Nasty employment conditions probably aren't technically legal. It's just that nobody has challenged them. Remember those companies that forced users to give up their Facebook passwords, etc.? They claimed the same. Until someone challenged them.

A work contract is an agreement of two people. It has to be a "meeting of minds" (i.e. you both come to agree) and it has to be reasonable (a two-way street). You can include anything you like, you can even sign it, it can sign you have to give them your first-born, it doesn't necessarily mean it's legal, enforceable or binding. (There's a long history of legal cases that establish that standard boilerplate contract terms are binding, for instance, but stuff related to 24/7 GPS tracking etc.? That's something that needs to be questioned as to its utility and reasonableness).

Uninstalling the app from the work phone may be against the IT policies, however, but they are much simpler alternatives. Just leave the phone somewhere or turn it off when you're not using it.

Implicit in law is the right to a private family life. While you're on-call, you're pseudo-working, pseudo-private. IANAL, but I could probably argue that they don't need to track you even while on-call unless something happens that requires you to come in - and then it's just a matter of phoning and asking where you are. I could certainly argue that they have no reason for me to even have the phone on when I'm not on-call, and certainly not with any kind of tracking.

But this all boils down to one thing - you're working for a scumbag company that doesn't care about your private life. Find another job if that bothers you. Amazingly, for some people, it DOESN'T bother them. Those people scare me. I mean, honestly... come on.

That's a coward's solution, however. And, technically, you lied to your employer about your availability while on-call. That'll get you into more trouble than anything, even if the reasoning behind that was sensible.

The real solution is you answer the phone, say "Okay, is it in my contract to work on-call, and is that a reasonable contract? Yes? Where? You're saying I'm REQUIRED to turn up now? Sorry, I don't think I am. We'll discuss it 9am tomorrow with my lawyer in tow, no?"

I do not have an "on-call" contract. However, there's a line about "other reasonable requests given by Boss X". The definition of reasonable isn't there, but reasonable is a two-way street. The servers just exploded, the business is dying, and I'm the only guy with the password? Yes. I'll help. Your printer has jammed at 3am? No. I won't, Wait until I'm in tomorrow.

The first time my phone number is abused like that, that's game over. I will remove your right to call the number, in writing, and add you to my blocklists.

I am under no obligation to give you that number, but I do so out of reasonableness if there's a problem. I am under ABSOLUTELY no obligation to answer that phone. But I may do so for similar reasons. I am certainly not required to DO anything about any phone call beyond the limits of my courtesy unless it specifically says so in writing.

At that point, however, you will provide me with a work phone as I'm not sustaining a personal phone just to be used for work all the time. And at that point, the work phone's availability will mirror my own.

Lying to an employer to try to be clever to get out of this stuff helps no-one. You can get into trouble. The employer gets a reason to sack you (not because you refused, but because you lied about it). And everyone knows what's really happening and you being "smart" doesn't help.

Just tell them - no. That's my limit, sorry. Renegotiate my contract? Sure. How many hours will I be officially on-call? Okay, I would need a salary of X to reflect that, and the tools to do so. Don't like that, so you're going to sack me? Unfair dismissal.

The amount of employment law in your favour these days is unbelievable, there's no need to bullshit.

And thus my problem with this entire concept:

That's a lot of pissing about just to hold some old family photos and some broken HTML code on the Internet for a while.

Stop pissing about. The desire for you to be remembered for ever only resides with you, maybe your children, and - possibly - your grandchildren. Past that, nobody gives a shit at all. You could be the biggest celebrity in the world and nobody would care by the time it's your grandchild's time.

Name a grandchild of a famous dead person. Pretty much they have their own lives and don't want to live in their shadow all the time, or they go bankrupt trying.

Give it up. Print stuff off into a book or archive. Self-publish it and put a few copies around the family. Then forget about it and move on with your lives.

Have signed such a contract too. Think my employer was quite surprised that I spotted their IP clauses and was happy to do the same - they merely CLARIFY that anything not to do with the business or on business time is not their properly, to save legal hassle later on if it should become an issue.

But, as you can see from the wording there, the implication is that that was true already, but just not clear that it DID NOT apply to my own stuff.

Completely agree. When you're being paid, you don't get to take products you've made home without permission, and certainly not to re-sell.

Most drives sold in the world today don't have power loss protection either.

If it matters to you, you put that stuff in the controller, not the drive.

Say you bought the 1Tb version (which is big for an SSD).

In this case, you rewrite it six times a year. That's 6Tb of write. That's...well... pathetic compared to the write expectancy of an SSD anyway.

So, actually, it's not that big a deal at all.

Europe has emissions testing already. Nobody suffered.

If every car has to pass emissions tests, then all cars are the same. The ones that fail the test fail the test the same as if their brakes don't work or the engine doesn't start.

