In the case of privilege and outsourcing to a third party, where the client has not intentionally waived privilege and there is no expectation that privilege be waived (i.e. if a person tells their lawyer to publish information, the person explicitly waives privilege over that information), then the information being held by that third party is probably still under privilege and not admissible as evidence in Court. As a general rule, the client must either explicitly or implicitly waive privilege in order for the information to be admissible in Court, and using a third party document creation and storage system would not of its own accord give rise to such a waiver.
IAAL too, albeit not an American. In common law countries, it is not as clear cut as your description makes it sound in the USA. If you convey information to a third party in circumstances which are inconsistent with the maintenance of privilege, then whether you intend to waive privilege or not it may well be that a Court will find that you have lost it in any event. Common law courts have a view which might be described as "you can't have your cake and eat it too" - i.e. if this stuff is too special and secret to be shared with your opponent, then you had better make damn sure your conduct with respect to the same is consistent when you are dealing with third parties too.
Giving Google access to your data for the purposes of marketing etc (which is presumably why Google really wants access) may well be inconsistent with the maintenance of privilege, at least in the UK, Australia and other common law jurisdictions.
Ads are just an added revenue stream at the cost of the consumer. Saying they keep the price low is nonsense. They are extra, bonus, on top of the retail price revenue some sneaky biz guy thought looked cool on a powerpoint slide. Especially when they get added in an update AFTER release.
When you want me to pay for a game, you better keep ads out of it.
Exactly. Either make it clear before the consumer purchases the product that this is the arrangement, or don't do it.
The way things stand I can't see why it wouldn't be equally reasonable for an owner of this game to bill Sony for the bandwidth and "market access" involved with the display of the ads.
Here in the internet backwater country we call Australia we get a limited amount of bandwidth usage quota.
Every time the PS3/game downloads advertisements it uses my limited quota...
If I run out of quota I either have to buy more, or suffer 64kbit shaping...
If Sony can arbitrarily start putting ads in this game and making money from you, why not take a similar liberty? Start sending them bills for the data downloads associated with their crappy ads. After all, if the original game didn't contain this stuff at all then nothing in your EULA for the game could amount to you agreeing to this.
In fact, maybe someone should be reading the original EULA carefully to see whether Sony is breaching it.
...xkcd has gone from occasionally funny and clever little web comic to hideously self-satisfied, self-indulgent crap, too in love with its own "mythology" and lame, self-referential in-jokes to leave space for anything particularly funny?
People often wheel out the "don't hate it cos it's popular" argument, but there are plenty of previously obscure, now popular things which are not particularly hated, so there must be some distinguishing factor.
The U.S. And in doing so, unequivocally saved hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of lives (mostly Japanese lives, by the way... which probably angers the DPRK to no end).
And the reason that they had to drop those nukes on the middle of civilian population centres and not, say, military installations would be what, exactly?
Fact of the matter is that premise doesn't matter. Every premise has been done. Every idea has been pushed through the salad-tosser that is the writer's pen.
I think it's sad if you believe this. Just because a great deal of our culture is rehashed doesn't mean that there are no genuinely new ideas.
I'm getting so tired of this nonsense. Bladerunner was a film noir set in the future with robots. It wasn't new. Asimov did androids struggling with their (lack of) humanity in the 50s, and all Dick added was his drug addicted sense of a decaying reality to which Scott added a very provincially 1980s aesthetic. Go watch Metropolis and the Maltese Falcon. There, see how easy it is to throw stones at a good and viewing-worthy film?
So hang on... Asimov was the last guy with a new idea, then? So we ran out of new ones in the 1950s, roughly?
This is, with respect, nonsense. You can take any two stories and show that one is "just" the other with certain basic elements added or subtracted, but this does not define the work in question or its originality. Blade Runner was a visionary film based on an innovative novel, and its combination of plot, themes and imagery were indeed new.
No doubt you also like to harp on about how Star Wars is "just" a western set in space.
To me the point is that we need to make sure things never get to that point in the first place. Because once a ruthless and totalitarian system in place, it is impossible to resist from within. See : present North Korea, Nazi occupied France, Saddam's Iraq, etc...
