Re:Things like this are easy to fix.
on
Google's Evil NDA
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· Score: 1
I'll grant you that one, I even have that clause in my own contracts. It's typically used for when state laws don't permit one part of a contract, or when someone like me doesn't know all the legal-speak, but lets presume it applies here too. You still can't unstrike a section of a contract and force someone to abide by it after it's been signed, which was the whole point.
You're also trying to take realestate contracts and apply them to employment practices, and those have far too many differences. The key difference being if you have a problem with a realestate contract, the worst case scenario is that the contract no longer applies and the home goes back to the original owner (with banks, lawyers, title companies, etc, this should never happen). With something like an NDA, the worst that can happen is you're no longer bound by the NDA and can disclose whatever you want. This isn't too far off from the GPL that everyone here loves, where if it somehow doesn't apply anymore, you lose the privileges it grants you and fall back to the copyright laws that forbid you from distributing it. The point being that you have to look at what happens when the contract, or even one clause no longer applies.
Also, not to be a stickler for details, most contracts that I've modified over the years were done electronically, it was faxed or mailed, and in most large companies, the legal department reviewed it once more before putting a stamp of approval and passing it back to management for their signature. There's rarely a red line crossing out sections of a contract because that's always done in advance electronically.
Re:Things like this are easy to fix.
on
Google's Evil NDA
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· Score: 1
Has that ever actually worked for anybody?
Yes, I alter contracts all the time, they rarely go signed by me without changes. Companies are used to this. As a self employed individual on contract projects, I usually change the "work for hire" where they own everything to one where I own everything and provide a non-exclusive license to use in the context of the project and transferable to child companies and any acquiring company, at no additional cost. Since I'm a consultant, the whole reason they bring me in is to benefit from my experience at other companies, so as long as they have some kind of non-disclosure for company proprietary data, they never have an issue with this. As an employee, you just have to make sure your changes make sense. They insisted on seeing past companies you've worked for on your resume, so why shouldn't you be allowed to say you work for google? Strike it, move on, and if they don't agree, find another company or start your own if no one else is doing it right.
Re:Things like this are easy to fix.
on
Google's Evil NDA
·
· Score: 3, Informative
IANAL, but from going through home sales and purchases a number of times now, each party must initial anywhere there was a change, to indicate that the change was accepted. If the candidate lines out an item, it may not be a valid revision unless someone with authority to represent Google also initials each stricken or modified comment.
If they don't initial and don't agree to your change, then the most they can do is declare the contract void. They aren't allowed to force you to agree to something you removed before signing the document. In this case, google doesn't want the entire NDA declared void, so there's nothing they can do to unstrike the comment other than not hire you and not tell you something subject to the NDA.
Seriously, why couldn't some kind of "GOOD" botnet be created that does this? If the spammers can do it, why can't Microsoft, Yahoo, Goolge, AOL, Symantec or someone? A botnet that goes around and secures all these drone computers would save the connected world a lot of headaches.
Because of liability and money. A large company won't do this because if they take control of your machine against your will through a security hole (and there's no other way they'd put a dent in the problem if people had to volunteer to have this installed) they are liable for any damage that does and open themselves up for trespassing lawsuits. Consider a patch that a company is not installing because it conflicts with business critical applications or because they are aware of an even bigger security hole it exposes.
As for some hacker doing it, it's all about money, and maybe a little fame. Doing this puts you in a worse position than the airline ticket hacker. So anyone that exposes themselves to this kind of risk, does so for money. And right now, there's money to be made in cutting out the competition in terms of making your botnet bigger than theirs and less likely to be removed (users are less likely to notice just one bot).
since this is essentially a record of government proceedings, what should be happening is that c-span should have a contract with the federal government to produce these videos and the resulting product should be entered directly into public domain.
"Should" philosophically, you're absolutely right. "Should" practically, I'd rather see tax dollars being spent on the national debt, unless c-span were to abuse their privileges, which I don't see occurring.
Thanks for the danheller.com link, great site. And point well made about the trademarks, though I don't think that's going to be an issue with what c-span is broadcasting.
Why the hell does a company own the copyright to the Americans peoples only source of in depth legislative coverage?
After the $5,000 bill for a toilet seat, do you really want to know how much it would cost the government to run a television feed and pay for the air time? We've got better things to spend money on when c-span does a perfectly fine job for 99.999% of the country.
