A consumer contract for a cell phone, or other consumer items is a contract of adhesion and is presented on "take it or leave it" terms with no chance of modification. Strike outs will not be accepted as they typically have to be reviewed by a legal team, and the cost to do so exceeds the value of the new business in most cases. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contract_of_adhesion#Contracts_of_adhesion for more details.
Are you willing to run a business where you can't fire someone at-will? Most of those countries have stricter employee protection laws. In fact, only the US (49 of 50 states) has at-will employment. Also most of the countries you mention have single-payer health care and high taxes because of it.
If you are programming in Maple or Mathematica, then you are worth more than $80K/yr as you likely have a Masters or a Doctorate in Engineering or Applied Mathematics. These guys are a rare resource. As soon as something better comes along and/or the economy improves, you'll lose your talent if you aren't careful.
Some businesses and people may leave. It's their loss. There will always be businesses who will remain in California because a significant portion of the best talent available will not live anywhere else for a number of reasons.
No, but as an employee I am enjoying section 16600 of the California Business and Professions Code. California is one of two states where this employee friendly law is on the books. The other is Oklahoma. Never ever let employers take advantage of you.
Yes, that is the way it should work. Consideration for signing the non-compete should not be a condition for future or continued employment. The consideration should be that if the non-compete clause is invoked, the company must pay a salary for the duration of the non-compete or until the ex-employee has found a non-infringing job at a comparable salary with another employer. The financial incentive of this approach will make the old employer help the released employee to find a non-infringing job to cut down on the salary expense. And the released employee can't milk the system for the duration of the non-compete. This would also stop the practise of non-competes being required for all employees.
Beck/Limbaugh alert: This thinking would be viewed as "socialist" and "un-american" by the brainwashed conservative masses.
Given our federal government and constitution was designed to protect the "opulent minority" this would never see the light of day. One possibility is the Article 5 Constitutional Convention, but 38 states would have to tell Congress to call a convention, and Congress will probably ignore the request unless we are the brink of a second civil war. You can try voting out all the incumbents, but since the campaign finance law has been invalidated by the Supreme court, you'll just end up voting someone else in who is a puppet for the opulent minority. The constitutional framework to protect the "opulent minority" is what needs to be rebalanced as the playing field is not level. Back when the framers designed the constitution, it probably had to be done this way. I'm not advocating a "pure democracy". A pure democracy probably would not work today either, but our current constitution is in dire need of some revisions.
First, all of these companies passed off the task of marketing to Epsilon, then Epsilon had a 'chink' in their armour, and user names and Email addresses were stolen. Sounds to me like the bad guys knew that the best way to get this information was to attack an aggregator such as Epsilon. All of these companies which use aggregators such as Epsilon, are doing something that they should never do without your express permission: divulging your personal information.
The current system of privacy pamphlets being mailed out by companies periodically is a utter joke. There are so many loopholes you can drive the starship enterprise right though them.
We need a centralised 'do not divulge list' which could be an expansion of the current 'do not call list' for telephone numbers. Why not expand it so that you can enter email address, and street addresses. Anything entered on this 'do not divulge list' would be off limits for marketing purposes.
Write your US congresspersons and senators (I did)
Web searches used to yield more relevant info back in the early to late 90's. Since the Internet has become used by everyone, commercial interests have polluted the search engines for their financial gain. Because of this you can't always trust what you see in the search engines result page, and end up cross checking things like Wikipedia and other research sites. This in my opinion is is a terrible shame as that was not meant to be how the web was used back before it was commercialized.
What would really be nice is a search engine where feedback from the users doing the searching could be used to influence the relevance of the search results. I don't think Google will ever do this because of vested financial interests in the adwords business, but maybe some day someone else will.
No good deed goes unpunished. I would not like to see free software be labeled as an "attractive nuisance" and an environment where users could litigate against free software developers. This would kill free software.
The US was founded as a republic and not a democracy for this very reason. I do know that Canada is a representative democracy like the US, so therefore the same reasoning may apply there as well.
The individuals in the capatilist class (the top 2% of the population) own the means of production. The rest of the classes, are at the mercy of how well this 2% shares or grants access to the means of production.
