Please remember the difference between border guards and the idiots who tell them what to search.
Some border guards are power hungry sociopaths who like to torment you, most aren't. Realistically most of them won't search your computer because they'll think it's as stupid as you do and they don't care.
That said, like most people in public facing government jobs they're not likely to have an awful lot of patience or understanding for people who want to cause them trouble.
They or friends of theres are also fairly likely to be the people you encounter the next time you cross at that particular crossing so being a tool and making their jobs harder than it already is without good reason is going to make you more likely to get searched a second time.
Border guards aren't that stupid, most of them are halfway decent people, but they've got fairly broad ranging powers and nobody likes a smart ass.
Unless your border guards have had a recent donation from the RIAA/MPAA/BSA they probably don't really care, realistically unless they're bored they're not going to do much about data even if they bother to look at it. It's none of their business and doing anything about it would require filling in paper work.
On the other hand, if you act like a smart ass and piss them off, you'll probably find your car being taken apart to make sure you don't have any hidden compartments, a cavity search and your drives sent to the appropriate interested parties.
Never act like a dick to someone who has the power to make your life miserable unless you're damned sure you're right and willing to take the consequences.
No, you don't have government twits telling you what health care you can and can't have.
Instead you have greedy blood sucking HMO's telling you what health care you can't have and charging you more for the priviledge.
I'm living in Australia now, and guess what, my "failed" government system, slow as it is is better than what I used to get from my mothers HMO in the US. I actually get to pick my doctor, and so long as I'm willing to wait for non essential stuff they'll give it to me.
Of course we've got private as well if you don't want to wait, or want a private room or that sort of thing, so it works both ways, but the US system, is a much more spectacular disaster.
We might have long waiting lists, and the occaisional issue with someone who needed treatment not getting it, but in the US you solve this by just denying treatment to anyone who can't afford it.
Your credit card company knows everything you've ever bought with the card, your bank knows everywhere you've ever accessed your account from, your ISP knows everything you've ever looked at(or could if they wanted to).
The conveniences of modern life require a certain loss of privacy, part of the world getting so much smaller is that there's a lot less distance. However, just like the IT guys at your work probably don't read your e-mail, partially due to professional ethics and partially because it's boring, google probably doesn't read your e-mail or look at your documents.
They could, but realistically they probably aren't going to. Unless you have no-script and block google-analytics and never use a google search or go to a site with google-ads on it they probably know an awful lot about you already.
Facebook is another situation, but it can be used appropriately and you can use it while maintaining a reasonable degree of privacy.
Privacy is a continuum not an end point. It isn't just on-line where you lose it, your co-workers can guess at pieces of your personal life based on your appearance and behaviour, even your grocery store clerk could, if they cared enough to remember it, make some pretty good guesses about your life. Every time you interact with another person, that person learns things about you and you lose a little bit of privacy. You can take that with tinfoil hat and go live in the middle of the woods with no interaction with others, but you'd give up an awful lot of stuff to do that.
The internet is the same, you have to make the balance between the realistic cost to your privacy and the benefits you receive by doing something.
Using google applications might be, if they're useful to you, ok. Having a facebook account, if you take the time to make sure you untag any photos that you don't want tagged as you, and if you actually use it, might also be ok.
Living makes your life less private, you've got to work out which bits of it are worth what loss to your privacy.
Personally I don't advertise my business on-line, but I don't hide under the bed either. I don't really want folks peeking through my windows, but I'm not going to live in a house without them just in case someone does.
AMD have a lot of issues, and they've made a lot of mistakes.
They got greedy when they were on top, and charged too much for processors which allowed Intel to do to them exactly what they did to Intel(swoop in with cheaper parts).
They've also got some problems with maintaining any presence in the top end of the CPU market. This isn't a huge deal for fabrication as almost no one buys those thousand dollar CPUs anyway, but those thousand dollar CPUs are your next generation main stream CPUs so you've got to have them.
They've also had some issues because they aren't big enough to take what's been happening in the market lately as easily as Intel has. AMD is now worth less than they paid for ATI, they're not alone in being worth a lot less, but it's not as visible for other companies.
