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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: October 8th, 2023

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  • Artyom@lemm.eetoMildly Infuriating@lemmy.worldHow my morning is going...
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    3 months ago
    1. They’ll give you a $1000 phone under the guarantee of a 2-year contract. That can be considered a type of loan and they can repo the phone if you stop paying.
    2. If you stop paying monthly bills, they can only really force you to pay the balance if they have your SSN and can affect your credit score.

    I’m not endorsing the practice of ruining people’s chances of buying a home over unpaid phone bills, but it’s a pretty good deal from AT&T’s perspective.









  • HDMI has a private company that owns the rights to it. They get to decide if you get to call yourself HDMI and they can sue you if you lie about it. They decide what new features HDMI implements. This is a proprietary standard. As a recent example, AMD wrote an open source driver for HDMI 2.1 that would allow 8k on any device using an AMD graphics card. The HDMI owners basically said “no, you can’t distribute this, shut the project down and write something proprietary.” This doesn’t help the consumer at all, and although they didn’t explicitly say it, HDMI probably made that decision because studios pay a lot of money to make it hard to pirate over HDMI.

    DisplayPort is an open standard. If you were to write the same AMD 8k driver for DisplayPort, they would say “great, we can’t stop you from using this anyways, so share as much as you like.” Open standards are better for consumers because they can improve more easily.




  • An idea isn’t a product to protect, you don’t have to declare an idea that hasn’t been made yet. When you get your new job, if you explore this idea on company time, they get rights. If you want to keep the rights, you’ll need to explore the idea outside of company time. If and only if this idea already exists in some form of product AND you plan on using it at work, you’ll need to declare it to your new employer, I’ve seen forms for that attached to letters of offer, if you don’t see it there, ask. The company can refuse for that item though, meaning that if you continue developing that product during work hours, they have some rights to it. IANAL.