Movies are sold not licensed, like any other copyrighted material, and you ARE (via Betamax) within your legal rights to timeshift/formatshift. (but there's no requirement they make it easy)

What the DMCA makes illegal is circumventing an encryption scheme... So you ARE allowed to format shift (although the MPAA/RIAA would rather you didn't know that) but there's no legal way to do it losslessly.

I've actually started to think this should really be a 2nd amendment issue - that encryption is the
current democratic arms.

CreepyCrawler did a better job of responding on the merits, so I'll just touch a few points:

I'm not a lawyer and, frankly, don't want to be a lawyer. I do HAVE a lawyer, and have entered a modest number of contracts...

If you think I need to be a lawyer to make my /. post, which, summarized, basically says to the OP "You're an idiot and you need a lawyer" - then I think you have a rather odd view of the world. You needn't be an attorney to handle that post.

I completely agree that the probability is low of any dispute rising to the actual expensive investigation and lengthy court hearings (because OP would have to make something of very significant value AND somehow have significant resources to continue fighting against this contract in court AND the contract would have to be weak enough that this didn't get immediately shut down.)

I also agree that this slight relevance depends on the contract actually being very badly written - because establishing his bad faith through crazy methods is only necessary if there's any doubt about whether he understood the contract in the first place. Which, if it's written reasonably, there probably isn't. I agree. And etc., I'm sure there's more.

However, if you don't think that an argument of bad faith in this context could EVER be relevant, especially to damages, or that IF it was worth enough money for them to do an intensive investigation and there is no circumstance where they would EVER use this if they knew about it (remembering that we haven't actually seen how good or bad the actual contract is) then I'm not sure I believe you're a lawyer. However, I suspect you're just saying that it's vanishingly, impractically unlikely - which I agree with.

But more importantly, you really missed my point there. First my meta-point, that the OP should take away from my post that not having an attorney is bad, and HIM not having an attorney is even worse. Do you disagree with either of these points?

To rehash that particular point of mine, it was:

- Whether /. is findable/admissible/worthwhile or not I can tell from your OP that you _believe_ this contract would restrict your rights, and you want to sign it then ignore it.

- That doing this to a random university makes you, in my opinion, a liar and a badly behaving person - whether or not the courts can thwack you for it.

- And that, in general, the courts may thwack you for acting in bad faith, if it can be demonstrated. (through obvious reading of the contract, or whatever)

- My mention of his /. post was really just illustrative - which I'd think you'd understand, considering the use of 'gasp' and 'Guilty' in your post.

P.S. ASKING on /. isn't what I meant as evidence of bad faith but (assuming you went through the possibly significant work to prove he really was the poster) his specific wording seemed in pretty bad faith to me.

I was just trying to pretend to be funny... which I admit is often sortof orthogonal to seeming rational. But rockets sounds like a better idea, around here.

While that's the explanation I'd LIKE, really I just added 0 later, and - as another poster suggested - I didn't think it was as meaningful.

But mostly I just don't value editing on /. enough to go renumber my points just to add a new one at the start. I'm sure around here somewhere I have a post that starts with -1.

Original complainer clearly doesn't understand that integers stretch in both directions.

Well, the INTENT was that I agreed with and was expanding on the, uh, 'concise' posting of the parent post -- that I wasn't trying to say this post armed you to negotiate your contract, but rather that the OP's obvious lack of legal understanding made it even MORE important they seek an attorney.

My execution might've been poor, though -- I don't exactly edit /. posts. :)

Thanks for the other bit; corrected.

Something is seriously wrong w/ your OSX install. I've used several minor versions of each major version of OS X, and it shouldn't do this... Have you tried reinstalling? Tried running Rember? (free memtest for OS X)

I'm curious what menu pops up. Does the mouse jump to a new location when you click? The only thing I can imagine popping up at an arbitrary location is the context menu - this would be what's supposed to happen if you right-clicked instead of left clicking. Is it possible you're clicking on the wrong button, or your mouse is malfunctioning, or your keyboard is malfunctioning/dirty (you'll get the same behavior if the 'control' key is being intermittently depressed)

You could test the keyboard part pretty easily by just unplugging the kybd and clicking around with the mouse plugged directly into the machine, and seeing if you get the same behavior.