Essentially the biggest thing this does is allow AMD the design company to ditch its debts into AMD the fab company. Investors will be much more willing to accept debt in the fab company because at the very least the assets are worth cash and it won't be dependent on whether AMD can come up with something halfway decent design wise. If the design company goes under, they can always just go fab Intel CPUs.
The design company on the other hand, after offloading a whole lot of its debt, is much more likely to stay alive long enough to fix things. They've got to get designs out into the market, they've got to be cheaper, and they've got to be at least almost as good as the Intel parts, but they have to survive long enough to do that.
Realistically, AMD will probably buy the company back if they do survive because having your own fabrication facilities is probably key to being in the top of this market, but in the meanwhile they get to stay alive in a failing economy, a credit crunch, and a time of total lack of vision for the future.
This split, silly as it sounds, may allow them to survive long enough to do this, and at the very least might keep Intel worried enough that they don't go back to the old days for a few more years.
Didn't say I don't have the money, said I won't spend it on a second MMO, I have other bills, and better things to do than spend money on yet another monthly fee for a game I won't have time to play.
I also pay to rent movies(don't get out to the movies very often admittedly, but it's expensive here).
I didn't say I needed it to be a WoW killer, I said that if MMO's as a genre are going to survive as anything more than an expensive to build/run niche product that one of them is going to have to steal some market share from WoW.
Fanbois don't matter, because as we've already established, the fanbois aren't what's important. What's important is those millions of people who signed up for WoW that no one ever thought would play an MMO. That's the market that every single one of the people paying for these things is trying to capture, even if their developers aren't.
World of Warcraft is the biggest entertainment money pot in the world. Hardware costs virtually nothing, on that scale software licenses are fairly cheap(for the few things they actually need licenses for), the kind of staffing they'd realistically need to keep it going is fairly low, bandwidth isn't even really all that expensive.
Realistically it can't be costing them much more than 200 million a year to keep the thing running and patched, and even if I'm wrong and it's costing them three times that they're still taking those costs out of 1.8 billion dollars in revenue.
That's why we have more MMO's than ever, because folks are willing to take a gamble to get that kind of money.
For one, MMO's take time as well as money, and there's only so much of that too.
Secondly, personally, I'm much more likely to cancel a second MMO than I am to skip going out to the movies because going out to the movies is a different form of entertainment.
I only have the room in my time/money budget for one MMO, and I don't think I'm alone.
True, this probably isn't the case for single folks with no lives, or whose entire social network plays the game with them, but those people aren't the bread and butter of what makes WoW what it is. Most of the difference between WoW and everyone else is that WoW works for the people who wouldn't play anything else.
Those are the people that the company that's going to finance/publish your MMO want, because they want that gigantic pot of money. Creating a new MMO that'll appeal to a couple of hundred thousand people world wide and pay for itself is fairly easy, even Sony can do it, but that's not what the publishers want.
If nothing competes with WoW the MMO industry will languish because why bother, there are plenty of ways to make money with less risk, and less up-front cost. Everyone will play WoW(or WoW 2) and nothing will ever change.
The industry needs a WoW killer, because the industry needs to feel that they have a chance at some of that money.
Based on what they charge folks in the western world, Blizzard has got to be pulling in over 150 million dollars a month in subscription fees, that's more than a billion dollars a year, most of which, realistically, is pure profit. Everyone wants a piece of that, and despite your "$15 isn't an awful lot of money to pay twice" almost no one is getting it. There's some folks out there who will subscribe to multiple MMO's, and there's another 9-10 million who won't.
Technically it's the number of people who are registered for unemployment.
Of course since the only reason to bother registering for unemployment is if you're money from them and not everyone who is unemployed qualifies for unemployment and those that do qualify, qualify for only a limited period of time, this number can, depending on the economy, be anything from fairly accurate, to wildly inaccurate.
In particular it is bad at reflecting the employment rates of new entrants to the work force(who haven't worked full time at a permament job and therefor don't qualify) or people without kids who have been unemployed for a prolonged period of time.
