One quiver, many arrows.

A contract is easier to enforce than many trade secrets laws, and can apply to proprietary information that doesn't neatly fit the definition of trade secrets. But yes, there's also trade secrets laws. They complement one another, non-competes and other things.

You skipped the case in which it's not unique code but for which you don't have a library.

See the part that says "any product or service". That's entirely too broad. Have you seen the breadth of things Amazon sells? This could probably only be enforced if someone was taking proprietary information about how Amazon does things and improves the processes at a competitor.

I really hate how every little thing gets some catchy marketing name now that is hard to search. Just give me the damn CVE.

My back was so screwed up from an auto accident I could barely walk upright for months. When you can't get from the bed to the car or the car to your desk without wincing the whole way, a bike or elliptical is a pretty big challenge. That sort of thing can get better, and I lost the weight later. It can take some time, though, especially when still working crazy amounts of hours.

Yeah, it takes someone incredibly lazy to work 80 hours a week and suffer injuries that keep one from working out properly. Incredibly lazy. Nobody's everyone's hero for their fitness level. They might be their own personal hero, or a hero to a friend or family member, but they aren't public heroes like people who save someone stranger's life. It's something that lots of people do. Doing it doesn't make any of us an expert in it. A weight loss expert is someone who knows how to help a lot of other people overcome their specific situations to lose weight. It's someone who can actually give advice based on a deep understanding of the various issues. It's not someone who says "this is what worked for me so it's definitely going to work for everyone on Slashdot."

"Whee! 30 pounds! I'm a weight loss wonder story fit for the front page!" It's a good start. Maybe it was all you needed to lose. I know several people (myself included) down by a hundred or more. None of us claim to be experts.

I bought a boxed copy of Caldera OpenLinux back before they merged with SCO and started their "we own Linux" campaign. Even if I needed a Linux license from them, which nobody does, I already had it.

Well, systemd takes some getting used to. It's not perfect. It is nice to write one systemd definition for a service across all systemd-using distros and get daemon watching for free vs. hand-writing all those SysV init scripts.

Wait... wait... you hate Lennart so much as to pass on a Hans Reiser joke?

I've had no problems with these companies after years of use: SRSPlus (as a reseller) domain.com Namecheap Dotster The least expensive, best UI, most perks, and best opposition to things like SOPA has been IME the Namecheap option. They usually are the cheapest and are always among the cheapest of the options, too. I also don't remember Namecheap ever reserving a domain for registration only through them after I did a whois lookup through their web interface. Network Solutions (NSI) did that until ICANN told them to stop. SRSPlus is part of NSI so that's a strike against them. So IME I can recommend a few, but mostly Namecheap.

When the government tells you what's news, you're in a police state.

Of course the free hardware movement isn't about actual physical devices. Free software isn't about being able to share the compiled code. It's about enabling the sharing of the designs in a specific enough way as to produce the final product; it's sharing the software in source code form. The hardware version would be about the same thing: specs, plans, and designs being open and unencumbered.

There are plenty of places to get readership for a serial these days. BOFH is but one example of a short short serial series. Lots of long-story web comics have a one-page comic out once or twice a week. Many people do a weekly tech blog, business blog, news blog, or politics blog, many of which are multiple case studies or ongoing case studies. Serialized fiction works great on TV. Serialized short stories could definitely find a nice niche again.