I'm fearing for the days when all you have at home is a thin client to some virtual machine inside some big server farm. You buy CPU time, like in the old mainframe times, get billed by cycle.
Look around. There are no thin clients. The iphone is 100x more powerful than my first computer. The macbook air is 1000x more powerful than my first computer.
Imagine 21 years from now. Imagine computers 128x more powerful than they are today. That means that the iphone of 21 years from now will be 10x more powerful than "the lightest laptop available today."
You're talking about "thin clients". But a really powerful computer will be the size of a thick piece of paper.
Yeah, I'm dreaming - but how else do you expect to keep up!? In my professional career (say 18 years), computers have become 100x more powerful, and fit in an envelope.
The only reason for "thin clients" is because the client wants and agrees to be thin.
Disclaimer: My Macbook Pro is my primary computer.
There are so many reasons to have a notebook that is a fully-featured computer, and only one not to: 2lbs
So get a full laptop, not an ultralight. Clearly, different people have different thresholds.
Apple went too far. I can understand leaving out the optical drive - it's probably the biggest part of the notebook. But one USB port? No FireWire? No Ethernet? No replacable battery? These are standard notebook features.
I use my OD all the time, so I would not get an air (given my current set of machines/needs). I only ever use one USB port, and only seldom. I do sometimes use FireWire (camera). If I had a main desktop, I wouldn't. I only rarely plug in ethernet - and only when one of my damn neighbors is spewing copious amounts of RF interference so that my wireless won't work. That will change when I move next month. I have never replaced a laptop battery.
You don't miss having an Ethernet port until you want to transfer some DVD images from a desktop - what takes 2 hours on 802.11g (1MiB/s) takes 3 minutes over GigE (40 MiB/s).
Your wireless connection sucks! I get 3+ MB/s on home wireless without trying, and on older equipment. Still no fun to transfer a whole DVD, but see below.
You don't miss having a microphone port until you realize that your USB headset takes up your only USB port. Oops. Hope you brought that USB hub.
Mic is built in. If you really need a mic & headphones, get an integrated set, or bluetooth.
You don't miss having a full-sized display connector until you want to show something on a larger monitor. Hope you remembered to bring your mini-DVI to DVI adapter. And your DVI to VGA adapter.
You're right. You will want to carry around your connector. I'm thinking the laptop bag would be a good spot.
You don't miss the optical drive until someone asks you to watch their training video on DVD. Or a new movie. Or install MATLAB. Or Mathematica. Hope you brought your external optical drive. And a USB hub, since it uses your only USB port.
Or use someone else's. I'm sorry I can't find a link, but it comes with software that will let you share someone else's (mac/pc) optical drive.
So, I guess it comes down to this: you can bring a 5lb notebook and be ready for pretty much anything. Why would you give up all of that capability for 2lbs?
It's not for me, because it costs nearly the same as a MBPro, which I use as a main machine. But if it cost less and I had a desktop, I'd sure consider it. The reasons you listed would all be unimportant to me if I had a desktop. I certainly know people who have been waiting years for just this machine.
You must still be in college, right? Once you've graduated outside your cocoon and into the Real Word, you'll understand what I'm talking about...maybe.
Nearly 2 decades later. I guess I'll never get it.
Next I have to ask: what about guantanamo & the war? 2 things that the president can actually do something about. Or maybe you think they're OK (see point 1).
But I do have a question: You can't get divorced without 6 months of good marriage counseling, preferable faith-based (you choose the faith, obviously). The one exception is abuse. If there is abuse, you can leave today. We'll help. But if you accuse abuse and it is proven that you lied, you're locked up.
Also on the marriage front, you can't get married without at least a few sessions of marriage counseling. Talk about kids, values, in-laws, sex, where you want to live, religion, and everything else. The divorce rate is too high, and I see it as causing too many problems. These last two are designed to help lower that and improve things.