Generally it's a very clever number because the higher the number of unemployed in the country the greater the inaccuracy, so it reduces the unemployment figures at their worst without being obviously out of wack at lower numbers.
Generally you can probably presume that that 6% is at least 8% not including folks in prison.
The main reason that Goldman Sachs isn't doing as badly is because at Goldman Sachs the employees are playing with their own money as well as ours.
Needless to say that when their own cash is at stake investment bankers are interested in something more than just making a quick buck on transaction fees.
They still did a lot of the same stuipd things because well a quick buck is a quick buck, but there were some consequences for them doing the wrong thing, which really there ought to be for everyone.
The thing is that realistically it does need to be a WoW killer, or at least a serious WoW competitor.
There's only so many entertainment dollars available, even in the best of times, and WoW is currently getting a relatively large chunk of that money.
Every time a new MMO fails to take even a small chunk of that market share investors are going to be more reluctant to fund a new one(having an MMO which will survive launch is expensive cause you need a lot of server resources).
Personally I'm thinking of switching from WoW to WAR because I'm getting a little sick of WoW and I don't see WotLK fixing what's wrong with WoW.
The various BSD's are nice systems, but they don't have(and can't get) a lot of the user land stuff that linux has got, so they're realistically even further away from being ready for Joe SixPack.
The saying doesn't imply that all old pilots were never bold, or that no bold pilots ever get to be old, it merely suggests that it is very unlikely that any pilot should both continue to be bold and live to be old.
The folks on the space program are most likey bold, and a large number of them survive to be old, but generally folks go into space maybe a half dozen times on the outside they don't do it over and over and over again.
Plus, at least if you live in the US, your employer can screw you over for financial gain with no consequences whereas if you do it they'll sue you into oblivion. So from a pragmatic approach it's a bad idea.
Or the Kernel devs could stop being tools and realize that if they ever want Linux to be on the desktop they have to cooperate with hardware vendors even if they don't want to open source their drivers.
Well, when you take into account that Apple, while a bunch of smarmy jerks, don't have the general disdain for closed source that the Linux community does, it's not really blockheaded at all.
Kernel interfaces change frequently, with no regards for backwards compatibility, and linking into the kernel with a closed source module is considering akin to genocide.
The linux world is my way or the highway, which is the prerogative of the community, but as I've said before, if you act like a tool don't be surprised if no one wants to play with you.
The thing is that it's not sufficiently cheaper, as these returns indicate.
A $200 savings is not sufficiently great for someone who isn't particularly computer literate(and doesn't understand why they're doing something only that they have to do it and so can't translate well) to spend their time learning how to use a new system.
For you and me relearning something on linux is an hours work and it's fun, for Joe Sixpack, it's probably more like a month to learn how to do everything he needs to do, if he's lucky and has some help.
$200 isn't worth a month of frustration, and the four freedoms mean bupkiss to 99% of the population.
There's a difference between quitting and getting a new job at a company, and stealing corporate secrets and selling them in exchange for a job offer.
Selling out your employer for financial gain is most certainly morally(and legally) wrong.
Going to work for a competitor because they're the people who will pay the best for your skill set after legitimately leaving your previous employer and not revealing any privelidged corporate information is neither.
Well, realistically there's one of two situations here.
Either there's a healthy team of developers working on this project and the loss of one guy and his improvements aren't going to make much difference to the project and he's not screwing over the community anyway.
Or, he's the creator, or otherwise the primary developer of this project and they're buying the project. In this case, yes, a lot of people who use the project will be annoyed, but realistically, they're free to take up the code base(it's not like they can take the already released BSD code off the market) and improve it themselves.
Open Source doesn't guarantee you the right to anyone's time or resources, it guarantees you the right to take over if the person writing it doesn't want to do it anymore, and this hasn't changed.
Realistically what he's doing isn't any different than retiring, the company cannot steal the whole project if the source is already out there, and if the source isn't already out there then it was probably only a feel good open source project anyway, and if the author feels bad he can release it out before he signs the contract.