Precisely. Orwell is telling us that the time to fight the totalitarian state is before it assumes power, not after, because we are reaching a point technologically where it will no longer be possible to fight it after it takes power. So instead of depressing us, 1984 should galvanize us to stop anything similar from ever arising.
Meanwhile we happily let our elected 'representatives' permit total surveillance, secret police, torture, free speech zones, unexplained foreign wars, state-sponsored corporations...
I am a big fan of "We" but I must say I find it to be much more in the vein of Brave New World or Brazil than 1984. It presents a society which attempts, perhaps even genuinely attempts, to run itself on principled and idealistic grounds, but which in reality imposes a bureaucratic dystopia on its people because (a) those ideals are fundamentally misplaced and (b) the very notion of forcing people to live according to particular principles is doomed to have that result. But, for example, D's friend R is a government-endorsed poet and a 'true believer' in the state and its principles. The characters are able to engage in discussion and reflection on these issues, even though those who become too prominently troublesome are subject to 'correction'.
By contrast the core of 1984 in my mind is that there is literally no room for debate or reflection - the state doesn't ask you to accept anything, it demands it with absolutely no tolerance whatsoever for anything other than complete subservience. The state is also more overtly cynical, for instance waging perpetual war as a means of keeping the domestic population under control, and deliberately entrapping its citizens to ensure total compliance. The character of O'Brien in 1984 serves to emphasise that the state is not interested in your consent - he engages Winston Smith in political/philosophical discussion, but this is just a ruse of the state to trap Winston, who still instinctively believes that there must be room for such things. This differs from the government in We which genuinely (in my opinion) believes in its stated principles and indeed wishes to export them to the rest of the universe to 'enlighten' other species.
Anyway, I suppose I take issue with your implication that Orwell stole his ideas from Zamyatin (as I think his name is spelt in English). Orwell freely acknowledged that We was very influential on him, but I think it is equally clear that 1984 takes certain ideas about the totalitarian state to much more brutal and harsh extremes. Orwell's idea is really that the state can assume total control to a point where the consent of the individual is utterly irrelevant; in We, the consent of the individual is still significant, and it is the belief in the system which allows it to continue.
Just my two cents, they are both great novels. I hope Zamyatin had a better grasp on humanity than Orwell, but I doubt it.
How much carnage does the average coal mine produce? Typically ripping apart a huge, huge chunk of the countriside (for open cut), innumerable trucks and other big machines trundling around, not to mention the massive construction required for the actual power generation plant itself.
This type of story strikes me as particularly stupid: "big objects hard to move around" doesn't equate to "wind power worse than other types of power" as the summary seems to imply.
I also find it hard to believe that the truck traffic for installing windmills is coming through at such a huge volume that it is actually degrading any half-decent road. That would involve tens of thousands of trucks, surely?
Wah! My privacy is being invaded by voluntarily using this program!
I have no problem with it, oh anonymous troll, if Google makes it totally clear exactly what kind of Faustian deal is being done when you use their software.
I want guarantees that no-one and nothing at Google, Inc or anywhere else I don't expressly authorise has access to anything I drop into this magic box in my browser.
Based on Google's track record, users should otherwise assume that anything and everything they let this system touch will be stored indefinitely even if deleted, indexed, and trawled for marketing and other purposes.
Re:How many soldiers die if 187 F-22s aren't enoug
on
F-22 Raptor Cancelled
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· Score: 1
Do you really believe that the world will stop hating America if America stops meddling in other nations' affairs?
Yes. A large amount of anti-US sentiment is definitely generated by US interference - social, economic, political, covert or military - in the affairs of other countries. It is ridiculous to suggest otherwise.
What are your thoughts on interfering when a state-sponsored genocide is in progress?
If the US actually did this maybe people would like it more. I am still waiting for the US interventions in Sudan and Zimbabwe, for example.
Large portions of the world are going to hate the United States of America no matter its foreign policy.
Why? This is a ridiculous assertion. After World War II most of the world actually loved America and it was widely regarded as an inspirational role model for a modern democracy. The USA had a hell of a lot of goodwill, and it then set about burning through it as fast as it could.
It would not surprise me to see America the target of more hatred and violent attacks after returning to isolationism than in its most internationally-meddling times.
It depends, do you mean real isolationism or 'we won't invade you but we will continue to dominate and manipulate you economically and politically'?
