Author: RagManX

Stick to your beliefs, get fired. Woohoo!

I’m not talking about fringe religions, or sexual practices, or anything potentially odd to some.  In this case, Inga Chernyak was fired from her job as a legal clerk at an intellectual property law firm in midtown New York because she gave an interview in which she took a view of DRM which differed from her employer’s.  She was assured of her right to hold her view, and then fired for them.  Thankfully, she held her view of DRM problems to be more important than her job.

As an active member of FreeCulture.org, and the president of the NYU chapter, I feel both obligated and prepared to stand behind the organization’s stance on where copyright is headed, and where it should be. I can not, in good conscience, renounce my beliefs in the hopes of gaining a rung on the corporate ladder. Still, I would like to say a few words in my own defense.

[tags]DRM, Legal, Intellectual Property[/tags]

Pot, meet kettle – gaming style

Electronic Arts calls Ubisoft out for their use of non-compete clauses in employment contracts.  Hearing EA call another gaming company to task for their hiring practices and treatment of programmers is hard to swallow, given EA’s past problems with employee relations.  And a link to the PDF of the actual letter.

[tags]EA, Electronic Arts, Ubisoft, Non-Compete[/tags]

The science President

Can’t really say it better than this, by Chris Mooney.

A while back I blogged about an idea floated by Morton Kondracke: That George W. Bush should try to become the “science” president by emphasizing, in his State of the Union speech, themes of global scientific competitiveness and the need to ensure that the good old USA is leading the pack. Well, it now seems official: According to the Boston Globe, in his speech tonight Bush plans to highlight Norman Augustine, a former Lockheed Martin CEO who “last year led a congressionally mandated National Academies team that issued a report warning that America is ‘on a losing path’ in the global marketplace.”

EFF sues AT&T for assisting NSA with President Bush’s illegal wiretaps

Full link.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed a class-action lawsuit against AT&T on January 31, 2006, accusing the telecom giant of violating the law and the privacy of its customers by collaborating with the National Security Agency (NSA) in its massive and illegal program to wiretap and data-mine Americans’ communications.

[tags]EFF, Wiretaps, NSA, Bush[/tags]

Smart fridge magnets make poetry

From Engadget. Here is a set of refridgerator magnets made up of a 16 character LCD display. The magnets can recognize what other parts of speech are nearby and adjust themselves to make poetry without user interaction. And if you don’t like what comes up, you can shake a magnet to change its word.

As you compose a poem, placing words in grammatical order, the magnets communicate with each other to learn the grammar rules you are using.

Once they are ‘trained’, the magnets can change the words they are displaying to substitute words that don’t fit the established grammar rules, like an autocorrect function.

[tags]Poetry, magnets, Cool[/tags]