No one with a copy of that source is under any obligation based on a contract this guy signs, and the BSD licensing can't be retrospectively revoked, so all he's doing is stopping work on the project and going to work on a proprietary fork, all he's taking away is his own effort which he doesn't "morally" or "legally" owe to anyone.
If he's the creator of the project he could relicense any future code from a GPL project as proprietary too, there's no legal or moral difference. You can't undo what's been done, and no one has the moral right to what you haven't done yet.
Outside the development world, that's essentially what pretty much everyone does.
If you're an engineer, you don't stop being an engineer because you've changed jobs, and if you're a specialized kind of engineer or you have extensive experience in a particular field, then you're realistically going to end up at one of your competitors.
The same is true for doctors, nurses, kitchen staff, scientists, etc.
Pretty much anyone with any level of specialization whatsoever(ie anyone who isn't a PHB or a lemming) will eventually end up taking a job with someone who is/was a competitor(even if they weren't a major competitor) to one or more of their previous employers, its' the nature of the game.
Unless you don't switch jobs, don't attain any level of specialized skill, or are willing to throw away any experience you gain in a specialized area, you're going to do this eventually.
I'm a developer who moved within my company from tier 2 support. I admittedly got very lucky and didn't have to do much in the way of tier 1, but your problem is probably not so much that you did tech support(having a tech support background can be very helpful in a development role).
Your problem is that, unless you mean something else when you say call center than what I(and your perspective employers) think, you've spent two years in what is essentially a breeding ground for bitter, unimaginative and generally twisted souls.
Your future employers are going to see not only that you spent two years in an entry level job(which doesn't look good for your initiative or ambition), but that you spent it in a job that has likely already made you bitter and twisted.
That said, once you reach the interview stage, your employment history doesn't matter all that much, so you're probably also failing to impress at the interview or applying with the wrong types of companies.
I have never in all my years seen a 2d barcode that actually contained any information I'd want(as opposed to information a company wanted me to have).
Every packaged product in any store in the western world has a 1D barcode, and that barcode has a hell of a lot of information on it.
Add in the fact that you can store a hell of a lot of information in custom 1D barcodes, and it's actually a useful thing to use.
The bar code reader on your phone is a 2d barcode reader(I know I've got it set up on mine). It works fine for the 3 2d barcodes you're ever likely to find, but it won't read 1d barcodes(the kind on most stuff).
1D barcode reader plus google could be a killer app. Doesn't mean it will be, and of course you'd need a decent data plan to make it work, but if google can put together a halfway decent database of pricing, and encourage shops to participate(see how many small businesses now turn up on google maps), and it could be a hell of a killer app.
All the information you need about a product at the click of a button, immunity from all the garbage some companies pull(I'm looking at you dell) where two items(monitors) have the same model number but aren't the same. Not a bad start.
As has been stated before, false positives would be very unlikely in this scenario, if the program does something that doesn't match the execution pattern in its source code then its done something wrong.
False negatives would be a much bigger problem, but it's as good an automated technique as anything I've seen before. If the profiles can be distributed with binaries it might make it mainstream.
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Some border guards are power hungry sociopaths who like to torment you, most aren't. Realistically most of them won't search your computer because they'll think it's as stupid as you do and they don't care.
That said, like most people in public facing government jobs they're not likely to have an awful lot of patience or understanding for people who want to cause them trouble.
They or friends of theres are also fairly likely to be the people you encounter the next time you cross at that particular crossing so being a tool and making their jobs harder than it already is without good reason is going to make you more likely to get searched a second time.
Border guards aren't that stupid, most of them are halfway decent people, but they've got fairly broad ranging powers and nobody likes a smart ass.
Unless your border guards have had a recent donation from the RIAA/MPAA/BSA they probably don't really care, realistically unless they're bored they're not going to do much about data even if they bother to look at it. It's none of their business and doing anything about it would require filling in paper work.
On the other hand, if you act like a smart ass and piss them off, you'll probably find your car being taken apart to make sure you don't have any hidden compartments, a cavity search and your drives sent to the appropriate interested parties.
