Just as a (sympathetic) note here from a PostgreSQL guy.
I stopped working with MySQL when PostgreSQL 7.3 came out. Prior to that, I did most of my prototyping on MySQL and then would move the scripts over to PostgreSQL (which I did since PostgreSQL 6.5). The basic facts are:
1) Prior to 7.3, PostgreSQL, while superior in many ways, was just a pain to deal with when trying to prototype databases (dropping a column was one of the big issues... you couldn't). MySQL was so much easier to work with. 2) Firebird, Ingress II, were not available.
As much as I advocate PostgreSQL for *all* tasks now, there was a time when this was not the case.
MySQL has generally gotten a lot of flak for not being a "real" RDBMS. I.e. for a long time it didn't have transactions, the ability to really enforce data consistancy and the like. While many of these are being addressed they look to many of us who do RDBMS-backed buisness apps like they are only partial solutions (strict mode can be turned off by any client application, if we distribute software we have no way of knowing that transactions really are enabled on the server, etc).
At the same time, MySQL has traditionally excelled for things like light-weight web content management and the like. It is almost as if MySQL was designed originally for this sort of task as its core market.
What were the original design goals for MySQL? Has MySQL outgrown them and moving on to become something else?
IANAL, but you give these agreements, and your work together in exchange for the money you are paid.
However, having said this, my suggestion is that this might be unenforcible because it would suggest that work you would do for another employer would be theirs as well for a period of time after you leave. That seems to me to be a stretch but again, IANAL, and it need not be legally enforcible to make your life difficult.
F0r example, as an employer, if you didn't tell me about such contracts when I hired you and I found out later, I would fire you because that provides a strong risk to my business. If you did tell me, I would have to decide whether it is worth possibly fighting with your previous employer, how I wanted to try to mitigate the risk, and so forth. It would make hiring you more difficult and more expensive which is probably the point.
In general, it is probably a good idea to assume all contracts are enforcible when signing. This is simply a matter of recognizing that regardless of whether something would be upheld in court, it could still be used against you.
There are two other points as well, beyond the scope of legal advice (IANAL, TINLA, etc, and I am not even addressing legal issues here).
The first is that contracts like this are at least a symptom of an employer's approach to employees. This means, bailing on the company as quickly as possible. As an employee, you probably don't want to be in a position where the employer demands these things.
Secondly, one of the serious issues you have here is that some areas are clearly unenforcible but the goal may be to have a pretense to legally threaten your next employer. In short it doesn't have to be legally enforcible to make your life difficult (as in very hard to find another job).
Of course it is also possible that this is an honest mistake-- that someone decided that this would make a good clause without thinking through the ramifications. In that case, you may want to try to open a rational dialog about what is being asked of you in the contract and see i you can get it changed.
"They" is something I would expect someone with a BA in Linguistics to accept;-). After all you aren't studying what high school English teachers teach (which isn't English as a language, but rather good "style"). In short, you study how people use language, while the English teacher tries to show you how to communicate clearly.
There are several issues with using "they" as a generic singular. The largest one is that it causes a conflict of number when used with a clearly singular indefinite pronoune. For example "Someone should claim their keys" doesn't read well. Compare with "Anyone who has lost keys should claim their keys at the lost and found" and "Everyone should claim their keys."
As I am sure you are aware, Modern English inherited a lot of screwy gender stuff from Middle English (but most of this was not present in Old English). Unfortunately the problem is there but we have no clear solution from a communication perspective. The obvious solution would be to go back to they/that. So the first example would become:
"Someone should claim thats keys.";-)
(Note that "That" is the neuter version of the same root that gives us "she." That:she::it:he.)
"His" is decended from the genitive (i.e. posessive) form of both the masculine and neuter (i.e. 'hit' -> Md. Eng. 'it') version of the same word. "Him" is also the dative form of both. So yes, makes perfect sense if you know Old English...
I don't think WWII was the issue. The fact is that if you go back before the industrial revolution, you will find that whole sectors of the economy ran on women's work. These included making textiles, for example. Women were (and still are) very much involved in farm labor, and worked hard (till do). For the most part, they didn't just stay home and raise kids. They stayed home, raised kids, and made money.
The first sectors of the economy that were transformed by the industrial revolution were those areas where women had primarily ran via cotage industries prior to that point. The industrial revolution caused a drastic collapse of those cottage industries, effectively excluding women from the economic roles they had filled prior. Urbanization followed and a lot of the same women who had their own businesses making cloth ended up employed for pennies in the mills which displaced them.
I think that long-term we are going to see a lot of people (men and women) opting for home-based businesses of their own design, returning to a model where one parent is at home, takes care of the children, and runs a business at the same time.
When I worked at Microsoft, they handled things a bit differently. At the beginning of employment I had to sign a contract with similar terms to the ones you mention, but there were some differences.
1) I also filled out an invention disclosure list which excluded any of my own projects from the contract. Out of the entire room of new hires, I was the only one who did this (I take the time to read contracts). I was never really sure how the policy on open source affected this since all of my disclosure were open source, but my reading said that continuing to work on these would be OK.
