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Comment Re:What? No Due Process? (Score 2, Interesting) 301

I agree with you that this sort of publication of charges instead of convictions sucks.

However, your characterization of drunk drivers is just wrong. They ARE incredibly dangerous. They ARE reckless, and while they may not intentionally be seeking out people to mow down, they are showing a tremendous disregard for those same people.

Buying Chocolate when you wanted Strawberry is a bad decision. Getting behind the wheel while drunk shows a fundamental contempt for human life.

Attempting to trivialize it in the way you have is honestly quite disturbing.

Comment Re:*First post.. (Score 1) 590

Royalties for a text-book, yes. However writing a text book is not an expected part of a university professors job.

Creating lesson plans, however, is a very different animal. It's an expected and required part of your job. We (the taxpayers) pay teachers to create these plans. For a teacher to claim ownership of these plans doesn't make a lick of sense to me. Just because you 'do it at home' doesn't change it. If I write software for a company at home, I'm still being paid for that work and have no right to claim it as my own. There is no difference here.

Comment Re:The System (Score 1) 863

How does this generate extra revenue for the city over the traditional system? The real problem these systems solve (and they are very widespread) is making it easier to support credit cards for payment. That's a huge convenience for most folks who don't generally carry change. I get that cynicism is ultra-cool these days, but it's hardly warranted in this case. This is an attempt to alleviate a real problem for folks (like me) who rarely have change. I've used the system in Portland, Denver, and several other cities both here and abroad and I see no issues with it.
 

Comment Re:Are there more than 20 apps for it? (Score 1) 384

Simply not true. Nokia S60 has a veritable ton of apps available. Palm has roughly a billion.

It's not quantity, it's quality of experience. Neither Nokia nor Palm have really made the process of locating and buying apps very easy. The iPhone has.

Google has built a promising system for Android, and as they get more phones to market you'll see more and more applications built for it. I think this battle is going to be fought on balancing 'open' versus 'reliable'. Is apple right? Can developers not be trusted to build high quality applications if the phone is largely open?

Time will tell.

Idle

Woman Hires Stripper to Impersonate Her At Reunion 16

Andrea Wachner, like many other people, was dreading her high school reunion, so she decided to have some fun and hire a stripper to impersonate her. Wachner, a freelance comedy writer, made a documentary about it called, "I Remember Andrea." Some of her classmates didn't think the prank/film was funny, and when she posted clips on YouTube from her 40-minute documentary, there was an outcry from '95 alums. "There's definitely a contingency of people who hate me because of this," she said, adding, "I can't think of one thing you could do there where you weren't competing against hundreds of other kids. I didn't really relate to a lot of what the others accepted as the norm, and I was OK with that — it just didn't make it great. Most of the girls I knew had eating disorders. A huge percentage. I'm not scarred by it. It wasn't torture. It was not a miserable experience. But I think high school in and of itself is kind of awful."

Comment Re:Um (Score 4, Insightful) 334

The point is you don't have to do even that. The routine would look something like:

- User initiates action with the floppy drive
- Run the auto-detection routine to see what answer you get
- Spin up the drive and check to see if something is in the drive
- Compare that with the pre-spun result to see what answer you get.

Something along those lines. There are several variations on this that would work and never require you to interact with the user at all.

Comment Re:Ask for Revenue Sharing and Shares (Score 2, Informative) 315

Taxes is EXTREMELY important here. Those shares are going to be taxed as income, even though they have no cash value (they will be taxed at the current valuation of the company at the time of the award). This can be a very significant amount of cash..

You should be looking for options, which allow you to defer much of that tax burden till at least they are liquid (but be careful how the contract is worded in terms of vesting and term of availability.

Comment Re:Destined to the "ungratifying"? (Score 1) 358

It's always interesting when I consider the number of hard-core Republicans I know that happily take government welfare. Rural areas are FILLED with people who don't want to work (they're "contractors"), yet live on 5 acres and have 11 horses (real example). They need food stamps to get by. They depend on government medical coverage for their children.

Yet come election time they are red as red can be.

Software

Losing My Software Rights? 440

vintagepc writes "Having written a piece of software as part of my research employment, I now face (and will later face again, with other software I've developed), the issue of intellectual property rights. The legal department stated that if I was paid by the University to produce the software, the University would own all rights to it. This is supposedly black and white, not a gray area. However, I was hired as a research student, not directly by the University, and also via a research award (NSERC). Furthermore, it turns out that faculty members here, in fact, retain their intellectual rights to any software they write. At this point, I can still back out, since I have not explicitly agreed to the conditions, but this decision must be made soon. So, I turn to the Slashdot community to ask: Are they allowed to completely strip my rights to the software? If anyone has had any similar experiences, then what was the outcome? Additionally, is this a normal action, or do I have some maneuvering room?"

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