So you think that without the sea change that was the civil rights movement, without someone challenging the status quo, without enforced integration of schools, that the south would have just remained in a bubble and not had any effect on racial relationships in the rest of the nation?
Racism is a scourge, a cancer that has far reaching effects beyond the people who are most recognized as racists. To ignore it is to let it fester.
There is a lot more to Obama than the color of his skin, and that's the least important of his features in my book. But as the person who will next hold the most powerful position in the land, he is an important symbol, and his skin tone is a barrier in many people's eyes, even today. Those people vote, and I think it is due to the work and sacrifice of many generations that the people who voted against him because of his race were not numerous enough to tip the balance. 20 years ago, or even ten, I'm not sure that would have been the case.
Glad for the clarification; my point is that in agreements, one side often tries to take advantage of the other. When it becomes apparent that this is happening, it is totally right to take a stand for what is right.
It sounds like your position is mostly against cowards who just disappear when they've made a ocmmitment, and I couldn't agree with you more. It's happened to me in my personal and professional life, and there's nothing more frustrating.
But sometimes, you have to break your commitments, or change them. As long as you're doing that head-on and honorably, nobody should have a problem with it.
But while I respect your feelings/opinions on the matter, telling someone they deserve to die is beyond the pale. Judge not, my friend, lest thou be judged. I understand you're angry; heck, I'm angry about a few things, too. But I've learned that if you let your anger run unchecked, it'll do damage, most likely to you.
I have never broken a non-compete, for the record. When I was in a situation where a company wanted me to reduce my hours and I was concerned that the non-compete I had signed some years before when I was just a kid right out of college was too restrictive, I asked that it be renegotiated, as they wanted me to stay on part time.
Because I had some leverage--they needed me, to keep what client base they still had happy--I was able to renegotiate, but it could have been a very difficult time. When I first joined up, they told impressionable little me that it was just boiler plate, not to worry about it, and I just wanted my first job. Maybe the never would have sued me, but I didn't want that over my head.
But I can imagine a lot of situations where employers use all sorts of pressure that maybe a person who is new to the work force as I was doesn't know how to negotiate. Just because someone is naive doesn't mean that a "lying dirtbag shitfuck" employer should be able to get away with it. That's why we have courts, to evaluate when something is not reasonable within the bounds of the law.
So who exactly hurt you so much, and what did they do? Let me know if you want to talk. But whether or not you welcome my friendly advances, you have to realize that saying someone is not fit for life because of how they deal with their contractual commitments is pretty extreme.
Once you're at that level, there are fewer positions available, and if there's collusion such that no companies hire without a NC agreement, then you are either forced to sign, or you're flipping burgers.
Your loan example is apples to my oranges. A loan is a material exchange. A closer example would be if you made a loan to me at a rate that is outside of the bounds allowed by usury laws. I might sign it not knowing what the laws are, or because I'm desperate for the money, but if I learn that I'm being taken advantage of, I may well tell you I will not pay you more than the legal limit on interest over the principal, and I may sue you for punitive damages for the high payments you've required of me thus far.
Sometimes unjust laws have to be challenged by breaking them. Without Rosa Parks, our next president might have spent hhttp://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1024461&cid=25714231#is childhood sitting at the back of the bus.
If it's that big of a deal to you then don't sign it. I've known several programmers that confronted management about the non-compete and didn't have to sign.
However, non-competes make a ton of sense FOR THE EMPLOYER, at least the narrower ones which specify that you can't go to a company in direct competition with your current one. For tech jobs, knowledge is everything, and knowledge doesn't just disappear overnight. If a senior programmer where I currently work were to jump to a competitor, it would be worth millions of dollars if they could pick his brain about techniques, abilities, and which customers were dissatisfied.
There, fixed that for you. If the employee is worth that much, employers should treat them well, compensate them appropriately and make them feel appreciated. There are already laws about trade secrets; a non-compete agreement is just a control mechanism which, when enforceable, gives great leverage to the employer and none to the employee.