2) I also filed (within my first year) for moonlighting permission to do my own consulting work (specifically mentioning open source). This provided me a shield for my own open source work without ceding the copyrights to Microsoft.
3) I also noted that the non-compete clause was appropriately scoped and did not exclude working for all competitors in all capacities, it only prevented me from taking jobs where there was a reasonable likelihood of IP leakage. I.e. one can't be an MS Office coder who then takes a job doing similar work on OpenOffice, but the same person might be able to work for IBM as a Linux kernel engineer.
When I quit, I ended up doing so without notice due to a number of personal issues at the time. I was able to do so and keep rights to all software I developed on my own time, and remain eligible for rehire. Sadly, a lot fo other companies seem to want to lock you in for life. I know of at least one person who was asked to sign a broad non-compete simply because his company lost an executive to a competitor. This is a service business with very little in the way of trade secrets, etc. And it is highly unlikely that there is a pro-competitive reason for this sort of clause in his case.
In short the question to ask is whether the contract is fair and provides you as an employee with adequate protections. If it is not, then I would look elsewhere. Employees should look out for their own interests, and employers who try to own employees as contractual slaves should have a harder time finding employees than those who are good to their employees.
Note that here in Washington, we have at-will employment laws too. The idea is that an employee can quit without notice, and an employer can terminate the employment without notice. This is fair. I have unfortunately had to be in both sides of this in the past and have had to quit a job without notice and yet remain on good terms with my former employer. But this varies from state to state.
Anyway the key thing about employment contracts is that they should be bilateral. This shouldn't be the employee giving up additional right in exchange for employment but either a clarification of expectations or an exchange of additional promises (you agree to give x weeks notice, and I agree to a severance package if I terminate your employment without notice, for example).
Typically non-compete clauses do last beyond the terms of employment though my business has no need for such terms. They should be appropriately scoped, however. I.e. when I worked for Microsoft I was barred from competing with them in areas where I had access to trade secrets for a period of 6 months (iirc, might have been a year) after working for them-- the goal was quite clearly to prevent me from taking Microsoft source code and giving it to competition. This was reasonable. Their moonlighting policies were also somewhat reasonable (but less reasonable since at one point I had moonlighting permissions revoked because Microsoft decided to get into a market where I would be competing with them).
If things are too one-sided you need to be looking for another job. If you are a good worker you should always be able to find a way (even if it means starting your own business). I hate to plug Microsoft on this forum but I did find their practices reasonable in these areas. I would sooner work there again then at a place that was much more one-sided regarding employment. But then, my company is hiring Perl and PL/PGSQL programmers (email resume to chris@metatrontech.com) for work on FOSS projects.
While I agree with your points, I wouldn't sign such a contract. The basic issue is that it really is not worth going to court to ask if it is legal, and I would be willing to bet that your next employer would rather terminate your employment than end up in such a court battle.
And BTW, if people are really looking for ways out of that sort of thing, my firm is hiring (send email to chris@metatrontech.com w/resume). Mostly looking for steller Perl programmers (experience with financial software a bonus).
The basic problem is that the LaGrange points 4-5 are stable, but require a fair bit of energy to get to in part because you have to slow down a lot more (no nice large gravity well to assume an orbit around).
In general the amount of time to get there/back would be dependant on how much energy you want to put into getting there and back.
Finally we do already have a satellite (SOHO) on the L1 point relative to Earth and the Sun. This is an unstable point so some energy is used maintaining position However it is a telescope on an L point relative to the Earth and Sun.
I share your view of SQL-Ledger. Unfortunately, forking was a matter of supporting some projects I inherited (and the fact that SQL-Ledger was for a time the best FOSS SMB accounting app available, which says alot about the competition or lack thereof). Take a look at what we are doing in/trunk to see where we are going. By 1.3, we will be well on our what to a full, secure rewrite and re-design of the code. Interestingly, our code is shrinking considerably with each major release.
My issues with Qmail have tended to stick to only a few of the standards (no support for 2554, for example, without patches). Yes netqmail is helpful but without active maintenance of the main application, this means that Qmail is more or less frozen on old archaic standards. (any standards later than 2821 aren't even mentioned by DJB in his reerence, as well, nor are critical extensions for preventing spam and the like).
The second issue is that DJB seems to like to break as many conventions as possible. He does not seem to try to follow standards such as those of file system layout much at all. Unlike many others. One gets the impression that anything one runs that he wrote that it is at best tacked on to the side of the *nix OS and doesnt really integrate well (HTML-based help pages often replace MAN pages, files and scripts are not where one expects them to be, and so forth). These can't be corrected because any changes have to be approved by him personally.
Finally DJB does some generally braindead things (such as extremely stupid sources of random numbers (such as getpid()), and the extreme phobia of any sort of parsing results in strange bugs when it comes to compatibility with certain email clients. These algorithms are braindead because they don't take into account future standards which could be intended to be backward compatible and yet cause strange bugs to mysteriously appear in the server software, and because they are otherwise brittle.