The question remains whether videos of governmental proceedings should be public domain by default or whether the attribution requirement is reasonable in the face of easy video copying and distribution.
I'd say that the government cannot require a license on their proceedings since their work is implicitly public domain (except when those darn national security requirements get in the way). But if an organization (c-span is owned by the cable companies, not the government) that provides the content decides to place restrictions on their video, especially if it's just to receive credit for their effort, then we shouldn't have any problem with that.
To put it another way, I enjoy photography myself, and if I take a picture of a public building, the choice should be mine as to whether I provide it to the world without restriction or if I try to make some money for my efforts.
I think it's important that we have some kind of check against companies that treat their employees badly, but the gang mentality of unions doesn't work for me. Plus, we are competing against foreign companies that have a significantly lower cost of labor (even if they treated their employees fairly, there are many areas outside of the US that are cheaper to live). I'd prefer to see retail organizations proactively grade the employment conditions of the producers of their goods and place it right next to the price tag with a bright color coding. Producers will know that their cheap employment conditions will impact their sales and find a better way to treat their employees.
When I think of unions, the first two organizations that come to mind are US auto makers and airlines. Neither of these seem to be a good way to run a business. The employees have driven these companies to non-profitable levels, and even bankruptcy. Pensions are being turned over to the government to pay because the companies can no longer afford them. And the US government has bailed out various companies for fear of the impact that it could have if they completely went under. So when you think of all the US cars you see on the roads, stop to think how much of that car did you pay for with your tax dollars. I'm sure it's a fraction of a cent, but that's still a fraction to big when we're referring to someone else's personal property.
I agree that charter schools would be a nice experiment. I'd also like to see vouchers. Those the strongest against the vouchers seem to be the teachers unions, for obvious reasons. The rich could care less, they can afford private schools. The middle class would significantly benefit since private tuition is a significant burden for those that choose it. And for the lower class, it might just put a good education in reach and make a dent in the widening wage gap. Having the schools compete to be worthy of the students is probably a better motivation than trying to keep themselves off the government's "no child left behind" bad list.
The trade off however is to have employees with no meaningful negotiation power against their employers. The vast majority of States in the US are "Work at will".
You have a huge negotiating power. Mainly "my skills are more valued elsewhere, so I'm leaving."
Everyone likes to consider how unfair "at will" work is for the employee, but forget that the same goes for the employer. There's nothing legally binding you to 2-weeks notice, you can leave right now. There's also nothing that requires an employer to give you a severance when you're laid off. But the fact is, most employees will give some notice if the company was good to them, and most companies will give a severance if the employee was good to them. It's not just common courtesy, you and your company are known for how you treat others.
Personally, I'd rather have an "at will" environment where companies are much more likely to hire me with the knowledge that they can fire me if times get tight or if it turns out I'm not what I promised. The alternative is France, where the unemployment problem has been leading to riots. Before you bash someone, it doesn't hurt to consider it from the other side. How would you feel putting your life's work into a small business and have the government tell you that the hawaiian shirt guy that scares off customers can't be fired without showing his work is below par.
First, I'll say that our tax system is pretty screwed up, and your proposal to change it to a flat tax would be a welcome change.
However, there's an underlying theory that says you should tax bads, not goods, if you want to encourage good behavior. We should find a solution that encourages people to earn money and grow the economy, not to discourage income. For a healthy economy, we need to be encouraging more people to be producers, inventors, business creators, etc. And yet, these are the most taxed individuals when we tax the wealthy, their investments, and their income. When consumers pay the tax, we encourage more efficient behavior.
For example, I would be happy to see the tax on oil or gas climb faster than inflation, and so should every other environmentalist. And if I see one more Habitat for Humanity homeowner move in with a Lexus SUV, I'm going to find a better place to volunteer. The system we have built encourages people to have a low income and lots of goods, which is exactly what the large corporations that hire lots of people and sell goods want to encourage to keep their corporation sheltered profits high.
Your philosophy that we should adopt a tax based on what impacts the rich the most stems from lumping three groups of people into one. The wealth of this world is divided among the kleptocrats, heirs, and entrepreneurs. I think we all agree that the former should be eliminated. Messing with the second is up for debate, but I'm personally against it. And messing with the third group is unhealthy for your nation. The desire of entrepreneurs to create a better life for their heirs is the reason I'm against strongly taxing them.