Why on earth? I've seen this kind of thing advocated before, and I don't understand the notion at all. If the people getting divorced shared your values system, they probably wouldn't be getting divorced, would they? As it stands, I think that most divorcing couples do attend a few sessions of marriage counseling - they're called divorce lawyers. And if you think that divorce lawyers would wait a minute before changing their titles to marriage counselors, I don't think you know enough lawyers.
At this point, aren't you just telling folks to not get married?
1. Clients (laptops) default installed wifi software (hint: Steve Jobs are you reading???) need a scanning mode which does not waste my time telling me about all the password or mac-address locked wifi basestations, and only advises me about open ones.
You need to upgrade to leopard. It shows a little lock next to the names of locked down wifi.
Oh come on, 12MB/s is just fine for a normal home network, unless you have a SAN set up. Cheap fiber could be a boon to those with relatively large clusters, however.
I want video&sound from my computer or notebook to my HDTV at home. Never mind what is currently possible or reasonable. That's what I want. And 12MB/s ain't gonna cut it, is it? And why wouldn't joe-home-user want that?
Come on! Programming in C is no more "Thinking" than programming in Java. It's just thinking about lower level crap.
I cut my teeth in C, back in the day (before Java). But I never enjoyed system level programming. I like app and server programming. And I sure as hell don't enjoy doing it in C. Gimme a nice, garbage collected, pointer free language any day. I don't like thinking about all that crap.
But one man's crap is another's manure. And I thank god for the hardware and system programmers. I'm glad someone enjoys it.
Our assembler class sucked. I'm not sure whose fault it was, but it was really terrible. But we did have one. And we had a processor design class, which was a lot less crappy than the assembler class.
So I think having those classes is good and important. And I think if your Uni is going to have a "Computer Science" program it should probably have upper div assembly and processor design classes. But it ain't everyone's cup o' tea.
You're guessing. I've got 10 years experience with this and I'm telling you it's not practical.
I'm not sure you understand what percent of transit providers uses these caches.
Pissing contest? Not much interested. Can you tell me where I can find the statistics for how many ISPs or users are stuck behind a transparent proxy online?
But really, if *Russia* offers an alt top level, and it works for *Russians* (ie. Russian ISPs support it), and the workaround is trivial and well known (use a non-russian TLD, too), what is the problem?
So it'll work fine for the folks who want it to work most: people in Russia, with Russian ISPs.
It turns out it will also work for me. I set my DNSServer to be someone who does opennic resolving. I was immediately able to visit http://www.opennic.glue/ You're right that I would not be able to send them email without configuring a different smart mailserver.
But I don't think it is reasonable to say that the whole thing won't work because your ISP sucks and transparent proxies you.
How? It is just a nameservice. If russia decides they want a top level.manyspecialcharacters, google will buy/register the domain name google.manyspecialcharacters, just like they bought/registered google.ru. Russia will get some money, and everyone is happy - especially Russia. You can still call it google.com, or just 72.14.207.99.
One of the largest IPSs in Europe turned on IPv6 to all 8 million users this week. They've done the right thing and made it opt-in for now, their customers have to go to their control panel web page and turn it on, but almost 50,000 people did in the first 24 hours. They turned it on, and their Macs and Win machines started using IPv6 with no need to do anything other than tell Firefox and Tbird to start using IPv6 for DNS lookups. Because this one major ISP did this, their main competitor has been forced to make plans to enable IPv6 in January. After that, any ISP that doesn't have IPv6 turned on will be branded as "obsolete" or "incompetent".
It is possible you are just not a very good programmer. But maybe you are, and you're being "poorly managed". Being poorly managed is your fault. Here is a list of your responsibilities: Implement what the customer needs. Implement what the customer wants. Do what your manager needs (distant 3rd). Do what your manager wants.
Here is a list of your manager's responsibilities: Make it clear to you what you are supposed to be working on. Make it possible to do what you're supposed to do. Make it easy to do what you're supposed to do.
