However, when it is between children, the children usually are not concenting, or enjoying it in any way whatso ever.
ok so far...
In addition, having digitally created pictures of children in sexual positions only goes on to say that it is ok to have this type of thing done.
Why? Not criminalizing depictions of children having sex is no more of an endorsement of child pornography than not criminalizing violent movies is an endorsement of murder. (There are too many negatives in that sentence, but you get the idea.)
The fact that they are under the age of 18 regardless of if it is a picture or not, makes it illegal.
Except that when dealing with a computer-generated image, there is no "they".
if you post a story or something to an adult message board, you would not be permitted to post a story about children under the age of 18, regardless of if the story is true or not.
I seriously doubt that. If the owner of the forum decides that he doesn't want stories about kids, that is his right, but any law that says that you cannot write stories involving children engaging in sexual activity is blatantly unconstitutional.
Actually, he signed a piece of paper that says that taxpayers will no longer have money forcibly taken from them and used to fund a procedure that many find morally repugnant. If you don't like that, take out your checkbook and make a donation to Planned Parenthood.
I'm pro-choice, but I see no reason why having other people pay for your abortion is a "basic right".
I was a NeXTStep developer for 5 years, now I'm a Java developer. IMO Java is far superior as a language to Obj-C. Obj-C was a hack.
I respectfully disagree. Objective C is not a hack, it does many things much more cleanly than Java. Off the top of my head there's dynamic binding of all messages, categories (adding new methods to an existing class, without needing the source), true class methods, and 100% ANSI C compatibility. If it had Java's namespaces and garbage collection it would be almost perfect.
NeXTStep was sold on the basis that you could develop apps "five times faster" than conventional methods. This was pure marketing bullshit.
I don't know about "five times faster", but if you write an identical application in MFC, Swing, Carbon, and Cocoa (assuming experience with each, of course), the Cocoa app will be finished sooner and with much fewer lines of code. It's not all marketing hype.
By the way, did anyone else have the same problem finding the download link? The two other people I sent to the site had a hard time finding it too.
That's really interesting, I had exactly the same problem. The "Download for free" text is a muted gray that doesn't stand out at all (at least on Netscape 4.7), and the image link does look like it's just a pretty picture, especially since it's surrounded by other non-clickable images. You're right, Apple of all companies should know better than this.
The thinking is that users are likely to have difficulty with multiple buttons. I know this sounds silly to everyone here, but think in terms of the inexperienced user who is doing well to run a web browser and email client. It makes tech support much easier when you can say "click there" without worrying about them using the wrong button.
However, Mac OS X does have built-in support for multi-button mice, for example, the right button brings up contextual menus. This is the best approach in my opinion; there is nothing that cannot be done with a one-button mouse, but multi-button mice are fully supported for more experienced users.
But a GUI running on a server is just chewing up clock cycles, and any server that's worth using shouldn't be looked at that much any way, so the GUI is just unnecessary weight. And from all the reports, the Aqua OS is a lot of weight.
Sorry, this is wrong on multiple counts. First, Aqua or any other GUI takes essentially zero CPU time if you're not actively using it. For example, the iMac behind me is running Mac OS X Beta with a (transparent) terminal window running top. dnetc is using 98% of the CPU, Window Manager is using 0.6%. Second, Aqua is not mandatory. You can drop to a text console and do everything from there, or telnet or ssh in.
Apple should be spending time making an OS X server that actually lets you remotely administrate the server, with an optional GUI in case you can't
Until you can offer a way for the free market to address these kinds of situations (apart from hoping the companies lose business after they kill people, which demonstrably does not happen) I will remain extremely skeptical of the "corporations will line up with our interests" dogma.
I would say that maybe the free market is working just fine, and travellers are willing to accept a miniscule increase in risk (flying on the most dangerous airline is still far safer than driving) for a cheaper fare. With government regulation, they don't get to make those choices. In fact, if stricter safety regulation forced air fares up, more travellers might decide to drive instead, which would almost certainly produce more total accident deaths.
