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Beware Employment Contracts
A lot of people think they have no negotiating ability. You do. When you're thinking of signing on with some company, and they send you a boiler-plate contract to sign, don't just sign it and send it back. Read it carefully. Alter it as you see fit, striking out sections, adding sections, and initialing each change. Then sign it, make a copy for yourself, and send it back.
Where it says:
company owns the rights to all work produced during the term of employment
Just strike it out, and change it to:
company owns the rights to code written during working hours and in direct furtherance of any tasks assigned by the company
See how much nicer that reads? Now, when you do this, there are two possibilities: either the company will ignore it and hire you, or they will object to your alteration of the contract. In the second case, if they stand firm on the boiler-plate contract, I suggest you simply ask for more money - for instance, if you were expecting an 8 hour/day job and their contract asserts that they own what you do 24 hours/day, then you'll need at least three times as much salary to compensate.
And if you and the company cannot reach an agreement, well, maybe you didn't want to work for them anyway. If they're already screwing you before you've even signed on, that's not a good omen.
There's already some good advice in the comments on the perlmonks story, so I'll leave it at that.
As you may well know, $lashdot has been experiencing technical difficulties tonight. The result of this has been the page being inaccessible for awhile. This happens from time to time for whatever reason, and every effort is made to restore service as soon as possible.
As you may also know, we are a Linux and open source site. This company is part of the OSDN, which supports the open source movement. We are also owned by VA Linux^H^H^H^H^HSoftware, formerly a company using Linux as core to its business. While there may be indeed legitimate criticisms to the Linux operating system and to the model of open source. It's a matter of what you think is best and not everyone is a Richard Stallman. It's very much understandable.
You have free speech on the internet most likely. Some countries limit it, but it's usually about extremist views about racism. If you're reading this, you almost certainly have the opportunity to disseminate your views on the subjects at hand.
We here at $lashdot, however, have a business to run. These views are not welcome here. They destroy our business and we're on a tight enough budget already. This means we don't need more cutbacks here. We use free software that's often littered with bugs, already. There's not much else to do without starting to dismiss people.
In short, this site reflects on us and on VA as a whole. It's as popular as any site on the OSDN and it's great publicity for VA to own a site such as $lashdot. In order to maintain this benefit from this site, it's sometimes necessary to force users to conform to minimal standards.
These standards mean we can't allow posts that point out problems with Linux or open source. These destroy the good image we seek to promote here. Furthermore, we are in competition with Microsoft in some ways. Posts that are pro-Microsoft are also unacceptable.
We don't like to delete comments that have replies to them. So to stop possible replies, we tend to cause an outage and delete the comments during that time. It may be slightly disruptive to whoever is reading at those times, but we won't censor legitimate discussion. We also won't want to delete replies to those posts in question reminding them of what this site is about. Most of the readership gets it. They will correct these few who are outspoken. We don't want to delete their comments and penalize them for correcting the few who don't get what this site is about.
In effect, we caused the outage tonight. It was relatively brief and done with good reason. I'm sure you, the readers of this site, will understand the need for these posts to be deleted. We apologize to an legitimate users whom the downtime might have inconvenienced. Thank you for your understanding.
This early post for Ida!
I'm a moderation tester. And yes, I was testing to see how many moderators read the actualy story content before rating comments.
You should be a moderator.
Wow, you guys managed to get Perl Monks slashdotted. It's completely gone already, just a few minutes after the story was posted. It's scary what a big thing Slashdot has become. Maybe it's time to move on to a better place.
A 4? Jesus Christ, the moderation system is worse than I thought.
Sigh
Bad me...punish me. Unfortunately, the story was /.ed. But the comment was insightful... Why does everyone have to be such an ass and try to prove /. wrong? It's a web site, you want to test moderation? How about testing how to get a life?
-sk
God BLESS America! Land of the FREE! Land of opportunity!!!
Muahahaaa!!!! Stupid Americans. Your laws make the former Soviet Union look like a kindergarten.
Don't you understand the theory of the circle? Capitalism pushed to its extreme becomes like its opposite, Communism.
And now, the former Communists are being better capitalists than you.
Your empire won't last much longer!
It gets REALLY fucking expensive. $75/per. And the fucking Texas Ranger Bike Cop Republican Guard WILL chase you down. Ever wondered why Texas looks kind of like a toilet? Because it's full of shit.
This is funny. I posted the above comment as AC, at 12:15pm and then I get this in my mail:
Moderation of "Re:Fix page widening!" Thursday March 21, @12:21PM
For a comment that is 3 weeks old! No doubt a editor was insulted by my above comment and decided to 'punish' me by moderating an old comment.
HaHaHa! The funny thing is I'm at Karma 50, so I don't give a fuck!
In the society you dream of, it would have been necessary for the king and priest to also be free. The fact that at least one of them needs to be murdered (the priest may have died of natural causes, although the implication is `not') is a demonstration that Mr Abbey's society (and so a man in it) is not free.
Your next problem is that in a conceptually free society, no individual could have any more authority than any other, except that other grant it to him. So if I decide that ripping people's entrails out is a fine thing, and start with you, you have no more authority to decide that this is wrong, than I have that this is right. In theory an impasse, in practice might-makes-right, the stronger individual or team gets to carry out their will.
The missing ingredient is an incorruptible lawmaker with power to enforce. It's ironic that in order to be free, you must be in someone else's power... of course, most people won't settle for this, reason be damned, because the obvious candidate for the seat is God.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Are you new to Linux?
VA Software.
You are a fucking idiot child.
You miss the point. "Plagiarism" is copying someone else's work and calling it your own. The poster isn't claiming Tilly's writing as his own - he specificially says that he's repeating the original text, with credit to the original author, in order to reduce traffic on the Perl Monks website.