it depends (famous lawyer answer I know)
if you signed a contract with a non-competition clause in it, then you are in trouble, but you said that there was no such thing.
In that case you have to look at what duties you had to the company. Did the company trust you with company secrets with the implied understanding that you would not betray that trust by using your knowledge in competing against the employer in the future? Did you have clients that left with you when you moved from the company? the relationship you had with the employer will determine whether they have any cause of action. If there was no relationship of trust or clients that you poached from the employer, then they really have no claim against you. Labor contracts as a rule are generally non-binding. The employer has the right to fire you anytime for any reason and you have the right to leave at any time for any reason, even the 2 week notice is not a legal requirement in any state as far as Im aware. The only time you have to watch your step is if there is a WRITTEN labor contract that spells out the duties of the employer and employee relationship and establishes that post employment obligations of the employee.
thats my 2 cents.
Disclaimer: Im a 2nd year law student, not a lawyer, but as far as I know this is the general rule in the US.
these are fuckers that promoted the Iraq war. They are the ones that were responsible for such great hits as 'we will be greeted as liberators" and that the Iraq war would only cost a few billion dollars. makes me sick to see that this group of asses has such power in american politics. Cant we prosecute them? These people should lose their citizenship for treason and be sent to Iraq to enjoy the great democracy they helped create there.
this is very old news. Courts ruled over 10 years ago that phone conversations could be intercepted because they do not constitute protected speech. the constitutional rational is that people do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their cell phone conversations (legally) therefore, cell-phone conversations are not protected by the 4th amendment.
he understand the nature of bureaucracy better then anyone. he knows that if his foundation continues to exist indefinitely, it will only stagnate and become just another institution. Putting a time limit on when the money can be spent will allow for a sense of urgency that such organizations need, and it will likely give people who need that help the most bang for their buck since a lot more money can be used to do bigger projects.
thats why I said that my statement applied to people who were in my position.
You make a good point that addiction is a very flexible term, and that the media overuses it and its strong negative connotations. And the truth is that people can and do get addicted to just about anything. If you think about it, we are all addicted to food, the fact that we would die if we weren't addicted is a minor point, the thing that always gets pointed out is the abuse of food (overeating) and the problems it creates. if I could play a game like WOW for 3 hours a week and be able to put it down, I would probably still be playing, but for me the urge to keep playing the darn thing is just too great. And to clarify for myself personally, I don't think I have an addictive personality, at least I dont indulge to excess in most things of life, but WOW was the one thing that I really went over the line with. For some its food, for some its drink or drugs, and sometimes its games.
BTW, keep in mind that there is a distinction between physical addiction and impulse control problems that we also classify as a type of addiction. A drug user may (and usually does) have both poor impulse control and a physical addiction. On the other hand people who are addicted to food or games dont have a physical dependence so much as a problem with stopping an activity before it gets out of hand. Why? because it makes you feel good, so to that extent it is partially physical, but not to the point where your body would have withdrawal symptoms from quitting. (well...overeating might have quite a few withdrawal symptoms actually).
i got WOW when it first came out, and I played it non-stop for a year. I lived in that game. I would come from work at 6pm and stay in the game till 3am the next morning. I would eat at the computer and rush back to the game anytime I was away for even a minute. These online games are incredibly destructive to social life and most likely to health as well. it was a year of life wasted and the only thing that broke my addiction was a realization that i would never finish my degree if I didnt stop. Now some people probably can play for a few hours and then stop, but a lot of people like me can't, and as I realized, when you get that absorbed into a game, its better to just turn off the game, cancel the account and stop. If you are in the position I was before I quit, do yourself a favor, cancel your account, stop playing, and go outside for a while. do whatever it was you did before you started playing like go out with friends or surfing (im in california), snowboarding, etc. Dont waste your life and your money on this.
you guys should really read up on your 4th amendment rights. A this point its not what can the government do, its what can the government not do, because the 4th amendment is swiss cheese. There are so many exceptions and ifs and buts thanks to the conservative supreme court of the last 20 years, that we could for all intents and purposes rewrite the 4th amendment, completely ejecting the warrant requirement (which is hardly used anyway now anyways) and replacing probable cause with reasonable suspicion, because in todays world cops only need PC to arrest, they can do just about anything else without warrant or probable cause.