Basically your theory comes down to that old chestnut, "they hate out freedom" (or some variant of the same). You have not explained one cogent reason why anyone would hate the US if it ceased interfering in the affairs of other nations for its own benefit.
It currently is. "Illegal" does not necessarily mean "criminal". A very large amount of p2p filesharing is copyright infringement, which in Australia at least is illegal.
As much as you like to believe religion is being forced on you, it's not. Your kind of thinking and cynicism is the norm.
Three things:
1. If that's so, why not make a rule that no-one shall be taught any particular religion until the age of 18, at which time they may participate in whatever religious system they wish? Do you think many people would be, say, protestant, under this system?
2. Please explain to me why hindus are mostly Indian, buddhists are mostly asian, and christians are mostly European or hispanic, without any reference to (a) race and (b) geography? Presumably if religion is not forced upon people then their race and location should have no relationship to their beliefs.
3. I find it quite ironic that a person who posts a statement such as this:
God is important and relevant in our lives and religion provides a path to him.
would argue that religion is not being forced upon people. Can you work out why? (Hint: consider whether talking about hypothetical or imaginary things as though they are true is a device to encourage others to agree with you by adopting your semantics?).
What many people appear totally ignorant of is that the conditions of entry into private premises such as shops are purely contractual (if that... they may be nothing at all in some cases).
If you breach one of their conditions, but otherwise do not break the law, then they have NO RIGHT WHATSOEVER to interfere with you.
They are completely at liberty to sue you for breach of contract, but what is their loss? In this scenario, nothing. They are also at liberty to tell you to leave, and to sue you for trespass if you do not (or if you are banned and return). Again, this gives them no right to detain you or otherwise physically interfere with you.
Thus, if a security guard asks to search your bags on the way out of a shop, you are quite entitled to say "no, sorry" and leave. At worst you have breached a trivial contract between you and the person/entity in possession of the premises. You are also under no obligation to identify yourself.
Damn it, why don't people learn and use their rights?
So in summary, your argument is that you must show deference to people if they are (a) armed or (b) in a position to abuse their lawful authority to detain you? Not a great basis for a civil society, if you don't mind me saying.
You have no obligation to be polite to the police. Manners suggests that it's a pleasant thing to do, but that is quite a different proposition. So long as you aren't overtly aggressive or deliberately obstructing them in the course of their duties then you can be as unfriendly as you like.
If they are fucking with you as you lawfully go about your business, then why on earth would you be polite, though? Yes, it might get you out of the situation with less fuss, but on the other hand you are tacitly accepting their right to push you around.
Option A) Apple products. Option B) The freedom to do what you want with the stuff you buy.
Pick one and stop complaining.
Option A: read articles which raise awareness about Apple's anti-competitive, DRM-lovin', controlling practices with the iphone and contradict their branding as the peace, love and fluffy bunny company.
Seriously. If Apple wants to engage in practices that result in a chilling effect on your target market why the fuck are you going to support them? Because it's [LOVE]Apple{/LOVE]? Puh-leeze! Because it enables you to reach a large market of consumers? Oh wait, they're denying those customers access to your products!
I'm sure Apple is great and wonderful and really really nice. I'm sure their app platform is the greatest thing since sliced stupid-people. But if they're going to actively interfere with your ability to reach customers FUCK THEM!
And yes, it's Apple's store. They can sell or not sell whatever they feel like. However, it's not JUST Apple's store. It's the sole "legitimate" gateway into the devices you're writing apps for. That's part of the problem.
To use a baseball-related metaphor. You're a beer-hawker at a ballgame. Heaven help you if you try to sell booze in OTHER than the approved manner or brand.
Exactly.
Example 2, you're Microsoft. No doubt the same people bleating about how Apple has the "right" to control what is available through the app store would also die in a ditch to defend Microsoft's "right" to tie whatever web browser it chooses to its own operating system, right? Right?
If you're going to "warn people" to stay away from Apple because they're interested in their bottom line, you're going to have to warn people to stay away from pretty much all corporations. Of course, that means not having any sort of computing device...
Or to put it another way, if Apple are going to continnue to present themselves as the fun, shiny, easy, nice answer to everything, and both explicitly and implicitly suggest that everyone else is a bunch of crusty old business-oriented, consumer-hating corporations, then it will be totally legitimate and arguably even necessary for there to be a continued awareness campaign about the fact that they are behaving in this way.