Your post is silly. Companies require these non-comp agreements even where they are not enforceable so that they can bully their employees when they leave, if they leave for a competitive company. Without unionizing everything, few individuals will have the leverage to simply walk away from every company that requires a non-comp, and if they ever have to fight, it'll be expensive even if the law is on their side.
So in this case, who is lying? The person who signs an unenforceable document because it's a formality which is required in order to get hired, or the company which requires it and can only use it for intimidation because they know if their employee had the resources to fight it, they would lose?
Couple of things I've learned recently: Lawyers, apparently, never sign these things, but they're kind of special because a good lawyer can just hang out their shingle. Also, in the UK, it's common practice in the financial industry for the hiring company to pay a year's salary or more for someone they are poaching from a competitor to take a nice vacation, so they can come back outside of their non-comp boundaries.
The latter (UK financial) happened to a cousin of mine. The former I learned from my wife, who recently left the DOJ and was heavily courted by an HR consulting company. They practically begged for her to join, but they could not guarantee a minimum amount of consulting work, and also required a non-comp. Her reaction? "I believe slavery is still illegal in the US." No go.
Well there's your problem. I haven't had a computer with 64 MB of RAM since the mid-90s. My phone has 2 GB!
(kidding, of course, I know that post and was hoping that would show up in this thread. However, if you're going to update it for the context, go the full monty!)
Don't forget the water purifier. Kamen went on Colbert and showed off a system that can extract pure water out of essentially any stew, and is robust and cheap enough to use reliably and distribute throughout the the third world. His demonstration was pulling good water out of, I don't know, raw sewage or something, and he was drinking it.
When Colbert made his characteristic sarcastic remarks about not being able to see the point, Kamen responded that 50% of the deaths in the third world could be traced back to water-borne diseases. With this machine, he said, we could save the lives of millions of people per day.
Until that moment, I had thought that he was the self-promoter-yadda-yadda of the GP poster, but his concern and contemplation of the possibilities seemed genuine and sincere. I'm not going to buy a Segway any time soon, but man, but hats off to him if his inventions really do save lives.
My wife always snorts at me, by the way, when, instead of sincerely admitting defeat, I say something to the effect of, "I'm right so much of the time that, statistically speaking, I have to be wrong some time. Might as well be now."
Please forgive me for cynically (my definition) thinking that you were being as big an a-hole as I often pretend to be. Or at least I tell myself that I'm pretending.
Your definition of cynicism is where we disagree. Cynicism is not the belief that reality is always negative.
Actually, this is a commonly accepted definition.
It is, rather, the belief that people are motivated exclusively by self-interest.
I understand that this is another commonly-used definition of the word, but the other definition fits better with the original poster's message.
The joke about my failure was just that: A joke. Try not to take everything you read on Slashdot seriously.
Likewise, my original decree of "Cynic!" was meant to be taken as tongue-in-cheek. Your claim that cynicism and intelligence are tightly bound, and your subsequent challenge of my response seemed to indicate a motivation other than humor on your part.
OK, here's a more complete response: Intelligence doesn't cause cynicism, it encourages investigation. An intelligent person can, by fully understanding a situation, have appropriate levels of optimism about a situation. A cynic merely sees the negative possibilities and tries to convince others that if they think any differently, they must be stupid.
Some intelligent people are cynical in nature, but you are wrong to feel that there is a direct correlation between the two. I know dirt-dumb cynics and brilliant pollyannas. A crow, they say, is a black bird, but a black bird is not necessarily a crow.
Here's the thing: you may think that cynicism is usually correct because that's your perception of your experience. But it's not the case. The human brain--most mammalian brains, in fact--are susceptible to what psychologists call the "random reward reinforcement" cycle (or something like that). If you look negatively at everything, and you're right even one time in 50, that's the one you'll remember.
It's one reason that racist ideas seem so real to many people. If you have in your mind that all people of X group are lazy, any lazy person in X group will reinforce that, even if there are dozens of counter examples.