Note, the last part was blatantly stolen from rlp who said it better than I ever will.
They get in trouble when they don't have logs of what people said on IM, email, phone calls, etc because that's how they catch insider trading.
What do they do about personal mobile phones?
Good question. I wasn't around long enough to find out, but I'd guess they made things like that a policy that the traders are expected to follow. Friends of mine that work in the pentagon just leave their phones in the car. But in IT, when it's possible to be restricted with little effort, and you're legally bound to, it's the norm that you just lock it down.
I've been a user that is locked into crazy setups. The traveling consultant at client sites who's PC is setup to be managed from the corporate network. At one point, I got tired of the insanity, took a ghost image of the machine they gave me, and installed linux on the machine (and then restored the ghost image in a vmware session).
But here's the thing, I don't ask for support from the IT department because I'm the odd guy. I know they can't support me. What annoys me (as the one who helps other IT departments manage lots of PC's) are the people that install various applications that cause our automated installs to fail. 90% of the machines are managed with little to no effort. It's the 10% that cause days of work while we try to figure out which of the 20 apps you installed is breaking our install tool.
And for all those against IM and email lockdown, I've been to trading companies where that's the law. They get in trouble when they don't have logs of what people said on IM, email, phone calls, etc because that's how they catch insider trading. Of course for every sensible rule, I've seen 10 that make no sense at all. As has been said before, the USB key should force companies to reevaluate their policies.
Fault-tolerance is either built into the problem or into the application. Take for example search, if one search server on the backend that is handling 0.1% of the web sites goes down, you may not know or even care that those results are missing (assuming the system doesn't have something built in to give that query to another node searching the same dataset).
In fraud detection, thinking of the credit card companies, it's typically looking for patterns after the transaction has already gone through, and if one node of the cluster goes down, maybe you give the same transaction list to another node. You never find every case of fraud this way, but you want something that can search as many (or all) of the transactions as quickly as possible to reduce the time between the first instance and shutting down the account.
For the other examples, you just build it into the system, e.g. one HA broker on the front that can give out a task to another node if the first one goes down. When you build a system like this, single points of failure in the server farm aren't the concern. It's the mean time between failures and the process to replace nodes, the power and cooling requirements, failure points outside of the nodes, etc.
Sadly, this is pretty normal these days, and I don't blame Google for doing it. They have to look out for their share holders, and that involves saving money when reasonable. I only partially blame the state, since if NC didn't do this, another state would and the jobs would go that way too, making NC a worse place for their residents. But the sad thing is that small businesses are just now getting their tax bills for the year from their counties (yes, for the privilege of having a file cabinet in my office, I owe the county more money). And the tax breaks that the big businesses get are basically discrimination against smaller businesses and anti-competitive.
We are raising barriers of entry into every large industry we create. I don't think that it's up to the states to fix this, but the federal level should pass a law banning these anti-competitive practices. No city, county, or state should have the right to change taxes on one group in such a way that it discourages competition. We should implement this similar to anti-discrimination laws that we already have to minimize the impact on the local governments right to raise money.
What we need are laws to protect our privacy, not a president that says privacy is a nice thing. And who makes the laws? Congress. So if you really want to see her do something about this, you should be more encouraged to keep her in her current job. Unless she happens to pass a bunch of laws and then you'll want someone to enforce them. Given the track record of congress, I doubt anything will improve. Given the track record of Hillary, I suspect she'll say whatever it takes to get elected.
She's a politician, regardless of what she says, what her gender is, or who she's married to. And as the old joke goes, how do you know when a politician is lying? When their lips are moving.
"These factors suggest that, sooner or later, the penny will join the farthing (one-quarter of a penny) and the hapenny (one-half of a penny) in coin museums."
They didn't stop minting those. I just wrote a little program like a virus that rounds all the amounts down to the nearest penny and puts the difference into an account of mine. I'm going to adjust it to the nearest $.05 shortly to fix the penny issue.