A search of the home still requires a warrant and PC in some cases, but cops usually go around the requirement anyway by doing a knock and talk. Even when they do get a warrant, the judge can make a mistake and give warrant when there is no PC, and not be second guessed. Anyway, my point is simply that at this point we dont really have a 4th amendment right to privacy as most people here probably imagine. In fact, anything that goes through an intermediary is not protected by the 4th amendment, and that INCLUDES you email, your phone conversations, bank records, trash, etc etc. So when Gonzales says that he is not violating the constitution, he can actually say it with a straight face, because according to our highest court, he really isnt violating our rights because we didnt have any privacy expectation in our coversations, email, etc to begin with.
it wont die for one simple reason.
When i leave my house and I want to record a TV show, I pop in a VHS tape. Why? because like most people out there I dont have a DVR or a DVD recorder capable of recording broadcast TV. So the job falls to my trusty old tape, thats been taped over 500 times but still manages the job magnificently.
The day I can buy a DVD disk that I can use and re-use to tape bradcast TV on a $40 DVD player, the VHS will die. But that day has not come yet.
we have the same problem here in the US.
Simply put, our laws are outdated.
here is a quiz for you, which of the items bellow is information protected under our constitution absent probable cause and a warrant?
(1) telephone conversations (2) address information on mail (3) emial messages (4) bank records (5) the trash outside your door
The answer is none are protected, the government can look at your trash, get your bank records and read your email without any warrant or cause shown. This is all because sometime ago the supreme court of the US ruled that if information you passed went through a "3rd party", then there was no "reasonable expectation of privacy" and hence the 4th amendment did not apply. in this age of electronics however this takes on scarry proportions since virtually every communication goes through a 3rd party at this point. email, cell phone coversations, credit card transactions, everything you do from day to day leaves an electronic trail behind you, and according to current law none of that information is protected by the 4th amendment from government snooping.
Saddam deserves to die more than anyone else, but having said that, this trial was a sham. Saddam had over half a dozen of his defense attorneys killed and the presiding judge was replaced no fewer than 3 times. Under the circumstances of this trial, there is no way Saddam got a fair and impartial trial. he should have been tried in the Hague just as other war criminals were, unfortunately that would have exposed US complicity in bringing Saddam to power as well as us arming him with the weapons he consequently used to perpetrate his crimes. What is really ironic is that the guys who were funding him back in the 80s are the exact same people who are now cheering on about his execution. Rumsfeld and Chaney were both parties to the funding of Saddam, and now his former allies will be his executioners. its a shame that what could have been a true trial where the truth was revealed has turned into a circus. Iraqi's cheer his death, but make no mistake, they know, and they remember our complicity in his actions. the only ones who dont know is as is typical, the american people.
I would probably move to Italy. they get 5 weeks of vacation, free health care, and life quality is pretty good. Plus if you live in the North you can get a decent paying job.
i agree with you on the lart point about the american people wanting this. For all the moans and groans, we are ourselves responsible for what is happening to our democracy. Bush is a symptom, not a cause of the decay. As one example, the 4th amendment exclusionary rule forbade courts to introduce evidence into a criminal trial that was obtaind subject to an illigal search warrant (ie one with no probable cause). The reason for this is that the 4th amendment explicitly states that the government must have probable cause AND a warrant. Well, the supreme court in its wisdom ruled that so long as the cop reasonably relied on an illegal warrant, the evidence would be allowed in. This directly contradicted and indeed violated the american constitution. By all rights the supreme court should have been impeached for such a decision, sadly, this is but one example. of course you say, well how does this have anything to do with the people, they didnt vote for the Supreme court right. Well, in california we had a State Constitution exclusionary rule for precisely this type of evidence. So even if the feds did away with the 4th amendment, at least the state constitution would protect us right? WRONG. the year after the supreme court decision proposition 8 was passed by california voters, abolishing the exclusionary rule of the state constitution. So what we have here is an unelected supreme court not uphollding the protections of the constitution, and then the people of a state ruling for the annulment of their own constituional protections! And all this done in the name of preventing crime. And that was BEFORE 9/11.