Certainly, conspiracy theorists will accuse the government of manipulating information in order to control the public, but corporations don't even hide that fact.
Which is a point in favor of the corporations as far as I'm concerned. At least they don't hide their motivations. Or do you really think the purpose of the War on Drugs is to save the children?
And anyway, with such information surpressed, companies need only please the shareholders, not necessarily make products people will buy naturally. They make products they think they can convince people they need, and more often than not, it's successful.
Even if this is true, they still have to make products that Joe Consumer will voluntarily pull out his credit card to buy. Even if they run glitzy multi-million dollar ad campaigns, you still have a choice. Contrast this with government programs, where if you decide that you can better plan for your retirement than can the government, tough luck, 15% of your salary still goes down the Social Security rathole.
A product does NOT necessarily have to be truly superior for a company to claim it is such.
This is, of course, assuming that such powerful computers have applications beyond number-crunching and the military.
Of course they would. Every time computer power goes up an order of magnitude, there are always pundits claiming no normal person could ever use that much speed, and they are always quickly proven wrong. If nothing else, think of games: Quake and Unreal Tournament do huge amounts of number-crunching. Until we get to the point where computers can render ray-traced scenes at 60 fps in 36000x24000 pixels (huge flat-panel displays at 300 dpi) there will always be a use for more CPU power.
Agree completely. The Street Performer Protocol is the only system I've seen that both ensures that creators get paid and doesn't depend on anti-consumer "trusted" (i.e. crippled) hardware. Stephen King came close to the SPP, but failed because the payments weren't held in escrow and because his criteria was the percentage of readers who paid, not the total payment amount.
Yes. Here's output from our iMac running the OS X beta:
% hostinfo
Mach kernel version:
Darwin Kernel Version 1.2:
Wed Aug 30 23:32:53 PDT 2000; root:xnu/xnu-103.obj~1/RELEASE_PPC
Kernel configured for up to 2 processors.
1 processor is physically available.
Processor type: ppc750 (PowerPC 750)
Processor active: 0
Primary memory available: 192.00 megabytes.
Default processor set: 67 tasks, 131 threads, 1 processors
Load average: 1.03, Mach factor: 0.49
It says "up to 2 processors" but as far as I know there's no reason why it couldn't do 4 or more, and I expect it will when Apple releases quad or higher systems.
This is why I no longer care. American democracy is a lie.
A good thing too, since America was never intended to be a democracy, but rather a republic. Yes, there is a difference.
In essence, country bumpkins who probably don't follow politics unless its dictated to them by conservative talk radio shows shape the future of the nation far more than me, an educated college student living in a high-population area.
Oh good, fun with inflammatory stereotypes. I can play too: "This election showed that all the welfare leeches in the cities think they are entitled to free money and will vote for whoever promises them more goodies taken from the working citizens."
For the record, I am a well-educated college graduate in a high-population area and am quite glad that Al Gore did not win. Have you considered that it may be possible for intelligent people to have a difference of opinion?
As long as you can encourage the uninformed to vote, and you've got the heart of those who don't understand what interests you really represent, you can win -- even if you don't have the most votes.
This is the first time I've ever seen a Democrat complaining about uninformed people voting. The only reason Gore even came close was because of massive get-out-the-vote campaigns among minorities and seniors whom he convinced that Bush would burn their houses to the ground.
The government does NOT owe me the protection of a standing Army, or local police
While being sarcastic, that statement is correct. US courts have consistently held that law enforcement has no legal duty to protect you. The only person you can count on to defend yourself is you.
The government shouldn't have a right to stop any company from dumping whatever filth they want to on their own property. (never mind seepage into the water table)
In that case, whoever owns the property that becomes affected would have a cause of action against the company.
Except in anarchy, there's a line that's gotta be drawn somewhere. That Libertarians accept a line somewhere, makes them hypocrites.
