I can see wanting to do something like this, but exploring dirigibles first, or even gliders, would have made sense!
I think both have serious problems with high winds; I think crashes did more damage to the dirigible business than the Hindenberg did. Airplanes have been known to fly into hurricanes, in comparison. And at the given altitude, the jetstream is, what, 100 mph?
However, I have read plans for unmanned flights to do this. I suppose the problem is that you need a powerful aircraft to survive a high percentage of weather and thus keep your service almost always available.
Rest assured that computer -> svideo (or better) of decent quality will become a popular item
Decent wireless transmitters would also be a possibility. But really, if there's a stock format, a reasonably low-cost player will soon follow. If I can cut a CD-R on my PC and then play it on the standalone player, I'm happy.
Also, Pioneer's DVD-writer is ~$1000 today. I remember working with an $8,000 CD writer back in 1995, that wasn't as good as today's $150 machines. You should be able to get a DVD writer for $200 by, say, January 2003.
So just rename your technology something else and call it revolutionary...
Worked for MS
It must be said positively of Microsoft that they have never (to my knowledge) chosen to pursue patents as a way of eliminating competition or to generate extortionate licensing fees.
Users lose dialog boxes. I don't know how, but they do it.
One thing I think I'd like to see is the rest of the app graying if a modal dialog box is invoked, making it clear that the dialog is "in charge."
On the plus side, at least now I don't feel foolish for being a smart guy in the tech industry for ~10 years, and *not* being a multimillionaire.
How would all you clever hackers out there hide a function in an open source system in a way that it can escape detection even if all the source is read?
Write it in Perl.
Did you see that 7 line DeCSS program?
Because without things like fonts and headers, most people are less productive.
For throwaway documents, perhaps, but really specifying specific fonts and sizes is the wrong approach. Got some titles that should be in a different font than the main body? ID them as titles, don't change the font for each one individually so they look like titles. But that's how most people do word processing.
Not once has Windows of any variety given me any trouble on install
I went to bed one night convinced the 95->98 upgrade had trashed my computer. Overnight it apparently timed out from what I thought was a hang (my fourth try), and in the morning I was able to complete the install. That was just an upgrade, and a relatively minor one, of an existing OS.
I've never had trouble installing Linux. getting certain things working afterwards I've found to be more difficult, but the installations themselves have been cake.
The criminal inanity of this whole thing is that Ellison settled with the actual perpetrator, and now is going after ISPs. Why? Deeper pockets. It's not about copyrights, it's about money -- and not about recompense from damages, but just "we've been wronged and they've got the money to make it right." So whatever moral justification Ellison might have had is long lost.
By this logic, if some guy hits me with a car, I should sue Ford.
But if you give the copy to someone else when they would otherwise have bought their own, that's one less sale.
But so often that's not the case. Music copying isn't new, just somewhat more convenient than when Metallica's Lars was copying his friend's heavy metal. When a kid with a two dollar allowance has a $5,000 music collection, the music companies aren't losing out. Generally it's the wealthier, honest people who have the conscience to buy copyrighted materials, and are they going to go the Napster route? You hope not, but the more inconvenient and expensive the copyright vendors make it for them, the more you're going to turn away even the honest folk.
Now the GPL on our Python implementations won't expire in 95 years, with Disney's support we can keep them out of the public domain forever!
So the fact that it's easy to flout a law means the law shouldn't exist?
I don't know about you, but generally my behavior is predicated on what is right and wrong, not the law, and the law doesn't define this for me. In the case of copyright, right and wrong are defined by the social bargain we make, creating licensing rights in order to encourage content creation. And if I've paid for a license for X, I should be able to use X in a fairly general way; I don't feel it's wrong for me to ignore restrictions you try to place as long as they don't generally violate the bargain. So, if I purchase a book from you and then someone makes an electronic version available, you're not hurt if I possess the electronic version as well. I've already bought the license, and whether I scanned it or someone else did is really irrelevant to you.
In this situation, we have someone making scans generally available, even to people who haven't licensed the content. It's wrong, but in this case it should be noted that this has little influence on the license sales in general. (None of this "death of copyright" melodrama nonsense.) Once e-books are practical devices, Harlan's publishers should make electronic versions available; only at that point is someone making free versions going to matter. In my 15 years of net access, I've never read a book online, so I doubt it's a particularly widespread phenomenon.