Why do you think the government pointed machine guns at the union protesters back in the early 20th century? Because if the status quo were changed it would go against what the founding fathers envisioned! A representative democracy is set up to protect property rights first so that the capitalist class can maintain control, then human rights and the democratic process come second.
So, yes, the Canadian DMCA will pass if Canada is much like the USA in this regard.
Yes, that would [mostly] put a stop to it, but it will never happen because the amount of processing required to handle 1000's of https sessions would be staggering indeed.
I suppose if they were desperate enough, the ISP's could require MITM http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man-in-the-middle_attack on all HTTPS connections so they could bugger those as well. (They would also get access to juicy tidbits like SSN's and credit card numbers).
Some corporate firewalls are already doing MITM on HTTPS, so I would be careful of certificate prompts, and certificates installed in your browser at work by the IT department.
Rent seeking http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent_seeking. We need put incentives and or laws in place discourage and or punish rent-seeking activity as it is detrimental to society as a whole.
Not telling them where you are going will not prevent them from finding out the truth. HR managers network with other HR managers. I would suspect they would know exactly where you went after making a few targeted phone calls. It might be more difficult for them to find out where you are going if you have to leave the area to get the new job, but if you are going to work in the same town, they'll find out pretty quick.
It seems like that would be the answer the question as to who owns the device. Is leasing hardware the future of electronics with all the DRM crap and vendor lock-in occurring these days?
That might make China very unhappy. China has a vested interest in keeping the Junta in place. In fact, it might be viewed as an act of war by China if the G7 does such a thing. China depends upon Burma/Myanmar for access to the Indian ocean, and for raw goods such as timber.
Just before the real violence occurs. The two ISP's will shut down, all mobile phone basestations will be turned off, Commercial two way, CB, and ham frequencies will be jammed, and smoke generators will be used to obscure viewing by spy satellites.
I buy all electronics via mail order or at "hole in the wall" computer stores. Both Circuit City and Best Buy do not have competitive pricing, mine your "buying habits data" to exploit weaknesses they use to their advantage, and usually don't have what I'm looking for anyway.
BTW: a "hole in the wall" computer store is one that is not a chain, and one which transact business by passing your cash, or other payment, through a "hole in the wall", (usually with a one way mirror above the hole), and out come the goods through the same hole. Makes me wonder what type of weapons are locked and loaded bethind that wall.
A big sign on the entrance of Circuit City Stores will state the following:
By the act of physically being on these premises, you and Circuit City agree to settle all legal disputes using Binding Arbitration for any issue whatsoever including but not limited to civil rights violations, harassment by store employees, injuries (slip and fall), and for incidents where the police become involved.
There is the possibility the lawmakers pushing these types of limits might try introducing a constitutional amendment if their desires are continually shot down by the courts.
Microsoft is too proud of Vista. The mentality of "you will use it and you will like it" is the fatal flaw. This is typical of what happens when a product marketing group gets too arrogant and putting its own interests ahead of the Customer's.
There is no freedom in Vista. It is a the operating system equivalent of a fascist police state.
I suspect it could be shot down with a particle beam weapon. With the particle beam traveling at a good fraction of the speed of light, it would be vulnerable.
Stricter laws won't work, but maybe a Coup-de-tat by the MPAA and a constitutional amendment similar to the one below might:
---
Amendment XXVIII:
Patents and copyrights shall be perpetual and never expire. Violation of a patent, copyright, trade secret, or end user license agreement shall be a capital offense and punishable by death. Circumvention of technology used to restrict copying and viewing methods is also a capital offense and punishable by death. There will be no rights including but not limited to: due process, attorney, or habeas corpus for persons accused of these offenses. Persons accused shall be tried by a military tribunal without a jury and held in a supermax prison in solitary confinement without visitation rights while waiting for their trial to commence. Trial dates can be indefinitely postponed. Torture may be used to extract confessions. This amendment takes precedence over amendments 1-27 in the constitution as well as all previously written articles and sections.
---
In other words, to enforce IP laws to the satisfaction of the MPAA RIAA, and others, you need a police state.