Finally, if you only feel that you fail from time to time, you are either delusional or just not trying hard enough. You should fail more often; it'll make you feel alive.
Maybe, if these college students are still listed as dependents of their parents, the tax credit will go to the people who are really paying for college? I don't know. I was wondering about the tax credit thing myself. I certainly wasn't earning enough to pay $4k in taxes when I was in school.
Likewise cynics often say this to justify their cynicism, insult the opposition by implication, and in general, make them feel better about themselves.
Narcissists are often very intelligent, too. Doesn't mean they're right.
The problem with profitability is that it implies property. So while there are certainly profitable commercial products that enrich the world to some degree, it is arguable that those same products would be much better for the world if the concepts behind them were not kept proprietary.
I don't know if you recall the exciting race to the finish for the Human Genome project. I'm not a geneticist, so I'll over-simplify: basically there was a team at UC Santa Cruz working on completing the map, and a private pharma corporation doing the same. They both had the completed map within their sites, and the pharma group made it clear that, if they completed their map first, it would be copyrighted, and anyone who wanted to use the information would have to pay them a royalty--even if they did their own research and came up with the same data, they'd sue anyone they could nto oblivion. The UC group made it clear that their work was going into the public domain.
The final stretch was a nail-biter. There were stories of one of their coders working 23 hours per day, and strapping blocks of ice to his wrists so he could continue working on the sequencing software. At the end, the folks at UC won, and so did the world. Thousands of labs around the world have free access to that information; the act of making it proprietary would have effectively been an act of theft from humanity.
Of course, who am I to say what's better? Maybe there's an evil researcher out there who is perfecting a cancer that is as contagious as the common cold, and if s/he didn't have access to the genome map, it wouldn't be happening. I guess we'll never know.
Slashdot Mirror
A 419-baiter got some Nigerian scam artists to record themselves doing the sketch as well. I actually like this one better!
Well, OK, I'm including the flash memory card I stuck in there.
So you think that without the sea change that was the civil rights movement, without someone challenging the status quo, without enforced integration of schools, that the south would have just remained in a bubble and not had any effect on racial relationships in the rest of the nation?
Racism is a scourge, a cancer that has far reaching effects beyond the people who are most recognized as racists. To ignore it is to let it fester.
There is a lot more to Obama than the color of his skin, and that's the least important of his features in my book. But as the person who will next hold the most powerful position in the land, he is an important symbol, and his skin tone is a barrier in many people's eyes, even today. Those people vote, and I think it is due to the work and sacrifice of many generations that the people who voted against him because of his race were not numerous enough to tip the balance. 20 years ago, or even ten, I'm not sure that would have been the case.
Glad for the clarification; my point is that in agreements, one side often tries to take advantage of the other. When it becomes apparent that this is happening, it is totally right to take a stand for what is right.
It sounds like your position is mostly against cowards who just disappear when they've made a ocmmitment, and I couldn't agree with you more. It's happened to me in my personal and professional life, and there's nothing more frustrating.
But sometimes, you have to break your commitments, or change them. As long as you're doing that head-on and honorably, nobody should have a problem with it.
But while I respect your feelings/opinions on the matter, telling someone they deserve to die is beyond the pale. Judge not, my friend, lest thou be judged. I understand you're angry; heck, I'm angry about a few things, too. But I've learned that if you let your anger run unchecked, it'll do damage, most likely to you.
Take care, my friend, I mean it.
Tell me how you really feel!
I have never broken a non-compete, for the record. When I was in a situation where a company wanted me to reduce my hours and I was concerned that the non-compete I had signed some years before when I was just a kid right out of college was too restrictive, I asked that it be renegotiated, as they wanted me to stay on part time.
Because I had some leverage--they needed me, to keep what client base they still had happy--I was able to renegotiate, but it could have been a very difficult time. When I first joined up, they told impressionable little me that it was just boiler plate, not to worry about it, and I just wanted my first job. Maybe the never would have sued me, but I didn't want that over my head.