Never act like a dick to someone who has the power to make your life miserable unless you're damned sure you're right and willing to take the consequences.
Instead you have greedy blood sucking HMO's telling you what health care you can't have and charging you more for the priviledge.
I'm living in Australia now, and guess what, my "failed" government system, slow as it is is better than what I used to get from my mothers HMO in the US. I actually get to pick my doctor, and so long as I'm willing to wait for non essential stuff they'll give it to me.
Of course we've got private as well if you don't want to wait, or want a private room or that sort of thing, so it works both ways, but the US system, is a much more spectacular disaster.
We might have long waiting lists, and the occaisional issue with someone who needed treatment not getting it, but in the US you solve this by just denying treatment to anyone who can't afford it.
The conveniences of modern life require a certain loss of privacy, part of the world getting so much smaller is that there's a lot less distance. However, just like the IT guys at your work probably don't read your e-mail, partially due to professional ethics and partially because it's boring, google probably doesn't read your e-mail or look at your documents.
They could, but realistically they probably aren't going to. Unless you have no-script and block google-analytics and never use a google search or go to a site with google-ads on it they probably know an awful lot about you already.
Facebook is another situation, but it can be used appropriately and you can use it while maintaining a reasonable degree of privacy.
Privacy is a continuum not an end point. It isn't just on-line where you lose it, your co-workers can guess at pieces of your personal life based on your appearance and behaviour, even your grocery store clerk could, if they cared enough to remember it, make some pretty good guesses about your life. Every time you interact with another person, that person learns things about you and you lose a little bit of privacy. You can take that with tinfoil hat and go live in the middle of the woods with no interaction with others, but you'd give up an awful lot of stuff to do that.
The internet is the same, you have to make the balance between the realistic cost to your privacy and the benefits you receive by doing something.
Using google applications might be, if they're useful to you, ok. Having a facebook account, if you take the time to make sure you untag any photos that you don't want tagged as you, and if you actually use it, might also be ok.
Living makes your life less private, you've got to work out which bits of it are worth what loss to your privacy.
Personally I don't advertise my business on-line, but I don't hide under the bed either. I don't really want folks peeking through my windows, but I'm not going to live in a house without them just in case someone does.
The top of the range intel quad cores(if you can find them) were close to a grand before our dollar shat itself.
They got greedy when they were on top, and charged too much for processors which allowed Intel to do to them exactly what they did to Intel(swoop in with cheaper parts).
They've also got some problems with maintaining any presence in the top end of the CPU market. This isn't a huge deal for fabrication as almost no one buys those thousand dollar CPUs anyway, but those thousand dollar CPUs are your next generation main stream CPUs so you've got to have them.
They've also had some issues because they aren't big enough to take what's been happening in the market lately as easily as Intel has. AMD is now worth less than they paid for ATI, they're not alone in being worth a lot less, but it's not as visible for other companies.
Essentially the biggest thing this does is allow AMD the design company to ditch its debts into AMD the fab company. Investors will be much more willing to accept debt in the fab company because at the very least the assets are worth cash and it won't be dependent on whether AMD can come up with something halfway decent design wise. If the design company goes under, they can always just go fab Intel CPUs.
The design company on the other hand, after offloading a whole lot of its debt, is much more likely to stay alive long enough to fix things. They've got to get designs out into the market, they've got to be cheaper, and they've got to be at least almost as good as the Intel parts, but they have to survive long enough to do that.
Realistically, AMD will probably buy the company back if they do survive because having your own fabrication facilities is probably key to being in the top of this market, but in the meanwhile they get to stay alive in a failing economy, a credit crunch, and a time of total lack of vision for the future.
This split, silly as it sounds, may allow them to survive long enough to do this, and at the very least might keep Intel worried enough that they don't go back to the old days for a few more years.
I also pay to rent movies(don't get out to the movies very often admittedly, but it's expensive here).
I didn't say I needed it to be a WoW killer, I said that if MMO's as a genre are going to survive as anything more than an expensive to build/run niche product that one of them is going to have to steal some market share from WoW.
