October 3, 2002
@ 04:58 PM
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Meeting Other MSFT Bloggers, Truth In Advertising Laws, and Thoughts On Researchers Ownership of Pat
Microsoft Bloggers

I hadn't already met Keith Ballinger but had been reading his blog. I gave him some light-hearted flak about the fact that his weblog randomly changes background colors when you visit and most of the colors are puke inspiring. He also didn't look anything like I expected. :)

I'd already met Doug Purdy through Joshua over Dim Sum. He's one of those people whose read many of my articles but didn't realize I was the person that wrote them. He liked the C#/Java Comparison and the Miguel Interview but seemed to disagree with my Myth of Open Source Security Revisited series. It was actually Doug I came to meet with since I've been thinking about doing an Extreme XML column on .NET XML Serialization but actually got sidetracked talking about XSD 1.1, ranting about [some of my] issues with XQuery and marvelling at some of the ideas they are considering for future versions of .NET XML Serialization.

So besides Joshua, Doug and Keith the other Microsoft folks with blogs I've met are Don and Tim. If we add email exchanges then the list expands to include John Lambert and Ziv Caspi.

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Truth in Advertising Legislation

I read a Reuters story that claimed that a study by US regulators showed that 40% of weight-loss advertisements contained at least one representation that was almost certainly false. What is interesting to me is that I'd have expected US regulators to be fining or similarly reprimanding companies that are lying in their adverisements instead of publishing survey results that show that ads shouldn't be trusted.

For some reason I'd always assumed that there was legislation preventing companies from just blatantly lying and a quick Google search seems to imply that there are Truth In Advertising laws so I wonder why all we get are "surveys" out of supposed regulators. Weird. Maybe people are supposed to complain before they take action? I know there are several ads I'd have reported for being full of BS if I knew which phone number to call and turn their lying carcasses in.

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Claiming Ownership to Patents Obtained on the Job

Slashdot recently ran a story about a researcher who tried to sue his employer for a patent he obtained on the job. This kind of behavbior stuns me. Did he fail to read his job description? The sole purpose of a researcher in a corporate environment is to create valuable intellectual property for his employer. These comments adequately sum up my feelings about the entire affair.

Let this be a lesson to you. There's a reason Todd McFarlane didn't come up with Spawn until after he left Marvel and formed his own company.

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Guest Authors

I just noticed my picture is on the front page of MSDN again even though I didn't write the article this time. It's weird because if you don't click the article link and read about the fact that Benjamin Guralnik is the guest author you'd assume that was a picture of him.

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