How does this:

square off with this:

Oh, and btw, citing the source of research funding is generally considered a form of thanking the source for the funding rather than a necessary disclosure.

$100 honorarium is not a big deal. I've seen people wave it off with "donate it" just to avoid the paperwork.

Receiving money to conduct research is conflict of interest if the funds come from parties with vested interest in findings' results? 1.2 million over a decade is hardly a "fortune". It's on par with grants received by any small-size lab. In fact, probably much less. If he is quoted as often as the summary claims, he should be receiving at least 5 times as much in government funding.

buh... slashdot didn't allow a single < go through. The "O(n^K) O(n!)" was meant to says "O(n^K) is less than O(n!)".

The only thing which can improve the judicial system is making it as luddite as possible. US has a common law legal system. All common law systems have O(n!) complexity. Any attempts to fight the expanding complexity by hiring more lawyers are attempts at linear scaling (O(n)) solutions to O(n!) problems. Adding computers into the mix allows for exponential solutions O(n^K). Which creates the illusion of solving the problem because O(n^K) > O(n). But, for sufficiently large n and any fixed K, O(n^K) O(n!). So this creates a problem which will manifest itself as the system collapses under its own complexity with justice becoming completely impossible. The only reason that common law system existed and were viable before computers is that people forget. So all attempts at hiring more lawyers go out the windows and O(n) does grow very large; laws which are at the centers of the nodes which cause common law spider web of irrevocable "precedents" get repealed. But hiding this obvious need for repealing certain laws inside of the O(n^k) solutions makes near impossible to discern which laws need repealing. Which causes the whole legal system to collapse. The only solution to winning this game is not to play.

"I'll be your slave forever", no, they can't. "I will never seek any form of employment anywhere else", yes, one most certainly can enter into such a contract. Even if no future considerations are given. It may not be prudent, but one can enter into such a contract.

As long one enters into it with full knowledge (not likely), one can agree to such terms. People exchange immediate considerations for future opportunities all the time (selling proceeds from future rights for immediate cash payout would be one such example). And no one "forced" anyone to sign a contract. Employment can be employment at will without any contract restricting the terms beyond those established by laws.

Having said all of this, I still don't understand how they can sue Apple for violating terms of a contract to which Apple is not a party.

Apple's not a party to the agreement though, are they? This isn't a criminal matter, so it's not like they can be co-conspirators in causing damages to the claimants. Whatever damage they suffered, can only be caused by the violating employees themselves. 123 can try suing the employees for breach, but if I were in their place, I'd already have had a deal with Apple to cover legal costs in such a contingency.

That makes no sense. Wealth devalues. So hoarding that is not invested has a de facto tax on it. The wealth gap can only be produced by continued increase in the ownership of the means of production (due to continued investing in new means of production).

umm.. so freedom is slavery? I guess it goes hand in hand with war is peace http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2....

A system in which new means of production are created by the private interest reinvesting gains from business activity (aka "free capital")?

when George Bush's title "the last US President" should be the more permanent "The Last US President"? Yeah, yeah, flamebait me into oblivious, but no matter how leftist you are, you know Obama doesn't even bother with the law even if you agree with his goals. At least, Bush hired lawyers before deciding on where to walk the fine line between legal and illegal. Obama's more of a "law shmoe" kind of executive. So his DOT puts out SciFi as prediction for the future. Sure. Why not. He can't say we are in a recession because that would mean that we are. He can't say that Romney's plan for solving the national health care problems was better than his plan (and than Romney's plan for solving MA health care problems), he can't say that Russia is waging war in the Middle East (and winning) in order to divert attention from its war in Europe. Never mind that he can't say that the only way he could figure out how to solve the housing crises was to inflate the prices of everything else until they kept up with the prices of inflated housing market. So he puts out SciFi from DOT. Why not?

How to lie with statistics... "up to"? What's that "down to"? What's average and what's the median?

You can only expect people to buy the "most of world's data is stored on IBM mainframes" crap for so long. Virtualization made mainframes irrelevant. No one ever needed the full resources of a mainframe. They were only used to run multiple virtualized instances. The cloud made the difference between instances running on one piece vs instances running on multiple pieces of iron irrelevant because of cloud storage. You CAN compute a billion transactions in a day and then not use the hardware used for those calculations for the rest of the day now. Mainframe model simply can't compete with it. Oh, and all the legacy code which is presumably irreplacable because no one understands it... well, all the language research which was done because of the domain specific language fad has now made it trivil to tranlsate solutions between languages fairly efficiently. IBM simply has lost every single niche they had up to now. It's not the death of an industry as some suggest... just of the business model of that particular company.

If someone is instrumental to a law practice, they get a partnership. Why shouldn't the same model apply to other endeavors where people are required to be highly competent and creative in their endeavors towards increasing the outcome of a business. The 9-to-5 model is a remnant of the age where people worked on assembly lines and performed repetitive tasks. If you want individuals whose work is non-repetitive and requires half-a-lifetime of dedication to master, why should they settle for anything less than a partnership?

From the article:

Also from the article:

Simple question: how is a civilian gaining control, without authorization, of command-and-control equipment of police departments and federal agencies not a threat to human life? Did he inform them of their security vulnerabilities in order to allow them to fix em? Granted, it's not his responsibility to do so, but hacking into multiple government facilities for any purposes other than concern for their safety should at least indicate that he is a person worth watching, shouldn't it? It's not like there is a kill-on-sight order against him. He is on a watch list.