The breach led to the contract being voided. KlearGear never delivered and Paypal refunded the money. So there was no exchange on either side.
The buyers might have had a claim for non-performance but the idea that the seller could enforce their one sided terms is ridiculous.
A clause that prevents reporting the failure to perform is certainly not going to be valid, not even in Texas.
The contract clause is unenforceable for multiple reasons. The first amendment has a bearing on one of them.
First there is no contract, The goods were never delivered, KlearGear failed to perform its obligation, there was never an exchange of a consideration. Therefore no contract.
Second, the original agreement was with the husband, the comments were made by the wife.
Third, the contract terms were added after the original agreement as is demonstrated by the Way Back Machine archives
Fourth, even if there had been a contract it would be a contract of adhesion. The seller defines the terms and the buyer has a weak negotiating position. In such cases civilized jurisdictions (i.e. not necessarily a corrupt jurisdiction) generally strike out clauses that are surprising or contrary to normal practice absent clear proof that the buyer was aware the term existed. A line of text in a fifty page contract in 6pt type is not normally enforceable.
Fifth, the term in question was unconscionable which means that it offends the basic principles of commerce and/or society. Constitutional precedent and in particular the first amendment is frequently used to establish that a clause is 'unconscionable'. Kleargear is not 'violating' the first amendment but the courts are not going to enforce a contract term whose purpose is to take away constitutionally protected rights.
Sixth, even if all the above were not so, the claim for $3,500 is a liquidated damages clause and thus invalid. As a matter of public policy, corporations are not allowed to set fines.
Seventh, the amount was clearly in dispute. Thus the reporting to Experian was in breach of the fair credit reporting act.
I am sure that there are weaker claims out there, but I can't think of one offhand.
Not an IETF list.
It is not even meant to be a proposal.
The point of the document is that I took all the points that had been made five or more times already and put them into one document so that we can move the discussion on to the next stage. Otherwise every time we get a new person joining the group we have to go through the same thing all over. And the third or fourth time round it becomes 'we already know that', 'NOO you are trying to censor me, NSA plant!'.
It isn't meant to become an IETF draft, they would make me take out all the fun parts. Like pointing out the abject incompetence of an organization that lets a 29 year old contractor with a pole dancer for a girl friend have access to that material six months after joining. Why do Alexander and Clapper still have jobs? And spying on US citizens and then trading the raw SIGINT with foreign powers that are certain to share it with my commercial competitors? What were these idiots thinking?
There is work going on in IETF and in fact we started before his Bruce-ship made his call to arms. I doubt the PRISM-PROOF branding will stick. But it is powerful mind share as this story proves. We have botched deployment of almost all the security protocols developed in IETF except for TLS and that succeeded before it went in. This is a chance to hit the reset button and fix the mindbogglingly stupid deployment gaps. Like having no standard way to discover recipient keys and having two different message formats (OpenPGP and S/MIME) forcing people to choose between two key endorsement schemes rather than allow them to pick the one suited to their needs.
Yes, I do think there was interference in the past efforts but I suspect it was subtler than most imagine and not coming from the NIST folk. Rather, I think the interference came from folk who would encourage both sides in technical disputes to dig in and refuse to compromise, folk who participate with no visible means of financial support and seem to have limitless time to write drafts but are not very technical.
The last meaningful America's Cup races were held in the late '80s. Somebody squinted hard enough at the 12-meter rules and entered a multi-hull. Now it's just a matter of who spends the most money on a carbon fiber boat with a wing sail. This is a sailing race of fundamentally unseaworthy vessels. It would be literally be safer to cross an ocean in a dinghy than in one of these monstrosities.
Come September, do yourself a favor. Watch Deep Water on Netflix. Read any book on Ernest Shackleton. Read any Lin and Larry Pardey book. You'll finish all three before the America's Cup race is over, and you'll know more about sailing than watching every second of the America's Cup races.
I have a late 2008 15" MBP on Mountain Lion. It's fine.
Upgrade to the maximum RAM you are capable of. (A good practice at all times.) Mavericks will be a different beast, and it's well worth waiting to see on a 5+ year old machine, but you're probably fine.
Hmmm I replace my hard drives when I start to see RAID errors. I don't plan to run SSD raid as the on board fault tolerance should be ok.
Would be nice to have hard data on expected failures so that I know whether to plan for a three or a six year lifespan. I generally replace my main machine on a six year cycle as I have a lot of expensive software. Looking to upgrade this year when the higher performance intel chips launch.
1tb is quite a lot. Probably more than I need in solid state. The price is also quite a bit more than the $0.05/gig for Hard drives. But it's getting a lot narrower. And RAID 1 doubles that cost anyway...
It's actually fairly common for construction projects to run into changes. While nobody requests to turn a shed into a skyscraper, large changes that touch many disciplines occur quite regularly.
The difference between AEC and programming projects is a long history and legal framework that deals with these changes. Projects are given a budget, and that budget is often paid out at milestones--design development, 95%, construction documents, etc. If the owner requests a substantial change, or if a change is required because of unknowable circumstances, the budget is either revised or the work is value-engineered to fit--and this reality is reflected in the contract signed at the beginning.
The problem with programming projects is that there are not very many really good programmers, and programming is not suited to throwing more warm bodies at the problem. AEC is plate spinning, while programming is juggling. You can hire a bunch of folks to help keep the plates spinning, but you can't just send in somebody to help juggle.
If you don't like the 2nd Amendment, perhaps we can interest you in gutting the 1st Amendment?
Come come, now, we can all agree that those evil GUNS and evil VIDEO GAMES are ultimately culpable. Let's all come together and blame things that we don't like.
'Merica.
Auto-documentation is good stuff nowadays. Everything changes so much, and so quickly, that enforced documentation standards lead to better understanding of the underlying API or intent.
(As an example, why is PHP so popular? It's not because it's beautiful, or elegant. It is, however, very accessible, largely due to good documentation.)
Good comments--that are not prescriptive for whatever autodoc tool you use--are invaluable, but bad or marginal ones do more harm than good, especially in interpreted languages. You can condense 4 lines of comments into a 22-character, well-constructed function call/local variable and accomplish the same goal.
I might be in the minority, but I've learned to love the challenge of taming a beast of a code base.
Coming in and helping out people who don't have *anything* in place and slowly adding order has a satisfaction level all of its own.
Building out a test suite as we document business logic and then planning a refactoring can be rewarding too!
"The only way I can lose this election is if I'm caught in bed with a dead girl or a live boy." -- Louisiana governor Edwin Edwards