Fanbois don't matter, because as we've already established, the fanbois aren't what's important. What's important is those millions of people who signed up for WoW that no one ever thought would play an MMO. That's the market that every single one of the people paying for these things is trying to capture, even if their developers aren't.
World of Warcraft is the biggest entertainment money pot in the world. Hardware costs virtually nothing, on that scale software licenses are fairly cheap(for the few things they actually need licenses for), the kind of staffing they'd realistically need to keep it going is fairly low, bandwidth isn't even really all that expensive.
Realistically it can't be costing them much more than 200 million a year to keep the thing running and patched, and even if I'm wrong and it's costing them three times that they're still taking those costs out of 1.8 billion dollars in revenue.
That's why we have more MMO's than ever, because folks are willing to take a gamble to get that kind of money.
For one, MMO's take time as well as money, and there's only so much of that too.
Secondly, personally, I'm much more likely to cancel a second MMO than I am to skip going out to the movies because going out to the movies is a different form of entertainment.
I only have the room in my time/money budget for one MMO, and I don't think I'm alone.
True, this probably isn't the case for single folks with no lives, or whose entire social network plays the game with them, but those people aren't the bread and butter of what makes WoW what it is. Most of the difference between WoW and everyone else is that WoW works for the people who wouldn't play anything else.
Those are the people that the company that's going to finance/publish your MMO want, because they want that gigantic pot of money. Creating a new MMO that'll appeal to a couple of hundred thousand people world wide and pay for itself is fairly easy, even Sony can do it, but that's not what the publishers want.
If nothing competes with WoW the MMO industry will languish because why bother, there are plenty of ways to make money with less risk, and less up-front cost. Everyone will play WoW(or WoW 2) and nothing will ever change.
The industry needs a WoW killer, because the industry needs to feel that they have a chance at some of that money.
Based on what they charge folks in the western world, Blizzard has got to be pulling in over 150 million dollars a month in subscription fees, that's more than a billion dollars a year, most of which, realistically, is pure profit. Everyone wants a piece of that, and despite your "$15 isn't an awful lot of money to pay twice" almost no one is getting it. There's some folks out there who will subscribe to multiple MMO's, and there's another 9-10 million who won't.
Of course since the only reason to bother registering for unemployment is if you're money from them and not everyone who is unemployed qualifies for unemployment and those that do qualify, qualify for only a limited period of time, this number can, depending on the economy, be anything from fairly accurate, to wildly inaccurate.
In particular it is bad at reflecting the employment rates of new entrants to the work force(who haven't worked full time at a permament job and therefor don't qualify) or people without kids who have been unemployed for a prolonged period of time.
Generally it's a very clever number because the higher the number of unemployed in the country the greater the inaccuracy, so it reduces the unemployment figures at their worst without being obviously out of wack at lower numbers.
Generally you can probably presume that that 6% is at least 8% not including folks in prison.
Needless to say that when their own cash is at stake investment bankers are interested in something more than just making a quick buck on transaction fees.
They still did a lot of the same stuipd things because well a quick buck is a quick buck, but there were some consequences for them doing the wrong thing, which really there ought to be for everyone.
There's only so many entertainment dollars available, even in the best of times, and WoW is currently getting a relatively large chunk of that money.
Every time a new MMO fails to take even a small chunk of that market share investors are going to be more reluctant to fund a new one(having an MMO which will survive launch is expensive cause you need a lot of server resources).
Personally I'm thinking of switching from WoW to WAR because I'm getting a little sick of WoW and I don't see WotLK fixing what's wrong with WoW.
The various BSD's are nice systems, but they don't have(and can't get) a lot of the user land stuff that linux has got, so they're realistically even further away from being ready for Joe SixPack.
The folks on the space program are most likey bold, and a large number of them survive to be old, but generally folks go into space maybe a half dozen times on the outside they don't do it over and over and over again.
That's both illegal and immoral.
Plus, at least if you live in the US, your employer can screw you over for financial gain with no consequences whereas if you do it they'll sue you into oblivion. So from a pragmatic approach it's a bad idea.
That'll never happen though.