As an american Im very sad to see what is happening, but I blame us, and I blame you, because no one stands up for what is right, no one tries to educate themselves about the law. how many here know their rights under the constitution? how many would stand up and say something if they saw someones rights were being violated? And how many voted for either laws or politicians that supported the restriction and elimination of our rights? We deserve what we get, because we are killing our own democracy through ignorance and through lack of care and action.
if you are scared now, just imagine how scared you would be for your democratic freedoms if you actually knew anything about the current state of constitutional rights. As a law student i was quite shocked, but in fact the 4th amendment against search ans seizure has all but ceased to exist under the weight of exceptions that have built up over the last 20 years. the Patriot act which among other things allows "roaving wiretapping" and break and peek searches that allow personel to enter the home and search without a warrant or probable cause and without having to notify the owner have further damaged american's freedoms. on top of all that the exclusionary rule no longer applies in many cases whether it comes to immigrant rights or drug related offenses. the result is that the only legal remedy to a violation of your constitutional rights under the 4th amendment, ie the exclusion of illegally obtained evidence in a trial, is now void, meaning that your "right" is no longer a right, but more of a suggestion. Welcome to this brave new world, and dont speak too loudly into the microphone.
you are probably thinking of sex addicts:)
You know, you can be a sex addict even if you don't have "sex" per se since masturbation technically counts, so if you are..playing with your joystick... twice a day, then you just might qualify for some sort of program.
can't we technically qualify anything as an addiction? I mean if you define an addiction as a habbit that leads to anti-social behavior, then anything from excessive porn watching to video-games to overeating can count as an addiction.
Maybe we (as in everyone) have to realise that anything and everything we do in life can potentially be an addiction (ie something we do excessively to divert our attention from the problems in our lives) Just ask the workaholics who work 14 hours a day instead of playing quake 14 hours a day.
BTW, I'm a "recovering" game addict as it were. I was in the top 10% of my law school class, then i picked up WOW, big mistake. I passed, but boy did my grades fall. That game litteraly came close to ruining me financially. I ditched it and deleted my char's. Bottom line with games like WOW is thins, if a friend calls you and asks you if you want to go out and you say no because you want to lvl your 55 lvl druid to 56 by grinding in an instance with you guild, then you have a problem.
I had heard of the $500 figure you mentioned, so you are probably right about that. of course does it matter if it's 500 or 700? I mean factually it matters, but in terms of the point I was making it does not change anything.
As for the landmines, I made a mistake.
yes, 32 billion is chicken feed when the USA does 700+ billion dollars worth of business manufacturing and selling weapons to places like Egypt, Israel, South Korea, et al. named a weapon, we got it. The USA is the #1 manufacturer of landmines that blow off the hands/legs/heads of all those nice refugees you always see. God bless the USA. But that doesent mean we don't still have some appreciation for other businesses, even if they are chicken feed.
the government has always been the enemy of the people alost by definition because the social contract is imperfect. it presumes either mob rule (democracy) or the rule by a few powerful elite (republic). Those in power have always sought to control the economy and the people, and to distribute income to the uppert classes. The democrats want to distribute wealth via direct redistribution schemes, while the republicans use regulation, quotas and other restrictions on fair trade to indirectly distribute wealth upwards. That makes both of them my enemies.
major conflict of interest don't you think?
I mean MS builds a platform full of holes, and then asks for more money to fix the holes.
Thats like if GM built a truck with no engine, and once you took delivery asked for a seperate additional check for the engine.
originally, television was supposed to serve the public as well. The government allowed companies to "rent" airspace for programming and in exchange promised to provide a public service in the form of news. We all know how that turned out. Now it looks like the companies are going to repeat the same thing with the internet, and because they control access, there is little anyone can do to stop them.
Computer literacy and how to measure such literacy
First, define what you mean by computer literacy. Does computer literacy for example include a student's ability to install ram/HD/mother board/etc, the ability to put hardware together from scratch, the ability to use basic programs like excel/word. Could it be the ability to fix hardware problems, recognize when a problem is hardware and when it is software based. Being able to adapt and use new programs previously not encountered. Perhaps computer literacy is being able to understand basic code: being able to use Visual Basic, C, Java, etc?
I would say that all of the above are important are important and relevant measures of computer literacy. What's more, all of them are required to some degree to function well in the modern workplace. If teachers are serious about having students coming out of school compute literate, students will have to be able to do all of the above. This raises the question, first how can you "test" someone when it comes to being able to problem-solve a network problem for example, and secondly, how can teachers teach this material when most of them are not knowledgeable enough themselves to perform all of the above.