Having said this, I generally agree with all of DJB's points about security with the exception of the categorization that least privilege is a distraction. In reality it is one level which helps to reduce the severity of security bugs as they occur. This is thus one aspect of defense in depth (which is to minimize the amount and types of damage that can be done at every point in execution). In fact, this idea of privilege separation is one of the basic mechanisms behind Qmail's lack of trusted code.
1) After divorce proceedings were started, she got her daughter dual citizenship (with Russia) 2 months before she disappeared she completed the same process for her son. Obviously she planned to return to Russia and take them with her (there is no reasonable explenation for that action). 2) There were clear issues with her boyfriend (Sturgeon) and also with her estranged husband. 3) She does not appear to have had a license to practice medicine in the US as far as I can tell. 4) As far as I can tell, getting permission to take the children back to Russia would have been difficult due to resulting custody disputes (they can't easily just fly back for the one week night a week or the every other weekend, can they?).
So, after she disappears, the only witnesses who can testify to Hans's actual behavior that weekend (his children) are whisked away to Russia never to return. AFAICS, they are not coming back to testify at the trial. If she had money (which she did if Hans and Ramone are to be believed and she embezzled money from the business), there is no reason she couldn't have turned to the Russian mafia for help. The point is that as far as we know. all her plans were executed and her children were taken to Russia, so the only question remains whether she made it back there alive or not.
Note that this poses a few interesting issues. 1) The children are the key to any alabi by Hans. Their removal casts inherent doubt as to whether he could have killed her as police have suggested. 2) If there is evidence that her minivan was driven by someone other than her (as in fingerprints, DNA, or the like) this might be significant. Also if she was using ecstasy, that would also explain the wild driving, I would think. This represents a serious unanswered question. She could have bought the groceries specifically in order to frame Hans. People do strange things during divorce.
Ultimately things boil down to the following possibilities: 1) Nina is alive, lying low in the US until things die down, when she will return to Russia 2) Nina is alive in Russia 3) Hans killed Nina 4) Someone else killed Nina.
I would suggest that, based on the evidence we know of now, all four theories are not without doubt. We don't know if Nina is alive or not, where she is if she is alive, and, if not, who killed her. I would personally suggest that we will see an acquittal and the case will drop off the news, the kids will stay in Russia, and only if we are exceedingly lucky, will we ever learn the truth beyond a shadow of a doubt.
I run Qmail still. I intend to move to Postfix fairly soon.
There is only *one* reasonable advantage of Qmail, that the security engineering is one of the best I have seen (there is still room for improvement, for example a missing rcpthosts file should not turn a SMTP server into an open relay-- it is better to fail to safe conditions and reject everything).
The major disadvantages are: 1) I don't see any attempts by DJB to modernize the software. I would therefore suggest that the project has been orphaned. 2) Since it is not open source, nobody can pick it up, modernize it, and release a version with compliance of newer standards (i.e the ones which have come out in the last 10 years, meaning you are stuck with pop-before-smtp and the like:-( ). 3) While the security engineering is good, the overall software engineering leaves a lot to be desired. In particular a lot of really braindead algorithms are used.
If the murder has occurred, then you have to ask why it happened, and what can be done to prevent similar circumstances from happening again. If it is due to mental illness, the proper response is to confine the individual to a mental health institution until it is determined that there is no further threat (could be very soon or never-- suppose it appears to have been caused by a frontal-lobe brain tumor). In that case, this is treatment, not punishment. Another great example would be postpartum psychosis causing a mother to kill her child or children (if this has happened more than once, court-ordered sterilization might be necessary).
Suppose on the other hand, that something unusual happened (for example coming home, finding one's wife having an affair, and murdering both individuals). The key to understand is that this example is traumatic for everyone, and that the murderer will also need both punishment and therapy in order to help prevent this from becoming a cycle. Unfortunately, people have a way of recreating unusual circumstances around them through their own actions, and so I would question what would qualify as a one-time murder which would certainly not repeat.
We should be looking at punishment as a form of therapy and look at how the length of incarceration affects recitavism rates.
1) She got Rory his Russian citizenship 2 months before she disappeared. 2) The children are then allowed out of the country with the idea that they will return. They do not. 3) The children are not allowed to testify at the trial by the Nina's mother. 4) She is accused (by both Hans and Ramone) of embezzling money from Namesys.
I am not saying she did, and I am not saying she didn't, but one possibility is that she became afraid fo Sturgeon, wasn't happy with Hans, and decided that the best thing to do was to return to Russia with her kids. This would only be really possible if she or her mother had full custody rights. Note that there is also accusations of Sturgeon trying to teach the kids to like pain, and getting Nina introduced to ecstasy. All in all, it is not an irrational choice to make, and not one which would have been beyond her means to do without messing up the fact that she is missing (and Hans is at least a suspect, etc).