I don't see why. Libertarians draw the line at initiation of force. I'm sure you can find logical inconsistencies in libertarian positions, but it's nothing compared to the Republicans ("Government should stay out of people's lives, but death to pot smokers") or Democrats ("Freedom of speech, except for whatever we deem 'offensive'").
For #2, did you read the rest of the item? About how they can access your house at any time AFTER THE AGREEMENT IS CANCELLED AND THE SERVICE IS TERMINATED. Oh... there's also that small part that says THEIR ACCESS CANNOT BE REVOKED AND IT WILL PERSIST ON THE PROPETY/LAND FOR ALL FUTURE OWNERS.
For some inane reason this post was moderated as "Offtopic" when it is clearly not. It is specifically referring to section 10.16 which states:
10.16 You grant to Sprint or any appointed subcontractors an irrevocable license to enter into or onto your Premises during normal business hours, Monday through Saturday, in order to install, repair, replace or remove Equipment. This license will survive termination or cancellation of this Agreement and will run with the land and inure to the parties' successors and assigns.
IANAL, but this sounds like Sprint claims that once you've ever used their service, they have a permanent right to enter your property without your permission even after you cancel the service. Not good.
I hope to see the United States (and in fact, all countries in the world) become a true democracy with choices made by the general population, rather than a representative republic biased in favor of corporations, the wealthy, and/or old white men.
It is true that the US government is biased in favor of corporations as opposed to individual rights. However, this is because the government has assumed so much power (in violation of the Constitution) that it becomes profitable to bribe^H^H^H^H^H lobby lawmakers for favorable legislation. The problem with the system of direct democracy that you are advocating is that the rights of minorities are easily violated. A majority of Americans support a ban on burning the flag. I'm certain that after Columbine a law to ban violent video games would have been supported by over 50%. And at the risk of invoking Godwin's law, Hitler was elected.
Personally, my wish is that we return to the constitutionally limited government that the US used to have, rather than the corporate/welfare/police state it is slowly becoming.
This sorta reminds me of the Heinlien story "Lif-line", where a scientist invents a machine that reports a person's time of death down to the second and the life insurance companies sue him. The judge in that story says something to the effect of "Just because you have been able to make money off of people in the past does not mean the legal system should gaurantee you ability to make it in the future". It's a shame you only see that kind of clear thinking in fiction from the 1930s.
Here's the full quote, written in 1939 and increasingly applicable today:
"There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute or common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back"
It may have been a moral argument, but it's a bad one. The guild's position summarizes to "make your customers pay more and give the difference to us". I fail to see how that incorporates good will and community spirit in any way.
I could write a letter to Amazon, requesting that they give me 0.1% of all their sales and making the "moral" argument that I need the money to take care of homeless puppies. Their correct response would be to tell me to go away. The guild has no more right to profit from Amazon's sales than I do, so "go away" is also the correct response to them.
Good point. I'm thrilled that thanks to today's drug laws, heroin and cocaine are no longer a problem. And I'm sure the innocent people that get caught in the crossfire of drug dealer shootouts would have had something bad happen to them anyway, so they're better off dead. And the thousands of sick patients and their doctors that claim to need marijuana to relieve their suffering are obviously just a bunch of stoners running an elaborate scam.
Drug laws are not and never have been primarily about public health. Narcotics laws originated due to racism and persist today because alcohol and tobacco companies don't want competition. FDA regulations are so expansive because from a bureaucrat's perspective it's better to let 1000 people die because a drug doesn't get approved in time than to have 1 person die from a drug that was approved. The latter will show up on CNN, the former won't.
What makes one think that as a foreign consumer they are "entitled" to see movies faster than the pace the movie industry wants? It's their industry.