So there you have it. (a) We can define what computer literacy at it's basic should be, but we can't really test it per se, at least not the way things are usually tested in schools (choose from the following (a)(b)(c)....)
(b) The second problem is that teachers don't know enough to teach the subject, so even if we solved the problem of testability, by say ignoring testing or making testing more subjective, we would still have this fundamental problem.
The result is watered down computer literacy, with literacy defines as being able to recognize how to use basic programs like word and excel and foregoing explanations of how to repair/upgrade/program computers.
nice to see the government doing the music industries dirty work. the pople who got busted are probably normal people, i doubt that a big time file downloader would allow all of his files to be exposed to edonkey or any other service which might make him/her a victim of just such an action. so yet again, you will end up getting a grandma going to jail screaming "what has my nice niece done!" Oh well.
this DRM debate brings up soe legal issues. The companies like sony and MS are framing digital files as property, and saying that copies of files infringe on their "rights" to the files. here is the fundamental problem. law defined property as a bundle of rights that the law will enforce. if you think about it, property is nothing more then the things you can or cannot do with what you own. For example you can own a gun, but you cant use it to shoot people 9except in self defense), or you can own a home, but you cant set up a gas station on it if the area is zoned for residential.
The same principle generally applies to all electronic files. What bundle of rights belong to the companies that produce content and waht rights belong to users is defined by LAW, not by some mystical or anchient system. Because electronic media as we know it today is so new, most courts have not really defined what rights property owners hold (users and content owners alike). So we are really in a crucial time right now, with the media companies trying to corner the courts into giving them more rights then the end user. DRM is a part of this, and people should be aware that whether DRM or any control system is legal or not is still up in the air since the courts have not yet determined what property rights users actually have in this new age of content. just my 2 cents -I'm an L2
The FDA? What logical relationship exists between a giant, inept and incompetent beaurocracy that tries to regulate foods and drugs, and nano-tech, which is mostly tech related?
Slashdot Mirror
it depends (famous lawyer answer I know) if you signed a contract with a non-competition clause in it, then you are in trouble, but you said that there was no such thing. In that case you have to look at what duties you had to the company. Did the company trust you with company secrets with the implied understanding that you would not betray that trust by using your knowledge in competing against the employer in the future? Did you have clients that left with you when you moved from the company? the relationship you had with the employer will determine whether they have any cause of action. If there was no relationship of trust or clients that you poached from the employer, then they really have no claim against you. Labor contracts as a rule are generally non-binding. The employer has the right to fire you anytime for any reason and you have the right to leave at any time for any reason, even the 2 week notice is not a legal requirement in any state as far as Im aware. The only time you have to watch your step is if there is a WRITTEN labor contract that spells out the duties of the employer and employee relationship and establishes that post employment obligations of the employee. thats my 2 cents. Disclaimer: Im a 2nd year law student, not a lawyer, but as far as I know this is the general rule in the US.
these are fuckers that promoted the Iraq war. They are the ones that were responsible for such great hits as 'we will be greeted as liberators" and that the Iraq war would only cost a few billion dollars. makes me sick to see that this group of asses has such power in american politics. Cant we prosecute them? These people should lose their citizenship for treason and be sent to Iraq to enjoy the great democracy they helped create there.
this is very old news. Courts ruled over 10 years ago that phone conversations could be intercepted because they do not constitute protected speech. the constitutional rational is that people do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their cell phone conversations (legally) therefore, cell-phone conversations are not protected by the 4th amendment.
he understand the nature of bureaucracy better then anyone. he knows that if his foundation continues to exist indefinitely, it will only stagnate and become just another institution. Putting a time limit on when the money can be spent will allow for a sense of urgency that such organizations need, and it will likely give people who need that help the most bang for their buck since a lot more money can be used to do bigger projects.