In the end, unless Nina is found alive or dead, we will probably never know with any certainty what actually happened.
1) Eye witness sees an individual pushing the victim into a car at gunpoint. Hears what he thinks is a gunshot. 2) Forensic team finds evidence of a substantial pool of blood which is almost certainly related to a cause of death. DNA evidence suggests it is the victims. 3) On a tip, police search a workshop containing barrels of sulfuric acid. In the bottom of one they find sludge consistant with the distruction of animal tissue and also find intact human gallstones. The defendant is also in possession of valuables the alleged victim had last time she was seen. 4) Defendant freely confesses to the crime 5) a substantial bone, such as a femur, rib, skull is found, and DNA tests link it to the victim.
The problem is that, as a jury, the first question you have to ask is "Is it reasonable to doubt that she is dead?" If so, there is reasonable doubt as to the murder, isn't there? Once you have established that, the next question is "Is there reasonable doubt that Hans did it?" If either question has reasonable doubt, it seems not to reach the question of whether there is reasonable doubt that Hans is guilty of the crime.
Cremation: Requires a special crematorium, and generally also requires grinding bones. Not really practical.
Dumping in the ocean. Better hope that the body doesn't wash up onto the shore, get discovered by divers, etc. Pulling this off with a high degree of certainty would probably require strong knowledge of ocean currents or a boat capable of going pretty far out.
Now, having said this, part of the issue is that you may not know exactly where the body is. If it is buried in the woods, for example.... So I don;t think one should necessarily have a body. I do think one should definitely have some reasonably conclusive evidence that the given individual is in fact deceased and that foul play was involved. That evidence could be a large pool of blood, an eye witness, a body, gallstones in sludge at the bottom of an acid drum, or something similar. In this case, you only have a (reasonably discredited) story of a child who says they were arguing as far as evidence that the crime was actually committed (and some circumstantial evidence which may or may not be dispositive).
My questions are: 1) Was there evidence of a struggle in her car beyond her groceries being in disarray? So far we hear the answer doesn't seem to be a strong "yes." This suggests that it may be that she had a melt down in her car (divorce is hard on people). This is obviously the most important place in the case.
2) How extensive was the blood they found? So far it seems like there are traces of small blood stains which don't necessarily point to murder.
there was fairly strong evidence that someone had been killed and dissolved in the sulfuric acid (the gallstones), there was a confession, and there was strong evidence that he had fraudulantly sold various properties of the victims. What made that particularly horrible was the idea that he did this simply to pay gambling debts.
None of this applies tothe Reiser case. Is there even proof beyond a reasonable doubt that Nina was murdered by anyone? My point is that this sort of thing should be required *before* a murder case can proceed. I don't care if they have a body or not, or whether there is some suspicious sludge in the bottom of a drum of acid containing human gallstones, or if there is a substantial pool of blood, or some other strong evidence that the person was dead.
I think that the death penalty should be reserved for those who are unusually likely to re-offend based on objective factors (I would actually consider premeditation an objective factor), and for whom we can't afford to keep piling up victims.
Is the role of the criminal justice system to make people "pay" for their crimes? Or to provide the right amount of punishment necessary to give that individual a chance to change? I.e. do we want vengeance or do we want the ability to make former criminals able to become productive members of society. (Obviously the question is one of degree and focus, more than structure.)
Suppose the father or mother is dying of a very painful cancer which can only be treated using prohibitively expensive (and torturous) chemotherapy.
I agree that many or most suicides are irresponsible. But does that mean that all are? Are there any counterexamples you would like to mention?
Finally I would also add that I have lost friends to suicide. In one case, it was serious, chronic depression, and in the other it was a bad reaction to medication combined with PTSD (from her tour of duty in Iraq). In neither case would I suggest that these people were competent to choose to die, so blaming them for their actions misses the point. While regrettable, these sorts of things deserve compassion rather than shame. If someone is competent to make a decision to die and has a rational basis for that decision, then I am not one to question it, but the cases you mention are cases where medical (not moral) intervention are required.
have someone who has committed crime after crime. You sentence that person to a balanced punishment for a murder as a first step to rehabilitation, and after the individual gets out, that individual commits another, more gruesome murder.
Do you put that person away for life without parole (the low-cost solution)?
Or do you put that person to death?
Which is more humane? I argue that the death penalty, especially for certain very limited classes of criminals is a good thing, if only it could be applied justly and fairly (which I don't think it is at present). I think this problem is something that can be solved, but people are not interested in real solutions (I think that the first thing which needs to be done is to reduce the level of choice that a judge and jury have in deciding who gets the death penalty, and make these a matter of objective matters only, such as prior violent crime convictions, etc. Just because someone seems "cold" and "unremorseful" means absolutely nothing).
Slashdot Mirror
Let's hack the system to cause it to give you additional mod points every February 30th....
Just as a (sympathetic) note here from a PostgreSQL guy.