Slashdot Mirror
A consumer contract for a cell phone, or other consumer items is a contract of adhesion and is presented on "take it or leave it" terms with no chance of modification. Strike outs will not be accepted as they typically have to be reviewed by a legal team, and the cost to do so exceeds the value of the new business in most cases. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contract_of_adhesion#Contracts_of_adhesion for more details.
Are you willing to run a business where you can't fire someone at-will? Most of those countries have stricter employee protection laws. In fact, only the US (49 of 50 states) has at-will employment. Also most of the countries you mention have single-payer health care and high taxes because of it.
If you are programming in Maple or Mathematica, then you are worth more than $80K/yr as you likely have a Masters or a Doctorate in Engineering or Applied Mathematics. These guys are a rare resource. As soon as something better comes along and/or the economy improves, you'll lose your talent if you aren't careful.
Some businesses and people may leave. It's their loss. There will always be businesses who will remain in California because a significant portion of the best talent available will not live anywhere else for a number of reasons.
No, but as an employee I am enjoying section 16600 of the California Business and Professions Code.
California is one of two states where this employee friendly law is on the books. The other is Oklahoma.
Never ever let employers take advantage of you.
Yes, that is the way it should work. Consideration for signing the non-compete should not be a condition for future or continued employment. The consideration should be that if the non-compete clause is invoked, the company must pay a salary for the duration of the non-compete or until the ex-employee has found a non-infringing job at a comparable salary with another employer. The financial incentive of this approach will make the old employer help the released employee to find a non-infringing job to cut down on the salary expense. And the released employee can't milk the system for the duration of the non-compete. This would also stop the practise of non-competes being required for all employees.
Beck/Limbaugh alert: This thinking would be viewed as "socialist" and "un-american" by the brainwashed conservative masses.
Given our federal government and constitution was designed to protect the "opulent minority" this would never see the light of day. One possibility is the Article 5 Constitutional Convention, but 38 states would have to tell Congress to call a convention, and Congress will probably ignore the request unless we are the brink of a second civil war. You can try voting out all the incumbents, but since the campaign finance law has been invalidated by the Supreme court, you'll just end up voting someone else in who is a puppet for the opulent minority. The constitutional framework to protect the "opulent minority" is what needs to be rebalanced as the playing field is not level. Back when the framers designed the constitution, it probably had to be done this way. I'm not advocating a "pure democracy". A pure democracy probably would not work today either, but our current constitution is in dire need of some revisions.
First, all of these companies passed off the task of marketing to Epsilon, then Epsilon had a 'chink' in their armour, and user names and Email addresses were stolen. Sounds to me like the bad guys knew that the best way to get this information was to attack an aggregator such as Epsilon. All of these companies which use aggregators such as Epsilon, are doing something that they should never do without your express permission: divulging your personal information.
The current system of privacy pamphlets being mailed out by companies periodically is a utter joke. There are so many loopholes you can drive the starship enterprise right though them.
We need a centralised 'do not divulge list' which could be an expansion of the current 'do not call list' for telephone numbers. Why not expand it so that you can enter email address, and street addresses. Anything entered on this 'do not divulge list' would be off limits for marketing purposes.
Write your US congresspersons and senators (I did)
Web searches used to yield more relevant info back in the early to late 90's. Since the Internet has become used by everyone, commercial interests have polluted the search engines for their financial gain. Because of this you can't always trust what you see in the search engines result page, and end up cross checking things like Wikipedia and other research sites. This in my opinion is is a terrible shame as that was not meant to be how the web was used back before it was commercialized.
What would really be nice is a search engine where feedback from the users doing the searching could be used to influence the relevance of the search results. I don't think Google will ever do this because of vested financial interests in the adwords business, but maybe some day someone else will.
No good deed goes unpunished. I would not like to see free software be labeled as an "attractive nuisance" and an environment where users could litigate against free software developers. This would kill free software.
20 cents a kWh? On my last bill, San Diego Graft and Extortion had a top rate of 31cents a kWh!
The US was founded as a republic and not a democracy for this very reason. I do know that Canada is a representative democracy like the US,
so therefore the same reasoning may apply there as well.
The individuals in the capatilist class (the top 2% of the population) own the means of production.
The rest of the classes, are at the mercy of how well this 2% shares or grants access to the means of production.