Your manager works for you. If she asks you to do something you should not be doing, don't do it. If he is not making it possible/easy for you to do what you need to do, complain. Learn the word "no." Say it over and over. If you are the [only] programmer, or you are the team lead, you know what is best for the project. Explain how and why it is best. Be understanding, but be firm.
It is important to be honest and clear very early in the process. If something can't be done [in some period of time], you have to say so. Better if you understand what they want and see if you can do something similar in the timeline suggested, in addition to explaining how long it will take "their way" - that's "being flexible". Doing something the wrong way (most of the time) or agreeing to something that can not be done in the time given is not "being reasonable", it is being harmful to the project.
My notion is that 90% of the work done on any project will be after it is "complete." I don't know where I picked that up, exactly (in some college course, long ago), but it seems like a reasonable attitude to approach a project with. And if I'm going to spent 9 times the effort maintaining the project as I spent writing it, I sure as hell want it to be easy to maintain.
First paragraph: The Google Summer of Code program for 2007 ran through August 31, 2007. This year, the program brought together 900 students and nearly 1500 mentors across 90 countries to contribute to over 130 different open source software projects. You can check out a KML file (requires Google Earth) showcasing this year's successful participants (and their supporting mentors from various Open Source organizations).
And as others have pointed out, the eligibility clause clearly states that fariners are allowed.
jruby lets us write new web apps that use thousands of lines of java controller code without having to rewrite those thousands of lines of perfectly functional code. Eventually we may migrate to pure ruby - but in the meantime, jruby is a great solution.
Hm. Where "not looking out for your best interest" means not ratting you out for software piracy? I'm not even sure which side of that could have to do with best interests.
I had a bad encounter with an RBL a few years back (late 90's, I think). I had installed some web proxy on my machine and opened it up so I could use it from outside my firewall. I never considered that it cold proxy to my machine itself. These were the bad middle days when packages could get away with shipping in not-quite-idiot-proof configuration. I later argued with the package maintainer that the proxy should disable local referrals by default. They didn't agree, and it wasn't my package.
Anyway. It turns out that spammers could blindly use my webproxy to push email to my local port 25 and send mail using it. Damn clever spammers. I figured it out after my email system croaked and I looked at the logs and mailq. (crap, 1000 spam messages in the outbox, originated on my system).
So I'd been a tool, and used, and it was my damn fault. I fixed it (uninstalled the proxy) and started to repair the damage.
One of the items of fallout was that the RBL lists had nailed my IP address as a spammer. Fair enough. But getting them to turn it off was a royal pain in the ass and took days - even though their notes described exactly how the spam was delivered through my system and it was easily verifiable that it was no longer an issue.
It left me pretty peeved, and I've never used an RBL since.
If i had a WoW account i would be cancelling it this second, no videogame has the right to violate the privacy of my computer
The what?
If I had a WoW account, I would be glad that Bliz has continued to take reasonable steps to limit cheating and violating the terms of their service (as they define it, for their game) as much as they can. Oh, wait, I do have an account!
And it turns out I enjoy their game, and I find that those that cheat and/or violate the terms of service (as they define it, for their game) detract from my gaming experience.
As for the inane rootkit FUD: what, you decompile all the games you play? You know what is executing? You track file access for those games?
And finally: if I were more paranoid, I'd just create a wow account on my machine, limit it's access, and worry not at all.
I bailed on kuro5hin.org a couple of years ago. Basically, it had become popular enough and let people vote on enough things (what got published to what pages, etc), that it seemed that the teaming masses of idiots were running the place. And basically they were.
As much as some of the editors here are idiots. As much as they fail to edit. As much as they abuse their editorship (quips in the article, changing article text), they are also answerable to someone. And I think that's probably a good and important thing.
And as much as the mod system here at/. may suck, mostly the crap sinks to the bottom, and good responses float to the top. Especially if you change your modifiers so that responses marked mostly "Funny" are given -2 in your personal filter.