Maybe we need a revised iphone advertisement:
"The great thing about the iphone is, if you want to find the nearest restaurant, there's an app for that... and if you want to use a spirit level thingo, there's an app for that... and if you want to use useful software developed by someone Apple doesn't approve of, you can go to hell... and if you want to use technology which Apple is nervous about, you can also go to hell... and if you think you actually own that phone you got when you handed over money, you are living in a fantasy world.
The freedom to seek gainful employment should not be infringed.
While not a specifically enumerated right of the people, it is both expected that we work in a productive manner, and beneficial to the society in which we live.
The only way I could possibly agree with the enforcement of such a contract would be through compensation - have them pay his salary for each of the 12 months they expect him to be employed.
Even then, it deprives society of the good work he could be doing. Why should the government agree to such a thing?
I think confidentiality is a better concept to employ in this scenario than blanket non-compete clauses. I.e., fine, work for whoever you want, but your previous employer should (and does, at least in Australia) have a right to require you to keep secret any confidential information you gained during the course of your employment with them.
I am no fan of governments or companies controlling my life either. But I can see that there is a bargain to be made whereby you are paid to work on potentially sensitive and highly valuable proprietary material, and there is a legitimate expectation that you cannot just walk across the road and use "your knowledge and expertise" to transmit the benefits of that investment directly to a competitor.
No. Once you stop paying me you don't have any right to tell me what to do. You don't want me to join a competing company for say a year, you can damn well pay me for a year to sit on my ass. I'm fairly sure that they are not allowed in the UK anyway, so I'm fine.
You could look at it that part of the pay you receive while you are there is paying you not to do certain things after you leave.
Whether or not that is correct, (IAAL in Australia) you can be restrained by equity from using any confidential information you acquire in the course of your employment with one company to benefit, well, anyone else, including future employers.
So if you work for Company A then leave for Company B, which mysteriously starts producing similar competing products to those of Company A, you may well find yourself along with Company B in a world of litigation hurt. This can be further beefed up by a confidentiality agreement.
In addition, there's nothing to stop Company A making you sign something saying that all of your ideas (when put in appropriate and protectable form) which you develop while you work for them are their property - thus if you go and use those ideas elsewhere you may end up infringing IP that they own.
Slashdot Mirror
In the case of privilege and outsourcing to a third party, where the client has not intentionally waived privilege and there is no expectation that privilege be waived (i.e. if a person tells their lawyer to publish information, the person explicitly waives privilege over that information), then the information being held by that third party is probably still under privilege and not admissible as evidence in Court. As a general rule, the client must either explicitly or implicitly waive privilege in order for the information to be admissible in Court, and using a third party document creation and storage system would not of its own accord give rise to such a waiver.
IAAL too, albeit not an American. In common law countries, it is not as clear cut as your description makes it sound in the USA. If you convey information to a third party in circumstances which are inconsistent with the maintenance of privilege, then whether you intend to waive privilege or not it may well be that a Court will find that you have lost it in any event. Common law courts have a view which might be described as "you can't have your cake and eat it too" - i.e. if this stuff is too special and secret to be shared with your opponent, then you had better make damn sure your conduct with respect to the same is consistent when you are dealing with third parties too.
Giving Google access to your data for the purposes of marketing etc (which is presumably why Google really wants access) may well be inconsistent with the maintenance of privilege, at least in the UK, Australia and other common law jurisdictions.
Ads are just an added revenue stream at the cost of the consumer. Saying they keep the price low is nonsense. They are extra, bonus, on top of the retail price revenue some sneaky biz guy thought looked cool on a powerpoint slide. Especially when they get added in an update AFTER release.
When you want me to pay for a game, you better keep ads out of it.
Exactly. Either make it clear before the consumer purchases the product that this is the arrangement, or don't do it.
The way things stand I can't see why it wouldn't be equally reasonable for an owner of this game to bill Sony for the bandwidth and "market access" involved with the display of the ads.
Here in the internet backwater country we call Australia we get a limited amount of bandwidth usage quota.
Every time the PS3/game downloads advertisements it uses my limited quota...
