You are correct, at least as far as the Supreme Court of Canada and Superior Court of Ontario are concerned. They have ruled time and time again that overreaching non-compete agreements sign away unalienable rights and are thus invalid.

Noncompetes which are limited in scope on the other hand are routinely upheld.

IANAL; ASDA

No, 5% of humanity will evolve to survive those

But the GAO has to make its findings public, or at least put it in congressional review reports. Congress persons are political animals by nature, both parties, and if they can take something out of context or cherry-pick bits and re-package them into a scary-sounding narrative to score political points, they will.

Look how they mangled issues with emails, back-up systems, file formats, servers, hard-drive failure rates, etc. in the Lerner/IRS situation. (Granted, some of the mangling of IT concerns* may have been sheer ignorance instead of intentional political manipulation.)

Transparency is a double-edge sword. I'm not choosing sides here, only saying that they are probably between a rock and a hard-place.

* They probably also mangled non-IT subjects, such as law, but I don't know enough about those topics to readily spot mistaken notions or claims.

I've been around a while, and I don't see how that is different than in the past. There has always been a fairly large gap between specialties where bugs and bad design can sink a company versus software with fuzzy up front requirements that is allowed to organically mature to some extent.

So will God Goo get us first, or AI?

"How cute, a selfy ... Oh shit!"

Yip. I've also been tossed around by the boom and bust cycle. California was highly glutted after the dot-com bust and I tried to move out of state, which was very difficult due to family issues. My legacy tool skills are the only thing that saved me, being that all those web newbies had no pre-web experience.

I suspect that something more programmer-friendly will soon replace the bloated layer-heavy HTML/CSS/Lamp stack et al currently used; and techies will fired en mass. "Remote" GUI standards are ripe for a big factoring event in the industry. Common GUI dev does not have to be rocket science. It's like the days of Windows C++ just before VB and Delphi came along, making GUI's a snap (initially), putting many of them out of work.

Fortunately for them, the Windows market in general was expanding such that there were plenty of projects that needed the speed or control of C++ GUI's still. But the same may not be true of the next Idiom Cleaning event.

It's pretty obvious to me that the real solution is to store passwords in a hardware black-box (with a mirrored spare) that only allows a limited number of tries for a given password and all passwords per time period. E.i. throttled.

Computers are getting to fast to permit them to chomp on raw encrypted files.

An idiot may not know that :-)

If the STEM wages in other countries are almost double relative to the local standard of living, then typically those people would put more effort into it. Capitalism incentives 101.

The threat of being outsourced here also tends to make one treat hands-on technical work as a mere stepping-stone job, hoping to move into management, which pays more relative to heads-down tech work. If it's a temp job, obviously one will tend to put less effort into fine-tuning their skills.

I thought the main purpose was to help you remember the company, not to produce sales then and there. Nobody really expects to do much "real" business at conventions.

Conventions are a "notion" system and bragging tool: bigger booth = bigger company, to help separate you from little guys. And for a little guy, demonstrate that your company exists and has enough money to at least afford a (small) booth.

What's the alternative term? "Non-virtual human-body-based visual attention-capturing mechanism"? Too long, for one.

vendors' afterparties...around in one of the creepy "party busses" prowling the...

Do you have to put it in such negative terms? That really drains the fun from my visits there ... I mean my friend's visit.

So we need a meter for meters now.

This explains republicans....

(ducks)