There were no riots, the poor didn't go vehicle-less, it just means that all cars come with catalytic converters as standard, emit inside emission guidelines, and do that from new until the day they are taken off the road.

Saying "the poor can't afford it" is a poor argument. If you can afford to run an inefficient old car, you can't then say you couldn't buy the cheapest old banger to replace it when the time comes.

The poor couldn't afford digital TV either, and had to throw out their TV's and replace all their set-top-boxes and change all their cables. I don't remember uproar about that. And it's more than arguable that a car costs a LOT more to run than a TV.

And this is a safety issue. Just because you're poor doesn't mean you can go around contributing to people's ill health and death. Sure, it's cheaper not to have regular safety inspections on your gas meter, or to use leaded petrol rather than the modern equivalents, or to burn paraffin rather than pay for heating. But you can't be allowed to do stuff dangerously just because you can't afford to do it safely.

P.S. I've never owned a car worth more than a few hundred GB pounds ($300-500). I've also never had a car that's unroadworthy or failed an emissions test. My cars are generally 15 or more years old by the time I buy them, having done 100,000 miles or more. But still they are all fitted with decent emissions-reducing equipment and work and don't pollute unnecessarily.

Poverty isn't an excuse.

Yep.

And, en-route, invented electronic engine management, catalytic converters and everything else required to meet those targets, which is now all compulsory equipment, standard and included on all cars. Not a bad thing at all.

If you're worried about it, test old cars regularly and take them off the road. If you don't, then you're not worried about it.

Evidence requires preservation.

If it's returned without a) a court order saying the evidence was removed by order of the court or b) the evidence, then the evidence has been improperly recorded.

In the circumstances discussed, it's rarely about evidence preservation or even victim protection. In both those cases, there are laws against deleting the evidence from your devices without the correct permission from the court. If you say you filmed something, the officer confiscated your device but the device contains NO trace of that evidence and forensics even hints that it was cleared or deleted, that's destruction of evidence. Courts can/will/should come down extremely harshly on that. It's basically evidence-tampering, perverting the course of justice, etc.

You can't stop your device being confiscated. But you cannot be asked to delete your evidence or have it deleted without a court order.

It comes under similar rules to paedophiles having their computer equipment returned. It has to be properly recorded, tagged, booked in, untampered, forensically analysed, recorded, presented to court, and the order made to remove or destroy only those infringing parts (and/or they ask if you object to just destruction of all the data on it to save time).

It's still your hardware, but it's held in evidence. It can't be tampered with (legally), and it can't be held indefinitely.

In the UK, the police officer would have to give you written confiscation records etc. and you'd be entitled to have details specifically noted about the last file you recorded on there, if you asked for it.

It's all a case of where the crime gets too stupid for an officer to be found guilty of. Asking you to stop recording, the worst that happens is - not much, actually. Asking you to move on from the area, again not much so long as it's done for a vaguely plausible reason. Arresting you? That requires a charge that isn't made up just to harass you. Confiscating your equipment? That requires a) a valid reason b) all reasonable evidence preservation, c) written records of that confiscation and reasons (and, as far as I know, "because he was filming me" isn't a reasonable reason but victim protection may be but even that's dubious in the case of something like a road accident or plain "filming an arrest" scenario).

This has come up in the UK several times and the police commissioners have had to announce that, actually, no they cannot delete your files without a specific, and requested, court order. They can't ask you to do it (except voluntarily), they can't do it for you, and certainly can't do it without treating it as evidence (in which case it's destruction of evidence, which is infinitely more serious than just taking a dislike to someone filming you).

But then, I live in a vaguely civilised country. Your local interpretation of the law may be different.

What the hell kind of sadist is going to manage their machines from a Linux machine running PowerShell?

"Unsupported configuration" is the first hurdle that I'd foresee, followed by just being plain, unnecessarily painful.

You're playing games.

That happens WITH people nowadays. If one friend can't join in, for whatever reason, you can't really politely play that game together.

And if you have to buy one-per-person for gaming, you better be damn sure the people you're buying it for can use it. I wouldn't buy my parents one (whereas they are a mad gaming family that have collectively completed every Mario game in existence and owned pretty much every console), purely because it's likely they won't be able to enjoy and share it together.

Or have higher standards and identify their ugly hacks where others don't?

I used to live smack bang on the delivery border of my local pizza delivery. I lived above a shop opposite the railway bridge, and they would never deliver past the railway bridge.

When you told them the road name, they asked if you were past the railway bridge or not. Say yes, you get no pizza. Seriously. And there was no other takeaway that would deliver to you in the area. Say no, however, and they come and deliver no questions asked even if the driver rings to ask where you are.

One time the driver turned out to be an old guy who'd lived in the same house previously and had the same problems. He never ratted us out, though.

Short-sighted business practice, as it was literally 20 feet or so difference and they had no competitors in that area.

