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Rewriting a Software Product After Quitting a Job? 604

Posted by kdawson from the clean-room-white-coats dept.
hi_caramba_2008 writes "We are a bunch of good friends at a large software company. The product we work on is under-budgeted and over-hyped by the sales drones. The code quality sucks, and management keeps pulling in different direction. Discussing this among ourselves, we talked about leaving the company and rebuilding the code from scratch over a few months. We are not taking any code with us. We are not taking customer lists (we probably will aim at different customers anyway). The code architecture will also be different — hosted vs. stand-alone, different modules and APIs. But at the feature level, we will imitate this product. Can we be sued for IP infringement, theft, or whatever? Are workers allowed to imitate the product they were working on? We know we have to deal with the non-compete clause in our employment contracts, but in our state this clause has been very difficult to enforce. We are more concerned with other IP legal aspects."
Transportation

Bay Area To Install Electric Vehicle Grid 388

Posted by kdawson from the recharge-it dept.
Mike writes "Recently San Francisco, San Jose, and Oakland unveiled a massive concerted effort to become the electric vehicle capitol of the United States. The Bay Area will be partnering with Better Place to create an essential electric vehicle infrastructure, marking a huge step towards the acceptance of electric vehicles as a viable alternative to those that run on fossil fuels." Inhabitat.com has some conceptual illustrations and a map showing EV infrastructure, such as battery exchange stations, stretching from Sacramento to San Diego — though this is far more extensive than the Bay Area program actually announced, which alone is estimated to cost $1 billion.
NASA

NASA's New Lunar Rover, Now Testing In Arizona 59

Posted by timothy from the detatchable-p-suit dept.
MarkWhittington writes "NASA has unveiled a new prototype lunar rover, called the Chariot, a production version of which is hoped to be operational on the lunar surface by 2019. NASA is now testing the Chariot lunar rover in Arizona, on terrain that resembles the lunar surface." Perhaps Arizona's an even closer match to the moon's surface than is Texas, or Moses Lake, WA where NASA was testing the last time we mentioned Chariot. (Here's a bit of video from the Texas round.)
The Courts

Taser International Wins Lawsuit to Change Cause of Death 577

Posted by Soulskill from the shock-and-law dept.
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Taser International recently started a legal campaign against medical examiners who claimed tasers contributed to the cause of death for several people. On Friday, an Ohio judge ruled in favor of the stun gun manufacturer (free registration may be required). While they do have a number of scientific studies on which they establish their claims, it's interesting that the alternate cause of death they champion — excited delirium — appears only in police reports on the deaths of difficult or drug-addled inmates, not in medical textbooks. Of course, that may change soon — Taser is funding and promoting research on the subject. Coroner reports such as the ones in this case contributed to the UN's opinion that taser use is torture."
The Internet

Submission + - Tim Berners-Lee discusses the future of the Web

Submitted by maximus1
maximus1 writes: In this exclusive interview, Tim Berners-Lee explains his vision of the Semantic Web. He says: "The Semantic Web is going to take off particularly when we see people using it for data processing, when we see people using it in more and more things, adding personal data, adding files to government data." His position on net neutrality. "We've seen cable companies trying to prevent using the Internet for Internet phones. I am concerned about this, and am working, with many other committed people, to keep it from happening. I think it's very important to keep an open Internet for whoever you are. This is called Net neutrality. It's very important to preserve Net neutrality for the future." And a fun tidbit — He mentions his 1989 memo to his boss at CERN that described his vision for the Web.
User Journal

Journal Journal: Educational Captcha

Journal by sabufrancis
I got sick and tired of looking a captchas that only had a random collection of letters. No doubt they prevent automated web robots from processing some critical forms because you are forced to type the letters from the captcha image. But what a waste of time! So I thought, why not make the captchas teach something when the person is in the middle of filling a form. Kind of a digression some may say. And they may very well be right. But then some others (Edward de Bono for e.g.) may call it a d

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