Yeah, I've signed several ridiculous papers - but I live and work in California, and I know they are unenforceable. I figure some lawyer somewhere was told to write a contract that would do thus-and-so, so they did. To hell with whether it was enforceable or not. The odds of my bitching about a dumb contract making a good impression on an employer or making it up the chain and getting something changed are about nil (given that these usually come with short-term contract gigs in my case).
There was one job where that kind of happened, though. I skimmed the contract (because I don't much care what they say), pointed out some of the things that were clearly insane while my boss's boss and some flunky hovered. The flunky took interest. I read a few sentences and said "Look, this essentially means that you get my work on my hardware on my time for free, even if it has nothing to do with you. That doesn't fly." He replies "that amounts to slavery - that isn't possible." "Right. Whatever. Who wrote this crap?" "I did."
It's fortunate that I have generally worked for smart, reasonable people. I signed the ridiculous contract and we all got on with our lives.
leereyno, I looked at some of your other posts, and I wish you had worded this one a little differently.
Are these nations known for their defense of liberty? Are their citizens free?
Patriot Act Warrantless Wiretapping Guantanamo
America is hardly at its height in the human rights game. Hell, we're confirming an Attorney General who isn't sure that waterboarding is illegal/torture. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21698732/
No, we're not yet as bad as the nations you listed.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm fearing for the days when all you have at home is a thin client to some virtual machine inside some big server farm. You buy CPU time, like in the old mainframe times, get billed by cycle.
Look around. There are no thin clients. The iphone is 100x more powerful than my first computer. The macbook air is 1000x more powerful than my first computer.
Imagine 21 years from now. Imagine computers 128x more powerful than they are today. That means that the iphone of 21 years from now will be 10x more powerful than "the lightest laptop available today."
You're talking about "thin clients". But a really powerful computer will be the size of a thick piece of paper.
Yeah, I'm dreaming - but how else do you expect to keep up!? In my professional career (say 18 years), computers have become 100x more powerful, and fit in an envelope.
The only reason for "thin clients" is because the client wants and agrees to be thin.
I'm curious if "rootkit-like techniques to evade detection" is anything but BS market speak.
Disclaimer: My Macbook Pro is my primary computer.
There are so many reasons to have a notebook that is a fully-featured computer, and only one not to: 2lbs
So get a full laptop, not an ultralight. Clearly, different people have different thresholds.
Apple went too far. I can understand leaving out the optical drive - it's probably the biggest part of the notebook. But one USB port? No FireWire? No Ethernet? No replacable battery? These are standard notebook features.
I use my OD all the time, so I would not get an air (given my current set of machines/needs). I only ever use one USB port, and only seldom. I do sometimes use FireWire (camera). If I had a main desktop, I wouldn't. I only rarely plug in ethernet - and only when one of my damn neighbors is spewing copious amounts of RF interference so that my wireless won't work. That will change when I move next month. I have never replaced a laptop battery.
You don't miss having an Ethernet port until you want to transfer some DVD images from a desktop - what takes 2 hours on 802.11g (1MiB/s) takes 3 minutes over GigE (40 MiB/s).
Your wireless connection sucks! I get 3+ MB/s on home wireless without trying, and on older equipment. Still no fun to transfer a whole DVD, but see below.
You don't miss having a microphone port until you realize that your USB headset takes up your only USB port. Oops. Hope you brought that USB hub.
Mic is built in. If you really need a mic & headphones, get an integrated set, or bluetooth.
You don't miss having a full-sized display connector until you want to show something on a larger monitor. Hope you remembered to bring your mini-DVI to DVI adapter. And your DVI to VGA adapter.
You're right. You will want to carry around your connector. I'm thinking the laptop bag would be a good spot.
