Doesn't that mean I would be downloading all of the image data and only using part of it?

No. Part of the http spec is the ability to download only a specific range of bytes in a file.

I live in St. Louis.

We have a growing tech scene. Some of my friends refer to St. Louis's tech as the "Silicon Ghetto" as it's not quite as expansive as SF. More businesses are moving and starting up here because of Arch Grants and one of the co-founders of Square has a startup accelerator here as well.

Granted, I don't work for a company in St. Louis. I actually work remotely for a company based out of San Fran.

I've always hated the notion of "We pay you some small amount to own you 24/7."

In my opinion, what I do outside of work hours is mine and mine alone. I always make sure I state that explicitly and modify any contract that tries to do otherwise.

It's definitely icky. I don't sign those things anymore, but then I don't get paid enough to. I do wonder how these negotiations go though for someone at Carmack's level. These contracts aren't compulsory... Carmack apparently understood that enough to work out an exclusion for Armadillo... and certainly there's a price at which I'd happily sign one of those agreements (though I can't imagine anyone paying it), so it's not clear to me yet which side of this I'd fall on, despite really despising those kinds of employment contracts.

I don't know anything specific about the details of any of Carmack's contracts; but certainly when signing them you have a lot more leverage to carve out exclusions when some other company actively wants to buy "you" and your company than you do later when it is clear to everyone that you're on the way out the door.

Armadillo was started way before ZeniMax acquired id (thus easy to foresee needing a documented exclusion), whereas Oculus VR wasn't even a thing until a few years after that was a done deal.

Right, the way I would read the Armadillo thing isn't as "Carmack knew he needed a documented exclusion clause to work on other stuff," but as "ZeniMax acquired id NOT Armadillo and that made a document setting the exclusion necessary.

Obviously, without seeing Carmack's contract, it's impossible to ascertain if he did agree that all work, in our out of the office, including ideas, belonged to ZeniMax.

And even then, the definition of work product could be argued in all kinds of ways. Is it only committed code, does it also include research and sketches. How does it extend to what is shared with others, etc.

Carmack has a good lawyer, I'm sure. Hopefully that lawyer also looked over his ZeniMax contract.

It goes without saying that you have more leverage before signing a contract than afterward, and the contract is obviously open ended... I was just pointing out that it's a risk of the unknown that would be weighed against compensation by both parties so it's not totally clear to me that Zeni is out of line yet.

I would assume Carmack did the usual programmer thing and just expected them to not be huge unreasonable assholes about future situations after his ZeniMax employment had ended.

This is a common mistake programmers make when dealing with lawyers and other corporate types who stand to gain money from being huge unreasonable assholes.

Could Carmack leave Oculus and have Oculus hire Armadillo as a contractor paid in a form of cash and equity/options?

I nearly turned down my current job because they were using a default contract that had clauses like that in it. It also said that they have control over everything on my computer, despite the fact that the laptop I bring in for work is my own personal laptop.

I ended up spending about an hour with their lawyer reviewing and amending the contract until those kinds of clauses were completely taken out. Lucky the lawyer was very amenable to the changes.

Always read the fine print, and don't sign anything if you're at all uncomfortable with it.

(IANAL etc)

I don't think "work hours" is really an applicable concept for someone in Carmack's position - he's not a 9-to-5 worker, his life and work are surely much more entangled.

It's hard to deny that Carmack's involvement in VR was linked to his position at id (Zenimax by extension) in a way that Armadillo for example was not; if nothing else, he did talk (show?) Rift versions of id properties. However, his image, popularity, visibility and even open promotion of Oculus are not really at issue here, at most they would have been grounds for disciplinary action from Zenimax at the time.

It's up to Zenimax to prove exactly what sort of tangible, protected IP and 'know-how' was transferred to Oculus. During 2012 he tweeted often about his research on lag, and I imagine his work was more extensive than what he publicly disclosed. If there's any link between that work and any properties of Zenimax, say a computer, email address, code or assets owned by Zenimax and used in any way to do VR-related work that Oculus took advantage of (even if it's not in use today), then there will be blood, pain and tears.

Carmack also tweeted and spoke often about Zenimax refusal to touch VR and support Occulus. He basically said Doom 3 BFG Edition VR support was done by him OFF the clock and he would have to buy HIMSELF from his own money all the copies that went with Occulus KS fulfilment.

Basically Zenimax didnt want to do anything with VR while he was there, but now those slimy lawyer cockroaches want piece of the action.

The NDA says that it's an agreement between Id, on behalf of Zenimax, and Luckey (Occulus)

Interesting that it phoned home

That's not how DMCA works. That's how some of the bigger copyright organizations (RIAA for example) want it to work.

Besides, what might be copyright infringement to one user might be legitimate usage to another. For example, you might have an illegal copy of an ebook in your folder, but I have the same copy, but mine was paid for. Should I lose access to mine? OReilly books don't have DRM, so it's possible it could happen.

The way I understand this, he did not lose access to the file, he just was not able to share it with someone else. Synchronisation within the account should not count as sharing, so I guess what happens is just when a new share link is being created, Dropbox is checking the checksum against a list of blocked ones and prevents you from sharing it. Which, tbh., is fair enough.

Again, that's not the structure of the law. The DMCA requires that a takedown notice specify the specific content. Both the data itself and the usage have to be identified, there's no notion in the law of forbidding access to specific "files" by their data alone.

Yes, Dropbox is working pre-emptively on their own initiative here.

The message is quite cleverly constructed, as it doesn't actually say that there is a DMCA takedown request against the file (because there isn't). It just says that there has been a takedown request sometime, possibly(probably) against some other file/url.

I realize that, but the parent comment I was replying to was suggesting that the access would be removed from everyone that had the same file, sharing or not. At least that's how I read it. I could be wrong.

However, as stated, the DMCA isn't currently meant to take down the file and keep it down forever. It's meant to kill links one at at time.

Bigger organizations want it to take a file down and keep it down forever, which is what's being kicked around now as being a possible reinterpretation of the DMCA, which is crazy.

To some people, that means "one who removes copy protections from software"

I believe it was just a user of Github and not an employee that did that nonsense.

This quote suggests more than one GitHub employee was in on it at the least:

'They purposefully allow this glaringly obvious mechanism for insulting and annoying their members and are actually involved in the joke. Until I broke their server they were all laughing at my "testing", then they were pissed when they had to fix the bug I found. If you don't believe me, look at the HackerNewsTips twitter account, which I know is astroturfed by a github employee.'

In one of the first few paragraphs, there's this block:

"The other piece of information you need to understand is that there's a sort of running hidden gag among the Ruby Iluminati (aka Rubynati) within San Francisco. Employees from Engine Yard, PowerSet, and ... github love this joke where they create code that generates ASCII art penis pictures and then force other people onto their project without permission. Here's another one called dicks by Martin Emde."

It's a shame that companies doing some useful things have to encourage a culture of brutish behavior.

I think it was just a user of Github and not an employee that did that nonsense

You could try an old trick that I used during my tech support days.

You can kill Windows explorer with task manager and then use the File/New Task option to restart explorer with a higher level user. You can then do whatever you need to as that user (e.g. control panel, delete files, add hardware, etc). When you're done, you can just repeat the process and start explorer again as the original users.

I haven't tested 100% in Windows 8 (killing and starting explorer as another user does work), but it should work in Windows 7 and below.

I used this any time right clicking an exe and selecting "run as" wasn't enough