re: speed - I'd expect OS X to perhaps startup slower, esp 10.3 (4 and 5 have actually sped things up in certain scenarios.) , but I'd much rather watch a YouTube on the G4. The only other things that's very true is that however much OS X might be harder on your CPU/HD/etc., it's MUCH more RAM intensive. If you're running 10.3.9 and you can fix your crazy clicking issue, I'd recommend at least 512M of RAM. That machine takes at least 2 GB, and almost all the USB+ models are completely compatible with most standard PC RAM of the right speed. (My 400Mhz G4 tower is PC133, but I don't recall if the one you have is PC133, DDR, or the one model that used something weird.)

several posts say talk to an attorney, in detail, when they can READ your contract, and they're right. IANAL. However, since this is the Internet, I want to take this opportunity to point out several substantial flaws in your submission.

0. Posting here and not getting an attorney. Fail.

1. A purely ownership and non-personal right like this, it's very unlikely there's any prohibition against you signing it away. (Unlike, e.g. some noncompetes which are SOMETIMES unenforceable.) Fail.

2. If you sign this when you obviously (and demonstrably - you posted it here!) thought they intended it to mean you had no ownership, the courts will not look kindly on you turning around and saying you don't believe that. That's called 'bad faith'. Even if the contract WAS weak, if it's clear that both parties understood the same intent, usually that's what happens.

And there's a good reason for that. Knowingly signing that when you clearly believe they mean that if you don't intend to carry it through makes you a liar.

Fail.

3. That the faculty, who have a totally different contract, get to keep their work has no bearing on your contract. Fail.

4. The faculty don't even meet the standard you set out - which is 'if you're paid TO develop software' - which they aren't. They're paid to uphold the educational mission of the institution and do their research. The actual software is (at least contractually) secondary.

I'm not telling you not to take the job -

I only see two glimmers of hope here:

- If the UNIVERSITY's contract with NSERC specifies something different, you count point that out to them.

- I don't know if this is in your goalset, but depending on the U, if you WANTED to open source your project (whatever license) the U may allow that - and you MIGHT be able to get them to approve allowing that BEFORE hiring you. YOU will still own none of it. They'll own all the rights to sell a closed source version, etc., and they could un-open-source their future versions. (Which, if you were GPL, no one ELSE could legally do) But they can't exactly 'unlicense' the code they agreed to release.

I realize this is probably not an answer to the OP, because this kind of time (learn Actionscript) is a lot more than really free.

However, to answer the parent - to do applications these days Adobe Flex is preferred to Adobe Flash. And while Adobe Flex Builder isn't free (Eclipse based IDE with GUI Dreamweaver mode) the underlying vanilla SDK/compiler IS free (as in beer, at least)

Perfect for this discussion, the singular thing the free version doesn't come with is the advanced Charting package, but it's totally reasonable to draw arbitrary charts however you want (and indeed, with more customization), it's just slightly less automatic.

The Flex IDE also has a 100% student discount.

My degree was in Mechanical Engineering, with a minor in CS, and now I manage a software firm (including hiring)

Mathematicians at a university are smarter, in my experience (dated by about a decade) I don't think this has to fundamentally mean there are no brilliant people in CS - I'd suspect the following mechanism:

CS is often really bad at evaluating students' ability. Possibly partially because they're a quite young educational discipline. Therefore, it's relatively hard to flunk out of CS due to lack of brilliance. (Flunking out from lack of DILIGENCE is different; a CS degree is still a lot of work.) I've seen VERY incompetent people with degrees from all sorts of places...

Math is often easier to flunk out of, and in some cases more likely to be very difficult to get program admission to. Perhaps this is partially because it's an extremely old educational discipline... And being less 'practical' I suspect there's a greater part brilliance and lesser part diligence to getting the degree. (That's not bad - some project management is important in CS!)

So if you take the same pool of candidates and randomize which field they go into, more people will stay in the program and graduate in CS than Math - at least in the admittedly limited subset of universities I've been exposed to. The best will do fine in either, the worst in neither, but a certain class of middle ones will pass in CS if they stick with it, and would fail out of Math.

I think it's also true that being a more practical, commercial discipline, there's simply demand for many more CS degrees, diluting the 'average' brilliance of someone graduating with that degree. I have made no attempt to verify this whatsoever, however.

Yes, I realize someone knows of a school where the math dept is easy and the CS dept is hard. I'm not trying to say this is a law of the universe, only a statistical truth.