I asked if they would alter the agreement to strike the non-compete terms but he said they wouldn't do that. I know better than to accept some verbal assurance from a recruiter vs what the contract says. That's like believing that guy at BestBuy that your extended warranty covers the battery in an iPod (it won't). While at the time I didn't think I would have left MS very soon I was afraid that if I was a good performer that they'd be even more likely to try and enforce such a non-compete. I'm sure they let it slide if you suck at your job.

The trick here is that he got sued in WA court. I've heard of some companies trying to take the action up in CA first on such contract since CA courts would side with the employee as such terms are considered unconscionable in CA.

I've seen it both ways, but more often than not it doesn't include pay such as in the case of Microsoft. Their draconian anti-employee contract is a major reason I don't work there today.

I had an offer to work at Microsoft just out of college. I was seriously considering the offer until I saw the draconian anti-employee non-compete they wanted me to sign. I told the recruiter that I didn't feel comfortable signing such an agreement since Microsoft works in so many different areas that there was no way to avoid some sort of conflict. I was assured by the recruiter that they don't usually enforce the agreement. Maybe that is generally true, but this ruling definitely proves that they will enforce it on occasion. Instead I ended up with a different company in CA where such draconian non-competes are illegal and most companies don't even attempt to get you to sign one.

I should also add that not all non-competes have to be as evil as Microsoft's. One company I had an offer for had a similar non-compete but it had a clause that if they decide to enforce it as long as it's in force and you're looking for other gainful employment they would continue to pay you your salary until the non-compete expired. I felt that this policy was more than fair since it allowed the company to decide how important enforcing the non-compete was and didn't have such negative consequences for you as an employee should they choose to enforce it. I personally feel all non-competes should include such a clause otherwise I would NEVER consider signing one.

I don't think Blu-Ray is done for quite yet. The biggest problem is that true high def content is large, 25-50GB large for a movie. Given bandwidth caps, and our poor broadband networks in the in the US I don't see downloading "real" HD content coming soon. Sure you can get HD movies on Hulu, iTunes, Netflix but the quality there is terrible compared to watching a Blu-Ray.

Another issue for purchased content is local storage. Even though hard drive space has increased exponentially on a 1TB drive one could only store about 40 HD movies. Not only that but hard drives are prone to failure and one could easily lose their entire movie collection if a hard drive fails, or gets reformatted. I have yet to see a site or company which offers downloadable movies where one can download their collection whenever they want. The ONLY reason I can accept buying games via steam is that I can delete, and re-download my games as much as I want on any computer I log into.

Actually in CS and Computer Engineering typically the Journals are the lowest bar, and conferences are more prestigious. Though a simple poster at a conference is probably easier than a Journal.

Because 1 million in Revenue (sales) isn't a big deal. I have a cousin who owns a small restaurant which primarily sells hotdogs (yes hotdogs). His small business has ~1 million in sales annually but after expenses he's lucky to break even.

All this article seems to say is that if you do open source hardware, you can make as much as a small restaurant per year in revenue! Which really isn't so impressive. Now if they had a 1+ million profit I'd be more impressed.

PhysX can also run on the CPU (and PS3, Wii, and Xbox360) but can't handle the same amount of workload in that case since the CPU doesn't have as much raw compute power as the GPU.

The thing which irritates people is that it doesn't start to get really cool until you crank up the object density to the point the CPU can't handle it anymore. At that point you need a GPU or PhysX card, and right now that means NVIDIA only. (Note that I've heard NVIDIA would license PhysX to AMD if they want to code their own back end, but AMD has no interest.)

Good idea, but if that's the case you'd probably want to be able to write on the tablet and use it like a notebook. Too bad the iPad doesn't do handwriting recognition. That's the big deal breaker for me.

The grandparent is right though, many people here seem to be seriously bigoted against home schooling as if nothing good can come of it. I was homeschooled by non-religious parents because the local school system wasn't meeting my needs. School in many place has become more about warehousing a bunch of kids than actually trying to teach people anything.

Are people just jealous that their parents didn't let them skip out on all the mindless busywork they had to do at school, and let them actually learn as fast as they could?

How different are they compared to the regular geeky/nerdy kid in school? Are they not getting picked on and harassed as much as the other kids?

There are tons of resources and ways for homeschool students to get together to socialize. While I was homeschooling I didn't suddenly disappear and stop hanging out with the other kids living in my neighborhood. In addition to hanging out with people who lived near me, I met other homeschoolers from other parts of the city and state.

There are many homeschool groups in most states which offer classes, and ways for people to get to know one another. Not to mention one can participate community education classes, theater, or sports to meet others.

Perhaps there's some homeschoolers who just sit at home all day and never talk to peers, but that didn't seem to be the norm where I was from.

You're right that some do it to indoctrinate their kids in religion, but there's also a significant group of people who do it because the school system isn't meeting the needs of their kids. I was home schooled and have some experience with this. About half the people I met were being homeschooled for religious purposes, and the other half had genuinely concerned parents who didn't think the school system was meeting their needs. While I didn't spend too much time with the religious side the non-religious groups typically had motivated parents with higher degrees who took extra time to help their kids succeed.

There were also a handful of people out there who claim to homeschool and don't teach their kids anything. Those people always made me angry since they were doing their children a disservice by keeping them out of school. At least most states don't allow parents to get away with such neglect if properly reported.

Also just because someone is homeschooled in the US doesn't mean you'll avoid religious indoctrination. There are many private schools that parents can send their kids to to learn evolution is nothing more than a lie. As long as we allow private religious schools there will be no way to avoid the crazy.

Plus, in some parts of the US you might actually have to homeschool to teach real science such as evolution. Parts of Kansas and Texas have been trying to exclude that subject or add "intelligent design" to the curriculum for ages.

Charlie doesn't know what he's talking about. Most of the 2xx cards at this point should be GT21x chips which are based on the GT200 high end chip. The 9000/8000 series cards were all g9x or g8x architectures. Though I think at the low end they might have reused g92 as a G210 in the desktop segment.

I agree it would become inconvenient, but in general 99% of games probably will never require it. The big problem is that WoW items have real world value. People sell game items and gold on the black market, and there's real money to be made by hacking unsuspecting people and taking their stuff. Basically criminals are hacking into peoples accounts, stealing their virtual items and liquidating it all for gold, then stealing their in game gold and selling it to other players via black market sales.

Blizzard currently attempts to restore items from accounts which have been ransacked, but it takes a large number of man hours to go through all their logs and investigate all these hacking occurrences. They're looking to add this extra security as a way to significantly reduce the number of hacked accounts, and reduce their costs with investigating these issues.

So until other games on the PS3 and XBOX become big targets for hackers who are trying to make real world money, I don't think we'll see these authentication schemes on your console. There's really no value in stealing my PS3 trophies. The problem here is that criminals have found an easy and fairly lucrative target in trading WoW gold.

Blizzard does have several soft token schemes which don't require that you purchase a physical authenticator. There's an iPhone app you can get for free and use to do generate an access code. They also have apps for a few other phones available.

The only thing they don't offer is a PC application and this is intentional. Using a PC app means some virus/trojan could run your pc authenticator and capture the code which makes it decidedly less useful.