I'd have to agree with this and can state my experience from a different angle. I had a PhD from the top rated institution in my country (not the US, rather the UK) which was followed by a successful 3 year postdoc. This was a 1 year contract which was extended by 2 and the promise that good performance would lead to a permanent position (note: not tenured, just permanent and substantive). My performance was good with presentations around the world at top conferences and some good papers (not science and nature but top in the field) but I was told that due to finances, I could only get my contract re-extended by another year rather than be made permanent. I could see that this was just going to continue with the institution avoiding to employ me properly.
My income as a PhD was about $10,000 (no income tax) and my postdoc salary was about $30,000. With that, I couldn't afford even a studio flat in my home city.
So newly married and with a child on the way, I resigned and set myself up as a freelance user experience consultant (my PhD and postdoc was relevant to this). Since then, I've been earning over $150,000 USD a year and I'm more or less my own boss. The work can be challenging but often isn't - the biggest challenge is selling designs to stakeholders. I'm contributing to projects that frankly I don't care much about but I can look after my family when invoices are paid. I still research in my spare time to produce papers and wish I could devote more time because I love it. However, in industry it is style rather than substance that wins rather than genuinely useful content. Make potential clients feel confident and you're winning.
I have honestly come across even educated people deriding academic papers because they're "too hard to read" even if the information contained within is pure gold. My PhD has brought condescension of me being "too academic" even though I run a successful business and please commercial clients. I'm at the point where I barely mention the PhD in my resume because of all the snobbery it engenders even when it's topic pertains directly to a project. It's sad that people have these attitudes.
I'm glad I got out of science purely for my family's needs but I really miss the fun of research.
Wouldn't a combined European military include the UK and France? That would confer nuclear (sorry, ahem, nuculer) capability), plus the FSU have a few left over if they were involved.
Good grief! Open source becoming mainstream? Have these people not heard of BIND? Apache? Firefox? PHP? Perl? Since when have these been marginal?
Anyway, the article is mostly complaining that open source software might be put to bad purposes but that can happen with any software.
Quoth: "The embrace of open-source technology by governments may result in more intuitive software applications," I wonder if the writer has ever used govt mandated software. Intuitive it ain't. The writer's other point about (eg) skype failing because of different systems being used - how many non-Chinese people here have ever heard of QQ? These differences exist already.
Don't forget that the RIAA factor in the costs of the record companies whereas this is just compensation for the artists.
However, it does show that the companies are screwing over everyone by taking the lion's share of the profit. Okay, they do a lot of work for it, but the disparity is enormous. I can understand most published musicians seeing this and wondering why they are getting a tiny fraction of the takings. Most people are happy to pay if the artist gets fairly compensated but this doesn't seem equitable.
Sounds a bit like an old game I used to play on the BBC Micro at school called UK PLC. You played Prime Minister and determined tax rates, expenditure and tried to defend against an increasingly dissatisfied population.
The trick was for the first three years to set the income & corporation tax rate to 10000% or some other stupid figure and expenditures to negative figures, reap loads of cash and survive the hate and then in the last 2 terms of power, give a lot of the cash back with zero tax and massive expenditure. Cheating, yes, but the game company *should* have put bounds checking in.
Critique is fundamental to design - good & great designers actively seek out criticism. Whether the criticism is worthwhile is another question, but any designer worth paying is big enough to deal with flack. IMHE, I've found designers to be the most motivated solicitors of feedback.
I seem to remember that the speccy price was about 140 quid though it dropped towards 85. I guess part of the reason we lusted after BBCs was the cost plus we used them in school. Chucky Egg was never better. I'm almost tempted to get hold of an emulator for old time's sake. Me - I had a Dragon 32. A Motorola 6809 processor and had fun converting assembler into hex codes and poking into memory (couldn't afford an assembler).
The big advantage of the speccy was that it was cheap and if you got one, you could hand some tapes to friends who would copy hundreds of games onto it for you because most of your mates had speccys too. And, to be fair, the games were really very good with the likes of Ultimate play-the-game. Commodores were much more expensive in my neck of the woods, had a less impressive selection and had a reputation of having a crap built-in basic.
I agree that Silverlight is pointless: Flash is pretty much the same thing but has massive uptake and HTML5 is coming along nicely thanks (and I'm a great believer in open standards). Air can do just as much if not more.
However, I'm a UX designer and I've seen a lot of positions available that require Silverlight experience. Daft really as a UX designer doesn't really need knowledge of the platform but then a *lot* of people don't grok what UX really is (hint: it's not skins either). It does concern me that MS releases something like Silverlight and a lot of shops automatically take it simply because it is MS. Yeah, I've been around for long enough to know that not taking up an MS product is unthinkable for many firms, but the mentality of assuming anything from MS will be a surefire market success still amazes me. I wouldn't have bet anything on it until it had significant adoption.