thats why I said that my statement applied to people who were in my position. You make a good point that addiction is a very flexible term, and that the media overuses it and its strong negative connotations. And the truth is that people can and do get addicted to just about anything. If you think about it, we are all addicted to food, the fact that we would die if we weren't addicted is a minor point, the thing that always gets pointed out is the abuse of food (overeating) and the problems it creates. if I could play a game like WOW for 3 hours a week and be able to put it down, I would probably still be playing, but for me the urge to keep playing the darn thing is just too great. And to clarify for myself personally, I don't think I have an addictive personality, at least I dont indulge to excess in most things of life, but WOW was the one thing that I really went over the line with. For some its food, for some its drink or drugs, and sometimes its games. BTW, keep in mind that there is a distinction between physical addiction and impulse control problems that we also classify as a type of addiction. A drug user may (and usually does) have both poor impulse control and a physical addiction. On the other hand people who are addicted to food or games dont have a physical dependence so much as a problem with stopping an activity before it gets out of hand. Why? because it makes you feel good, so to that extent it is partially physical, but not to the point where your body would have withdrawal symptoms from quitting. (well...overeating might have quite a few withdrawal symptoms actually).
i got WOW when it first came out, and I played it non-stop for a year. I lived in that game. I would come from work at 6pm and stay in the game till 3am the next morning. I would eat at the computer and rush back to the game anytime I was away for even a minute. These online games are incredibly destructive to social life and most likely to health as well. it was a year of life wasted and the only thing that broke my addiction was a realization that i would never finish my degree if I didnt stop. Now some people probably can play for a few hours and then stop, but a lot of people like me can't, and as I realized, when you get that absorbed into a game, its better to just turn off the game, cancel the account and stop. If you are in the position I was before I quit, do yourself a favor, cancel your account, stop playing, and go outside for a while. do whatever it was you did before you started playing like go out with friends or surfing (im in california), snowboarding, etc. Dont waste your life and your money on this.
you guys should really read up on your 4th amendment rights. A this point its not what can the government do, its what can the government not do, because the 4th amendment is swiss cheese. There are so many exceptions and ifs and buts thanks to the conservative supreme court of the last 20 years, that we could for all intents and purposes rewrite the 4th amendment, completely ejecting the warrant requirement (which is hardly used anyway now anyways) and replacing probable cause with reasonable suspicion, because in todays world cops only need PC to arrest, they can do just about anything else without warrant or probable cause. A search of the home still requires a warrant and PC in some cases, but cops usually go around the requirement anyway by doing a knock and talk. Even when they do get a warrant, the judge can make a mistake and give warrant when there is no PC, and not be second guessed. Anyway, my point is simply that at this point we dont really have a 4th amendment right to privacy as most people here probably imagine. In fact, anything that goes through an intermediary is not protected by the 4th amendment, and that INCLUDES you email, your phone conversations, bank records, trash, etc etc. So when Gonzales says that he is not violating the constitution, he can actually say it with a straight face, because according to our highest court, he really isnt violating our rights because we didnt have any privacy expectation in our coversations, email, etc to begin with.
it wont die for one simple reason. When i leave my house and I want to record a TV show, I pop in a VHS tape. Why? because like most people out there I dont have a DVR or a DVD recorder capable of recording broadcast TV. So the job falls to my trusty old tape, thats been taped over 500 times but still manages the job magnificently. The day I can buy a DVD disk that I can use and re-use to tape bradcast TV on a $40 DVD player, the VHS will die. But that day has not come yet.
we have the same problem here in the US. Simply put, our laws are outdated. here is a quiz for you, which of the items bellow is information protected under our constitution absent probable cause and a warrant? (1) telephone conversations (2) address information on mail (3) emial messages (4) bank records (5) the trash outside your door The answer is none are protected, the government can look at your trash, get your bank records and read your email without any warrant or cause shown. This is all because sometime ago the supreme court of the US ruled that if information you passed went through a "3rd party", then there was no "reasonable expectation of privacy" and hence the 4th amendment did not apply. in this age of electronics however this takes on scarry proportions since virtually every communication goes through a 3rd party at this point. email, cell phone coversations, credit card transactions, everything you do from day to day leaves an electronic trail behind you, and according to current law none of that information is protected by the 4th amendment from government snooping.