I stopped working with MySQL when PostgreSQL 7.3 came out. Prior to that, I did most of my prototyping on MySQL and then would move the scripts over to PostgreSQL (which I did since PostgreSQL 6.5). The basic facts are:
1) Prior to 7.3, PostgreSQL, while superior in many ways, was just a pain to deal with when trying to prototype databases (dropping a column was one of the big issues... you couldn't). MySQL was so much easier to work with.
2) Firebird, Ingress II, were not available.
As much as I advocate PostgreSQL for *all* tasks now, there was a time when this was not the case.
MySQL has generally gotten a lot of flak for not being a "real" RDBMS. I.e. for a long time it didn't have transactions, the ability to really enforce data consistancy and the like. While many of these are being addressed they look to many of us who do RDBMS-backed buisness apps like they are only partial solutions (strict mode can be turned off by any client application, if we distribute software we have no way of knowing that transactions really are enabled on the server, etc).
At the same time, MySQL has traditionally excelled for things like light-weight web content management and the like. It is almost as if MySQL was designed originally for this sort of task as its core market.
What were the original design goals for MySQL? Has MySQL outgrown them and moving on to become something else?
IANAL, but you give these agreements, and your work together in exchange for the money you are paid.
However, having said this, my suggestion is that this might be unenforcible because it would suggest that work you would do for another employer would be theirs as well for a period of time after you leave. That seems to me to be a stretch but again, IANAL, and it need not be legally enforcible to make your life difficult.
F0r example, as an employer, if you didn't tell me about such contracts when I hired you and I found out later, I would fire you because that provides a strong risk to my business. If you did tell me, I would have to decide whether it is worth possibly fighting with your previous employer, how I wanted to try to mitigate the risk, and so forth. It would make hiring you more difficult and more expensive which is probably the point.
In general, it is probably a good idea to assume all contracts are enforcible when signing. This is simply a matter of recognizing that regardless of whether something would be upheld in court, it could still be used against you.
There are two other points as well, beyond the scope of legal advice (IANAL, TINLA, etc, and I am not even addressing legal issues here).
The first is that contracts like this are at least a symptom of an employer's approach to employees. This means, bailing on the company as quickly as possible. As an employee, you probably don't want to be in a position where the employer demands these things.
Secondly, one of the serious issues you have here is that some areas are clearly unenforcible but the goal may be to have a pretense to legally threaten your next employer. In short it doesn't have to be legally enforcible to make your life difficult (as in very hard to find another job).
Of course it is also possible that this is an honest mistake-- that someone decided that this would make a good clause without thinking through the ramifications. In that case, you may want to try to open a rational dialog about what is being asked of you in the contract and see i you can get it changed.
For that matter, names like Ashley where the presumed gender of the name depends on where the person is from.
"They" is something I would expect someone with a BA in Linguistics to accept ;-). After all you aren't studying what high school English teachers teach (which isn't English as a language, but rather good "style"). In short, you study how people use language, while the English teacher tries to show you how to communicate clearly.
;-)
There are several issues with using "they" as a generic singular. The largest one is that it causes a conflict of number when used with a clearly singular indefinite pronoune. For example "Someone should claim their keys" doesn't read well. Compare with "Anyone who has lost keys should claim their keys at the lost and found" and "Everyone should claim their keys."
As I am sure you are aware, Modern English inherited a lot of screwy gender stuff from Middle English (but most of this was not present in Old English). Unfortunately the problem is there but we have no clear solution from a communication perspective. The obvious solution would be to go back to they/that. So the first example would become:
"Someone should claim thats keys."
(Note that "That" is the neuter version of the same root that gives us "she." That:she::it:he.)
"His" is decended from the genitive (i.e. posessive) form of both the masculine and neuter (i.e. 'hit' -> Md. Eng. 'it') version of the same word. "Him" is also the dative form of both. So yes, makes perfect sense if you know Old English...
I don't think WWII was the issue. The fact is that if you go back before the industrial revolution, you will find that whole sectors of the economy ran on women's work. These included making textiles, for example. Women were (and still are) very much involved in farm labor, and worked hard (till do). For the most part, they didn't just stay home and raise kids. They stayed home, raised kids, and made money.
The first sectors of the economy that were transformed by the industrial revolution were those areas where women had primarily ran via cotage industries prior to that point. The industrial revolution caused a drastic collapse of those cottage industries, effectively excluding women from the economic roles they had filled prior. Urbanization followed and a lot of the same women who had their own businesses making cloth ended up employed for pennies in the mills which displaced them.
I think that long-term we are going to see a lot of people (men and women) opting for home-based businesses of their own design, returning to a model where one parent is at home, takes care of the children, and runs a business at the same time.
When I worked at Microsoft, they handled things a bit differently. At the beginning of employment I had to sign a contract with similar terms to the ones you mention, but there were some differences.
1) I also filled out an invention disclosure list which excluded any of my own projects from the contract. Out of the entire room of new hires, I was the only one who did this (I take the time to read contracts). I was never really sure how the policy on open source affected this since all of my disclosure were open source, but my reading said that continuing to work on these would be OK.
