..amongst the 1% of users who a) know what region codes are and b) are affected adversely by their presence in day-to-day use.
But these people are the early adopters - tech-savy users with sufficient free cash. They travel a lot. As an example, I bought my laptop while teaching in the US. I also got a few DVDs. Now I'm back in Europe. I bought a couple of DVDs. I'd like to be able to play all of the DVDs I bought on my laptop. Some of the more exotic and arty ones are Region 0, but most are not. Even DVDs that of ancient movies that are almost definitely released in high-income countries first (e.g. Inherit the Wind) are region-locked.
Note that import/export does not even come into play in my case - it's just that I moved from Europe to the US and back again. This is by no means unusual anymore.
No need, so far. They have run their course and eventually been terminated by mutual consent (and with a hefty amount of money paid to me).
Just state clearly that the software you write is yours, and that the company gets whatever license they need.
The thing is, if he's an employee, then the software isn't his. Copyright law makes an author go through a lot of hoops to legally transfer the ownership of copyright, and with a work made for hire, the author is the employer, not the employee.
That why it needs to be spelled out. "The parties agree that any software created by the employee as part of his work for the employer is not to be considered a work for hire, but that the employee has and retains full rights over it. The employee in return grants empoyer a perpetual, free license to use, modify and distribute such code."...or similar.
In contrast to what everybody else has written, I would not go to a lawyer for such a trivial thing (and yes, I have negotiated contracts about my IP with both my employer and the company that bought a license for it). Just state clearly that the software you write is yours, and that the company gets whatever license they need.
If you need a lawyer for trivial everday stuff like selling (or retaining) your work, you live in a country with a fucked-up legal system. As far as I can tell, most judges are fairly good at interpreting contracts fairly. Moreover, the chance that you will end up in court about this seems pretty miniscule.
Going to a lawyer might be safer. It might also complicate stuff so much that your company does not want to deal with it any more ("He got a lawyer, so now we need to get one, too...").
So if a child steals from a store that they go to without a parent, it should be OK because the minor can't afford to purchase the item?
It's not ok, but there is not necessarily something that can be done. In many countries, a 13 year old is old enough that permanent supervision is not required, but not old enough to be legaly liable. Once the parents have been warned, it becomes their problem (they need to increase supervision).
I'm not even sure that the RIAA can afford so many lawsuits. Sure, they're a multi-billion dollar "co-op" organization "defending" artists, but each lawsuit costs them something. Even with in-house legal staff, there are still filing fees, follow-up costs, and the like. I'm assuming their return-on-investment is calculated by how many people they assume will stop pirating their music out of fear of lawsuits?
You forget that they strongly encourage people to settle for a few thousand dollars. That should pay for a lot of copied form letters...
It's still significant enough to warrant a discount, which is something AMD can't really bring to the table. [...] Now I'm no industry expert, but 1.18 million chips is enough to warrant a discount, hell, lots of 1000 are enough to knock a few bucks off per chip for chains and resellers.
Well, even discounted, Intel chips currently are more expensive per performance than AMD at all or nearly all performance levels. As far as I can tell, what Apple wants it the big brand name and the guaranteed supply. Once x86 Apples are established, Apple may very well introduce AMD chips. But now it would cause more confusion among traditional and targeted customers (how many of those will know about compatibility anyways?).
Q: Who's "death squads" have the higher body count? The left or the right?
Depends on who does the counting and classification. But I don't care. I don't want my (or, indeed, any) gouvernment to be involved with any death squads. "Better than Pol Pot" is not a sufficent criterion to rank as acceptable on my scale of gouvernments.
Pascal, Modula-2, and Oberon (guess which school I attended:-). This hasn't exactly prevented me from getting gainful employment.
Well, if you graduate in CS from ETH in the early 90s, it probably was hard not to drown in job offers. I don't know if it has anything to do with languages.
At U. Kaiserslautern, I mostly learned
Modula-2, LISP, Fortran ("voluntary" - hah) and C (not taught - pick it up or die, 90% of 3rd-year+ work required it).
As production of the high-salinity "Deep Water" lessens or ceases entirely, currents like the Gulf Stream weaken.
I'm not a climatologist, and I have not researched this in detail. However, it seems obvious to me that the gulf stream not only delivers heat to Northern Europe, it also removes it from the Gulf of Mexico. So waters in the gulf should be warmer on average...leading to an extended and stronger hurricane season. Hmmm...
Putting this kind of scrubber [as used in space craft] in play on earth would be possible, but very, very expensive. And with expense, comes corporate questioning: is the gas really bad enough to warrant installing scrubbers to clean up the atmosphere? Or should we just spend the money on putting scrubbers on our houses, cars, and airplanes?