If you work in an emergency call centre, most of the calls you get will be genuine emergencies. Though you might get the odd crank, when they start continuing on but acknowledging you ("Ma'am, this is an emergency line", "Yes, please", "Ma'am, we're not a pizza delivery", "No, no anchovies, thanks my husband hates them", "Ma'am, do you have an emergency?", "Yes, how long will it be?" etc.) it doesn't take a genius to work out what's happening.

Sure, you still get drunks, timewasters, etc. but if you even think for a second that there is a problem, you send out units anyway, even if just to avoid a repeat incident.

People are inherently skilled in conveying meaning without saying those particular words. It's a fabulous human skill. Even more fabulous when you can do it without alerting someone else listening in to one half of the conversation as to what's happening.

I have to say, one of the things I've always tried to pre-arrange is the "I'm in trouble call". If you call and use a certain keyword, that's me coming running. If you call and I ask if you're okay and you say "No, dur, I'm being taken hostage", then you're probably fine. If I say "Honestly, are you okay?" and you say "Yes, I'm fine", that's my cue to come running.

Pre-arrange such things with your family. Get a keyword between you. Or a private joke that you can deliberately ruin when you're actually in trouble. Something that others won't notice. Because the guy kidnapping your daughter might actually be that boyfriend she trusted and knows her well and that she has to phone daddy every Monday or he'll get suspicious, so he lets her but listens in. She might need that way to make herself known without anyone else noticing.

VR is one of the faddy things that, once a generation, some bright spark thinks they can do "properly this time", picks it up, makes some demos of it, realises that it's expensive stuff that needs high-end and portable equipment sold for a reasonable price to lots and lots of people to succeed, slips away into a corner somewhere until people forget about it, and then reinvents itself with the next bright spark.

In the early days of VRML, the same happened. Quake was around. A full, 3D, accelerated environment that could run on commercial PC's, benefit from full 3D vision, and the VR hardware was "the thing" to look at your new architect's idea for the local council buildings or whatever. Never did the two get put together.

Now we have ubiquitous and extraordinarily powerful and realistic 3D graphics. Still, explicit support is required because our 3D is really 3D-cheats dependent on the single-viewport way of drawing things. So you have to design the hardware, mass-produce it, get people to buy it, redesign the games to take account of it, then put it all together for a price people are willing to pay for a gaming gimmick that makes them sit at home with a silly hat on.

I have no doubt that we could get a console going with it, and sell a handful of games, and cost a bomb, and people would play it and go "Yeah, it's okay, but you wouldn't play every game like that", and then it'll be on the dustheap again for a while until the next generation pick it up again.

The 3D power is there. We all have cards capable of running at stupid resolutions at stupid framerate that we could easily have "two of" or a "special" card to do VR.

The screens are there. We all have smartphones and high-res displays.

The human interface still isn't. We're still strapping things to our head and hoping our eyes are roughly aligned like everyone else's and presuming that all people have two healthy eyes in relative sync that they can use such things (my girlfriend can't see 3D movies, several of my friends can't see 3D movies, so why would you pay to go to a 3D movie over a normal one? Same problem). We're still dangling screens in front of our eyes and then wondering why they aren't as impressive in resolution and why they have to be so carefully synched and why it costs twice as much as just buying a decent monitor and why we have to drive two cards (or one powerful card) to drive two displays. We're still having to have one-per-person specialist hardware, that's fragile and expensive and cumbersome and hard to mass-produce until we get literally millions of users.

And all for a game. Now games are worth billions nowdays, but at the end of the game it's just a game. All the potential research / medical / whatever uses DO NOT use this kind of technology, even though they could and could probably afford to do so as a one-off. For decades we've had medical-operation-by-remote-control, but we still don't have that or anything approaching 3D vision coming into common use.

Because, at the end of the day, the use-cases are limited of fanciful, and the cost is prohibitive, and the setup is an awful lot of faffing about.

Standardised VR has been suggested several times - never happened.
VR headsets have been around since the 80's - never took off even as part of a Nintendo offerings (maybe a slight wart, but even so - nobody was interested in bettering it).
The capability to even put 3D environments into web pages has been around as long as I've been involved in websites, everything from VRML upwards. We still don't use it or enjoy global browser support for it.
Accelerometers and other sensors have PLUNGED in price since this was first tried - there's still no accurate way to model your head movements.

It's just a fad each time it comes around and the same problems hit. Even with millions in Kickstarter funding, etc. it's hard to produce a handful of working units that developers will rewrite their games for. It's hard to convince people to part with the price of a tablet or laptop in order to move a game into the third dimension (with lots of caveats, of course).

Like battery technologies, when it does take off, you'll find out because your friend actually has one already and you try it out and even your grandma gets one in the same year because everyone else has one (Wii syndrome). Not because of whatever showmanship is put on for you by a company itself, or what research is done, or what prototype device you see a news item on. It'll just arrive, without fanfare.