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Comment Re:Non-compete agreements are BS. (Score 5, Interesting) 272

Goes both ways. Reminds me of a situation I ran into years ago. The company I worked for shut its doors overnight (Monday was business as usual, Tuesday "we're done"). I was one of the last people out the door because I stayed on to wrap up our last projects. When that was finally done a few weeks later, I did my exit paperwork. One of the documents said that the company owned any IP I had created during the time I worked there (both on the clock and off the clock, even if it was unrelated to my job) and everything I might create for the next 5 years. When I stopped laughing and dried my eyes I said, "You can't be serious." So the accountant who had inherited HR duties read the document. "You're the first person to say anything about this. Wow. That's just... Okay, cross out the parts you don't agree to and we'll both initial the changes." There was hardly anything left by the time I stopped crossing shit off.

I thought I'd been working with intelligent people but I'm the only one who noticed that ridiculousness.

Comment Re:Why can't (Score 3, Interesting) 349

When you grow up and buy a house, you're going to be shocked how other utilities work. They charge you for the capacity of your connection, then charge you for the amount of product you move through it. Water for example. My last house was around $62 to have the 1/2" connection. That's it. Just the potential to move water into my house. That cost went from about $35 for 1/4" to hundreds of dollars for larger pipes. Once I flushed a toilet, the usage meter started ticking and I paid $2.73 per 100 cubic feet of water. The usage rate was constant all the way from a 1/4" to 6" connection. That's how all the utilities were set up. A monthly fee for the connection based on capacity, a per-unit cost for the amount delivered. And, if you have a water leak, they rarely give you a warning. They just send a bill.

Cable and internet are the oddballs that charge a flat "connection" rate with no metered usage. That works for cable TV but not so much for internet which functions more like water or electricity. Trouble with internet is they'll cut you off for using "too much" of their product but don't give you a way to purchase more of it. I wouldn't mind the caps so much if they'd give an accurate measure of usage and the option to purchase additional product at $10 per hundred gigs or so. That seems reasonableish to me. But they don't want you paying for the product that you use. They want you paying for product that you don't use.

Comment People assume they're watched. (Score 5, Funny) 195

One day, I was puttering away on some project when the phone rang. "It was totally an accident!" "What was an accident." "I didn't mean to go to that website." "What website." "The porn site." Then it dawned on me that this woman actually thought I sat around all day watching what people were doing on their computers.

Comment Re:Huh? (Score 4, Informative) 465

2 years is a ridiculously short time to "age out" email archives. Especially for an agency that takes longer than that to handle basic interactions. I just got a call last month from the IRS regarding the estate of a relative who passed in 2011. And the IRS claims they have the authority to go back six years for substantial errors so I'd expect them to be keeping their emails at least that long. More realistically, I'd expect them to keep their emails indefinitely. Storage is getting cheaper faster than email accumulates. What does the average person accumulate in a decade? 5 gigs? IRS has around 90,000 employees so that's 450,000 gigs of data give or take. Shit, I've got 32,000 gigs of storage 2' from me. I could expand that to 78,000 by swapping in bigger hard drives. And 144,000 by swapping in bigger drives and adding more ports. That's with stuff I could order from Newegg and assemble on the dining room table. If I went with real equipment, the only limit would be my wallet.

Last company I worked for, had been archiving email for years before I started and hadn't thrown out (or lost) a single email when I left 5 years later. If legal needed something from 2005, they'd give me the particulars and I'd plug them in and the system spit out a compilation of every message that met the specs. I also made an image of every employee's hard drive when they left the company before I put a fresh image on their computer. Just in case they'd stored something important on their local drive instead of their department's server. Only needed that a few times but the cost was so negligible we spent more on donuts and bagels than storing drive images.

Their failure to have a redundant, secure archive of such recent email is either intentional destruction or gross incompetence.

Comment Ow, the ignorance (Score 5, Informative) 186

Was that summary written by someone who's never used a 30Hz 4k display?

A 30Hz feed to an LCD panel is not like a 30Hz feed to a CRT. The CRT phosphors need to be refreshed frequently or the image fades. That's why 30Hz was all flickery and crappy back in the 90s. But 30Hz to an LCD isn't like that. The image stays solid until it's changed. A 30Hz display on an LCD is rock solid and works fine for a workstation. I know. I've seen me do it. Right now. There are no "transition" issues, whatever that is supposed to mean. Nothing weird happens when I switch between applications. Multitasking works fine. I'm playing multiple HD videos without a hitch. Same way the 30hz 1080 programming from cable and satellite plays just fine on LCDs. Gaming's not great but turn on vertical sync and it's not terrible. I'd rather be running at 60Hz but I got my 4k panel for $400. It'll hold me over until displays and video cards with HDMI 2 are common.

Comment It's too late. (Score 0) 90

If you don't want to be tracked, you need to dump your cell phone immediately. It collections location information and has both audio and video recording (in two directions) capabilities. Worrying about a "smart" thermostat, smoke detector, or watch is silly. We're way past that.

Comment Re:That's not what we need in the US (Score 1) 78

Show me one current uncapped option that doesn't have fine print limiting the amount of data you can use or how you use it. Meaning a contract that allows me to tether to my laptop and move hundreds of gigs of data. I have that now but those data plans are no longer available and have been unavailable for 4+ years.

You've just told me to pay for an option that no longer exists.

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