Comment Re:Democracy at work (Score 1) 155
Technically, those unions are generally corporations.
Technically, those unions are generally corporations.
They probably wanted to play with it, didn't want to wait for their order of the new dev kit to show up, and needed some BS excuse to justify a clearly ridiculous purchase (Worlds Chat, anyone?). They are a public company, after all...
That is classic Slashdot. Oversimplification and grand declarations regarding the behavior of others at the helm of businesses.
How about this: Social interactions, personal conflicts, and politics are all part of business (and, really, any team environment), and you'd better be ready for it or be ready to get out.
It is completely unrealistic to expect business to somehow be an antiseptic environment, like some ideal altar of pure motivation. When people hide behind claims of protecting shareholder interest, it's the same shit.
It's still a group of people, behaving like, shocker, people...
I came here to say this.
I'm quite the fan of Qt, but it's far from an industry standard. HTML5 + wrapper probably has as much, if not more, adoption.
And, once you use iOS or Android to dev GUI, some modern, convenient, and well-crafted patterns begin to emerge. They're not perfect, but they're nice to use. Honestly, if Google wants to use their own toolkit and publish it as open source, why should anyone complain about that? Some very interesting ideas may come out of it and be brought into other projects. Just as Mozilla's XUL was clearly aped for Microsoft's XAML, open source contributes to the field as a whole, not just one particular project. There's no need to lick the pizza with open source.
Only the ever-trolling slashdot community could turn Google releasing and dog-fooding an open source project into a bad thing.
I've been on base to get a tour of the Solar Impulse plane.
I filled out a half-page form and brought it with me.
There are a number of smaller operators that operate out of Moffett. Of course Lockheed Martin has some operations there (They're a couple blocks away), too, but don't make it out to be some grand government conspiracy. A place in desperate need of money and planes, with spare space for planes, found a private party that was:
A) Willing to give them lots of money.
B) Wanted to park planes.
Now and then, they make them available for experiments (i.e. joy rides).
And despite the billboard advertising it, there's no way that I'd eat at the commissary.
A number of public and private entities use the field. H211 (and others) typically do two things:
1. They pay fees to NASA for the storage and operation of their aircraft at this airfield.
2. They agree to allow NASA to install equipment in these aircraft and afford NASA the use of these aircraft for experiments.
In exchange for this, they get cheap fuel, but not below NASA's cost. Sure, they're not paying the normal taxes on this fuel because federal regulations prohibit the taxation of fuel sold from government owned airfields, and federal regulations allow for private operations to use NASA facilities under contract with NASA.
NASA has hangars, fuel storage/delivery facilities, a short supply of aircraft for research, and no money. Private entities have aircraft, no place to park them near their bases of operation, and money.
Would it piss you off if frequent government contractor Lockheed Martin operated private aircraft out of Moffett? Oh! Wait! They do! Would you be pissed if the highly publicized and technologically interesting solar plane venture Solar Impulse parked their plane in one of the hangars and threw parties around it while in the Bay Area? Oh! Wait! They did!
People need to chill out about this. This is no big deal. Either change the laws creating this condition or kick private entities out of Moffett, an idiotic action that would likely result in the financial collapse of an already under-funded operation of NASA.
But, yes, I'm willing to grant your first statement... you are simple minded.
If that is the case (I haven't read the trial transcripts, just short trial summary reporting), then, yeah, that would be pretty effed.
Even if the code differs, if it can be shown (or suggested) that the code is a derivative construction, it would still be subject to copyright. Anyway, it's still a strange place to end up determining the case. Unless it's in East Texas, one would typically expect instructions to the jury to be sufficient to sway their directions (e.g. Lucy Koh in Apple v. Samsung).
First off, the plaintiff brought in an expert who *did* make an assertion of source-code similarity. As programmers, we do this all the time. (Raymond Chen calls this "psychic debugging")
Secondly, without an understanding of how to identify underlying coding patterns from exhibited high level traits, how can the jury be expected to make a reasonable determination of code copying from a visual analysis of the *compiled* product? It's an on-the-face absurd assertion.
It is still surprising to me that decompilation didn't surface as an option when the source code was not produced, but sitting back and cruising to a jury verdict only to leverage a *really* rare motion to take a verdict notwithstanding judgment is bad news. This is *not* how we want to have our cases conducted. We want judges to have the latitude to correct for off-the-wall juries, but, in this case, this effectively signals that expert, aggregate, and indirect evidence is insufficient for jury determination of infringement, suggesting that respondents should just clean up their tracks after they've illegally copied code.
No. This is the original judge overturning a jury determination. It is a legal determination, but he's not ruling on the law. I'm pretty sure there isn't any case law requiring side-by-side game demos in order to make a determination of infringement/contract-breach in the presence of analysis-based expert testimony for one party and thumb-up-ass rebuttal from the other.
This is blazing new (and stupid) ground.
I disagree on this one.
Let's take a car analogy.
If I bring suit because you hit my car and drove off, then bring a witness who says you hit my car and drove off, and you do jack+shit in the case only to claim in a post-verdict motion that I didn't provide photographs of my car in support of my case, you will get laughed out of court.
Unless you're EA. The judge may have thought that the judgement was high, but a jury found that the preponderance of the evidence supported the plaintiff's claim. Remember, that burden is a greater than 50% chance that the plaintiff's claim is true. Sure, showing the games might help show that, but an expert witness who has made a deep inspection of the games in question can determine if the underlying mechanics of scoring, play selection, and player rating are derivative, without getting bamboozled by 16-bit graphics.
In this case, the staggering move is the absolute lack of source code. Sheesh, people. Just subpoena the source. Oh, it's not available? How about expert analysis determining the algorithmic similarity? Oh, surprise, here we are.
We need more judges who want to learn to code. The rest should sit the fuck back and stop screwing things up.
Wait, did I interview and bounce you?
I mean, sheesh. Just give me a bad yelp review. AC on a stale
Worse if I gave you a thumbs up...
More than that, in most companies I've been with, if you are unable to answer the "what are your weaknesses" or "what is your largest professional mistake" question, you're out. Even if the rest of the loop didn't catch on to what a self-satisfied dope you are, your failure to answer that question is enough to let us know that:
- You have an ego problem, or
- You don't have a solid memory for (and learn from) failures, or
- You have no real experience, or
- You are an absolutely impossible rock star who doesn't know how to fail or have deficiencies.
We take the relatively safe bet that the last one is a really small proportion. (i.e. zero people) of the population.
How would you know unless... You saw it?
Minds. Blown.
This is a fundamentally flawed idea, that the moral choices of religious organizations should outweigh the rights of the *employees* of those organizations. So... No life insurance beneficiaries for gay partners? What about interracial ones? What about the medical privacy of janitors? Do those janitors need to look for as new job if they undergo a religious shift?
Individual rights must stand above organizational whims if you don't want to have what amounts to institutional slavery and private micro-governments. The church is not being made to violate their morals. The church is being compelled to comply with employment law and individuals are making private medical decisions.
Would we allow a Christian Science organization to skip out in FICA contributions for employees because they don't believe in medicine and, thus, don't believe in social security (or at least, socialized medicine)? No. That would be completely fucking absurd.
This is, too. Your employees are not your moral chew toys. They are individuals compensated for work. They are not property.
Wait... This leader is killing the economy by using a wedge or block to prevent movement? Chocking?
Oh, I see. It makes more sense if you say it while being a complete idiot.
Life is a healthy respect for mother nature laced with greed.