True, but that does not give the industry unlimited control over how their products are used after they are sold. See the "first sale" and "fair use" doctrines, both of which the DMCA unconstitutionally attempts to destroy. If I'm in the US and I want to buy a Japanese DVD, certainly the movie producer is not obligated to sell it to me. However, if I find a willing seller who obtained their copy legally, the producer should have no authority to prevent that exchange. But region coding and DMCA-backed penalties for circumventing it do in fact prohibit that, which is just one of many reasons why both should be eliminated.
well in all honesty, the availability of automobile transportation only became possible due to massive amounts of your tax dollars used to build roads. Chances are you were never given a choice as to whether that was what you wanted.
Good point, and I agree. Public roads should be funded with tolls or other user fees. People who use choose mass transit shouldn't be forced to subsidize drivers, and vice versa. What I was responding to was the attitude that the automobile is solely an implement of destruction, people's living and travel preferences are irrelevant, and we must all be forced to conform to a utopian vision of "community".
In other words, the automobile increased people's freedom, you don't like the choices they made with that newfound freedom, so you wish to "force" them (your word) to live the way you want. Maybe people would rather define their communities by common interests than by location of residence, in which case personal automobiles allow them to interact with people living elsewhere.
If you want to live in a high-density environment and rely on public transportation, more power to you. But your preferences are not necessarily right for everyone, and I oppose attempts to impose such decisions by force.
Re:OK -- So when's /. going to HTTPS ???
on
The Encryption Wars
·
· Score: 1
It is, however, extremely CPU-intensive
That's true, but you don't have to use SSL everywhere. For example/. could use SSL when sumbitting posts and entering passwords, while keeping the article pages unencrypted.
Look, this is comparatively simple; it is a principle of contract law that you cannot enforce a contract whose provisions are illegal.
Sure, all I'm saying is that the contract in this instance should not be illegal.
You give me the dough. I stiff you on the meth. You sue for injunctive relief to make me cough up the drugs. You get nothing, because the provisions of the contract were for illegal acts.
Well, I'm not too fond of drug laws either, and that's a major reason why. With no legal framework, we may end up settling our disputes with firearms rather than in a court.
State law requires that hourly employees be paid time and a half if they work more than forty hours in a single week. Your employer asks you to sign a piece of paper saying that you will work forty-five hours a week at base pay.
If that's the case, I would have had a good reason to do so. Maybe I'm buying a house and need the extra money, but EvilCo isn't willing to pay overtime rates so I agree to standard rates. No foul, unless they had a gun to my head.
You work at the job for six months before you meet a disgusting, slimy lawyer at a party. He convinces you to sue for back overtime.
No he doesn't. I honor my contracts. (Plus I saw him looking at my wife.)
Do you get it? It's illegal. The courts enforce laws.
illegal!=wrong. Fugitive Slave Act, segregation, DMCA, etc, etc.
The laws are mostly designed to do things like protect naive underage workers, migrant workers who might have poor command of English, and so forth. But they apply to everybody.
Precisely, they are overly broad and restrictive. I'm not debating the existence or meaning of the laws which apply to this case. I'm saying they are bad laws that should be removed, as they unnecessarily limit freedom of both employers and employees.
As such, even if the contract says otherwise, you are required to get all the employee benefits.
Regardless of whether I actually want those benefits or would prefer, say, a larger paycheck or more flexible hours.
There are plenty of boneheads on/. who will claim that this is awful, and that contracts should be honored no matter what.
Bonehead and proud of it. I have this wacky belief that agreements made between consenting adults should be honored, even if one person decides several years later that he's changed his mind. I especially oppose the concept that it is the government's job to tell me what agreements I can and cannot make because I am incapable of running my own life.
but that we have social desires (e.g. preventing people from starving in the street) that are more important than adhering to an imperfect system of economics.
If anything, this ruling makes it more likely that people will starve in the streets, because it increases the cost that companies must pay to hire workers. As cost goes up, they will be less willing to hire. The law of supply and demand is not subject to repeal by the legislature.
It is more important that employers not abuse their employees than it is to let the employees accept it because they have very little choice in the matter.
