Login Code of Conduct Found Not Binding

SurturZ writes "The Industrial Relations Commission of New South Wales, Australia, has ordered a company to reinstate an employee who downloaded porn onto a work laptop, even though it was in contravention of his workplace's code of conduct. From the article: the IRC said there was an 'air of automatically' about the annual signing off of employees on NCR's code of conduct, 'a degree of mechanical, unthinking routine in employees making a commitment to abide by the code.'" So, I think most of us can agree, porn at work == bad, but recognition that Click EULAs/other agreements are not binding is probably good. The question is — what replaces them?

I Scoff at the TOS/EULA

[eldavojohn]

I've violate TOS & EULAs like Michael Jackson at a daycare center.

I'm not too worried about the click through TOS/EULA being used against me in a court of law. For you see, I was installing Warcraft and then the phone rang and I got up to answer it. Meanwhile my cat walked across the keyboard that was unattended and when I came back, the game was ready to play.

What's that? You have multiple screens that prompt me everytime a new patch comes out? Well, I guess I should remind you that my keyboard is laced with catnip & I have many cats which are very active animals.

Either way, I certainly never read or understood the TOS/EULA so how could I violate it?

whoa. slow down there ....

[nblender]

Porn at work == bad? Will the erosion of job satisfaction never end? What next? No more booze in the server room?

Re:whoa. slow down there ....

[k33l0r]

where do they propose we keep the booze?

With the heat production of modern CPUs it's possible to use them to run the stills. Say hello to moonshine! Trust me, I've done this sort of thing before. Go ahead and look into the case of any server in any respectable server room and you'll see what I'm on about. I even believe that Intel once filed for a patent on this particular cooling technique.

Re:I Scoff at the TOS/EULA

[eldavojohn]

If your cat plays your character is that unattended macroing?

Well, now that you mention it, my character did unexpectedly have his tier two helm when I returned from a night shift. When I got on vent to ask how it happened, my guild was calling me a "pussy" a lot more than usual.

That would also explain the bags under Boots' eyes and his extreme irritability during the day.

Re:Signed contracts

[RingDev]

"Are there other computer programmers out there who don't have internet access at work?"

Due to an incompotent network supervisor's actions, we inadvertantly lost 90% of internet access. He basicly put the entire organization behind the filtering tools most limited filter. One of the sites cut off was Google...

Complete work shutdown. Us developers complained, nothing happened. 20 minutes later the Officers from the company started walking in wonder why they couldn't get out. It wasn't until the 3rd officer came in that he finally got spurred into action. It turns out that the denied message included words like "control" and "disallowed". Nothing like a balding man in a thousand dollar suit shouting obscenities to motivate the incompotent.

The solution was great though. The moron shut down the entire web access filter and logging system. One of my buddies over on the network side of the house was in the process of testing the filter when it was taken down. It was one of those 'oh crap' moments when Penthouse.com actually came up!

-Rick