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Another nutty ruling.. if you willingly sign a contract that contained a non-complete clause, that's your issue with the company you should fight for.

But wacky judges just says these are no good.

Yeah right, as in "you are perfectly free not to sign this contract, but unfortunately we then won't employ you , oh and by the way all the other firms in this industry have similar contracts, so in fact your choice is sign or never work again".

The reason you have to have laws protecting employees is that employers otherwise have such a position of strength that no fair contracts are feasible.

For the reasonable price of $1 visitors to New York's Coney Island amusement park can watch a man with a black hood pour water on the face of a prisoner in an orange jumpsuit strapped to a table. Unfortunately both men are actually robotic dolls created by artist Steve Powers to protest waterboarding. It's a shame that they couldn't find some college kids to get waterboarded. There are few things I like to do in the summer more than have some beers, get bloated with corn dogs and pour water over the face of someone tied down.

gunnk writes "In the past six weeks, my web-hosting provider has let the physical hard drives on my shared server space fill up TWICE. Each time it takes days to fix after I complain — and once it's fixed I get the same "it won't happen again" email.

Where's a geek to turn for a little inexpensive, but quality hosting? I'm not talking a big corporate site — I just want space to host the various pages my family has along with our blogs. I'm looking for real hosting (not just a blogger page or the like) since I want to have PHP, MySQL, and other basic website functionality at my disposal.

Where does the Slashdot crowd turn for personal web hosting that's reliable, cheap, and reasonably feature-rich?"
http://www.kevingunn.org/

Susie D writes "Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 was released today, and Linux Format has an in-depth first look (with screenshots aplenty). With RHEL 5, Red Hat aims to become even more 'open', by using a shorter and clearer SLA, improving community involvement through its Knowledge Base, and providing the new Red Hat Exchange. But what you really want to know is, yes, it does include XGL for fancy 3D desktop effects."

jemecki writes "I was looking through the distributed computing statistics at BOINCstats today and I noticed that SETI@Home distributed computing grid just passed 280 TeraFLOPS in computing power. The reason this is so remarkable is that the fastest supercomputer in the world Blue Gene/L ALSO operates at a sustained 280 TeraFLOPS. So while governments are busy using their supercomputers to model bombs and nuclear weapons, the geeks have put together the world's fastest computer and they're using it to look for aliens. Awesome."

gunnk writes "We've deployed a Samba server here to replace some aging Novell Netware boxes. It works great: fast, secure, stable. However, we have one VIP that feels that Samba is "amateur" software and that we should be buying Windows servers. I've been searching with little success for large Samba deployments in enterprise environments. Anyone out there care to share stories of places that are happily running large Samba installations for their file servers? Or not so happy, for that matter — better to be informed!"

MattSparkes writes "The ESA's Rosetta probe swooped around Mars on Sunday, completing a key manoeuvre in its 10-year mission to land on a distant comet. The 3-tonne probe came within 155 miles of the planet's surface, and took some incredible images that reveal cloud systems on the planet. "At this time of the Martian year, a large fraction of Mars' atmosphere is evaporating from the southern polar cap and will migrate to the northern polar cap during nothern winter. Over most of the Martian disk one can see large cloud systems.""

zaxios writes "John C. Dvorak has weighed in on the recent Novell-Microsoft pact. Among his insights: "Microsoft has been leery of doing too much with Linux because of all the weirdness with the licenses and the possibility that one false move would make a Microsoft product public domain at worst, or subject to the GPL at best." But now, "the idea is to create some sort of code that is jammed into Linux and whose sole purpose is to let some proprietary code run under Linux without actually 'touching' Linux in any way that would subject the proprietary code to the GPL." According to Dvorak, it's only a matter of time before Linux is "cracked" by Microsoft, meaning Microsoft figures out a way to run proprietary code on it."

An anonymous reader writes, "CNet says this will be the most disappointing Christmas ever for gadget-lovers. The Playstation 3 is delayed across most of the world, the Zune MP3 player is cancelled for everyone outside the US, Vista won't be out for home users before the big day, and even Final Fantasy XII won't reach Europe in time. From the article: 'It's enough to make you slit your wrists with the shards of a smashed Christmas tree bauble... Santa fails to deliver on almost all of his Yuletide promises. Most of the major technologies that were supposed to be ready for purchase have been delayed until next year.' The writer goes on to suggest phrases to use over Christmas dinner when the offending companies' products are mentioned. To reduce the pain of a Zune-less party, he suggests remarking: 'Imagine the stability and usability of Windows migrated to an MP3 player. In short, imagine a small portable version of Hell.'"