You don't miss the optical drive until someone asks you to watch their training video on DVD. Or a new movie. Or install MATLAB. Or Mathematica. Hope you brought your external optical drive. And a USB hub, since it uses your only USB port.
Or use someone else's. I'm sorry I can't find a link, but it comes with software that will let you share someone else's (mac/pc) optical drive.
So, I guess it comes down to this: you can bring a 5lb notebook and be ready for pretty much anything. Why would you give up all of that capability for 2lbs?
It's not for me, because it costs nearly the same as a MBPro, which I use as a main machine. But if it cost less and I had a desktop, I'd sure consider it. The reasons you listed would all be unimportant to me if I had a desktop. I certainly know people who have been waiting years for just this machine.
You must still be in college, right? Once you've graduated outside your cocoon and into the Real Word, you'll understand what I'm talking about...maybe.
Nearly 2 decades later. I guess I'll never get it.
OK. I have to start by saying that you're insane.
Next I have to ask: what about guantanamo & the war? 2 things that the president can actually do something about. Or maybe you think they're OK (see point 1).
But I do have a question:
You can't get divorced without 6 months of good marriage counseling, preferable faith-based (you choose the faith, obviously). The one exception is abuse. If there is abuse, you can leave today. We'll help. But if you accuse abuse and it is proven that you lied, you're locked up.
Also on the marriage front, you can't get married without at least a few sessions of marriage counseling. Talk about kids, values, in-laws, sex, where you want to live, religion, and everything else. The divorce rate is too high, and I see it as causing too many problems. These last two are designed to help lower that and improve things.
Why on earth? I've seen this kind of thing advocated before, and I don't understand the notion at all. If the people getting divorced shared your values system, they probably wouldn't be getting divorced, would they? As it stands, I think that most divorcing couples do attend a few sessions of marriage counseling - they're called divorce lawyers. And if you think that divorce lawyers would wait a minute before changing their titles to marriage counselors, I don't think you know enough lawyers.
At this point, aren't you just telling folks to not get married?
1. Clients (laptops) default installed wifi software (hint: Steve Jobs are you reading???) need a scanning
mode which does not waste my time telling me about all the password or mac-address locked wifi
basestations, and only advises me about open ones.
You need to upgrade to leopard. It shows a little lock next to the names of locked down wifi.
Oh come on, 12MB/s is just fine for a normal home network, unless you have a SAN set up. Cheap fiber could be a boon to those with relatively large clusters, however.
I want video&sound from my computer or notebook to my HDTV at home. Never mind what is currently possible or reasonable. That's what I want. And 12MB/s ain't gonna cut it, is it? And why wouldn't joe-home-user want that?
Seriously. You're a student, now. You're studying programming. That tells us a bunch of nothing.
What do you WANT to do?
If you want to teach English, you should consider changing majors.
If you want to design circuit boards, you should take some EE classes.
If you want to write high level apps and programs, you're probably doing fine.
You have taken a compiler course, and a circuit design course, right? I think there are some useful ideas in those.
What the hell do they teach, these days, anyway?
But more importantly for you: why the hell are you studying programming?
Come on! Programming in C is no more "Thinking" than programming in Java. It's just thinking about lower level crap.
I cut my teeth in C, back in the day (before Java). But I never enjoyed system level programming. I like app and server programming. And I sure as hell don't enjoy doing it in C. Gimme a nice, garbage collected, pointer free language any day. I don't like thinking about all that crap.
But one man's crap is another's manure. And I thank god for the hardware and system programmers. I'm glad someone enjoys it.
Our assembler class sucked. I'm not sure whose fault it was, but it was really terrible. But we did have one. And we had a processor design class, which was a lot less crappy than the assembler class.
So I think having those classes is good and important. And I think if your Uni is going to have a "Computer Science" program it should probably have upper div assembly and processor design classes. But it ain't everyone's cup o' tea.
You're guessing. I've got 10 years experience with this and I'm telling you it's not practical.