Um, no. There will always be some microsoft tool that requires their browser causing some form of lock-in. Heck, using microsoft's action pack subscription web page to purchase software requires IE. What the numbers mean is that web designers are finally paying attention and making their sites support firefox and a few other standards based browsers or risk loosing a good chunk of their customers. And now that everyone's favorite web pages work in firefox, they can start making a piecemeal migration away from vendor lock-in. However, just because they can use firefox for most things, you can be sure that microsoft will ensure there is lock-in someone and default to their browser giving them a 75% chunk of the market for life. The next chunk of the monopoly to fragment will be office with various online tools and openoffice making advances. But, I expect that will be another 2-4 years before we see anything like firefox's progress.
That wasn't my resolution this year, but maybe 4 or 5 years ago, and I'm still sticking with it. My personal preference was the local Habitat for Humanity chapter. It's educational, a good workout, lots of fun, and you see the people you are helping.
As for my list this year, it's to get a treadmill and put the mythtv in the same room. My workout routine went out the window when it got cold, wet, and dark outside. I also plan to spend some time developing some software in the hopes of building a new line of work for myself. While odds are against me selling it, the returns are high enough to make the risks worth the attempt.
Finally, resolutions shouldn't be left for just the new year. I decide to do things all the time. And it's also important to focus on changing your lifestyle permanently, not going on the infamous diets to lose a few pounds.
Sorry to hear about your accident. For those that haven't been so unfortunate, I'd recommend long term disability insurance. It's not on my resolution list, but it has been on my todo list and the paperwork just arrived in the mail yesterday. For those that think they don't need it, ask yourself where you will get the money to pay your bills should you suffer a major injury and if you are able to keep your job if you can't drive.
Also, I know this doesn't apply to you, but for all the college students and recent grads out there, don't spend what you don't earn. The exceptions to this are your education and home, and for those, be conservative and make sure you can afford the payments down the road.
The best and worst part of javascript is the client side scripting. Unlike just about every other language, you don't get to pick the best implemented compiler or interpreter or platform for your program. Rather, whatever web browser happens to pull up your page today with a half implemented javascript spec is what you get. You can't just test every piece of code you write, you have to test every piece of code with every platform and browser you plan on supporting. And as bad as that is, there just aren't any better options for cross platform/browser support for client side scripting that are built in.
A legal system can be simple, consistant, just, and efficient, but not all at the same time. In our society, and pretty much every other civilized society, we've chosen to go for just and consistant and where possible, efficient.
If I had to choose, I'd pick simple and just. As long as I'm able to understand the law and it's applied fairly I'd be willing to give up some consistency if it means I get to actually know I'm breaking the law in advance. If the common person is unable to tell you what case law applies from the past 20 years and if they are breaking the law, then what's the point in being consistent.
I fully admit that this system will never come into existence, but more because of how congressmen do their jobs than for practical reasons. If you have a suggestion for how one should fix the system, feel free to say it. Otherwise, you're encouraging an environment where the difference between breaking the law and being a good citizen is how much the police like you. While that's worked well for me in the past (cop reducing a speeding ticket), that doesn't mean that it's right, or even consistent, or even just, and I'm incline to think it's pretty inefficient when you look at our courts.
The James Madison quote mentioned below basically sums up my philosophy. I'm throwing out one possible implementation of it, but there are certainly others that are easier to implement and result in a better system.
Before any additional law (or tax, regulation, etc) two other laws must be canceled, until such a time as the general public has a firm understanding of all of the laws they are required to obey. At that point, every new law must cancel a previous law in order to be entered into the books. The end result should be a 200 page paper back book that is required reading for a high school student. Enforcement of the law should be done by the letter of the law and not by looking over past cases. If a law is ambiguous, it should be clarified and replaced with a new law.
Consider what would happen to the bureaucracy if the most complex tax return was 5 pages long, how much better the legal system would be if anyone could defend themselves without knowledge of years of case law, and what would happen to the special interest if you had to fight against every other special interest for the little space left in the law books left for exemptions.
Of course, that is about as likely to happen as congress voting for a pay cut or the two party system implementing a ranking voting method that doesn't have a built in bias for the two party system.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll grant you that one, I even have that clause in my own contracts. It's typically used for when state laws don't permit one part of a contract, or when someone like me doesn't know all the legal-speak, but lets presume it applies here too. You still can't unstrike a section of a contract and force someone to abide by it after it's been signed, which was the whole point.