We clearly have radically different definitions of the word "abuse". Every single temp worker involved in this suit had at least two choices: continuing to work as a temp, or quitting. (And most of them probably had many more options.) By choosing to work as temps, they demonstrated that they were better off with Microsoft than without it. I fail to see how this mutually beneficial agreement can be termed "abuse".
Slashdot Mirror
True, it was simply wrong.
However, when it is between children, the children usually are not concenting, or enjoying it in any way whatso ever.
ok so far...
In addition, having digitally created pictures of children in sexual positions only goes on to say that it is ok to have this type of thing done.
Why? Not criminalizing depictions of children having sex is no more of an endorsement of child pornography than not criminalizing violent movies is an endorsement of murder. (There are too many negatives in that sentence, but you get the idea.)
The fact that they are under the age of 18 regardless of if it is a picture or not, makes it illegal.
Except that when dealing with a computer-generated image, there is no "they".
if you post a story or something to an adult message board, you would not be permitted to post a story about children under the age of 18, regardless of if the story is true or not.
I seriously doubt that. If the owner of the forum decides that he doesn't want stories about kids, that is his right, but any law that says that you cannot write stories involving children engaging in sexual activity is blatantly unconstitutional.
I'm pro-choice, but I see no reason why having other people pay for your abortion is a "basic right".
I respectfully disagree. Objective C is not a hack, it does many things much more cleanly than Java. Off the top of my head there's dynamic binding of all messages, categories (adding new methods to an existing class, without needing the source), true class methods, and 100% ANSI C compatibility. If it had Java's namespaces and garbage collection it would be almost perfect.
NeXTStep was sold on the basis that you could develop apps "five times faster" than conventional methods. This was pure marketing bullshit.
I don't know about "five times faster", but if you write an identical application in MFC, Swing, Carbon, and Cocoa (assuming experience with each, of course), the Cocoa app will be finished sooner and with much fewer lines of code. It's not all marketing hype.
That's really interesting, I had exactly the same problem. The "Download for free" text is a muted gray that doesn't stand out at all (at least on Netscape 4.7), and the image link does look like it's just a pretty picture, especially since it's surrounded by other non-clickable images. You're right, Apple of all companies should know better than this.
However, Mac OS X does have built-in support for multi-button mice, for example, the right button brings up contextual menus. This is the best approach in my opinion; there is nothing that cannot be done with a one-button mouse, but multi-button mice are fully supported for more experienced users.
Sorry, this is wrong on multiple counts. First, Aqua or any other GUI takes essentially zero CPU time if you're not actively using it. For example, the iMac behind me is running Mac OS X Beta with a (transparent) terminal window running top. dnetc is using 98% of the CPU, Window Manager is using 0.6%. Second, Aqua is not mandatory. You can drop to a text console and do everything from there, or telnet or ssh in.
Apple should be spending time making an OS X server that actually lets you remotely administrate the server, with an optional GUI in case you can't
Which is exactly what they did.
I would say that maybe the free market is working just fine, and travellers are willing to accept a miniscule increase in risk (flying on the most dangerous airline is still far safer than driving) for a cheaper fare. With government regulation, they don't get to make those choices. In fact, if stricter safety regulation forced air fares up, more travellers might decide to drive instead, which would almost certainly produce more total accident deaths.
Which is a point in favor of the corporations as far as I'm concerned. At least they don't hide their motivations. Or do you really think the purpose of the War on Drugs is to save the children?
And anyway, with such information surpressed, companies need only please the shareholders, not necessarily make products people will buy naturally. They make products they think they can convince people they need, and more often than not, it's successful.
Even if this is true, they still have to make products that Joe Consumer will voluntarily pull out his credit card to buy. Even if they run glitzy multi-million dollar ad campaigns, you still have a choice. Contrast this with government programs, where if you decide that you can better plan for your retirement than can the government, tough luck, 15% of your salary still goes down the Social Security rathole.
A product does NOT necessarily have to be truly superior for a company to claim it is such.
Neither does a government program.
