1. There is plenty of room within 'the' law (I'm assuming you are US-based, given your disregard of the existence of other rules of law in the world) to do the things I'm suggesting.
2. The 'reality' is something we can change. If we rationally ascertain that we are currently doing things the wrong way, we can start taking actions to fix that. Even if (1) was not true, it would be an interesting discussion to find out how to make it true, especially here on Slashdot.
3. You are creating ridiculous straw men. The OP was asking for advice. He was never claiming he deserved the ownership to the things he currently creates. He wants that ownership but doesn't see a way to get it.
4. Your discussion skills are terrible.

Why are you asking questions I've answered in this specific thread?
Just click on the link that says 'Parent' a few times and read. It's that simple.

Is a script, written by a devver, to enumerate a bunch of files in a directory 'part of the construction'?
The answer is that it is impossible to tell without knowing what the devver was supposed to build. Some people here argue that it is code, that the developer is 'paid for writing code' and thus that he does not own that script. His employer does.

I argue that the devver has created a tool enabling him to better do his job. A tool which the employer was not expecting the devver to deliver and where the lack of existence of that tool would not change the relation between employer and devver at all. The construction worker gets paid, smurfhammer or no smurfhammer, as long as he does his job properly (although one could say that the employer has reason to question the amount of time he spends on investigating the effect of attaching smurfs to various implements). The same holds for devvers that do not develop great tools or libraries in the process of meeting the requirements of their jobs.

No, it is not. It is besides the point, because nobody is disputing that the things you do in your spare time should be yours. There is no discussion and nothing interesting there. The (/my) point is that people can create things during their workday which should principally not belong to their employer. A secondary point is that allowing employees to retain some ownership of things they create creates a more constructive environment, which actually benefits their employers.

Let me reiterate the importance of being able to reuse your own code. A lot of constructs in software development are reusable and the same coder will favor certain constructs. Imagine switching jobs or projects and going into a similar job or project. Having handed over the ownership of everything you've written in that previous job or project means you are technically obliged to obtain a license to reuse any part of the code that you have written previously. I think that is absolutely retarded.

That is ridiculous, an appeal to fear and completely unfounded.

The point is that they shouldn't. Try thinking outside your box.

Don't be so obtuse. It is very clear that the poster is looking for 'a way out'.

He knows damn well that his current situation will not allow selling the developed goods. The question is how he can find a way between his current situation and going full blown independent.

Following your own (again: obtuse) line of reasoning, you should have said: "well, make sure you strike up a new agreement with management that allows you to keep ownership on parts of your code."

That would have been helpful. It would have also been nice if you'd have come up with a proper reply to my hypothetical situation (which is still in the domain of 'entirely work for hire').

You are misrepresenting the situation and are defending straw men.

The entire point is that the construction worker invented the hammer during his workday and that the hammer helps him in his job. As software developers might (and regularly) similarly do during their workday. Forget about spare time. It is besides the point.

It's a terrible and uninformed simplification that software developers are paid for 'writing code'. It's not as if any code will do. Developers are hired to make sure certain requirements are met within the project. That is what they are paid for, not to be a source of software development ideas in general.

People may disagree with this line of thinking, but I know I'm never going to sell everything in my mind for 8+ hours a day and consequently fear reusing my own code again.

No, it is not.

What about this situation: You're a construction worker and at some point during your workday, you find a smurf and attach it to the hammer you were using to do some hammering. The smurfhammer proves to work ten times better than the smurfless hammer -- a great invention!

According to your reasoning, the company the construction worker works for now owns the smurfhammer (2000). What's worse, all employees are discouraged from ever thinking up and using smurf-augmented tools on the job. If they do, they'll have to surrender their inventions and the IP. So the company actually suffers from workers afraid of being (smurfwielding) geniuses on the job. They save their genius for when they don't need to hand over the fruits of it.

Now, most construction workers don't often make such advances during their work (there is a clear lack of smurfs on most construction sites), but in software development, there are many many instances of creating domain-independent tools to achieve the domain-specific needs of the employer. Both parties benefit from the freedom of the developer to put as much of his/her skills to work as possible.

I've personally entered a number of contracts in which there was an explicit separation between the domain-independent and domain-specific elements. The thinking is that the stuff that I created specifically for the other party was the result of a collaborative design process with that other party and that it was what I was hired to do. The other party owns it, but I have the (lifelong) right to reuse the code in other projects, as long as those projects do not compete with the core business of the other party.
On the other end, the other party received a lifelong, transferable right on the domain-independent stuff I wrote (but I retained ownership), as if they'd pulled an open source library off of the net.

Effectively, you agree on dividing your work between a general purpose library and domain-specific code. I believe and find it works quite well and is an honest reflection of the merits and efforts of all parties involved.