2) I also filed (within my first year) for moonlighting permission to do my own consulting work (specifically mentioning open source). This provided me a shield for my own open source work without ceding the copyrights to Microsoft.
3) I also noted that the non-compete clause was appropriately scoped and did not exclude working for all competitors in all capacities, it only prevented me from taking jobs where there was a reasonable likelihood of IP leakage. I.e. one can't be an MS Office coder who then takes a job doing similar work on OpenOffice, but the same person might be able to work for IBM as a Linux kernel engineer.
When I quit, I ended up doing so without notice due to a number of personal issues at the time. I was able to do so and keep rights to all software I developed on my own time, and remain eligible for rehire. Sadly, a lot fo other companies seem to want to lock you in for life. I know of at least one person who was asked to sign a broad non-compete simply because his company lost an executive to a competitor. This is a service business with very little in the way of trade secrets, etc. And it is highly unlikely that there is a pro-competitive reason for this sort of clause in his case.
In short the question to ask is whether the contract is fair and provides you as an employee with adequate protections. If it is not, then I would look elsewhere. Employees should look out for their own interests, and employers who try to own employees as contractual slaves should have a harder time finding employees than those who are good to their employees.
Note that here in Washington, we have at-will employment laws too. The idea is that an employee can quit without notice, and an employer can terminate the employment without notice. This is fair. I have unfortunately had to be in both sides of this in the past and have had to quit a job without notice and yet remain on good terms with my former employer. But this varies from state to state.
Anyway the key thing about employment contracts is that they should be bilateral. This shouldn't be the employee giving up additional right in exchange for employment but either a clarification of expectations or an exchange of additional promises (you agree to give x weeks notice, and I agree to a severance package if I terminate your employment without notice, for example).
Typically non-compete clauses do last beyond the terms of employment though my business has no need for such terms. They should be appropriately scoped, however. I.e. when I worked for Microsoft I was barred from competing with them in areas where I had access to trade secrets for a period of 6 months (iirc, might have been a year) after working for them-- the goal was quite clearly to prevent me from taking Microsoft source code and giving it to competition. This was reasonable. Their moonlighting policies were also somewhat reasonable (but less reasonable since at one point I had moonlighting permissions revoked because Microsoft decided to get into a market where I would be competing with them).
If things are too one-sided you need to be looking for another job. If you are a good worker you should always be able to find a way (even if it means starting your own business). I hate to plug Microsoft on this forum but I did find their practices reasonable in these areas. I would sooner work there again then at a place that was much more one-sided regarding employment. But then, my company is hiring Perl and PL/PGSQL programmers (email resume to chris@metatrontech.com) for work on FOSS projects.
While I agree with your points, I wouldn't sign such a contract. The basic issue is that it really is not worth going to court to ask if it is legal, and I would be willing to bet that your next employer would rather terminate your employment than end up in such a court battle.
And BTW, if people are really looking for ways out of that sort of thing, my firm is hiring (send email to chris@metatrontech.com w/resume). Mostly looking for steller Perl programmers (experience with financial software a bonus).
The basic problem is that the LaGrange points 4-5 are stable, but require a fair bit of energy to get to in part because you have to slow down a lot more (no nice large gravity well to assume an orbit around).
In general the amount of time to get there/back would be dependant on how much energy you want to put into getting there and back.
Finally we do already have a satellite (SOHO) on the L1 point relative to Earth and the Sun. This is an unstable point so some energy is used maintaining position However it is a telescope on an L point relative to the Earth and Sun.
I share your view of SQL-Ledger. Unfortunately, forking was a matter of supporting some projects I inherited (and the fact that SQL-Ledger was for a time the best FOSS SMB accounting app available, which says alot about the competition or lack thereof). Take a look at what we are doing in /trunk to see where we are going. By 1.3, we will be well on our what to a full, secure rewrite and re-design of the code. Interestingly, our code is shrinking considerably with each major release.
My issues with Qmail have tended to stick to only a few of the standards (no support for 2554, for example, without patches). Yes netqmail is helpful but without active maintenance of the main application, this means that Qmail is more or less frozen on old archaic standards. (any standards later than 2821 aren't even mentioned by DJB in his reerence, as well, nor are critical extensions for preventing spam and the like).
The second issue is that DJB seems to like to break as many conventions as possible. He does not seem to try to follow standards such as those of file system layout much at all. Unlike many others. One gets the impression that anything one runs that he wrote that it is at best tacked on to the side of the *nix OS and doesnt really integrate well (HTML-based help pages often replace MAN pages, files and scripts are not where one expects them to be, and so forth). These can't be corrected because any changes have to be approved by him personally.
Finally DJB does some generally braindead things (such as extremely stupid sources of random numbers (such as getpid()), and the extreme phobia of any sort of parsing results in strange bugs when it comes to compatibility with certain email clients. These algorithms are braindead because they don't take into account future standards which could be intended to be backward compatible and yet cause strange bugs to mysteriously appear in the server software, and because they are otherwise brittle.