But I can imagine a lot of situations where employers use all sorts of pressure that maybe a person who is new to the work force as I was doesn't know how to negotiate. Just because someone is naive doesn't mean that a "lying dirtbag shitfuck" employer should be able to get away with it. That's why we have courts, to evaluate when something is not reasonable within the bounds of the law.
So who exactly hurt you so much, and what did they do? Let me know if you want to talk. But whether or not you welcome my friendly advances, you have to realize that saying someone is not fit for life because of how they deal with their contractual commitments is pretty extreme.
If it's that big of a deal to you then don't sign it. I've known several programmers that confronted management about the non-compete and didn't have to sign. However, non-competes make a ton of sense FOR THE EMPLOYER, at least the narrower ones which specify that you can't go to a company in direct competition with your current one. For tech jobs, knowledge is everything, and knowledge doesn't just disappear overnight. If a senior programmer where I currently work were to jump to a competitor, it would be worth millions of dollars if they could pick his brain about techniques, abilities, and which customers were dissatisfied.
There, fixed that for you. If the employee is worth that much, employers should treat them well, compensate them appropriately and make them feel appreciated. There are already laws about trade secrets; a non-compete agreement is just a control mechanism which, when enforceable, gives great leverage to the employer and none to the employee.
Your post is silly. Companies require these non-comp agreements even where they are not enforceable so that they can bully their employees when they leave, if they leave for a competitive company. Without unionizing everything, few individuals will have the leverage to simply walk away from every company that requires a non-comp, and if they ever have to fight, it'll be expensive even if the law is on their side.
So in this case, who is lying? The person who signs an unenforceable document because it's a formality which is required in order to get hired, or the company which requires it and can only use it for intimidation because they know if their employee had the resources to fight it, they would lose?
Couple of things I've learned recently: Lawyers, apparently, never sign these things, but they're kind of special because a good lawyer can just hang out their shingle. Also, in the UK, it's common practice in the financial industry for the hiring company to pay a year's salary or more for someone they are poaching from a competitor to take a nice vacation, so they can come back outside of their non-comp boundaries.
The latter (UK financial) happened to a cousin of mine. The former I learned from my wife, who recently left the DOJ and was heavily courted by an HR consulting company. They practically begged for her to join, but they could not guarantee a minimum amount of consulting work, and also required a non-comp. Her reaction? "I believe slavery is still illegal in the US." No go.
Didn't things start to fall apart when they tried to push that crazy DIVX rent-and-throw-away DVD format?
(w/64 Megs of RAM)
Well there's your problem. I haven't had a computer with 64 MB of RAM since the mid-90s. My phone has 2 GB!
(kidding, of course, I know that post and was hoping that would show up in this thread. However, if you're going to update it for the context, go the full monty!)
Don't forget the water purifier. Kamen went on Colbert and showed off a system that can extract pure water out of essentially any stew, and is robust and cheap enough to use reliably and distribute throughout the the third world. His demonstration was pulling good water out of, I don't know, raw sewage or something, and he was drinking it.
When Colbert made his characteristic sarcastic remarks about not being able to see the point, Kamen responded that 50% of the deaths in the third world could be traced back to water-borne diseases. With this machine, he said, we could save the lives of millions of people per day.
Until that moment, I had thought that he was the self-promoter-yadda-yadda of the GP poster, but his concern and contemplation of the possibilities seemed genuine and sincere. I'm not going to buy a Segway any time soon, but man, but hats off to him if his inventions really do save lives.
FWIW, Colbert had a sip, too.
Eloquence and information FTW.
Dang, man, that post should be modded +10^10 or higher!
One day, I think we shall be great friends.
My wife always snorts at me, by the way, when, instead of sincerely admitting defeat, I say something to the effect of, "I'm right so much of the time that, statistically speaking, I have to be wrong some time. Might as well be now."
