Golden parachutes would usually only kick in if you retire or are asked to leave. This guy left on his own.
Well, since you mentioned EU ; IANA(European)L, but I think that in most EU countries, non-compete clauses are void unless compensation for the non-compete period is provided - it doesn't matter whether an employee quits or gets fired.
I'm surprised more cases like this haven't happened (or at least been publicized) in the EU, where their civil rights tend to include the right to work.
The "right to work" is rather a vague idea, having no base in actual written law.
In some countries the goverment is obliged by constitution to give their best effort to assure general well-being (including employment) to all citizens. Careful wording is used, so that an unemployed citizen cannot sue the government for not assuring him job. Basically it's just an empty clause to make the constitution look pleasing to the socialists.
I'm interested in seeing how federalism works in the EU, and whether or not there will be secessions from the Union when the going gets tough.
IMHO - not going to happen soon. The top possible cause for this could be money, but there isn't enough tension from this to cause a secession. EU doesn't have enough power to force a country to pass a law, so the US secession scenario is not likely - the EU "South" would probably just ignore a directive outlawing slavery.
My methodology for studying gender differences is to dig up funny quotes from the fortune database. Here are my (preliminary) results:
Shoes:
The average man has 4 pairs of footwear: running shoes, dress
shoes, boots, and slippers. The average woman has shoes 4 layers
thick on the floor of her closet. Most of them hurt her feet.
Laundry:
Women do laundry every couple of days. A man will wear every
article of clothing he owns, including his surgical pants that were
hip about eight years ago, before he will do the laundry. When he
is finally out of clothes, he will wear a dirty sweatshirt inside
out, rent a U-Haul and take his mountain of clothes to the
laundromat. Men always expect to meet beautiful women at the
laundromat. This is a myth.
Jesus, tell me about it. I get 30kb attachments merely saying "Got your email, thanks!" with "thanks" done up in some odd curly red font and a six-line sig, not to mention the twenty-seven 8x10 colored glossy JPG attachments with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one...
Similar experiences here. My last J2EE project lost a few precious weeks trying to get Websphere implementation of entity beans to work on MSSQL. Even though each transaction inserted some fresh records and operated on them (distinct sets of records), we still managed to get database deadlocks (strange kind of index range locks). We tweaked all there was to tweak (locking schemes, isolation levels, both on DB level and app server level). Interestingly enough, we couldn't recreate the deadlocks outside Websphere. We also tried substituting Oracle for MSSQL and the deadlocks vanished. Too bad that Oracle was not an available option in the production environment.
Finally we dumped the entity beans altogether and went back to hand-written SQL. This got rid of the deadlocks and even busted the throughput almost twice, not to mention the relief from EQL which at that time sucked a big one (I don't know whether it improved, and I am not eager to try.)
This was more than a year ago and I have moved away from J2EE. I am curious what's the status of the entity beans layer nowadays.
Oh, I see. So you're saying that there's no anonymnity on the 'network.' If somebody 'acts up' or is 'unsuitable' to be a passenger, they are refused service.
How is this different from a drunk driver being refused the licence to drive?
And everybody else is consistently and rigorously tracked and cleared for each use of the system, in case they become 'unsuitable' or 'act up.'
Horrible! Almost as horrible as being watched by traffic cops in my private car!
I see where you're taking this. ..
News flash: you can't have anonymity everywhere. Can you rent a car anonymously? Libraries don't lend books anonymously, for a good reason: accountability. Should we ditch the library system
because of this?
The sooner we start using a fuel we can grow, even if it's not efficient, the sooner our dependance on fossil fuels will end.
My definition of "not efficient" is "needs external source energy". So you're still dependent on external source of energy, be it fossil fuel, uranium, hydro, wind or solar. Btw, with current technology, only uranium comes close to replacing the fossil fuel energy output. Too bad it is not renewable.
They conclude the country would be better off investing in solar, wind and hydrogen energy.
What is this recurring BS about hydrogen energy? Hydrogen is only a medium for storing/transporting energy - it does not generate any more energy than used to produce it. So, until we start to mine for hydrogen, the "hydrogen energy" buzzword is no more than annoying crap.
Ok, perhaps "hydrogen energy" has some meaning like "solar/wind energy used to produce hydrogen", but certainly not in the context above ("solar, wind and hydrogen energy").
I doubt they have monitors or video cards that can detect, say, a simple splitter or repeater. It's the sort of thing a third-year EE student can build (fourth year for digital signals).
A simple splitter or repeater won't get you anywhere if the signal is encrypted, as I guess it's supposed to be, at least the signal transmitted via the monitor cable. You have to stick your probes where the signal is not encrypted, and the real question is: how hard can they make it and at what cost per unit?
Video encryption in real time is doable, but how will they protect the LCD matrix? I'm genuinely curious.
Too bad they haven't even mentioned Continuous Ink Flow Systems - CIFS replacement kits exist for most of the ink printers out there and you stop getting raped by the printer manufacturers. Why buy cartridges at all, when you can buy ink by the barrel?
from TFA: I guarantee that whoever wrote that code wasn't thinking about threads or concurrency or lock-free algorithms or any of that stuff.