Saddam deserves to die more than anyone else, but having said that, this trial was a sham. Saddam had over half a dozen of his defense attorneys killed and the presiding judge was replaced no fewer than 3 times. Under the circumstances of this trial, there is no way Saddam got a fair and impartial trial. he should have been tried in the Hague just as other war criminals were, unfortunately that would have exposed US complicity in bringing Saddam to power as well as us arming him with the weapons he consequently used to perpetrate his crimes. What is really ironic is that the guys who were funding him back in the 80s are the exact same people who are now cheering on about his execution. Rumsfeld and Chaney were both parties to the funding of Saddam, and now his former allies will be his executioners. its a shame that what could have been a true trial where the truth was revealed has turned into a circus. Iraqi's cheer his death, but make no mistake, they know, and they remember our complicity in his actions. the only ones who dont know is as is typical, the american people.
I would probably move to Italy. they get 5 weeks of vacation, free health care, and life quality is pretty good. Plus if you live in the North you can get a decent paying job.
i agree with you on the lart point about the american people wanting this. For all the moans and groans, we are ourselves responsible for what is happening to our democracy. Bush is a symptom, not a cause of the decay. As one example, the 4th amendment exclusionary rule forbade courts to introduce evidence into a criminal trial that was obtaind subject to an illigal search warrant (ie one with no probable cause). The reason for this is that the 4th amendment explicitly states that the government must have probable cause AND a warrant. Well, the supreme court in its wisdom ruled that so long as the cop reasonably relied on an illegal warrant, the evidence would be allowed in. This directly contradicted and indeed violated the american constitution. By all rights the supreme court should have been impeached for such a decision, sadly, this is but one example. of course you say, well how does this have anything to do with the people, they didnt vote for the Supreme court right. Well, in california we had a State Constitution exclusionary rule for precisely this type of evidence. So even if the feds did away with the 4th amendment, at least the state constitution would protect us right? WRONG. the year after the supreme court decision proposition 8 was passed by california voters, abolishing the exclusionary rule of the state constitution. So what we have here is an unelected supreme court not uphollding the protections of the constitution, and then the people of a state ruling for the annulment of their own constituional protections! And all this done in the name of preventing crime. And that was BEFORE 9/11. As an american Im very sad to see what is happening, but I blame us, and I blame you, because no one stands up for what is right, no one tries to educate themselves about the law. how many here know their rights under the constitution? how many would stand up and say something if they saw someones rights were being violated? And how many voted for either laws or politicians that supported the restriction and elimination of our rights? We deserve what we get, because we are killing our own democracy through ignorance and through lack of care and action.
if you are scared now, just imagine how scared you would be for your democratic freedoms if you actually knew anything about the current state of constitutional rights. As a law student i was quite shocked, but in fact the 4th amendment against search ans seizure has all but ceased to exist under the weight of exceptions that have built up over the last 20 years. the Patriot act which among other things allows "roaving wiretapping" and break and peek searches that allow personel to enter the home and search without a warrant or probable cause and without having to notify the owner have further damaged american's freedoms. on top of all that the exclusionary rule no longer applies in many cases whether it comes to immigrant rights or drug related offenses. the result is that the only legal remedy to a violation of your constitutional rights under the 4th amendment, ie the exclusion of illegally obtained evidence in a trial, is now void, meaning that your "right" is no longer a right, but more of a suggestion. Welcome to this brave new world, and dont speak too loudly into the microphone.
you are probably thinking of sex addicts :)
You know, you can be a sex addict even if you don't have "sex" per se since masturbation technically counts, so if you are..playing with your joystick... twice a day, then you just might qualify for some sort of program.
i think what you have qualifies as a pot addiction. good luck with the treatment :)
can't we technically qualify anything as an addiction? I mean if you define an addiction as a habbit that leads to anti-social behavior, then anything from excessive porn watching to video-games to overeating can count as an addiction. Maybe we (as in everyone) have to realise that anything and everything we do in life can potentially be an addiction (ie something we do excessively to divert our attention from the problems in our lives) Just ask the workaholics who work 14 hours a day instead of playing quake 14 hours a day. BTW, I'm a "recovering" game addict as it were. I was in the top 10% of my law school class, then i picked up WOW, big mistake. I passed, but boy did my grades fall. That game litteraly came close to ruining me financially. I ditched it and deleted my char's. Bottom line with games like WOW is thins, if a friend calls you and asks you if you want to go out and you say no because you want to lvl your 55 lvl druid to 56 by grinding in an instance with you guild, then you have a problem.