You're also trying to take realestate contracts and apply them to employment practices, and those have far too many differences. The key difference being if you have a problem with a realestate contract, the worst case scenario is that the contract no longer applies and the home goes back to the original owner (with banks, lawyers, title companies, etc, this should never happen). With something like an NDA, the worst that can happen is you're no longer bound by the NDA and can disclose whatever you want. This isn't too far off from the GPL that everyone here loves, where if it somehow doesn't apply anymore, you lose the privileges it grants you and fall back to the copyright laws that forbid you from distributing it. The point being that you have to look at what happens when the contract, or even one clause no longer applies.
Also, not to be a stickler for details, most contracts that I've modified over the years were done electronically, it was faxed or mailed, and in most large companies, the legal department reviewed it once more before putting a stamp of approval and passing it back to management for their signature. There's rarely a red line crossing out sections of a contract because that's always done in advance electronically.
Yes, I alter contracts all the time, they rarely go signed by me without changes. Companies are used to this. As a self employed individual on contract projects, I usually change the "work for hire" where they own everything to one where I own everything and provide a non-exclusive license to use in the context of the project and transferable to child companies and any acquiring company, at no additional cost. Since I'm a consultant, the whole reason they bring me in is to benefit from my experience at other companies, so as long as they have some kind of non-disclosure for company proprietary data, they never have an issue with this. As an employee, you just have to make sure your changes make sense. They insisted on seeing past companies you've worked for on your resume, so why shouldn't you be allowed to say you work for google? Strike it, move on, and if they don't agree, find another company or start your own if no one else is doing it right.
If they don't initial and don't agree to your change, then the most they can do is declare the contract void. They aren't allowed to force you to agree to something you removed before signing the document. In this case, google doesn't want the entire NDA declared void, so there's nothing they can do to unstrike the comment other than not hire you and not tell you something subject to the NDA.
As for some hacker doing it, it's all about money, and maybe a little fame. Doing this puts you in a worse position than the airline ticket hacker. So anyone that exposes themselves to this kind of risk, does so for money. And right now, there's money to be made in cutting out the competition in terms of making your botnet bigger than theirs and less likely to be removed (users are less likely to notice just one bot).
Thanks for the danheller.com link, great site. And point well made about the trademarks, though I don't think that's going to be an issue with what c-span is broadcasting.
After the $5,000 bill for a toilet seat, do you really want to know how much it would cost the government to run a television feed and pay for the air time? We've got better things to spend money on when c-span does a perfectly fine job for 99.999% of the country.
To put it another way, I enjoy photography myself, and if I take a picture of a public building, the choice should be mine as to whether I provide it to the world without restriction or if I try to make some money for my efforts.
I think it's important that we have some kind of check against companies that treat their employees badly, but the gang mentality of unions doesn't work for me. Plus, we are competing against foreign companies that have a significantly lower cost of labor (even if they treated their employees fairly, there are many areas outside of the US that are cheaper to live). I'd prefer to see retail organizations proactively grade the employment conditions of the producers of their goods and place it right next to the price tag with a bright color coding. Producers will know that their cheap employment conditions will impact their sales and find a better way to treat their employees.
When I think of unions, the first two organizations that come to mind are US auto makers and airlines. Neither of these seem to be a good way to run a business. The employees have driven these companies to non-profitable levels, and even bankruptcy. Pensions are being turned over to the government to pay because the companies can no longer afford them. And the US government has bailed out various companies for fear of the impact that it could have if they completely went under. So when you think of all the US cars you see on the roads, stop to think how much of that car did you pay for with your tax dollars. I'm sure it's a fraction of a cent, but that's still a fraction to big when we're referring to someone else's personal property.
I agree that charter schools would be a nice experiment. I'd also like to see vouchers. Those the strongest against the vouchers seem to be the teachers unions, for obvious reasons. The rich could care less, they can afford private schools. The middle class would significantly benefit since private tuition is a significant burden for those that choose it. And for the lower class, it might just put a good education in reach and make a dent in the widening wage gap. Having the schools compete to be worthy of the students is probably a better motivation than trying to keep themselves off the government's "no child left behind" bad list.
Everyone likes to consider how unfair "at will" work is for the employee, but forget that the same goes for the employer. There's nothing legally binding you to 2-weeks notice, you can leave right now. There's also nothing that requires an employer to give you a severance when you're laid off. But the fact is, most employees will give some notice if the company was good to them, and most companies will give a severance if the employee was good to them. It's not just common courtesy, you and your company are known for how you treat others.