Actually, it is not possible in practice and total nonsense in theory. You need something to bind the CO2 to. That something has to be produced, using energy. Thermodynamics tells us we will lose out in the process. So if we use fossil energy sources, we need to create more CO2 than we can absorb. If we use any other energy source, we could just as well use the energy directly, without the extra loss and expense of burning carbohydrates in the first place.
The real issue is still global warming and environmental effects. H2O is a greenhouse gas, just like CO2. H2O also has more immediate effects on local weather. If we switch over to hydrogen powered autos, we can count on more foggy roadways in the future.
Well, H2O is a greenhouse gas, but not like CO2. The time scales are different. The carrying capacity of the atmosphere for water vapour depends only on the air temperature. Superfluous water drops out really quick via precipation. CO2, on the other hand, is only removed via very slow processes. So CO2 is a driver of climate change, water vapour only acts to reinforce the primary effect.
BTW, burning HYDROcarbons also generates water vapour. If we use hydrogen in fuel cells, the amount generated is probably less than the amount we get from burning gasoline. And in both cases, the amount of water vapour we create is small compared to natural evaporation.
...You can plant trees to soak up CO2. (Just don't burn them for firewood later!)
...or do anything else with them. If you want to keep the carbon out of the air, you need to sequester the wood and neither burn it nor allow it to rot. Of course, if you burn it instead of fossil fuels, you come out on top (i.e. you're carbon neutral instead of putting more CO2 into the atmosphere).
... and here I thought a car that needs more than 10l/100km qualifies as a gas guzzler by the criteria for 2005. Guess I was wrong.
Yes, a vehicle that needs more than 10l gasoline per 100km is a gas guzzler (by European standards, at least). Doing this on hydrogen is something very different. If this works (and I'm sceptical), it is good enough to make hydrogen viable as an energy carrier for transportation.
The trouble began last fall after the school district issued some 600 Apple iBook laptops to every student at the high school, about 50 miles northwest of Philadelphia.
Well, if they dump 600 iBooks on every student, no wonder they get in trouble. You need a minor warehouse just to store them...
A few million weather balloons with spark gap generators ought to do the trick to cut that 50 years down to something more reasonable.
No, that would be useless. Ozone is created in the stratosphere continously, at a rate much higher than we can hope to match with technical means. The problem is that the ozone concentration is in a dynamic equilibrum. Putting CFCs into the stratosphere leads to increased destruction of ozone, so while the same amount is produced, the resulting concentration is much lower. And CFCs are acting as catalysts, i.e. they are not destroyed by the process. We have now stopped putting CFCs into the atmosphere, and the CFC concentration has stabilized (and so has the ozone concentration). The CFC concentration will now slowly decrease due to natural break up. 50 years is the time scale until most of them will have broken down or otherwise been removed from the atmosphere. This will automatically allow ozone levels to recover to normal levels.
If we want to speed up this process, we need to remove CFCs from the stratosphere. I doubt this is feasible, especially without serious side effects.
Since they weren't even looking for the "ozone hole" until just recently, they don't have much historical record of it. I believe it's much less than 10 years. They really don't know if it is normal to have a hole at the poles or not, because they don't have any historical evidence.
I'm always surprised how people form strong opinions based on no knowledge at all. The dramatic decrease in ozone was discovered during the 70s. Nobody was "looking for it", scientist were measuring the ozone concentration over Antarctica to understand the atmosphere better. The Montreal treaty about reductions in CFC production has been signed in 1987 (that is nearly 20 years ago) and been revised twice since. Since 2000, no major CFCs are produced in any signatory countries (which includes esentially everybody, even the US), except for extremely limited uses such as medical sprays. And, as the articles both say, it seems to work.
And no, nobody is randomly assigning causes to measured effects. In addition to a correlation, we also understand the mechanism how CFCs catalytically destroy Ozone. And yes, we also understand how CO2 causes global warming by increasing the absorbtion of radiation by the atmosphere.
Read less junk science (.org) and more real science.
And yet somehow over the last 200 years America was at the fore front of science and technology.
Umm....maybe you have a slightly US-centric point of view.
For science, the US is in the picture for about the last 70 years, with a huge boost from Hitler getting rid of nearly everybody with a brain in Germany (many of which emigrated to the US), and another boost by capturing Nazi scientists after 1945.
You don't have to put a fancy label on it for it to be copyrighted; common law provides the protection.
Common Law as the common source of British and US law does no such thing. It has no concept of copyright at all. In early times, copyrights were established for each work individually by Royal decree.