Why do you think the government pointed machine guns at the union protesters back in the early 20th century? Because if the status quo were changed it would go against what the founding fathers envisioned! A representative democracy is set up to protect property rights first so that the capitalist class can maintain control, then human rights and the democratic process come second.
So, yes, the Canadian DMCA will pass if Canada is much like the USA in this regard.
In California it could be life imprisonment without any possibility of parole or the death penalty if someone dies as a result of it.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Train_wreck
Yes, that would [mostly] put a stop to it, but it will never happen because the amount of processing required to handle 1000's of https sessions would be staggering indeed.
I suppose if they were desperate enough, the ISP's could require MITM http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man-in-the-middle_attack on all HTTPS connections so they could bugger those as well. (They would also get access to juicy tidbits like SSN's and credit card numbers).
Some corporate firewalls are already doing MITM on HTTPS, so I would be careful of certificate prompts, and certificates installed in your browser at work by the IT department.
Rent seeking http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent_seeking. We need put incentives and or laws in place discourage and or punish rent-seeking activity as it is detrimental to society as a whole.
Not telling them where you are going will not prevent them from finding out the truth. HR managers network with other HR managers. I would suspect they would know exactly where you went after making a few targeted phone calls.
It might be more difficult for them to find out where you are going if you have to leave the area to get the new job, but if you are going to work in the same town, they'll find out pretty quick.
It seems like that would be the answer the question as to who owns the device. Is leasing hardware the future of electronics with all the DRM crap and vendor lock-in occurring these days?
That might make China very unhappy. China has a vested interest in keeping the Junta in place. In fact, it might be viewed as an act of war by China if the G7 does such a thing. China depends upon Burma/Myanmar for access to the Indian ocean, and for raw goods such as timber.
Just before the real violence occurs. The two ISP's will shut down, all mobile phone basestations will be turned off, Commercial two way, CB, and ham frequencies will be jammed, and smoke generators will be used to obscure viewing by spy satellites.
I buy all electronics via mail order or at "hole in the wall" computer stores. Both Circuit City and Best Buy do not have competitive pricing, mine your "buying habits data" to exploit weaknesses they use to their advantage, and usually don't have what I'm looking for anyway.
BTW: a "hole in the wall" computer store is one that is not a chain, and one which transact business by passing your cash, or other payment, through a "hole in the wall", (usually with a one way mirror above the hole), and out come the goods through the same hole. Makes me wonder what type of weapons are locked and loaded bethind that wall.
A big sign on the entrance of Circuit City Stores will state the following:
By the act of physically being on these premises, you and Circuit City agree to settle all legal disputes using Binding Arbitration for any issue whatsoever including but not limited to civil rights violations, harassment by store employees, injuries (slip and fall), and for incidents where the police become involved.
There is the possibility the lawmakers pushing these types of limits might try introducing a constitutional amendment if their desires are continually shot down by the courts.
History has repeated itself again.
Microsoft is too proud of Vista. The mentality of "you will use it and you will like it" is the fatal flaw.
This is typical of what happens when a product marketing group gets too arrogant and putting its own interests ahead of the Customer's.
There is no freedom in Vista. It is a the operating system equivalent of a fascist police state.
I suspect it could be shot down with a particle beam weapon. With the particle beam traveling at a good fraction of the speed of light, it would be vulnerable.
Stricter laws won't work, but maybe a Coup-de-tat by the MPAA and a constitutional amendment similar to the one below might:
---
Amendment XXVIII:
Patents and copyrights shall be perpetual and never expire. Violation of a patent, copyright, trade secret, or end user license agreement shall be a capital offense and punishable by death. Circumvention of technology used to restrict copying and viewing methods is also a capital offense and punishable by death. There will be no rights including but not limited to: due process, attorney, or habeas corpus for persons accused of these offenses. Persons accused shall be tried by a military tribunal without a jury and held in a supermax prison in solitary confinement without visitation rights while waiting for their trial to commence. Trial dates can be indefinitely postponed. Torture may be used to extract confessions. This amendment takes precedence over amendments 1-27 in the constitution as well as all previously written articles and sections.
---
In other words, to enforce IP laws to the satisfaction of the MPAA RIAA, and others, you need a police state.
1. Intrusion Alarm
2. Dogs
3. H&K