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Comment: crappy employers require amex accounts (Score 2) 228

by drwho (#43565123) Attached to: Salesforce, a Pillow Maker and a $125k AmEx Bill

Back in 1998, I was pushed into applying for a corporate AmEx card by my employers, a consulting company of moderate repute. The idea was that I would use this for expenses related to travel. When I read the agreement in full, and understood that it was my responsibility, rather than my employers, to pay the bill I declined to apply. Shortly thereafter, I heard from other people in the company that it was expecting them to charge various IT related expenses to the card, and was taking a very long time (over four months) to pay. This was clearly a credit-kiting scheme cooked up by corporate finance to support the company's cash flow. When I told my boss that not only had I not applied for the Amex card, but that I had no credit cards (true: I tore them up about a year before), I was treated with disdain. A few weeks later, I was asked to resign under the pretense of some irregularities in my job application (which I had been forced to fill out after I had been accepted by the company and switch coasts). For a variety of reasons, not the least of which is an NDA, I can't reveal the name of the employer. I can say that they were swept up in one acquisition after another, and few people remember the name fifteen years later. But I still remember how much I came to distrust them, starting with an employer trying to force loans from its employees. Beware!

Comment: Make life easy (Score 1) 687

by drwho (#43229825) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: What Is a Reasonable Way To Deter Piracy?

Make it easy to buy (paypal, or similar), install, and use. Make a custom binary which fills in registration data, which comes on the title/bootup screen, saying "This software is licensed for the exclusive use of $customer, all rights reserved, copyright $year". Hide it in the binary (make it hard to find and edit with a hex editor/ decompiler), but don't spend too much time doing so. You have the right to be paid for your work, but being a dick in protecting those rights is just not worth the effort.

Comment: Re:very interesting (Score 0) 151

by drwho (#43144015) Attached to: Astronomers Discover Third-Closest Star System To Earth

This is happening, with the propellantless drive, the EMDrive, which looks impossible at first, because it seems to violate laws of inertia, but it actually is sound. It uses a very high efficiency (high Q) tuned microwave cavity. The caveat is, that it is only efficient when used at low speeds (to clarify: it is not the speed the drive is travelling at, but rather, using the eMdrive alone to attain such speeds), so it is useful as anti-gravity. Because of its high efficiency, it can provide us with flying cars and a freight train to orbit, but it's not useful for interplanetary or interstellar travel.

Etiquette is for those with no breeding; fashion for those with no taste.

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