Having said this, I generally agree with all of DJB's points about security with the exception of the categorization that least privilege is a distraction. In reality it is one level which helps to reduce the severity of security bugs as they occur. This is thus one aspect of defense in depth (which is to minimize the amount and types of damage that can be done at every point in execution). In fact, this idea of privilege separation is one of the basic mechanisms behind Qmail's lack of trusted code.
1) After divorce proceedings were started, she got her daughter dual citizenship (with Russia) 2 months before she disappeared she completed the same process for her son. Obviously she planned to return to Russia and take them with her (there is no reasonable explenation for that action).
2) There were clear issues with her boyfriend (Sturgeon) and also with her estranged husband.
3) She does not appear to have had a license to practice medicine in the US as far as I can tell.
4) As far as I can tell, getting permission to take the children back to Russia would have been difficult due to resulting custody disputes (they can't easily just fly back for the one week night a week or the every other weekend, can they?).
So, after she disappears, the only witnesses who can testify to Hans's actual behavior that weekend (his children) are whisked away to Russia never to return. AFAICS, they are not coming back to testify at the trial. If she had money (which she did if Hans and Ramone are to be believed and she embezzled money from the business), there is no reason she couldn't have turned to the Russian mafia for help. The point is that as far as we know. all her plans were executed and her children were taken to Russia, so the only question remains whether she made it back there alive or not.
Note that this poses a few interesting issues. 1) The children are the key to any alabi by Hans. Their removal casts inherent doubt as to whether he could have killed her as police have suggested. 2) If there is evidence that her minivan was driven by someone other than her (as in fingerprints, DNA, or the like) this might be significant. Also if she was using ecstasy, that would also explain the wild driving, I would think. This represents a serious unanswered question. She could have bought the groceries specifically in order to frame Hans. People do strange things during divorce.
Ultimately things boil down to the following possibilities:
1) Nina is alive, lying low in the US until things die down, when she will return to Russia
2) Nina is alive in Russia
3) Hans killed Nina
4) Someone else killed Nina.
I would suggest that, based on the evidence we know of now, all four theories are not without doubt. We don't know if Nina is alive or not, where she is if she is alive, and, if not, who killed her. I would personally suggest that we will see an acquittal and the case will drop off the news, the kids will stay in Russia, and only if we are exceedingly lucky, will we ever learn the truth beyond a shadow of a doubt.
I run Qmail still. I intend to move to Postfix fairly soon.
:-( ).
There is only *one* reasonable advantage of Qmail, that the security engineering is one of the best I have seen (there is still room for improvement, for example a missing rcpthosts file should not turn a SMTP server into an open relay-- it is better to fail to safe conditions and reject everything).
The major disadvantages are:
1) I don't see any attempts by DJB to modernize the software. I would therefore suggest that the project has been orphaned.
2) Since it is not open source, nobody can pick it up, modernize it, and release a version with compliance of newer standards (i.e the ones which have come out in the last 10 years, meaning you are stuck with pop-before-smtp and the like
3) While the security engineering is good, the overall software engineering leaves a lot to be desired. In particular a lot of really braindead algorithms are used.
The article is an interesting one to read though.
If the murder has occurred, then you have to ask why it happened, and what can be done to prevent similar circumstances from happening again. If it is due to mental illness, the proper response is to confine the individual to a mental health institution until it is determined that there is no further threat (could be very soon or never-- suppose it appears to have been caused by a frontal-lobe brain tumor). In that case, this is treatment, not punishment. Another great example would be postpartum psychosis causing a mother to kill her child or children (if this has happened more than once, court-ordered sterilization might be necessary).
Suppose on the other hand, that something unusual happened (for example coming home, finding one's wife having an affair, and murdering both individuals). The key to understand is that this example is traumatic for everyone, and that the murderer will also need both punishment and therapy in order to help prevent this from becoming a cycle. Unfortunately, people have a way of recreating unusual circumstances around them through their own actions, and so I would question what would qualify as a one-time murder which would certainly not repeat.
We should be looking at punishment as a form of therapy and look at how the length of incarceration affects recitavism rates.
1) She got Rory his Russian citizenship 2 months before she disappeared.
2) The children are then allowed out of the country with the idea that they will return. They do not.
3) The children are not allowed to testify at the trial by the Nina's mother.
4) She is accused (by both Hans and Ramone) of embezzling money from Namesys.
I am not saying she did, and I am not saying she didn't, but one possibility is that she became afraid fo Sturgeon, wasn't happy with Hans, and decided that the best thing to do was to return to Russia with her kids. This would only be really possible if she or her mother had full custody rights. Note that there is also accusations of Sturgeon trying to teach the kids to like pain, and getting Nina introduced to ecstasy. All in all, it is not an irrational choice to make, and not one which would have been beyond her means to do without messing up the fact that she is missing (and Hans is at least a suspect, etc).