If I run out of quota I either have to buy more, or suffer 64kbit shaping...
If Sony can arbitrarily start putting ads in this game and making money from you, why not take a similar liberty? Start sending them bills for the data downloads associated with their crappy ads. After all, if the original game didn't contain this stuff at all then nothing in your EULA for the game could amount to you agreeing to this.
In fact, maybe someone should be reading the original EULA carefully to see whether Sony is breaching it.
...xkcd has gone from occasionally funny and clever little web comic to hideously self-satisfied, self-indulgent crap, too in love with its own "mythology" and lame, self-referential in-jokes to leave space for anything particularly funny?
People often wheel out the "don't hate it cos it's popular" argument, but there are plenty of previously obscure, now popular things which are not particularly hated, so there must be some distinguishing factor.
Which one's actually used a nuke?
The U.S. And in doing so, unequivocally saved hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of lives (mostly Japanese lives, by the way ... which probably angers the DPRK to no end).
And the reason that they had to drop those nukes on the middle of civilian population centres and not, say, military installations would be what, exactly?
spoonfeeding the masses the crap we've had to endure for the past twenty years
Point of order, plenty of music has been both popular and good in the past twenty years.
I hate this myth that it hasn't, which is often pushed on ./ .
Why the hell would I want to:
- use bandwidth every time I want to listen to something
- place my music 'collection' in the hands of a third party who can pull the plug whenever they see fit/go bust
- allow a third party to track what I listen to without my consent
- be depdendent on a functioning net connection for my music
I much prefer to have my music safely on my local computer in unencrypted, DRM-less form, thanks.
I think it's sad if you believe this. Just because a great deal of our culture is rehashed doesn't mean that there are no genuinely new ideas.
So hang on... Asimov was the last guy with a new idea, then? So we ran out of new ones in the 1950s, roughly?
This is, with respect, nonsense. You can take any two stories and show that one is "just" the other with certain basic elements added or subtracted, but this does not define the work in question or its originality. Blade Runner was a visionary film based on an innovative novel, and its combination of plot, themes and imagery were indeed new.
No doubt you also like to harp on about how Star Wars is "just" a western set in space.
To me the point is that we need to make sure things never get to that point in the first place. Because once a ruthless and totalitarian system in place, it is impossible to resist from within. See : present North Korea, Nazi occupied France, Saddam's Iraq, etc ...
Precisely. Orwell is telling us that the time to fight the totalitarian state is before it assumes power, not after, because we are reaching a point technologically where it will no longer be possible to fight it after it takes power. So instead of depressing us, 1984 should galvanize us to stop anything similar from ever arising.
Meanwhile we happily let our elected 'representatives' permit total surveillance, secret police, torture, free speech zones, unexplained foreign wars, state-sponsored corporations...
I am a big fan of "We" but I must say I find it to be much more in the vein of Brave New World or Brazil than 1984. It presents a society which attempts, perhaps even genuinely attempts, to run itself on principled and idealistic grounds, but which in reality imposes a bureaucratic dystopia on its people because (a) those ideals are fundamentally misplaced and (b) the very notion of forcing people to live according to particular principles is doomed to have that result. But, for example, D's friend R is a government-endorsed poet and a 'true believer' in the state and its principles. The characters are able to engage in discussion and reflection on these issues, even though those who become too prominently troublesome are subject to 'correction'.
By contrast the core of 1984 in my mind is that there is literally no room for debate or reflection - the state doesn't ask you to accept anything, it demands it with absolutely no tolerance whatsoever for anything other than complete subservience. The state is also more overtly cynical, for instance waging perpetual war as a means of keeping the domestic population under control, and deliberately entrapping its citizens to ensure total compliance. The character of O'Brien in 1984 serves to emphasise that the state is not interested in your consent - he engages Winston Smith in political/philosophical discussion, but this is just a ruse of the state to trap Winston, who still instinctively believes that there must be room for such things. This differs from the government in We which genuinely (in my opinion) believes in its stated principles and indeed wishes to export them to the rest of the universe to 'enlighten' other species.