Except the British in (what was then) Malaya managed it against a force of communist insurgents and they didn't have 4 x the population of the country. Malaysia (as it is now) is now one of the most developed, peaceful and stable Asian countries - a testament to so many people there striving hard for peace. Other advantages: a reasonably respected 'prime minister' and population who bought into the idea that independence had to wait (over a decade) until the insurgents were defeated and potential communist recruits / supporters being looked after instead of massacred (with one possible exception).
Proviso: I say British, but the force that countered the insurgents was composed of Malayans, British, Gurkhas, Indians, New Zealanders and Fijians (possibly others too). The UK masterminded most of the plan. In case any reader is curious, the method was to consider it a police action - ie, really led by police intelligence working with civilians. The military was brought in only when killing was going to happen.
It's worth reading about as it's one of the few times that insurgents have been soundly defeated and a stable country left behind once the military have left.
...because as we all *know*, terrorists only ever use DSLRs. Me, armed with a 14.6 megapixel Sony NEX and a small kit zoom lens can only produce crappy quality pictures which are easily outmatched by even my n-year old 6 megapixel Pentax SLR with the same zoom.
Unless of course they want to crack down on journalists - but then journos are exempt.
Okay, so maybe they're having a go at the camera manufacturers who wouldn't pay a bribe - but then the same manufacturers also make small cameras too.
Ok, I'm stumped for answers unless the kuwaiti govt are a bunch of total f**wits whose distended pieces of fetid rectum they call their brains can't function for more than a millisecond unless there's a brown paper bag stuffed with someone elses cash at the end of it.
And the air quality in Edmonton is, "Woah! OMG! It's like awesome, man!" When asked about New York's air quality, he said, "Well, it's kind of like, uh, yeah!. It's all that, y'know?"
They're applying for a trademark rather than a patent so prior use is a little different here. I'm sure someone with greater knowledge of US trademark law will enlighten us, but I seem to recall that it is possible to trademark something that's been used (e.g., "Linux" was trademarked by Linus Torvalds back in the 1990s after someone else was using it for their business and he wanted it to be a protected phrase - this is AFAIR so I could be wrong).
Slashdot Mirror
So, assuming the case goes through and the alleged sharers win, would the judge be likely to award costs against ACS:Law? That would be awesome.
I'd have to agree with this and can state my experience from a different angle. I had a PhD from the top rated institution in my country (not the US, rather the UK) which was followed by a successful 3 year postdoc. This was a 1 year contract which was extended by 2 and the promise that good performance would lead to a permanent position (note: not tenured, just permanent and substantive). My performance was good with presentations around the world at top conferences and some good papers (not science and nature but top in the field) but I was told that due to finances, I could only get my contract re-extended by another year rather than be made permanent. I could see that this was just going to continue with the institution avoiding to employ me properly.
My income as a PhD was about $10,000 (no income tax) and my postdoc salary was about $30,000. With that, I couldn't afford even a studio flat in my home city.
So newly married and with a child on the way, I resigned and set myself up as a freelance user experience consultant (my PhD and postdoc was relevant to this). Since then, I've been earning over $150,000 USD a year and I'm more or less my own boss. The work can be challenging but often isn't - the biggest challenge is selling designs to stakeholders. I'm contributing to projects that frankly I don't care much about but I can look after my family when invoices are paid. I still research in my spare time to produce papers and wish I could devote more time because I love it. However, in industry it is style rather than substance that wins rather than genuinely useful content. Make potential clients feel confident and you're winning.
I have honestly come across even educated people deriding academic papers because they're "too hard to read" even if the information contained within is pure gold. My PhD has brought condescension of me being "too academic" even though I run a successful business and please commercial clients. I'm at the point where I barely mention the PhD in my resume because of all the snobbery it engenders even when it's topic pertains directly to a project. It's sad that people have these attitudes.
I'm glad I got out of science purely for my family's needs but I really miss the fun of research.
Wouldn't a combined European military include the UK and France? That would confer nuclear (sorry, ahem, nuculer) capability), plus the FSU have a few left over if they were involved.
Remind me because I forget which bit of Europe levied the taxes: was it Denmark? Sweden? Portugal? Italy? Ireland?
Or perhaps it wasn't 'Europe' at all?
Good grief! Open source becoming mainstream? Have these people not heard of BIND? Apache? Firefox? PHP? Perl? Since when have these been marginal? Anyway, the article is mostly complaining that open source software might be put to bad purposes but that can happen with any software. Quoth: "The embrace of open-source technology by governments may result in more intuitive software applications," I wonder if the writer has ever used govt mandated software. Intuitive it ain't. The writer's other point about (eg) skype failing because of different systems being used - how many non-Chinese people here have ever heard of QQ? These differences exist already.
I'll have to come back to you on that one. Just don't hold your breath...
Don't forget that the RIAA factor in the costs of the record companies whereas this is just compensation for the artists.
However, it does show that the companies are screwing over everyone by taking the lion's share of the profit. Okay, they do a lot of work for it, but the disparity is enormous. I can understand most published musicians seeing this and wondering why they are getting a tiny fraction of the takings. Most people are happy to pay if the artist gets fairly compensated but this doesn't seem equitable.
