It's a very big company, much, much bigger than "The ABC," and the Australian site called itself "ABC," not "The ABC." Without previous knowledge of "The ABC," it was a logical belief. The fact that the trade symbols were different made me double-check.

But by all means, continue calling me names until you're tired of it.

This one wasn't submitted for credit. :)

Xinhua is also a proper noun from outside my usual lexicon and is transliterated from a language I am unfamiliar with, so I am comfortable with getting it wrong once or twice in an informal context. I actually found "The ABC" more interesting, because it took me a little while to realize the site was The Australian Broadcasting Corporation rather than an Australian branch of the American company ABC.

In any event, please excuse the misspelling. But whether you do or not, I found the story interesting and wanted to share.

Kind Regards,

Etherwalk

No amount of education is going to cram an understanding of calculus into the head of someone who is incapable of learning calculus.

Calculus is trivial. Anyone within a standard deviation or two of median intelligence should be able to learn it if they have a teacher who understands it. The widespread lack of understanding is just a reflection of how badly we fail, as a society, to educate.

A dose of literature in the slashdot bits, every now and again, isn't a terrible thing.

Yes. He didn't say anything about whether he was working for hire or not, just that he had worked for different companies. That could either mean work for different companies on an IC basis or on an employee basis.

e is just the highest anyone can count, because if you start reciting it you will never get to 3.

One of them is a Cheshire child.

The average care on the road is *more* than ten years old. A lot of old cars still work perfectly well.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/ji...

That is the rule, hence "If you make a work *for-hire*" in my original post. There is a BIG distinction between making a work as a contractor and making one as an employee--and you don't need an employment contract to be working as an employee. Working for a company and not providing your own contract or being willing to take the time to provide one suggests employee, although there may be other facts supporting a finding that he made the work as an IC.

Just because a company goes bankrupt doesn't mean its IP is suddenly public domain--the creditors or another company (which either is the sucessor-in-interest or purchased them) will own the copyrights, including in the software you created as a work for-hire if you were employed by them.

If you open-sourced that software without permission, you put copyrighted work in the open source community without authorization. That means the creditors or other successor-in-interest to that failed startup can get an injunction against anyone using the software, for example. (They can also sue for copyright violation, although what they recover will depend on a variety of factors.)

If you want to open source software from a company you worked for that went bankrupt, you have to figure out who owns the software first, and get their permission. It may be a creditor, it may be an investor, it may be a new form of the company, it may be someone who bought the IP. If you make a work *for-hire*, then you don't own it just because you created it.

This is more or less completely not the way standardized testing works.

Standardized testing works by using current test questions and possible test questions for the future and mixing them together, scoring some and not scoring others, and relies on being able to re-use questions. That re-use is how you normalize the difficulty of exams. You agree not to discuss the questions.

The seriousness of discussing them goes up as the professionalism required goes up. Talking about Bar exam questions can be a *massive* deal. Talking about LSAT questions can be a big deal. Talking about SAT questions can be an issue that affects your college admissions prospects.

As a practical matter, a very small bit of discussion is normal, mostly just with people who took the test right after it. Good testing authorities only care if you cross the line--like describing a test question to an unfiltered audience or in an online forum or test prep book, for example. Posting a question to twitter is not okay. Posting comments that reveal something about the particular test is technically not okay, but you have to actually look at the circumstances and make a judgment call. (A lot depends on whether everyone has finished the particular test yet, for example.)

That being said, there is *also* a financial incentive for testing companies to go after people who are too egregious. Test companies license old tests and sell them as prep materials.

I disagree. Someone who has experience as an officer may have better knowledge and be more sensitive to anti-officer bias. They should not be able to spin the media toward anti-victim-bias, and the way their media people victimize victims of police shootings is criminal, but I have no problem with certain reasonable edits to an article that is going to attract a lot of people who have already prejudged the incident.

Put another way, everyone on one side of the issue edits the articles, so why shouldn't the people on the other side be able to?

Yes, DiSKiLLeR, why don't we take death more seriously?

That being said, if these are actually part of someone's job, they should really be making press releases or blog entries where relevant and letting the community update wikipedia; or they should be disclosing who they are when relevant. (E.g. trying to remove the Sean Bell shooting incident--plenty of stories become non-stories over time, but someone with an incentive to remove the story probably shouldn't be able to do so without disclosing their relationship to the subject matter.)