Please forgive me for cynically (my definition) thinking that you were being as big an a-hole as I often pretend to be. Or at least I tell myself that I'm pretending.
Your definition of cynicism is where we disagree. Cynicism is not the belief that reality is always negative.
Actually, this is a commonly accepted definition.
It is, rather, the belief that people are motivated exclusively by self-interest.
I understand that this is another commonly-used definition of the word, but the other definition fits better with the original poster's message.
The joke about my failure was just that: A joke. Try not to take everything you read on Slashdot seriously.
Likewise, my original decree of "Cynic!" was meant to be taken as tongue-in-cheek. Your claim that cynicism and intelligence are tightly bound, and your subsequent challenge of my response seemed to indicate a motivation other than humor on your part.
None of it is meant that way.
Are you certain of that? ;)
OK, here's a more complete response: Intelligence doesn't cause cynicism, it encourages investigation. An intelligent person can, by fully understanding a situation, have appropriate levels of optimism about a situation. A cynic merely sees the negative possibilities and tries to convince others that if they think any differently, they must be stupid.
Some intelligent people are cynical in nature, but you are wrong to feel that there is a direct correlation between the two. I know dirt-dumb cynics and brilliant pollyannas. A crow, they say, is a black bird, but a black bird is not necessarily a crow.
Here's the thing: you may think that cynicism is usually correct because that's your perception of your experience. But it's not the case. The human brain--most mammalian brains, in fact--are susceptible to what psychologists call the "random reward reinforcement" cycle (or something like that). If you look negatively at everything, and you're right even one time in 50, that's the one you'll remember.
It's one reason that racist ideas seem so real to many people. If you have in your mind that all people of X group are lazy, any lazy person in X group will reinforce that, even if there are dozens of counter examples.
Finally, if you only feel that you fail from time to time, you are either delusional or just not trying hard enough. You should fail more often; it'll make you feel alive.
A couple of additional notes:
pro-obamans may find that they misunderstood some of his plans, and may voice their dissent.
anti-obamans may find that they misunderstood some of his plans and may broadcast their new understanding to their circle.
Maybe, if these college students are still listed as dependents of their parents, the tax credit will go to the people who are really paying for college? I don't know. I was wondering about the tax credit thing myself. I certainly wasn't earning enough to pay $4k in taxes when I was in school.
Likewise cynics often say this to justify their cynicism, insult the opposition by implication, and in general, make them feel better about themselves.
Narcissists are often very intelligent, too. Doesn't mean they're right.
You misspelled "realist", good sir .
Optimist!
Cynic!
...at my uncle's dino-farm! He was so thrilled when I could help him. I was like, "I know this! It's a Unix operating system!"
I should sue /. for forcing me to live in a fantasy universe where my input is considered, alternately, funny, insightful or merely overrated.
The problem with profitability is that it implies property. So while there are certainly profitable commercial products that enrich the world to some degree, it is arguable that those same products would be much better for the world if the concepts behind them were not kept proprietary.
I don't know if you recall the exciting race to the finish for the Human Genome project. I'm not a geneticist, so I'll over-simplify: basically there was a team at UC Santa Cruz working on completing the map, and a private pharma corporation doing the same. They both had the completed map within their sites, and the pharma group made it clear that, if they completed their map first, it would be copyrighted, and anyone who wanted to use the information would have to pay them a royalty--even if they did their own research and came up with the same data, they'd sue anyone they could nto oblivion. The UC group made it clear that their work was going into the public domain.
The final stretch was a nail-biter. There were stories of one of their coders working 23 hours per day, and strapping blocks of ice to his wrists so he could continue working on the sequencing software. At the end, the folks at UC won, and so did the world. Thousands of labs around the world have free access to that information; the act of making it proprietary would have effectively been an act of theft from humanity.
Of course, who am I to say what's better? Maybe there's an evil researcher out there who is perfecting a cancer that is as contagious as the common cold, and if s/he didn't have access to the genome map, it wouldn't be happening. I guess we'll never know.
Remeber what?