Posts by Rich Lock
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How does one befriend these custard people?
Oh, it's quite trifling, really.
Make suitable offerings of fruit, jelly, sponge cake, and whipped cream.
Add brandy to the jelly to taste. Garnish with sprinkles, walnut halves and grated chocolate.
Serve chilled, with more whipped cream.
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The UK press/government has apparently started muttering about using the Royal Navy to get stranded passengers home.
My mind is boggling at the thought of long lines of tourists snaking down the beaches in Northern France (lets say for the sake of argument in the region of, ohhhh I dunno, Dunkirk...), the roads behind them littered with the detrius of a hasty retreat: discarded Louis Vuitton luggage knock-offs, straw hats and bottles of odd foreign liqueurs, and clogged with hastily abandoned hire cars.
Still, on the bright side, no northern European country should have any problems meeting its Kyoto commitments this year.
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There must be a word (and if there isn't, there should be) for that peculiar lurch you get in your guts, and the associated unpleasant skin-creepy feeling, when you realise that you're fine, but a few seconds ago you were inches/milliseconds/one flip of the cards of fate from something really nasty.
The time you jumped from a 10-metre cliff into a rockpool, and realised there was a submerged boulder a foot away from where you landed....
The time the rear of the car gave an interesting little shimmy, and you crossed the centre line for a second, getting yourself back on the right side of the road seconds before a logging truck came round the corner the other way...
The time you were drilling a hole in the wall to put up a picture, and there was a bright blue flash and the drill bit was suddenly half the length it was when you started...
And so on.
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Why would you have to wait 6 months? Immigration reasons? It's not the routine stand-down.
I was under the impression there was a more or less routine stand-down period, but I am happy to be corrected.
My reason for posting the life insurance stuff was just to point out that people do pay reasonably large sums of money to insurance companies to cover their arses, for quite a wide range of circumstances. Within this context (that people do pay reasonably large sums of money for arse-covering), $1000 p/a for an employment insurance scheme that pays out a pretty generous percentage of your former wage in the event of redundancy doesn't seem toooo unreasonable to me, although obviously it's not ideal, either.
My insurance doesn't cover me for redundancy, or anything short-term, or anything except permanent incapacitation or death. It's not an EI scheme by any stretch of the imagination. I don't have an EI scheme.
Of course, it would better if we all paid the money as higher taxes into a central pot, so that in the event of anything untoward occurring, Nanny State can swoop to the rescue, right...? And I understand that in some countries (France, for example), that is actually the case. In France, the redundant worker gets (from the state) a payout that is quite a high percentage of his or her former wage, for quite a long time. I don't know what the relative tax burden is, though. A comparison of tax vs private contributions normalised for range of protection would be interesting to see.
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The maximum EI contribution paid by employees now is just over $730 per year.
So, that'll be almost $1000 a year out of my paycheque, then.
?
Also, for a bit of perspective, I pay around $1700-1800 p/a for a life insurance policy that pays out not only if I've taken on alternative employment as a daisy-pusher, but also if I'm incapacitated.
If I lost my job today, in NZ the alternatives to employment insurance are another job, or nothing at all until I beomce elegible for the dole in around (I think) six months time.
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I will also miss the Cocktail Corner, even though nearly every drink they made sounded revolting.
Maybe Matt will take it with him to the breakfast slot.
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Yep, that pretty much sums it up.
The aural equivalent of an office poster saying 'you don't have to be mad!!!!!! to work here, but it helps!!!!!'
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Don't you just love it when an industry says 'no' but the lawyers still want to shove something down your throats?
Don, I joined this conversation in good faith. My intention was no more than to offer up a few clarifications based on my knowledge and experience from inside the patent industry. I'm not particularly interested in shoving anything down anyone's throat.
But if you're going to be a dick about it, then I think that this is the point at which I bow out.
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Firstly, a wee air-clearing session.
It is entirely possible to be appalled at the bully-boy tactics applied in the ACTA negotiations, but also a the same time not think that patents/copyright/intellectual property are evil concepts and should be abolished.
It's not a black/white, zero/one, on/off, with/against proposition, 'k? I'm not (necessarily) your enemy.
Moving on:
You are the one arguing for a special case, not me.
I'm not arguing for or against anything. Merely stating facts.
All I have thus far stated is that:
1) you need a lot of money to effectively use the patent system to your advantage, whatever area of industry you work in, therefore...
2) It sucks if you don't have any.There is "nothing special" about law either but I don't see too many lawyers rushing to have patents apply to special defences.
You'll have to expand on this because I don't grasp the point you're making.
What you are using is a "lawyerly trick" to try and patent what should not be patentable.
The second time in a month I've been accused of using lawyerly tricks. Maybe I should change my style. If I told you these aren't the 'droids you're looking for, would you tell me to move along?
And again, I'm not 'trying to patent' anything. The number of software patents I've filed, ever, is zero. I don't expect this to change any time soon.
The law (which parliament is responsible for making or changing, and the courts are responsible for interpreting, not me) as it currently stands states that: " "invention" means any manner of new manufacture" [NZ patents act 1953, S2].
The courts have decided that patent claims relating to software are valid (if drafted in a certain fairly specific manner). That is, they are a 'manner of new manufacture'. The relevant NZ decision is 'Hughes aircraft' (full text here) from 1995, which closely followed an Australian case (1) from 1991.
'Software patents' have been around a while, longer than I've been in the game. If it's a 'lawyerly trick' to point this inconvenient fact out, then colour me guilty as charged, yeronner.
I'm not the one arguing that software should be 'in' the patent system. In NZ, it already is 'in' the patent system and has been since 1995. That, I'm afraid, puts you in the position of arguing for a change in the status quo - that it should be 'outside' the patent system. You're the one arguing for the special case, not me.
If you want to argue that all intellectual property is wrong, then fine, make the case and let's debate the merits.
If you want to argue that software is special because of the quick turnaround and time to obsolescence, then fine, make that case. There are precedents (e.g. in pharmaceuticals) for a non-standard patent lifespan based on special circumstances.
But let's be clear what we're arguing about.
At a more practical level, as a software developer I can code up 100s of supposedly patentable concepts in a day. This is not "hard invention" work.
There's nothing in the law as it stands stopping a large corporation filing thousands of patent applications for purely mechanical devices, which at the time of filing they know are junk and none of which will ever result in a valid patent.
With enough money, the system can be used as a blunt instrument by those that wish to wield it in that manner. Quantity has a quality all of it's own.
So why is software a special case?
Where are all the patent examiners going to come from?
A good question, but it's not unique to software.
I spend much of an average working day fighting with the US patent office. As the not entirely fair saying goes 'those that can, do. Those that can't, teach.' And in the US, those that can't do either become patent examiners and make other peoples lives miserable by acting deliberately obtuse and obstructive.
In Europe, I'll end up talking to someone who actually knows what they're doing, but it'll take me four, probably five years to get to the head of the queue for a first exchange of correspondence. Then every couple of years after that. It's not unheard of for European applications to reach the end of a 20-year lifespan and expire before they are granted.
A severe lack of patent examiners is nothing new.
[1] International Business Machines Corporation v Commissioner of Patents. 8 July 1991, 9 July 1991, 13 December 1991. 33 FCR 218. I can't find a copy online.
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All NZ IT companies are small in this context.
All NZ companies, barring one of two of the larger corporates, are small in this context.
There's nothing special about IT.