Of course they would. Every time computer power goes up an order of magnitude, there are always pundits claiming no normal person could ever use that much speed, and they are always quickly proven wrong. If nothing else, think of games: Quake and Unreal Tournament do huge amounts of number-crunching. Until we get to the point where computers can render ray-traced scenes at 60 fps in 36000x24000 pixels (huge flat-panel displays at 300 dpi) there will always be a use for more CPU power.
Agree completely. The Street Performer Protocol is the only system I've seen that both ensures that creators get paid and doesn't depend on anti-consumer "trusted" (i.e. crippled) hardware. Stephen King came close to the SPP, but failed because the payments weren't held in escrow and because his criteria was the percentage of readers who paid, not the total payment amount.
Yes. Here's output from our iMac running the OS X beta:
It says "up to 2 processors" but as far as I know there's no reason why it couldn't do 4 or more, and I expect it will when Apple releases quad or higher systems.
A good thing too, since America was never intended to be a democracy, but rather a republic. Yes, there is a difference.
In essence, country bumpkins who probably don't follow politics unless its dictated to them by conservative talk radio shows shape the future of the nation far more than me, an educated college student living in a high-population area.
Oh good, fun with inflammatory stereotypes. I can play too: "This election showed that all the welfare leeches in the cities think they are entitled to free money and will vote for whoever promises them more goodies taken from the working citizens."
For the record, I am a well-educated college graduate in a high-population area and am quite glad that Al Gore did not win. Have you considered that it may be possible for intelligent people to have a difference of opinion?
As long as you can encourage the uninformed to vote, and you've got the heart of those who don't understand what interests you really represent, you can win -- even if you don't have the most votes.
This is the first time I've ever seen a Democrat complaining about uninformed people voting. The only reason Gore even came close was because of massive get-out-the-vote campaigns among minorities and seniors whom he convinced that Bush would burn their houses to the ground.
While being sarcastic, that statement is correct. US courts have consistently held that law enforcement has no legal duty to protect you. The only person you can count on to defend yourself is you.
The government shouldn't have a right to stop any company from dumping whatever filth they want to on their own property. (never mind seepage into the water table)
In that case, whoever owns the property that becomes affected would have a cause of action against the company.
Except in anarchy, there's a line that's gotta be drawn somewhere. That Libertarians accept a line somewhere, makes them hypocrites.
I don't see why. Libertarians draw the line at initiation of force. I'm sure you can find logical inconsistencies in libertarian positions, but it's nothing compared to the Republicans ("Government should stay out of people's lives, but death to pot smokers") or Democrats ("Freedom of speech, except for whatever we deem 'offensive'").
For some inane reason this post was moderated as "Offtopic" when it is clearly not. It is specifically referring to section 10.16 which states:
IANAL, but this sounds like Sprint claims that once you've ever used their service, they have a permanent right to enter your property without your permission even after you cancel the service. Not good.
It is true that the US government is biased in favor of corporations as opposed to individual rights. However, this is because the government has assumed so much power (in violation of the Constitution) that it becomes profitable to bribe^H^H^H^H^H lobby lawmakers for favorable legislation. The problem with the system of direct democracy that you are advocating is that the rights of minorities are easily violated. A majority of Americans support a ban on burning the flag. I'm certain that after Columbine a law to ban violent video games would have been supported by over 50%. And at the risk of invoking Godwin's law, Hitler was elected.
Personally, my wish is that we return to the constitutionally limited government that the US used to have, rather than the corporate/welfare/police state it is slowly becoming.
Here's the full quote, written in 1939 and increasingly applicable today:
I could write a letter to Amazon, requesting that they give me 0.1% of all their sales and making the "moral" argument that I need the money to take care of homeless puppies. Their correct response would be to tell me to go away. The guild has no more right to profit from Amazon's sales than I do, so "go away" is also the correct response to them.