Personally, I'd rather have an "at will" environment where companies are much more likely to hire me with the knowledge that they can fire me if times get tight or if it turns out I'm not what I promised. The alternative is France, where the unemployment problem has been leading to riots. Before you bash someone, it doesn't hurt to consider it from the other side. How would you feel putting your life's work into a small business and have the government tell you that the hawaiian shirt guy that scares off customers can't be fired without showing his work is below par.
First, I'll say that our tax system is pretty screwed up, and your proposal to change it to a flat tax would be a welcome change.
However, there's an underlying theory that says you should tax bads, not goods, if you want to encourage good behavior. We should find a solution that encourages people to earn money and grow the economy, not to discourage income. For a healthy economy, we need to be encouraging more people to be producers, inventors, business creators, etc. And yet, these are the most taxed individuals when we tax the wealthy, their investments, and their income. When consumers pay the tax, we encourage more efficient behavior.
For example, I would be happy to see the tax on oil or gas climb faster than inflation, and so should every other environmentalist. And if I see one more Habitat for Humanity homeowner move in with a Lexus SUV, I'm going to find a better place to volunteer. The system we have built encourages people to have a low income and lots of goods, which is exactly what the large corporations that hire lots of people and sell goods want to encourage to keep their corporation sheltered profits high.
Your philosophy that we should adopt a tax based on what impacts the rich the most stems from lumping three groups of people into one. The wealth of this world is divided among the kleptocrats, heirs, and entrepreneurs. I think we all agree that the former should be eliminated. Messing with the second is up for debate, but I'm personally against it. And messing with the third group is unhealthy for your nation. The desire of entrepreneurs to create a better life for their heirs is the reason I'm against strongly taxing them.
Note, the last part was blatantly stolen from rlp who said it better than I ever will.
a snowball's chance in hell of ever working.
I've been a user that is locked into crazy setups. The traveling consultant at client sites who's PC is setup to be managed from the corporate network. At one point, I got tired of the insanity, took a ghost image of the machine they gave me, and installed linux on the machine (and then restored the ghost image in a vmware session).
But here's the thing, I don't ask for support from the IT department because I'm the odd guy. I know they can't support me. What annoys me (as the one who helps other IT departments manage lots of PC's) are the people that install various applications that cause our automated installs to fail. 90% of the machines are managed with little to no effort. It's the 10% that cause days of work while we try to figure out which of the 20 apps you installed is breaking our install tool.
And for all those against IM and email lockdown, I've been to trading companies where that's the law. They get in trouble when they don't have logs of what people said on IM, email, phone calls, etc because that's how they catch insider trading. Of course for every sensible rule, I've seen 10 that make no sense at all. As has been said before, the USB key should force companies to reevaluate their policies.
Fault-tolerance is either built into the problem or into the application. Take for example search, if one search server on the backend that is handling 0.1% of the web sites goes down, you may not know or even care that those results are missing (assuming the system doesn't have something built in to give that query to another node searching the same dataset).
In fraud detection, thinking of the credit card companies, it's typically looking for patterns after the transaction has already gone through, and if one node of the cluster goes down, maybe you give the same transaction list to another node. You never find every case of fraud this way, but you want something that can search as many (or all) of the transactions as quickly as possible to reduce the time between the first instance and shutting down the account.
For the other examples, you just build it into the system, e.g. one HA broker on the front that can give out a task to another node if the first one goes down. When you build a system like this, single points of failure in the server farm aren't the concern. It's the mean time between failures and the process to replace nodes, the power and cooling requirements, failure points outside of the nodes, etc.
GV? Looks like the ice cream fell off the cone to me.
Sadly, this is pretty normal these days, and I don't blame Google for doing it. They have to look out for their share holders, and that involves saving money when reasonable. I only partially blame the state, since if NC didn't do this, another state would and the jobs would go that way too, making NC a worse place for their residents. But the sad thing is that small businesses are just now getting their tax bills for the year from their counties (yes, for the privilege of having a file cabinet in my office, I owe the county more money). And the tax breaks that the big businesses get are basically discrimination against smaller businesses and anti-competitive.