Kernel interfaces change frequently, with no regards for backwards compatibility, and linking into the kernel with a closed source module is considering akin to genocide.
The linux world is my way or the highway, which is the prerogative of the community, but as I've said before, if you act like a tool don't be surprised if no one wants to play with you.
A $200 savings is not sufficiently great for someone who isn't particularly computer literate(and doesn't understand why they're doing something only that they have to do it and so can't translate well) to spend their time learning how to use a new system.
For you and me relearning something on linux is an hours work and it's fun, for Joe Sixpack, it's probably more like a month to learn how to do everything he needs to do, if he's lucky and has some help.
$200 isn't worth a month of frustration, and the four freedoms mean bupkiss to 99% of the population.
Selling out your employer for financial gain is most certainly morally(and legally) wrong.
Going to work for a competitor because they're the people who will pay the best for your skill set after legitimately leaving your previous employer and not revealing any privelidged corporate information is neither.
Either there's a healthy team of developers working on this project and the loss of one guy and his improvements aren't going to make much difference to the project and he's not screwing over the community anyway.
Or, he's the creator, or otherwise the primary developer of this project and they're buying the project. In this case, yes, a lot of people who use the project will be annoyed, but realistically, they're free to take up the code base(it's not like they can take the already released BSD code off the market) and improve it themselves.
Open Source doesn't guarantee you the right to anyone's time or resources, it guarantees you the right to take over if the person writing it doesn't want to do it anymore, and this hasn't changed.
Realistically what he's doing isn't any different than retiring, the company cannot steal the whole project if the source is already out there, and if the source isn't already out there then it was probably only a feel good open source project anyway, and if the author feels bad he can release it out before he signs the contract.
No one with a copy of that source is under any obligation based on a contract this guy signs, and the BSD licensing can't be retrospectively revoked, so all he's doing is stopping work on the project and going to work on a proprietary fork, all he's taking away is his own effort which he doesn't "morally" or "legally" owe to anyone.
If he's the creator of the project he could relicense any future code from a GPL project as proprietary too, there's no legal or moral difference. You can't undo what's been done, and no one has the moral right to what you haven't done yet.
If you're an engineer, you don't stop being an engineer because you've changed jobs, and if you're a specialized kind of engineer or you have extensive experience in a particular field, then you're realistically going to end up at one of your competitors.
The same is true for doctors, nurses, kitchen staff, scientists, etc.
Pretty much anyone with any level of specialization whatsoever(ie anyone who isn't a PHB or a lemming) will eventually end up taking a job with someone who is/was a competitor(even if they weren't a major competitor) to one or more of their previous employers, its' the nature of the game.
Unless you don't switch jobs, don't attain any level of specialized skill, or are willing to throw away any experience you gain in a specialized area, you're going to do this eventually.
Your problem is that, unless you mean something else when you say call center than what I(and your perspective employers) think, you've spent two years in what is essentially a breeding ground for bitter, unimaginative and generally twisted souls.
Your future employers are going to see not only that you spent two years in an entry level job(which doesn't look good for your initiative or ambition), but that you spent it in a job that has likely already made you bitter and twisted.
That said, once you reach the interview stage, your employment history doesn't matter all that much, so you're probably also failing to impress at the interview or applying with the wrong types of companies.
Every packaged product in any store in the western world has a 1D barcode, and that barcode has a hell of a lot of information on it.
Add in the fact that you can store a hell of a lot of information in custom 1D barcodes, and it's actually a useful thing to use.
1D barcode reader plus google could be a killer app. Doesn't mean it will be, and of course you'd need a decent data plan to make it work, but if google can put together a halfway decent database of pricing, and encourage shops to participate(see how many small businesses now turn up on google maps), and it could be a hell of a killer app.
All the information you need about a product at the click of a button, immunity from all the garbage some companies pull(I'm looking at you dell) where two items(monitors) have the same model number but aren't the same. Not a bad start.
False negatives would be a much bigger problem, but it's as good an automated technique as anything I've seen before. If the profiles can be distributed with binaries it might make it mainstream.