Anyway, I suppose I take issue with your implication that Orwell stole his ideas from Zamyatin (as I think his name is spelt in English). Orwell freely acknowledged that We was very influential on him, but I think it is equally clear that 1984 takes certain ideas about the totalitarian state to much more brutal and harsh extremes. Orwell's idea is really that the state can assume total control to a point where the consent of the individual is utterly irrelevant; in We, the consent of the individual is still significant, and it is the belief in the system which allows it to continue.
Just my two cents, they are both great novels. I hope Zamyatin had a better grasp on humanity than Orwell, but I doubt it.
How much carnage does the average coal mine produce? Typically ripping apart a huge, huge chunk of the countriside (for open cut), innumerable trucks and other big machines trundling around, not to mention the massive construction required for the actual power generation plant itself.
This type of story strikes me as particularly stupid: "big objects hard to move around" doesn't equate to "wind power worse than other types of power" as the summary seems to imply.
I also find it hard to believe that the truck traffic for installing windmills is coming through at such a huge volume that it is actually degrading any half-decent road. That would involve tens of thousands of trucks, surely?
Wah! My privacy is being invaded by voluntarily using this program!
I have no problem with it, oh anonymous troll, if Google makes it totally clear exactly what kind of Faustian deal is being done when you use their software.
I want guarantees that no-one and nothing at Google, Inc or anywhere else I don't expressly authorise has access to anything I drop into this magic box in my browser.
Based on Google's track record, users should otherwise assume that anything and everything they let this system touch will be stored indefinitely even if deleted, indexed, and trawled for marketing and other purposes.
Yes. A large amount of anti-US sentiment is definitely generated by US interference - social, economic, political, covert or military - in the affairs of other countries. It is ridiculous to suggest otherwise.
If the US actually did this maybe people would like it more. I am still waiting for the US interventions in Sudan and Zimbabwe, for example.
Why? This is a ridiculous assertion. After World War II most of the world actually loved America and it was widely regarded as an inspirational role model for a modern democracy. The USA had a hell of a lot of goodwill, and it then set about burning through it as fast as it could.
It depends, do you mean real isolationism or 'we won't invade you but we will continue to dominate and manipulate you economically and politically'?
Basically your theory comes down to that old chestnut, "they hate out freedom" (or some variant of the same). You have not explained one cogent reason why anyone would hate the US if it ceased interfering in the affairs of other nations for its own benefit.
It currently is. "Illegal" does not necessarily mean "criminal". A very large amount of p2p filesharing is copyright infringement, which in Australia at least is illegal.
As much as you like to believe religion is being forced on you, it's not. Your kind of thinking and cynicism is the norm.
Three things:
1. If that's so, why not make a rule that no-one shall be taught any particular religion until the age of 18, at which time they may participate in whatever religious system they wish? Do you think many people would be, say, protestant, under this system?
2. Please explain to me why hindus are mostly Indian, buddhists are mostly asian, and christians are mostly European or hispanic, without any reference to (a) race and (b) geography? Presumably if religion is not forced upon people then their race and location should have no relationship to their beliefs.
3. I find it quite ironic that a person who posts a statement such as this:
would argue that religion is not being forced upon people. Can you work out why? (Hint: consider whether talking about hypothetical or imaginary things as though they are true is a device to encourage others to agree with you by adopting your semantics?).
The legal assignment of the right for Google to spy and report on you as they see fit.
Newsflash for Google fans: that stuff they're giving you isn't really 'free'...
What many people appear totally ignorant of is that the conditions of entry into private premises such as shops are purely contractual (if that... they may be nothing at all in some cases).
If you breach one of their conditions, but otherwise do not break the law, then they have NO RIGHT WHATSOEVER to interfere with you.
They are completely at liberty to sue you for breach of contract, but what is their loss? In this scenario, nothing. They are also at liberty to tell you to leave, and to sue you for trespass if you do not (or if you are banned and return). Again, this gives them no right to detain you or otherwise physically interfere with you.
Thus, if a security guard asks to search your bags on the way out of a shop, you are quite entitled to say "no, sorry" and leave. At worst you have breached a trivial contract between you and the person/entity in possession of the premises. You are also under no obligation to identify yourself.
Damn it, why don't people learn and use their rights?
So in summary, your argument is that you must show deference to people if they are (a) armed or (b) in a position to abuse their lawful authority to detain you? Not a great basis for a civil society, if you don't mind me saying.