Its very likely that the new set manufacturers will simply not implement this technology into their sets, precisely because it will allow the existence of old sets along with new.
Most of the current crop of HDTVs don't come with a tuner, the tuner is a separate add-on. This tech affects the tuner, not the base tube. By making digital TV signals more practical (it could work with cable without stealing channels, so cable systems wouldn't be reluctant to carry digital channels), this could help them sell *more* sets, not fewer.
Heck, you could even have a tuner box that creates the digital picture and then converts it back to analog, with the result probably a little higher quality than the original.
no but you can prevent situations from occuring. Password protect your goddamn system.
And this is so different from v-chipping because...?
As far as I can see, the studios currently have enough control over distribution
You use the record company's recording facilities, video producers, etc. If you want shelf space at major retailers, you have to pay -- especially for shelf end positions.
Read Courtney Love's bit on the rape of musicians, it's on Salon. Whatever you may think of copyrights in general, the RIAA has set up a monopolistic system that makes anything Microsoft has done seem amateurish.
I plan to begin an immediate hands on approach to discovering if this guys technique is valid and patentable...
No, no, don't fight this patent! Without a license to use the patent, you can't use a tape measure to size bras. So about the only way to measure cup size is by cupping 'em in your hands and figuring the weight. Hmm, perhaps I should switch careers to bra salesman...
Growing cartilage from fat cells is good news. It will probably make replacement parts cheaper and easier to get
Heck, I'd be happy to donate 20+ pounds worth! Where do I go?
Eccles the Rotund
Year after year, governments of different flavours repeat that they will *not* bow to Terrorist demands.
When Iran released the U.S. hostages (I hope at least some of you know history back as far as 1981), the U.S. freed up a few billion in Iranian assets.
The Iran-Contra scandal involved the U.S. selling missiles to that same Iranian government.
Yasser Arafat was not a flower salesman. (Nor was Yitzhak Shamir, for that matter.)
If they did, how would it look?
Like business as usual.
Err, I hope nobody interprets this as me wanting to have sex with Marge Simpson, because she's NOTHING compared to Wilma Flintstone.
Lister: This is crazy. Why are we talking about going to bed with Wilma Flintstone?
CAT: You're right. We're nuts. This is an insane conversation.
LISTER: She'll never leave Fred, and we know it.
The Death Star II was not 500 miles wide, as they state at the start of the Endor Holocaust site
If you surf around that website, which has been around a while, you'll find further bases for that claim: the size of the Executor when it crashes into DSII, for example.
Regardless, there are several holes in the evidence, as far as I can tell.
1) You don't have to provide direct escape velocity to any fragments, just divert 'em enough to use a gravitational slingshot. Not too close, though, or you'll pull off atmosphere.
2) As far as I can tell, there's no real indication of just how large the Ewok population is. It could be small enough that they all could fit on the available transports.
3) Star Wars tech might include some equivalent to the Star Trek Genesis device, a combination of tech that can make an uninhabitable planet inhabitable again in short order.
3) The Alliance has already been seen to have shielding technology sufficient to survive a bombardment from a fleet of Imperial Battlecruisers. It's possible they may have had such a device following the fleet in hyperspace ready for just this purpose. (Although the Imperials were able to land somehow, so such a shield isn't impervious to matter.)
Clearly this whole website is simply Imperial propoganda.
You cannot declare that X has affected Y to degree Z, unless you can observe Y in the absence of X.
Indeed. You can't say the Unabomber killed anyone, they might have spontaneously exploded even without his bombs being there.
However, you *can* measure correlations. If CD sales go up in the presence of Napster, that's pretty strong evidence Napster isn't destroying the music industry.
Is there any real incentive for a tech startup to locate here?
Michigan winters. It's too d---ed cold to do anything other than code then, anyway. Look what Finnish winters did for Linux...
Actually, the Pacific Northwest probably wins best coding weather. Rain doesn't keep you from going to the office, but it does keep you from wanting to be outside. I've said before that basing Microsoft in Redmond is Mr. Gates' smartest decision ever...
A creationist could simply say that God chose to create us with DNA containing similar components from other living things.
A philosopher might argue, however, that if God thought these through, then they happened in the mind of God, and thus did in fact happen.
Or God may have just wanted to give us these hints into his creation process, for reasons we don't and may never know.