In the end, unless Nina is found alive or dead, we will probably never know with any certainty what actually happened.
Some examples of such conclusive evidence:
1) Eye witness sees an individual pushing the victim into a car at gunpoint. Hears what he thinks is a gunshot.
2) Forensic team finds evidence of a substantial pool of blood which is almost certainly related to a cause of death. DNA evidence suggests it is the victims.
3) On a tip, police search a workshop containing barrels of sulfuric acid. In the bottom of one they find sludge consistant with the distruction of animal tissue and also find intact human gallstones. The defendant is also in possession of valuables the alleged victim had last time she was seen.
4) Defendant freely confesses to the crime
5) a substantial bone, such as a femur, rib, skull is found, and DNA tests link it to the victim.
The problem is that, as a jury, the first question you have to ask is "Is it reasonable to doubt that she is dead?" If so, there is reasonable doubt as to the murder, isn't there? Once you have established that, the next question is "Is there reasonable doubt that Hans did it?" If either question has reasonable doubt, it seems not to reach the question of whether there is reasonable doubt that Hans is guilty of the crime.
Hmm....
Cremation: Requires a special crematorium, and generally also requires grinding bones. Not really practical.
Dumping in the ocean. Better hope that the body doesn't wash up onto the shore, get discovered by divers, etc. Pulling this off with a high degree of certainty would probably require strong knowledge of ocean currents or a boat capable of going pretty far out.
Now, having said this, part of the issue is that you may not know exactly where the body is. If it is buried in the woods, for example.... So I don;t think one should necessarily have a body. I do think one should definitely have some reasonably conclusive evidence that the given individual is in fact deceased and that foul play was involved. That evidence could be a large pool of blood, an eye witness, a body, gallstones in sludge at the bottom of an acid drum, or something similar. In this case, you only have a (reasonably discredited) story of a child who says they were arguing as far as evidence that the crime was actually committed (and some circumstantial evidence which may or may not be dispositive).
My questions are:
1) Was there evidence of a struggle in her car beyond her groceries being in disarray? So far we hear the answer doesn't seem to be a strong "yes." This suggests that it may be that she had a melt down in her car (divorce is hard on people). This is obviously the most important place in the case.
2) How extensive was the blood they found? So far it seems like there are traces of small blood stains which don't necessarily point to murder.
there was fairly strong evidence that someone had been killed and dissolved in the sulfuric acid (the gallstones), there was a confession, and there was strong evidence that he had fraudulantly sold various properties of the victims. What made that particularly horrible was the idea that he did this simply to pay gambling debts.
None of this applies tothe Reiser case. Is there even proof beyond a reasonable doubt that Nina was murdered by anyone? My point is that this sort of thing should be required *before* a murder case can proceed. I don't care if they have a body or not, or whether there is some suspicious sludge in the bottom of a drum of acid containing human gallstones, or if there is a substantial pool of blood, or some other strong evidence that the person was dead.
I think that the death penalty should be reserved for those who are unusually likely to re-offend based on objective factors (I would actually consider premeditation an objective factor), and for whom we can't afford to keep piling up victims.
Is the role of the criminal justice system to make people "pay" for their crimes? Or to provide the right amount of punishment necessary to give that individual a chance to change? I.e. do we want vengeance or do we want the ability to make former criminals able to become productive members of society. (Obviously the question is one of degree and focus, more than structure.)
I would suggest that the better way of putting it is:
No reaspnable justice system would allow a conviction for murder without conclusive evidence that the alleged victim was actually dead.
Suppose the father or mother is dying of a very painful cancer which can only be treated using prohibitively expensive (and torturous) chemotherapy.
I agree that many or most suicides are irresponsible. But does that mean that all are? Are there any counterexamples you would like to mention?
Finally I would also add that I have lost friends to suicide. In one case, it was serious, chronic depression, and in the other it was a bad reaction to medication combined with PTSD (from her tour of duty in Iraq). In neither case would I suggest that these people were competent to choose to die, so blaming them for their actions misses the point. While regrettable, these sorts of things deserve compassion rather than shame. If someone is competent to make a decision to die and has a rational basis for that decision, then I am not one to question it, but the cases you mention are cases where medical (not moral) intervention are required.
have someone who has committed crime after crime. You sentence that person to a balanced punishment for a murder as a first step to rehabilitation, and after the individual gets out, that individual commits another, more gruesome murder.
Do you put that person away for life without parole (the low-cost solution)?
Or do you put that person to death?
Which is more humane? I argue that the death penalty, especially for certain very limited classes of criminals is a good thing, if only it could be applied justly and fairly (which I don't think it is at present). I think this problem is something that can be solved, but people are not interested in real solutions (I think that the first thing which needs to be done is to reduce the level of choice that a judge and jury have in deciding who gets the death penalty, and make these a matter of objective matters only, such as prior violent crime convictions, etc. Just because someone seems "cold" and "unremorseful" means absolutely nothing).