Current copyright law, with automatic copyright even without a copyright notice, is a recent concept, and due to the Berne Convention, originated in 1886, last revised in 1971, but becoming law in the US only in 1989. That is one reason why e.g. AT&T and SCO are in trouble with UNIX copyrights - AT&T may have published UNIX without copyright messages before 1989.
Teachers should be drawn from the professional work force....Yes, being successful in a field does not make you qualified to be a teacher, but it is a much better requirement than a rubber stamp certification.
One does not imply the other. Yes, rubber-stamping is bad (for any certification). Teachers should need to have decent training In most first-world countries, "Teacher" above elementary school levels actually have to get the equivalent of a bachelor degree qualification in their subjects (in addition to a degree in teaching), and they are only allowed to teach those subjects. In order to achieve that, teachers of course need decent pay and job security. One thing that totally baffled me in the US is that teacher is a rather low-prestige, low-paying job. Why? Teaching well is hard.
Certainly, one way of improving education is consistent and reasonable funding.
He cites research claiming that deterring a mere 0.2% of hacking crimes would save society $100 million. That's huge. We might not like regulation, but if we can't police our own bad behavior, steps need to be taken. Money talks.
It is not only huge, but also completely spurious. The economic benefit does not scale linearly. As long as there are a few aggressive viruses out there, you need to keep up the infrastructure to combat them. In fact, you would probably have to keep them up as a precaution just in case, or W32_Usamma will take out all modern infrastructure in 2008.
Moreover, consider the "Crime". The hacker does nothing more than running a program on his computer. That it spreads is caused by broken systems and stupid users. Yes, cracking should carry an appropriate penalty. But the key word is appropriate. I'd say it ranks somewhere between illegal graffiti (if done just "for fun") and fraud (if done with a commercial motive).
So lets just say that theoretically this guy and the guy who turned him in are working together. Adult writes the worm and gives it to the kid. Kid releases it onto the unsuspecting Internet. Adult turns him in. Kid gets a slap on the wrist Adult collects $250,000. A few months down the road, adult splits the cash with the kid. Profit!
That is either conspiracy to commit a crime, a crime commited jointly, or even incitement. The adult is in for it either way (and as an adult). The juvenile is still a juvenile and treated as such.
German law recognizes that in such situations most of the responsibility falls to the adult, regardless of who commits the actual act.
Of course there may be a problem with enforcement (i.e. you might not be able to fix it on the adult). But there is no reason why the juvenile should be punished for the incompetence of the prosecution.
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Note that import/export does not even come into play in my case - it's just that I moved from Europe to the US and back again. This is by no means unusual anymore.
If you need a lawyer for trivial everday stuff like selling (or retaining) your work, you live in a country with a fucked-up legal system. As far as I can tell, most judges are fairly good at interpreting contracts fairly. Moreover, the chance that you will end up in court about this seems pretty miniscule.
Going to a lawyer might be safer. It might also complicate stuff so much that your company does not want to deal with it any more ("He got a lawyer, so now we need to get one, too...").
At U. Kaiserslautern, I mostly learned Modula-2, LISP, Fortran ("voluntary" - hah) and C (not taught - pick it up or die, 90% of 3rd-year+ work required it).
BTW, burning HYDROcarbons also generates water vapour. If we use hydrogen in fuel cells, the amount generated is probably less than the amount we get from burning gasoline. And in both cases, the amount of water vapour we create is small compared to natural evaporation.
If we want to speed up this process, we need to remove CFCs from the stratosphere. I doubt this is feasible, especially without serious side effects.
And no, nobody is randomly assigning causes to measured effects. In addition to a correlation, we also understand the mechanism how CFCs catalytically destroy Ozone. And yes, we also understand how CO2 causes global warming by increasing the absorbtion of radiation by the atmosphere.
Read less junk science (.org) and more real science.
Current copyright law, with automatic copyright even without a copyright notice, is a recent concept, and due to the Berne Convention, originated in 1886, last revised in 1971, but becoming law in the US only in 1989. That is one reason why e.g. AT&T and SCO are in trouble with UNIX copyrights - AT&T may have published UNIX without copyright messages before 1989.
Certainly, one way of improving education is consistent and reasonable funding.
Moreover, consider the "Crime". The hacker does nothing more than running a program on his computer. That it spreads is caused by broken systems and stupid users. Yes, cracking should carry an appropriate penalty. But the key word is appropriate. I'd say it ranks somewhere between illegal graffiti (if done just "for fun") and fraud (if done with a commercial motive).
German law recognizes that in such situations most of the responsibility falls to the adult, regardless of who commits the actual act.
Of course there may be a problem with enforcement (i.e. you might not be able to fix it on the adult). But there is no reason why the juvenile should be punished for the incompetence of the prosecution.