Well, perhaps it's a job for the compiler to make that code thread-aware, at least to some degree. Two consecutive function calls that you (the compiler) know to be independent? Execute them in parallel. A loop running over 10000 independent objects? Split it into k loops, 10000/k objects each.
Of course the compiler has severe limits as to what it can really guess (the "independent" part can be very hard in this aspect), but at least once you write it, you can run it on all your apps for free.
Hm... Everytime I read something similar to the article (that is about twice a week), I think that there should be a non-profit organisation to oppose taking away customer rights under the guise of "intellectual property".
Something powerful enough to organise boycott that would cause *pain* to the offending company. Something that a congresscritter would be afraid to piss off. EFF comes close, except that it a) has a broader scope and b) sadly is not powerful enough.
Too bad that the existing consumer organisations are focused on making money from their "consumer reports" and the general population doesn't care (the frog is half-boiled and still comfortable).
These things need to be published for their deterrent value. One big problem with cybercrime is that the criminals feel that they'll never be caught, and if they ever are, then the punishment will be a slap on the wrist.
Deterrent value, ok, but it's probably gonna deter the stupid would-be-criminals, who are too lazy to inform themselves about possible punishment for their actions.
The smart ones know what's in store for them in case they get busted, so that's no news for them. They will read the story and try to learn from shadowcrew's mistakes.
As you say, there are examples where porting has helped a project. I know that in porting one of my games to four platforms (Classic Mac OS -> Windows -> Linux -> OS X) has helped eliminate bugs that I never knew were there. Also, I learned things that have made my later projects easier to port since I more able to write them "correctly" to begin with. By avoiding platform specific libraries and techniques I write better code.
Contrast this with the paragraph below:
Jon Ross, who wrote the original version of SimCity for Windows 3.x, told me that
he accidentally left a bug in SimCity where he read memory that he had just
freed. Yep. It worked fine on Windows 3.x, because the memory never went
anywhere. Here's the amazing part: On beta versions of Windows 95, SimCity wasn't
working in testing. Microsoft tracked down the bug and added specific code to
Windows 95 that looks for SimCity. If it finds SimCity running, it runs the
memory allocator in a special mode that doesn't free memory right away. That's
the kind of obsession with backward compatibility that made people willing to
upgrade to Windows 95.
Your conclusions might vary on the day. Be sure to write down your findings in your notepad.
Also the top prize is $700.00. If you spend every waking moment on it for 4 days (700 / 96) it amounts to a CHANCE at $7.29 an hour. Explain THAT to your significant other.
Challenge accepted.
"Hey, significant other, I'm not into it for the money"
Does that pinky toe hinder your ability to breed? If not, then why should 'evolution care'?
Everything affects your ability to breed, the pinky being no exception. The few grams of tissue have to be:
- grown
- fed
- kept warm
- protected from bacteria, viruses and fungi
- carried around
All of this uses resources that your organism could have otherwise spent on something that helps your ability to breed more than your pinky toe. Btw, the six-toe mutation seems more popular than the four-toe one (is there one at all? I don't know). This might mean that there is some use for toes after all.
Microsoft Thought Thieves? Aren't they the ones usually stealing ideas from other companies?
Yes and no. Yes - they thrive by implementing ideas from other companies. No - because it's not stealing. The whole "intelectual property" (and now "thought thieves") crap is language bastardized to make you believe that thoughts can be owned just like material property.
This is how they want to legitimize the whole software and "business method" patents, extending copyrights into eternity and a whole bunch of other gimmicks invented to make benefit from "owning" thoughts.
Publishing opponents personal details? I find it unbelievable that someone would go this far and expect no consequences. Even if the sys-con failed to fire her, she could have expected to have her ass sued (PJ indeed took legal action if I'm not mistaken)
Did someone pay MOG enough to compensate for losing what little credibility she had left? I don't believe that - not because this would be "too evil" but because it would be plain stupid.
My favorite logs are the ones where I get control over what events get logged and in what detail they get logged. There's no such thing as a one-size-fits-all software solution; why do we believe in one-size-fits-all logging?
We, who don't, use the log4j framework. If I had one word to put into an ad for log4j it would be "flexibility". You can configure (at runtime!) what where and how your app logs things. Severity level, application-defined types of events, event data (wan't dd/yyyy/mm date format? can do!), files (rotated or not) - all this is configurable without touching a single line of code in your app.
One thing it does not do for you is putting log statements into your code. The more logging info your app provides, the more your user can configure.
If anything, the second is closer to science as practised by actual scientists.
It's first part (continuing investigation) is OK. I'm in doubts about the second part: "more adequate explanations". What exactly does "more adequate" mean here?
... continuing investigation that uses observation, hypothesis testing, measurement, experimentation, logical argument and theory building to lead to more adequate explanations of natural phenomena.
I don't have any problems with "continuing investigation that uses observation, hypothesis testing, measurement, experimentation, logical argument and theory building" other than it's unnecessarily long - probably to divert attention from the "more adequate explanations". What does this "more adequate" actually mean?