I had heard of the $500 figure you mentioned, so you are probably right about that. of course does it matter if it's 500 or 700? I mean factually it matters, but in terms of the point I was making it does not change anything. As for the landmines, I made a mistake.
yes, 32 billion is chicken feed when the USA does 700+ billion dollars worth of business manufacturing and selling weapons to places like Egypt, Israel, South Korea, et al. named a weapon, we got it. The USA is the #1 manufacturer of landmines that blow off the hands/legs/heads of all those nice refugees you always see. God bless the USA. But that doesent mean we don't still have some appreciation for other businesses, even if they are chicken feed.
the government has always been the enemy of the people alost by definition because the social contract is imperfect. it presumes either mob rule (democracy) or the rule by a few powerful elite (republic). Those in power have always sought to control the economy and the people, and to distribute income to the uppert classes. The democrats want to distribute wealth via direct redistribution schemes, while the republicans use regulation, quotas and other restrictions on fair trade to indirectly distribute wealth upwards. That makes both of them my enemies.
major conflict of interest don't you think? I mean MS builds a platform full of holes, and then asks for more money to fix the holes. Thats like if GM built a truck with no engine, and once you took delivery asked for a seperate additional check for the engine.
originally, television was supposed to serve the public as well. The government allowed companies to "rent" airspace for programming and in exchange promised to provide a public service in the form of news. We all know how that turned out. Now it looks like the companies are going to repeat the same thing with the internet, and because they control access, there is little anyone can do to stop them.
Computer literacy and how to measure such literacy First, define what you mean by computer literacy. Does computer literacy for example include a student's ability to install ram/HD/mother board/etc, the ability to put hardware together from scratch, the ability to use basic programs like excel/word. Could it be the ability to fix hardware problems, recognize when a problem is hardware and when it is software based. Being able to adapt and use new programs previously not encountered. Perhaps computer literacy is being able to understand basic code: being able to use Visual Basic, C, Java, etc? I would say that all of the above are important are important and relevant measures of computer literacy. What's more, all of them are required to some degree to function well in the modern workplace. If teachers are serious about having students coming out of school compute literate, students will have to be able to do all of the above. This raises the question, first how can you "test" someone when it comes to being able to problem-solve a network problem for example, and secondly, how can teachers teach this material when most of them are not knowledgeable enough themselves to perform all of the above. So there you have it. (a) We can define what computer literacy at it's basic should be, but we can't really test it per se, at least not the way things are usually tested in schools (choose from the following (a)(b)(c)....) (b) The second problem is that teachers don't know enough to teach the subject, so even if we solved the problem of testability, by say ignoring testing or making testing more subjective, we would still have this fundamental problem. The result is watered down computer literacy, with literacy defines as being able to recognize how to use basic programs like word and excel and foregoing explanations of how to repair/upgrade/program computers.
nice to see the government doing the music industries dirty work. the pople who got busted are probably normal people, i doubt that a big time file downloader would allow all of his files to be exposed to edonkey or any other service which might make him/her a victim of just such an action. so yet again, you will end up getting a grandma going to jail screaming "what has my nice niece done!" Oh well.
this DRM debate brings up soe legal issues. The companies like sony and MS are framing digital files as property, and saying that copies of files infringe on their "rights" to the files. here is the fundamental problem. law defined property as a bundle of rights that the law will enforce. if you think about it, property is nothing more then the things you can or cannot do with what you own. For example you can own a gun, but you cant use it to shoot people 9except in self defense), or you can own a home, but you cant set up a gas station on it if the area is zoned for residential. The same principle generally applies to all electronic files. What bundle of rights belong to the companies that produce content and waht rights belong to users is defined by LAW, not by some mystical or anchient system. Because electronic media as we know it today is so new, most courts have not really defined what rights property owners hold (users and content owners alike). So we are really in a crucial time right now, with the media companies trying to corner the courts into giving them more rights then the end user. DRM is a part of this, and people should be aware that whether DRM or any control system is legal or not is still up in the air since the courts have not yet determined what property rights users actually have in this new age of content. just my 2 cents -I'm an L2
The FDA? What logical relationship exists between a giant, inept and incompetent beaurocracy that tries to regulate foods and drugs, and nano-tech, which is mostly tech related?