Sounds a bit like an old game I used to play on the BBC Micro at school called UK PLC. You played Prime Minister and determined tax rates, expenditure and tried to defend against an increasingly dissatisfied population.
The trick was for the first three years to set the income & corporation tax rate to 10000% or some other stupid figure and expenditures to negative figures, reap loads of cash and survive the hate and then in the last 2 terms of power, give a lot of the cash back with zero tax and massive expenditure. Cheating, yes, but the game company *should* have put bounds checking in.
Critique is fundamental to design - good & great designers actively seek out criticism. Whether the criticism is worthwhile is another question, but any designer worth paying is big enough to deal with flack. IMHE, I've found designers to be the most motivated solicitors of feedback.
Would you guys stop being so childish and immature?
No, really. Thanks. Yeah.
Yeah, but did you read the FAQ and set the proper options in ./configure for your architecture? ;-)
We don't blame the lawyers 'coz they'll sue us into oblivion if we do!
What's 0.001% of a couple of dead dingos, a rancid koala and a pile of sandy rock? Oh yeah, better remember to include Dame Edna....
I seem to remember that the speccy price was about 140 quid though it dropped towards 85. I guess part of the reason we lusted after BBCs was the cost plus we used them in school. Chucky Egg was never better. I'm almost tempted to get hold of an emulator for old time's sake. Me - I had a Dragon 32. A Motorola 6809 processor and had fun converting assembler into hex codes and poking into memory (couldn't afford an assembler).
How do you say "water"?
Wahdr? Many Americans do and don't understand when a British person says, "water".
Switzerland jailing Assange? This is new to me - what do the Swiss want him for?
Games, games, games.
The big advantage of the speccy was that it was cheap and if you got one, you could hand some tapes to friends who would copy hundreds of games onto it for you because most of your mates had speccys too. And, to be fair, the games were really very good with the likes of Ultimate play-the-game. Commodores were much more expensive in my neck of the woods, had a less impressive selection and had a reputation of having a crap built-in basic.
We all lusted after BBC B micros though...
I agree that Silverlight is pointless: Flash is pretty much the same thing but has massive uptake and HTML5 is coming along nicely thanks (and I'm a great believer in open standards). Air can do just as much if not more.
However, I'm a UX designer and I've seen a lot of positions available that require Silverlight experience. Daft really as a UX designer doesn't really need knowledge of the platform but then a *lot* of people don't grok what UX really is (hint: it's not skins either). It does concern me that MS releases something like Silverlight and a lot of shops automatically take it simply because it is MS. Yeah, I've been around for long enough to know that not taking up an MS product is unthinkable for many firms, but the mentality of assuming anything from MS will be a surefire market success still amazes me. I wouldn't have bet anything on it until it had significant adoption.
Except the British in (what was then) Malaya managed it against a force of communist insurgents and they didn't have 4 x the population of the country. Malaysia (as it is now) is now one of the most developed, peaceful and stable Asian countries - a testament to so many people there striving hard for peace. Other advantages: a reasonably respected 'prime minister' and population who bought into the idea that independence had to wait (over a decade) until the insurgents were defeated and potential communist recruits / supporters being looked after instead of massacred (with one possible exception).
Proviso: I say British, but the force that countered the insurgents was composed of Malayans, British, Gurkhas, Indians, New Zealanders and Fijians (possibly others too). The UK masterminded most of the plan. In case any reader is curious, the method was to consider it a police action - ie, really led by police intelligence working with civilians. The military was brought in only when killing was going to happen.
It's worth reading about as it's one of the few times that insurgents have been soundly defeated and a stable country left behind once the military have left.
...because as we all *know*, terrorists only ever use DSLRs. Me, armed with a 14.6 megapixel Sony NEX and a small kit zoom lens can only produce crappy quality pictures which are easily outmatched by even my n-year old 6 megapixel Pentax SLR with the same zoom.
Unless of course they want to crack down on journalists - but then journos are exempt.
Okay, so maybe they're having a go at the camera manufacturers who wouldn't pay a bribe - but then the same manufacturers also make small cameras too.
Ok, I'm stumped for answers unless the kuwaiti govt are a bunch of total f**wits whose distended pieces of fetid rectum they call their brains can't function for more than a millisecond unless there's a brown paper bag stuffed with someone elses cash at the end of it.
And the air quality in Edmonton is, "Woah! OMG! It's like awesome, man!" When asked about New York's air quality, he said, "Well, it's kind of like, uh, yeah!. It's all that, y'know?"
Wouldn't this analogy applied to the web imply that accessing any content without explicitly getting permission to enter illegal?
Thank you sir for the information. I stand corrected.
They're applying for a trademark rather than a patent so prior use is a little different here. I'm sure someone with greater knowledge of US trademark law will enlighten us, but I seem to recall that it is possible to trademark something that's been used (e.g., "Linux" was trademarked by Linus Torvalds back in the 1990s after someone else was using it for their business and he wanted it to be a protected phrase - this is AFAIR so I could be wrong).
And don't forget the tits on page 3.