You have no obligation to be polite to the police. Manners suggests that it's a pleasant thing to do, but that is quite a different proposition. So long as you aren't overtly aggressive or deliberately obstructing them in the course of their duties then you can be as unfriendly as you like.
If they are fucking with you as you lawfully go about your business, then why on earth would you be polite, though? Yes, it might get you out of the situation with less fuss, but on the other hand you are tacitly accepting their right to push you around.
Option A) Apple products.
Option B) The freedom to do what you want with the stuff you buy.
Pick one and stop complaining.
Option A: read articles which raise awareness about Apple's anti-competitive, DRM-lovin', controlling practices with the iphone and contradict their branding as the peace, love and fluffy bunny company.
Option B: don't.
Pick one and stop complaining.
Hey, that works really well! Thanks!
Seriously. If Apple wants to engage in practices that result in a chilling effect on your target market why the fuck are you going to support them?
Because it's [LOVE]Apple{/LOVE]? Puh-leeze!
Because it enables you to reach a large market of consumers? Oh wait, they're denying those customers access to your products!
I'm sure Apple is great and wonderful and really really nice. I'm sure their app platform is the greatest thing since sliced stupid-people. But if they're going to actively interfere with your ability to reach customers FUCK THEM!
And yes, it's Apple's store. They can sell or not sell whatever they feel like.
However, it's not JUST Apple's store. It's the sole "legitimate" gateway into the devices you're writing apps for. That's part of the problem.
To use a baseball-related metaphor. You're a beer-hawker at a ballgame. Heaven help you if you try to sell booze in OTHER than the approved manner or brand.
Exactly.
Example 2, you're Microsoft. No doubt the same people bleating about how Apple has the "right" to control what is available through the app store would also die in a ditch to defend Microsoft's "right" to tie whatever web browser it chooses to its own operating system, right? Right?
*sound of wind blowing... crickets chirp*
If you're going to "warn people" to stay away from Apple because they're interested in their bottom line, you're going to have to warn people to stay away from pretty much all corporations. Of course, that means not having any sort of computing device...
Or to put it another way, if Apple are going to continnue to present themselves as the fun, shiny, easy, nice answer to everything, and both explicitly and implicitly suggest that everyone else is a bunch of crusty old business-oriented, consumer-hating corporations, then it will be totally legitimate and arguably even necessary for there to be a continued awareness campaign about the fact that they are behaving in this way.
Maybe we need a revised iphone advertisement:
The freedom to seek gainful employment should not be infringed.
While not a specifically enumerated right of the people, it is both expected that we work in a productive manner, and beneficial to the society in which we live.
The only way I could possibly agree with the enforcement of such a contract would be through compensation - have them pay his salary for each of the 12 months they expect him to be employed.
Even then, it deprives society of the good work he could be doing. Why should the government agree to such a thing?
I think confidentiality is a better concept to employ in this scenario than blanket non-compete clauses. I.e., fine, work for whoever you want, but your previous employer should (and does, at least in Australia) have a right to require you to keep secret any confidential information you gained during the course of your employment with them.
I am no fan of governments or companies controlling my life either. But I can see that there is a bargain to be made whereby you are paid to work on potentially sensitive and highly valuable proprietary material, and there is a legitimate expectation that you cannot just walk across the road and use "your knowledge and expertise" to transmit the benefits of that investment directly to a competitor.
No. Once you stop paying me you don't have any right to tell me what to do. You don't want me to join a competing company for say a year, you can damn well pay me for a year to sit on my ass. I'm fairly sure that they are not allowed in the UK anyway, so I'm fine.
You could look at it that part of the pay you receive while you are there is paying you not to do certain things after you leave.
Whether or not that is correct, (IAAL in Australia) you can be restrained by equity from using any confidential information you acquire in the course of your employment with one company to benefit, well, anyone else, including future employers.
So if you work for Company A then leave for Company B, which mysteriously starts producing similar competing products to those of Company A, you may well find yourself along with Company B in a world of litigation hurt. This can be further beefed up by a confidentiality agreement.
In addition, there's nothing to stop Company A making you sign something saying that all of your ideas (when put in appropriate and protectable form) which you develop while you work for them are their property - thus if you go and use those ideas elsewhere you may end up infringing IP that they own.