Why not just state "can be falsified + explains natural phenomena"? By the way - intelligent design cannot be falsified. What discovery could actually prove that anything hasn't been designed by a superhuman being?
However, I applaud this group for at least trying. However the realistic cynic in me says that we're not going to see many gains. Hell, the average user in a company doesn't know of and has never been exposed to anything else but Word, Powerpoint and Excel.
There might be some gains in other areas, far from the average user's desktop. The point of not adhering to the standard can be raised the next time a government decides what software to buy. It can also have some meaning in anti-monopoly trials.
This of course depends on whether the standard gains some credibility. Perhaps IBM could have a stab at Microsoft by declaring their wholehearded support for the standard.
This means that all signs of evolution also will be signs of intelligent design, simply because evolution is a form of intelligence.
There are differences between some products of evolution and intelligent design (human engineering). Accumulating many small locally improving changes can be worse than designing from scratch.
Example 1: human eye. The nerves are connected to the photoreceptors from the outside - the blind spot is where they go through the retina. An engineer would obviously connect them from the outside.
Slashdot Mirror
Shoes:
The average man has 4 pairs of footwear: running shoes, dress shoes, boots, and slippers. The average woman has shoes 4 layers thick on the floor of her closet. Most of them hurt her feet.
Laundry:
Women do laundry every couple of days. A man will wear every article of clothing he owns, including his surgical pants that were hip about eight years ago, before he will do the laundry. When he is finally out of clothes, he will wear a dirty sweatshirt inside out, rent a U-Haul and take his mountain of clothes to the laundromat. Men always expect to meet beautiful women at the laundromat. This is a myth.
Finally we dumped the entity beans altogether and went back to hand-written SQL. This got rid of the deadlocks and even busted the throughput almost twice, not to mention the relief from EQL which at that time sucked a big one (I don't know whether it improved, and I am not eager to try.)
This was more than a year ago and I have moved away from J2EE. I am curious what's the status of the entity beans layer nowadays.
Ok, perhaps "hydrogen energy" has some meaning like "solar/wind energy used to produce hydrogen", but certainly not in the context above ("solar, wind and hydrogen energy").
Video encryption in real time is doable, but how will they protect the LCD matrix? I'm genuinely curious.
Too bad they haven't even mentioned Continuous Ink Flow Systems - CIFS replacement kits exist for most of the ink printers out there and you stop getting raped by the printer manufacturers. Why buy cartridges at all, when you can buy ink by the barrel?
Of course the compiler has severe limits as to what it can really guess (the "independent" part can be very hard in this aspect), but at least once you write it, you can run it on all your apps for free.
Something powerful enough to organise boycott that would cause *pain* to the offending company. Something that a congresscritter would be afraid to piss off. EFF comes close, except that it a) has a broader scope and b) sadly is not powerful enough.
Too bad that the existing consumer organisations are focused on making money from their "consumer reports" and the general population doesn't care (the frog is half-boiled and still comfortable).
The smart ones know what's in store for them in case they get busted, so that's no news for them. They will read the story and try to learn from shadowcrew's mistakes.
"Hey, significant other, I'm not into it for the money"
Worked for me. YMMV.
Another good stab at de Beers and the diamond scam: Have you ever tried to sell a diamond?
- grown
- fed
- kept warm
- protected from bacteria, viruses and fungi
- carried around
All of this uses resources that your organism could have otherwise spent on something that helps your ability to breed more than your pinky toe. Btw, the six-toe mutation seems more popular than the four-toe one (is there one at all? I don't know). This might mean that there is some use for toes after all.
This is how they want to legitimize the whole software and "business method" patents, extending copyrights into eternity and a whole bunch of other gimmicks invented to make benefit from "owning" thoughts.
Thank you, thank you, I'll be here with you all week!
Did someone pay MOG enough to compensate for losing what little credibility she had left? I don't believe that - not because this would be "too evil" but because it would be plain stupid.
Phew. I'm seriously baffled.
One thing it does not do for you is putting log statements into your code. The more logging info your app provides, the more your user can configure.
Why not just state "can be falsified + explains natural phenomena"? By the way - intelligent design cannot be falsified. What discovery could actually prove that anything hasn't been designed by a superhuman being?
This of course depends on whether the standard gains some credibility. Perhaps IBM could have a stab at Microsoft by declaring their wholehearded support for the standard.
Example 1: human eye. The nerves are connected to the photoreceptors from the outside - the blind spot is where they go through the retina. An engineer would obviously connect them from the outside.
Example 2: Flatfish. An engineer designing a flat fish would probably come up with something resembling a stingray - straight spine plus symmetrical ribs on both sides. The flatfish is totally unlike this - strangely twisted, it ( "undergoes a metamorphosis that involves the migration of one eye across the top of the head to a position adjacent to the non-migrating eye on the right lateral side" It probably reflects the way it evolved from some kind of "non-flat" fish that had to lay on its side to hide from predators.