We are raising barriers of entry into every large industry we create. I don't think that it's up to the states to fix this, but the federal level should pass a law banning these anti-competitive practices. No city, county, or state should have the right to change taxes on one group in such a way that it discourages competition. We should implement this similar to anti-discrimination laws that we already have to minimize the impact on the local governments right to raise money.
What we need are laws to protect our privacy, not a president that says privacy is a nice thing. And who makes the laws? Congress. So if you really want to see her do something about this, you should be more encouraged to keep her in her current job. Unless she happens to pass a bunch of laws and then you'll want someone to enforce them. Given the track record of congress, I doubt anything will improve. Given the track record of Hillary, I suspect she'll say whatever it takes to get elected.
She's a politician, regardless of what she says, what her gender is, or who she's married to. And as the old joke goes, how do you know when a politician is lying? When their lips are moving.
"has Microsoft finally met its match?"
Um, no. There will always be some microsoft tool that requires their browser causing some form of lock-in. Heck, using microsoft's action pack subscription web page to purchase software requires IE. What the numbers mean is that web designers are finally paying attention and making their sites support firefox and a few other standards based browsers or risk loosing a good chunk of their customers. And now that everyone's favorite web pages work in firefox, they can start making a piecemeal migration away from vendor lock-in. However, just because they can use firefox for most things, you can be sure that microsoft will ensure there is lock-in someone and default to their browser giving them a 75% chunk of the market for life. The next chunk of the monopoly to fragment will be office with various online tools and openoffice making advances. But, I expect that will be another 2-4 years before we see anything like firefox's progress.
That wasn't my resolution this year, but maybe 4 or 5 years ago, and I'm still sticking with it. My personal preference was the local Habitat for Humanity chapter. It's educational, a good workout, lots of fun, and you see the people you are helping.
As for my list this year, it's to get a treadmill and put the mythtv in the same room. My workout routine went out the window when it got cold, wet, and dark outside. I also plan to spend some time developing some software in the hopes of building a new line of work for myself. While odds are against me selling it, the returns are high enough to make the risks worth the attempt.
Finally, resolutions shouldn't be left for just the new year. I decide to do things all the time. And it's also important to focus on changing your lifestyle permanently, not going on the infamous diets to lose a few pounds.
Also, I know this doesn't apply to you, but for all the college students and recent grads out there, don't spend what you don't earn. The exceptions to this are your education and home, and for those, be conservative and make sure you can afford the payments down the road.
The best and worst part of javascript is the client side scripting. Unlike just about every other language, you don't get to pick the best implemented compiler or interpreter or platform for your program. Rather, whatever web browser happens to pull up your page today with a half implemented javascript spec is what you get. You can't just test every piece of code you write, you have to test every piece of code with every platform and browser you plan on supporting. And as bad as that is, there just aren't any better options for cross platform/browser support for client side scripting that are built in.
I fully admit that this system will never come into existence, but more because of how congressmen do their jobs than for practical reasons. If you have a suggestion for how one should fix the system, feel free to say it. Otherwise, you're encouraging an environment where the difference between breaking the law and being a good citizen is how much the police like you. While that's worked well for me in the past (cop reducing a speeding ticket), that doesn't mean that it's right, or even consistent, or even just, and I'm incline to think it's pretty inefficient when you look at our courts.
The James Madison quote mentioned below basically sums up my philosophy. I'm throwing out one possible implementation of it, but there are certainly others that are easier to implement and result in a better system.
I'll second that. My philosophy was similar:
Before any additional law (or tax, regulation, etc) two other laws must be canceled, until such a time as the general public has a firm understanding of all of the laws they are required to obey. At that point, every new law must cancel a previous law in order to be entered into the books. The end result should be a 200 page paper back book that is required reading for a high school student. Enforcement of the law should be done by the letter of the law and not by looking over past cases. If a law is ambiguous, it should be clarified and replaced with a new law.
Consider what would happen to the bureaucracy if the most complex tax return was 5 pages long, how much better the legal system would be if anyone could defend themselves without knowledge of years of case law, and what would happen to the special interest if you had to fight against every other special interest for the little space left in the law books left for exemptions.
Of course, that is about as likely to happen as congress voting for a pay cut or the two party system implementing a ranking voting method that doesn't have a built in bias for the two party system.