I'm not sure you understand what percent of transit providers uses these caches.
Pissing contest? Not much interested. Can you tell me where I can find the statistics for how many ISPs or users are stuck behind a transparent proxy online?
But really, if *Russia* offers an alt top level, and it works for *Russians* (ie. Russian ISPs support it), and the workaround is trivial and well known (use a non-russian TLD, too), what is the problem?
So it'll work fine for the folks who want it to work most: people in Russia, with Russian ISPs.
It turns out it will also work for me. I set my DNSServer to be someone who does opennic resolving. I was immediately able to visit http://www.opennic.glue/ You're right that I would not be able to send them email without configuring a different smart mailserver.
But I don't think it is reasonable to say that the whole thing won't work because your ISP sucks and transparent proxies you.
How? .manyspecialcharacters, google will buy/register the domain name google.manyspecialcharacters, just like they bought/registered google.ru. Russia will get some money, and everyone is happy - especially Russia. You can still call it google.com, or just 72.14.207.99.
It is just a nameservice. If russia decides they want a top level
One of the largest IPSs in Europe turned on IPv6 to all 8 million users this week. They've done the right thing and made it opt-in for now, their customers have to go to their control panel web page and turn it on, but almost 50,000 people did in the first 24 hours. They turned it on, and their Macs and Win machines started using IPv6 with no need to do anything other than tell Firefox and Tbird to start using IPv6 for DNS lookups. Because this one major ISP did this, their main competitor has been forced to make plans to enable IPv6 in January. After that, any ISP that doesn't have IPv6 turned on will be branded as "obsolete" or "incompetent".
Awesome. Go ahead and say it - who got it right?
I also cut me teeth on the IIe.
It is possible you are just not a very good programmer. But maybe you are, and you're being "poorly managed". Being poorly managed is your fault.
Here is a list of your responsibilities:
Implement what the customer needs.
Implement what the customer wants.
Do what your manager needs (distant 3rd).
Do what your manager wants.
Here is a list of your manager's responsibilities:
Make it clear to you what you are supposed to be working on.
Make it possible to do what you're supposed to do.
Make it easy to do what you're supposed to do.
Your manager works for you. If she asks you to do something you should not be doing, don't do it. If he is not making it possible/easy for you to do what you need to do, complain. Learn the word "no." Say it over and over. If you are the [only] programmer, or you are the team lead, you know what is best for the project. Explain how and why it is best. Be understanding, but be firm.
It is important to be honest and clear very early in the process. If something can't be done [in some period of time], you have to say so. Better if you understand what they want and see if you can do something similar in the timeline suggested, in addition to explaining how long it will take "their way" - that's "being flexible". Doing something the wrong way (most of the time) or agreeing to something that can not be done in the time given is not "being reasonable", it is being harmful to the project.
My notion is that 90% of the work done on any project will be after it is "complete." I don't know where I picked that up, exactly (in some college course, long ago), but it seems like a reasonable attitude to approach a project with. And if I'm going to spent 9 times the effort maintaining the project as I spent writing it, I sure as hell want it to be easy to maintain.
Huh. I find it is usually used when describing something that is rigged.
It's only for those who can read, anyway.
First paragraph:
The Google Summer of Code program for 2007 ran through August 31, 2007. This year, the program brought together 900 students and nearly 1500 mentors across 90 countries to contribute to over 130 different open source software projects. You can check out a KML file (requires Google Earth) showcasing this year's successful participants (and their supporting mentors from various Open Source organizations).
And as others have pointed out, the eligibility clause clearly states that fariners are allowed.
WTF, Taco?
How about a retraction or correction? Just once admit that it was really dumb to post this "story".
jruby lets us write new web apps that use thousands of lines of java controller code without having to rewrite those thousands of lines of perfectly functional code. Eventually we may migrate to pure ruby - but in the meantime, jruby is a great solution.
