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Comment Re:Contract: No! (Score 2) 353

Yes, any contractor who has any idea of what is at stake should incorpate as a Chapter S at least.

Ignoring the huge tax advantages that comes with a Chapter S, it is the most protection for the least amount of effort.

If you're doing it full time, or you make at least $20k/year in income from your contracting, it's crazy to do anything else - it more than pays for itself. That $500 tax prep bill is worth every penny I saved by claiming capital gains on distributions.

Comment Re:Contract: No! (Score 4, Interesting) 353

You are conflating two different yet semantically related things.

"Work For Hire" and "Works For Hire" (sometimes referred to as "Works Made For Hire".)

Work For Hire refers to the actual work done by an employee/contractor that has been designated as falling upon the IP rules of Works Made For Hire.

Works Made For Hire is part of the the IP doctrine of copyright law.

If you are a contractor, and you do not have the money nor legal team to fight off an IP assignation case, you must carefully and clearly stipulate who owns what IP REGARDLESS OF WORKS MADE FOR HIRE. It IS ambiguous, and a contract lawyer will tell you - do not leave it up to interpretation outside of your contract..

I had a contract just two years ago that ran into an issue where the client (and their a**hole lawyer) were getting confused because I was going to provide them a solution that was built off of some code of mine that I owned all of the IP for.

I clearly delineated that they would own the solution, but that they were only receiving a license to use my previous inventions (and here's the part they choked on for a while) and any necessary extensions to my product that were necessary in order to provide them with a solution.

Their lawyer spent weeks arguing that they needed to own the changes I made to my existing product. That didn't happen...

So, as anybody who has dealt with an unfriendly lawyer would tell you - don't ASSume anything. Don't assume they won't be jerks, that they're not idiots, that the court isn't stupid, that jurors aren't stupid, et cetera ad nausem. Make it clear in your contract, as in 'clear to a 4 year old', who owns what, when, and for how long.

Programming

Ask Slashdot: How To Own the Rights To Software Developed At Work? 353

New submitter ToneyTime writes: I'm a young developer building custom add-ins for my company's chosen SAAS platform as a full time staff member. The platform supports a developer community to share code and plug-ins with an option to sell the code. While I don't plan on having a breakthrough app, I am interested in sharing the solutions I create, hopefully with the potential of selling. All solutions are created and made by me for business needs, and I aim to keep any company's specific data out. I have a good relationship with management and can develop on my own personal instance of the platform, but would be doing so on company time. Going contractor is a bit premature for me at this stage. Any advice, references or stories to learn from?

Comment Re:"The Ego" (Score 2) 553

Be glad that you've never been in the corporate world at a level to watch the incompetent sychophants rise despite clear reasoning why they should be let go (much less 'not promoted.')

I've seen mid-level executives receive promotions for 'not being in the red' because for the three years they ran a division they re-org'd every year because the years you perform a re-org your numbers were given HUGE discrepancy allowances. One guy lost more than 10 million (on a budget of 7 million) a year for 3 years in a row and was promoted - through this trick.

Worse, I've known people who were CTOs of actual Silicon Valley tech companies (not huge ones, but worth a couple of hundred millions dollars) who DID NOT KNOW WHAT TCP/IP WAS OR WHAT A SOCKET WAS. Not CIOs, or CISO - CTO. It's okay though, he looked the part, and he said yes all the time.

Crazy man. Crazy.

Comment Re:This again? (Score 1) 480

They're measuring an anomalous force in an electromagnetic cavity. That's a measurement, a concrete fact. They're claiming that they'll be able to make a starship with it. That's beyond any credibility. It's totally delusional.

Jesus H you're dishonest. They HOPE to use it to propel objects from LEO to GEO. The reason that NASA is looking into this is in the HOPE that it bears fruit. NOBODY said they WILL be able to make a starship with it.

Some of the statements get rather ambitious, but they aren't statements of fact they're suggestions about what COULD be possible if this pans out.

Comment Re:This again? (Score 4, Insightful) 480

That's just silly. The people reporting this observable phenomenon do not claim to understand why this happens - in fact the point of the article is that we should strive to understand why this works.

Just because YOU don't understand why this works doesn't mean that they are claiming to be violating the conservation of momentum - especially since they are not. Most especially because there's a clear expenditure of input energy - a grossly inefficient (it would seem) one.

Comment Re:This again? (Score 1) 480

I see you like to comment on something without reading it.... try taking a look at the article... it says specifically that conservation of momentum is NOT violated...

Well, the article says it, so it must be true.

If you're not throwing anything out of the back of the rocket, you're violating conservation of momentum.

So... You're now arguing that you can violate the conservation of momentum. Interesting.

Comment Agile is great for customers who don't know... (Score 1) 208

...what they want.

If you're a company producing "division" size software and you don't know what you want - Agile isn't going to save you - it's going to obscure your problems.

IBM - stop hiring PROJECT managers as PRODUCT managers and get some domain experts for the software you wish to build and have them be your product managers. You might, just might, get a clue as to what your software should be doing.

Government

Woman Behind Pakistan's First Hackathon, Sabeen Mahmud, Shot Dead 494

An anonymous reader sends word that Sabeen Mahmud, a prominent Pakistani social and human rights activist, has been shot dead. The progressive activist and organizer who ran Pakistan's first-ever hackathon and led a human rights and a peace-focused nonprofit known as The Second Floor (T2F) was shot dead by unidentified gunmen in Karachi. Sabeen Mahmud was leaving the T2F offices with her mother some time after 9pm on Friday evening, reports the Pakistani newspaper Dawn. She was on her way home when she was shot, the paper reports. Her mother also sustained bullet wounds and is currently being treated at a hospital; she is said to be in critical condition.

Comment The things that scares the bejeesus out of me... (Score 1) 477

...is that people like this don't realize the implications of technology on his 'fantasy' of how things could be.

I don't want my autonomous car talking to ANYTHING that I don't control/manage/filter. I don't care what some unknown car reported, I don't trust that car. I'm no member of the tinfoil hat brigade, but I do work in software security and I assure you - IT IS INSANE to presume that ANY automaker is going to produce software that isn't trivially easy to pwn in the next decade. They all roll their own solutions (or have someone produce a custom solution) and using cryptography as an example - don't roll your own, even if you *really* know what you're doing, you're likely to regret it.

Software

Developers and the Fear of Apple 269

An anonymous reader writes: UI designer Eli Schiff has posted an article about the "climate of fear" surrounding Apple in the software development community. He points out how developers who express criticism in an informal setting often recant when their words are being recorded, and how even moderate public criticism is often prefaced by flattery and endorsements.

Beyond that, the industry has learned that they can't rely on Apple's walled garden to make a profit. The opaque app review process, the race to the bottom on pricing, and Apple's resistance to curation of the App Store are driving "independent app developers into larger organizations and venture-backed startups." Apple is also known to cut contact with developers if they release for Android first. The "climate of fear" even affects journalists, who face not only stonewalling from Apple after negative reporting, but also a brigade of Apple fans and even other journalists trying to paint them as anti-Apple.
Facebook

Man Claiming Half Ownership of Facebook Is Now a Fugitive 163

alphadogg writes Paul D. Ceglia, who was arrested in 2012 for defrauding Facebook on the claim that he owns half the company, is now a fugitive. Ceglia cut off his electronic monitoring bracelet some time around last Friday and left home in violation of the conditions of his bail, court papers said. Ceglia claimed in a 2010 lawsuit that he was entitled to half ownership of Facebook under a 2003 contract with Mark Zuckerberg, who had done programming work for Ceglia's StreetFax.com.

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