Ah yes, the +1 funny on the comment that indicates that a man whose wife does the driving isn't a real man...
Glad to see how much we've matured around here.
I believe that Saudi Arabia might be accepting immigration applications. You'd fit right in.
Non-competes are basically unenforceable in California
Thats my understanding as well, which is why A123 sued in Massachusetts, and Apple tried (unsuccessfully) to move the case to California. According to Wikipedia the current applicable MA law states “A covenant not to compete is enforceable only if it is necessary to protect a legitimate business interest, reasonably limited in time and space, and consonant with the public interest”. The most recent test case I could find is IBM v. Papermaster (2009) involving (perhaps not coincidentally) Apple poaching. The court backed IBM and granted an injunction against Papermaster, citing and expanding "inevitable disclosure". Papermaster & Apple settled before trial, just like they did with A123.
Google, Microsoft, Apple and so on have all settled these cases in the last 10 years or so, so nothing has gone to trial so no case law has been established, but IBM v. Papermaster lays the groundwork for more enforcement of non-competes in some cases. IANAL but it seems the anecdotal assumption that "non-competes are basically unenforceable in xxx" may not be as absolute as we engineers assume it is.
It's one thing to hire talented worked away from a company and have them design new things.
It's another to get your grips on one worker, and essentially use him as a mole to take away a whole team and/or any proprietary stuff they've been working on (which is what seems to be alleged here).
If the latter is allowed, then if any smaller company is working on a breakthrough idea can be easily broken and their tech taken by a larger company with buckets full of cash to steal their staff and secrets.
"But where's my choice of "watch it with the software I want to use"? Right, it's gone, because of the DRM."
There are plenty of situations where there's not much choice and it has little to do with DRM. In this case, you have *MORE* choice than before (and you're STILL bitching about it, I might add).
Your choice before was: Watch Netflix on a non-Linux OS (including: Windows, Mac, later Android/iDevices). Due to this change, you now have the ADDITIONAL choice to watch it on Linux, which is something a lot of us have been wanting for quite some time. You ALSO have the choice to do things EXACTLY as before, by NOT USING the f**king plugin.
So no choice is gone, because frankly it was never there. You now have additional choices. You also have the choice to go out and buy the bloody DVD and watch it that way. If you want to bitch about DRM then have a look at Blu-Ray which we still can't watch properly on Linux.
This sort of crap is why Linux users look bad, because even when we get something there's always somebody who has to piss and moan about it, and you make us all look like a bunch of whiners. It's their service, and unlike a physical owned medium they do have rights to determine how that service is access. Don't like it, don't use it. But stop using "choice" as a reason to bitch about it when you're actually being given additional options you NEVER HAD before.
I'm fairly certain humanity would find plenty of reasons to wage war if religions were not around to blame it on.
Religions were created as the first rudimentary forms of government or control over other people, and are still remarkably effective at that task. They only require an ongoing group of leaders to ensure obligations are continually felt by the members, as it's difficult to create a new religion quickly with a large enough number of committed adherents to wage an effective war.
The entire process is well understood and practiced worldwide.
Two researchers, Phillip Jovanovic of the University of Passau in Germany and Samuel Neves of the University of Coimbra in Portugal, published a paper exposing encryption weaknesses in the protocol.
The paper, “Dumb Crypto in Smart Grids: Practical Cryptanalysis of the Open Smart Grid Protocol” explains how the authenticated encryption scheme used in the OSGP is open to numerous attacks—the paper posits a handful—that can be pulled off with minimal computational effort. Specifically under fire is a homegrown message authentication code called OMA Digest.
"It's a sad day for Mozilla, the w3c, the web as a whole, and open culture"
Yes, it's a sad day when a vendor offers a CHOICE for a plugin which adds much-requested functionality to their product. Heaven fucking forbid.
There are two reasons I generally still even both to keep windows around, one is Netflix (which become a non-issue when Chrome started to work for it on 'nix), and the other is various games (also starting to change with Steam pushing Linux/GL).
Don't want it, don't use it. There are reasons to be open, but frankly I can see some valid reasons for not being thus. Sometimes FOSS zealots sound very similar to the "well, I've got nothing to hide" types when it comes to discussing surveillance.
Indeed, there are a number of people who post on Facebook about cop deaths, and then that "there were no riots after this guy was killed."
Well, duh. There's generally not any riots when a convenience store clerk is killed (in similar manner, I might add). Why? Who are you going to riot against? Is a cop being shot more terrible than the night-shift guy at 7-11?
Being a cop is not just a guy with a bad, blue uniform, and a job. They're a representative of government authority, with more power than the average citizen. When they start popping off citizens, they're display a form of OPPRESSION. People aren't rioting because Bob X died, they're rioting because a representative of government authority whose job is to PROTECT citizens is instead OPPRESSING and KILLING them.
If we only ever heard about the H1N1 flu subtype, severe acute respiratory syndrome, and bovine spongiform encephalopathy, much of the public would be unaware of the threat that each could pose
What was the common name for severe acute respiratory syndrome? I only heard it as SARS, and people seemed to get worked up about that just as easily as they did about mad cow disease, or avian flu. There was a water contamination scare around here a few years ago, and cryptosporidium and giardia became household terms for quite a while.
I don't think it's so much the naming as it is the reporting around it. If the media repeats it enough, people will remember the term, even if it is outlandish. The main problem, I think, would be that there's probably dozens of diseases that cause "severe acute respiratory" problems. Naming diseases after prominent symptoms is likely to lead to lots of confusion, as many diseases have very similar symptoms.
Musicians never got money from album sales. A sliver get allocated to them, and taken away again to repay the advance which the label gave them to make the album.
It entirely depends on the band, their contract, and how much they sell. The Beatles made massive piles of money even though they stopped touring halfway through their career, and the Pink Floyd "The Wall" album saved the band's members from bankruptcy while the following tour lost them all money. You can read about the structure of traditional music industry royalties here.
The short version is that on a CD sale, artists might make a 10% royalty after packaging, breakage, marketing and costs of production (advance) are subtracted. The above linked article shows how quickly that 10% shrinks, as well. Digital play royalties - unless the band is savvy and has negotiated better rates - are about half of the CD rate.
However, if you wrote the song that was performed, you will see an additional cut. And the band also gets royalties each time the song is played on the radio, or used on TV or in the movies (the writer gets an even bigger cut). So ultimately, there is still a lot of money to be made in recorded music, not just concerts and merchandise... but your music has to be popular enough to appear on the radio or other media for you to cash in. For indie bands, concerts and merchandise will be the big moneymakers of course, but they never sold much recorded music anyway.
Heroin was an over the counter cough rememdy for most of this country's history. Most of the people who used it did not become addicted to it. Addiction is a biochemical disorder in the production or action of various hormones, not a physical property of chemicals.
Heroin was "invented" in the late 1800s as a less addictive alternative to morphine. By 1920 it was strictly regulated as a response to the 200,000 heroin addicts in the US. As such, heroin was readily available for maybe 50 years in the US and it was indeed addictive, which is what caused congress to act with the Dangerous Drug Act.
Addiction is not a biochemical disorder. It is a biochemical process. Opiates, by their very nature, trigger responses in the brain that lead to addiction. It does not matter that some people can become addicted more readily than others. Heroin was an attempt to alter the physical property of morphine to make it less addictive. It worked, heroin IS less addictive than morphine, but it is still easy to become addicted to it. This is not because of a biochemical disorder in the brain, but because of the very way our brains work.
Being attracted to conditions similar to your parents, perhaps?
One of the chief duties of the mathematician in acting as an advisor... is to discourage... from expecting too much from mathematics. -- N. Wiener