I'm just saying that ratting out the company is so far removed from looking out for its best interests that it really isn't the same ballpark.
not looking out for your best interest
Hm. Where "not looking out for your best interest" means not ratting you out for software piracy? I'm not even sure which side of that could have to do with best interests.
I had a bad encounter with an RBL a few years back (late 90's, I think). I had installed some web proxy on my machine and opened it up so I could use it from outside my firewall. I never considered that it cold proxy to my machine itself. These were the bad middle days when packages could get away with shipping in not-quite-idiot-proof configuration. I later argued with the package maintainer that the proxy should disable local referrals by default. They didn't agree, and it wasn't my package.
Anyway. It turns out that spammers could blindly use my webproxy to push email to my local port 25 and send mail using it. Damn clever spammers. I figured it out after my email system croaked and I looked at the logs and mailq. (crap, 1000 spam messages in the outbox, originated on my system).
So I'd been a tool, and used, and it was my damn fault. I fixed it (uninstalled the proxy) and started to repair the damage.
One of the items of fallout was that the RBL lists had nailed my IP address as a spammer. Fair enough. But getting them to turn it off was a royal pain in the ass and took days - even though their notes described exactly how the spam was delivered through my system and it was easily verifiable that it was no longer an issue.
It left me pretty peeved, and I've never used an RBL since.
If i had a WoW account i would be cancelling it this second, no videogame has the right to violate the privacy of my computer
The what?
If I had a WoW account, I would be glad that Bliz has continued to take reasonable steps to limit cheating and violating the terms of their service (as they define it, for their game) as much as they can. Oh, wait, I do have an account!
And it turns out I enjoy their game, and I find that those that cheat and/or violate the terms of service (as they define it, for their game) detract from my gaming experience.
As for the inane rootkit FUD: what, you decompile all the games you play? You know what is executing? You track file access for those games?
And finally: if I were more paranoid, I'd just create a wow account on my machine, limit it's access, and worry not at all.
I bailed on kuro5hin.org a couple of years ago. Basically, it had become popular enough and let people vote on enough things (what got published to what pages, etc), that it seemed that the teaming masses of idiots were running the place. And basically they were.
/. may suck, mostly the crap sinks to the bottom, and good responses float to the top. Especially if you change your modifiers so that responses marked mostly "Funny" are given -2 in your personal filter.
As much as some of the editors here are idiots. As much as they fail to edit. As much as they abuse their editorship (quips in the article, changing article text), they are also answerable to someone. And I think that's probably a good and important thing.
And as much as the mod system here at
Yeah, I've signed several ridiculous papers - but I live and work in California, and I know they are unenforceable. I figure some lawyer somewhere was told to write a contract that would do thus-and-so, so they did. To hell with whether it was enforceable or not. The odds of my bitching about a dumb contract making a good impression on an employer or making it up the chain and getting something changed are about nil (given that these usually come with short-term contract gigs in my case).
There was one job where that kind of happened, though. I skimmed the contract (because I don't much care what they say), pointed out some of the things that were clearly insane while my boss's boss and some flunky hovered. The flunky took interest. I read a few sentences and said "Look, this essentially means that you get my work on my hardware on my time for free, even if it has nothing to do with you. That doesn't fly." He replies "that amounts to slavery - that isn't possible." "Right. Whatever. Who wrote this crap?" "I did."
It's fortunate that I have generally worked for smart, reasonable people. I signed the ridiculous contract and we all got on with our lives.
leereyno,
I looked at some of your other posts, and I wish you had worded this one a little differently.
Are these nations known for their defense of liberty? Are their citizens free?
Patriot Act
Warrantless Wiretapping
Guantanamo
America is hardly at its height in the human rights game. Hell, we're confirming an Attorney General who isn't sure that waterboarding is illegal/torture.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21698732/
No, we're not yet as bad as the nations you listed.
Evil never sleeps and stupid never dies.
But let's keep our eyes open.