Drug laws are not and never have been primarily about public health. Narcotics laws originated due to racism and persist today because alcohol and tobacco companies don't want competition. FDA regulations are so expansive because from a bureaucrat's perspective it's better to let 1000 people die because a drug doesn't get approved in time than to have 1 person die from a drug that was approved. The latter will show up on CNN, the former won't.
True, but that does not give the industry unlimited control over how their products are used after they are sold. See the "first sale" and "fair use" doctrines, both of which the DMCA unconstitutionally attempts to destroy. If I'm in the US and I want to buy a Japanese DVD, certainly the movie producer is not obligated to sell it to me. However, if I find a willing seller who obtained their copy legally, the producer should have no authority to prevent that exchange. But region coding and DMCA-backed penalties for circumventing it do in fact prohibit that, which is just one of many reasons why both should be eliminated.
http://www.votenader.com/
Maybe it's just me, but I find this combination of statements amusing.
Good point, and I agree. Public roads should be funded with tolls or other user fees. People who use choose mass transit shouldn't be forced to subsidize drivers, and vice versa. What I was responding to was the attitude that the automobile is solely an implement of destruction, people's living and travel preferences are irrelevant, and we must all be forced to conform to a utopian vision of "community".
If you want to live in a high-density environment and rely on public transportation, more power to you. But your preferences are not necessarily right for everyone, and I oppose attempts to impose such decisions by force.
That's true, but you don't have to use SSL everywhere. For example /. could use SSL when sumbitting posts and entering passwords, while keeping the article pages unencrypted.
Sure, all I'm saying is that the contract in this instance should not be illegal.
You give me the dough. I stiff you on the meth. You sue for injunctive relief to make me cough up the drugs. You get nothing, because the provisions of the contract were for illegal acts.
Well, I'm not too fond of drug laws either, and that's a major reason why. With no legal framework, we may end up settling our disputes with firearms rather than in a court.
State law requires that hourly employees be paid time and a half if they work more than forty hours in a single week. Your employer asks you to sign a piece of paper saying that you will work forty-five hours a week at base pay.
If that's the case, I would have had a good reason to do so. Maybe I'm buying a house and need the extra money, but EvilCo isn't willing to pay overtime rates so I agree to standard rates. No foul, unless they had a gun to my head.
You work at the job for six months before you meet a disgusting, slimy lawyer at a party. He convinces you to sue for back overtime.
No he doesn't. I honor my contracts. (Plus I saw him looking at my wife.)
Do you get it? It's illegal. The courts enforce laws.
illegal!=wrong. Fugitive Slave Act, segregation, DMCA, etc, etc.
The laws are mostly designed to do things like protect naive underage workers, migrant workers who might have poor command of English, and so forth. But they apply to everybody.
Precisely, they are overly broad and restrictive. I'm not debating the existence or meaning of the laws which apply to this case. I'm saying they are bad laws that should be removed, as they unnecessarily limit freedom of both employers and employees.
Regardless of whether I actually want those benefits or would prefer, say, a larger paycheck or more flexible hours.
There are plenty of boneheads on /. who will claim that this is awful, and that contracts should be honored no matter what.
Bonehead and proud of it. I have this wacky belief that agreements made between consenting adults should be honored, even if one person decides several years later that he's changed his mind. I especially oppose the concept that it is the government's job to tell me what agreements I can and cannot make because I am incapable of running my own life.
but that we have social desires (e.g. preventing people from starving in the street) that are more important than adhering to an imperfect system of economics.
If anything, this ruling makes it more likely that people will starve in the streets, because it increases the cost that companies must pay to hire workers. As cost goes up, they will be less willing to hire. The law of supply and demand is not subject to repeal by the legislature.
It is more important that employers not abuse their employees than it is to let the employees accept it because they have very little choice in the matter.
We clearly have radically different definitions of the word "abuse". Every single temp worker involved in this suit had at least two choices: continuing to work as a temp, or quitting. (And most of them probably had many more options.) By choosing to work as temps, they demonstrated that they were better off with Microsoft than without it. I fail to see how this mutually beneficial agreement can be termed "abuse".