Yes, they added that functionality after I'd made the switch. In the end, I'm happy the crashes made me switch. My new strategy has really taken away a lot of mental load. It's undoubtedly personal, but all those open tabs staring me in the face and constantly either asking my attention or asking that I ignore them in my visual field was simply stressful.

You're doing it wrong. You are abusing the concept of multiple tabs as a history and/or bookmarks bar and/or todo-list.

If you're really interested in keeping some pages around for a longer time than a couple of hours, just bookmark the fuckers. Or copy-paste the link onto your todo-list. Keeping a shitload of tabs open is a terrible way of maintaining a 'to read' or 'to process' list. I used to do exactly that, but stopped doing it when I lost my set of opened tabs one time too many due to some crash (and spending ten minutes finding and reopening the tabs from the history - yes, that is retarded). Remember, the only information you need is the URL. One line. Yet you spend 80MB, valuable screen estate and tab switching space, just to be reminded of that one simple string.

For things you visit daily or regularly: Speed dial extension

For branching information searches: Use one source Google tab, middle mouse click the stuff you need for the task at hand. Look at all the opened tabs and close the useless ones. If the query needs to be tweaked, repeat process. If the task is finished: clean up after yourself.

Things you want to look at in the coming days: URL on your todo-list. They're clickable in pretty much everything around nowadays anyway. Also: ALT+D, CTRL+C, ALT+Tab, CTRL+V, ALT+Tab. The advantage of using this approach versus bookmarking is that you have to actually plan to look at whatever it is and learn really fast to just get it over with or decide that it isn't interesting enough to spend time on anyway. This instead of creating yet another pile of shit (bookmarks) you're gonna plow through at some point in time (which is: never).

Things you need first thing tomorrow or actually go back to regularly during the day: Fine, leave those open.

Thanks for getting my point and not being a 'King Solomon'-waving or 'think of the child support!' dipshit, like most of the others here.

This is not a "women's body"-issue (as actual pregnancies may be construed as), but one of multiple sane adults enabling a postponed decision. Gender is irrelevant here, the subject is irrelevant and philosophically speaking, the number of parents is irrelevant as well.

The pre-embryos are not alive yet and the situation is thus equivalent to owning pretty much any inanimate objects with multiple people. The only slightly complicating matters are that the objects are very rare and irreplaceable, yet non-liquidatable. They could be inherited frozen T-Rex eggs: the problem (and answers) would remain the same.

Each 'contributor' owns 50%. No decision regarding the subject pre-embryo may be be made without a majority.
Case closed.

I would mod you up, but this is too interesting to pass up.

What I always wonder about is what the exact limitations are that the holographic principles imposes on a volume. Our intuition tells us that a volume can contain all possible configurations of 'particles', but apparently (given the holographic principle) it can't. Some configurations are just not possible or undetectably equivalent to others, leading to the lower information content in a volume (if I understand the principle correctly).

Now I can easily come up with some layman stabs at configurations which I'd deem physically unreachable, but I'm fairly convinced that it's a bit more complex than that.

Yeah, I don't have a uterus, so I don't believe that 50% of the population have a risk of getting cervical cancer.
Asshole statisticians, lying bastards trying to scare me for no reason.

Start drinking decaf.
No crashes, no 'needing a cup of coffee' (you don't, it's addict bullshit), no dehydration yet still be able to regularly enjoy warm tasteful beverages (more often even, as you also lose the 'I already.had x cups today' and 'I need to sleep in an hour' crap).

I switched a year ago and have not looked back. The only time I think about the effects of caffeine on me is when I feel supershitty and tired and remember that I had a cup of regular coffee two hours before that.

This is missing the point.

Parents do not generally compete with their own children. They do compete with the children of other parents. Getting a proper job when you're 55, unemployed and lack special skills is hard if there are droves of young people willing and able to work harder and for less pay (let alone with far superior intellectual capabilities!). I'm not trying to stretch the analogy, but I am saying that it is broken.

Humans will have to compete with cybernetic or artificial life forms and will become obsolete as a species. Competing for resources is not a problem if you are say 85 and do not really have to compete anymore (due to having amassed enough assets to be able to live out your life). If you are not in a comparable situation however and still need to gather resources to sustain yourself, you're fucked. Think about this: Apart from zoos, circuses and research facilities, we aren't exactly handing out jobs to chimps (mind you, if it would work, we would) and save for honoring the traditional social constructs of human rights, there is no reason for highly advanced artificial life forms to (ultimately) do otherwise with humans.

The 'good' news is that a variant of this will become a must-solve problem well before artificial life becomes relevant. There are already many individuals who are not able to compete in current society and that amount will only increase. The question for society 'what to do with them' is pretty much the same question advanced artificial life will have to answer for humans in general.