The one with the most impact by a good margin is water vapor . That's right folks, water.
BAN Dihydrogen Monoxide Now! Dihydrogen Monoxide is the primary component of Acid Rain! There exist thousands of factories across the US that dump thousands of gallons of Dihydrogen Monoxide a day into the sewer sytems! Dihydrogen Monoxide has been found in large quantities in every water resivoir across the country. Inhaling even small quantities of Dihydrogen Monoxide can be fatal as it clogs the respitory system and displaces oxygen.
BAN DIHYDROGEN MONOXIDE TODAY!
Start a petition. Call your Congressman. Don't let this travesty continue. After all, can we afford to take the risk and find that it is too late to stop it later?
This is no different than the short-sighted Pascal's Wager "proof" that you should worship god. It ignores likelyhoods and just says that since there's a *chance*, you should act on that chance, with no regard at all to how large that chance is. If that was the way we operated, everyone would be buying volcano insurance.
The Big Problem has always been: What type of technology will allow us to simultaneously protect a consumer's right to Fair Use while preventing him from illegally distributing the entertainment he has purchased?
Nah, the bigger problem is this: How can that technology, if it gets invented, work in such a fashion that it doesn't criminalize open source software? Right now, every solution the industry comes up with depends on the software writers being 'trusted' by the recording industry. In other words, the techniques fail if you can write your own software from scratch. (For example, the technology that prevents you from fast-forwarding DVD's during certain sections, and the technology that prevents you from watching a DVD in the "wrong" country, both depend on the software author choosing to go out of his way to enforce it even though customers don't want it. This doesn't work in an open-source solution, which is why the MPAA hates DeCSS so much. It's not the copying, since that can happen anyway - it's the breaking of their ability to tell you exactly how you can and can't view the DVD.)
I fear DRM because it *does* result in information (not just entertainment) being stifled. Tell someone the information needed to write their own content playing software and go to jail, even though there are reasons for doing so that have nothing to do with piracy.
...you dishonest prick! Your article cited problems with Java's interface to databases and the web, and then drew a conclusion about the language itself from that. Nope. Doesn't fly. Does JDBC suck compared to embedded SQL? Yes. Do servlets suck compared to PHP? Yes. Does Java suck compared to C++ or Perl? No. C++ and Perl have had better interfaces written for them, but this has nothing to do with anything inherent in the language.
You aren't listening. I'm not talking about deliberate, manually started connections to Live. I'm talking about the game software doing it for you when it told you it was doing something different. It's like Smith & Wesson not telling you that inserting the bullet causes it to automatically fire.
The shed didn't "glow" to the naked eye. That was a misreading of the article, and now an urban legend. It "glowed" on radiation detectors. The government noticed when their methods normally used to search for rouge nuclear programs came up with a major source of radiation that was not registered. (Normally anything that might show up on such a scan has to be registered, so that the spy equipment doesn't issue panic alarms every time someone gets an X-ray done or a university runs a small physics experiment.)
So let's say that a company produces a product that they know has holes. Let's say they put them there on purpose. Later, they charge for an update to the product that fixes them. Customers are stuck having to either (a) stop using the product which by now they probably have already committed to in ways that are hard to back out of, or (b) be fined by this rule when their machine is used in an attack, or (c) buy the upgrade.
Sounds like a sweet deal for the company - planned obsolescence where the customer is fined for being out of date.
This law should be written so it will only apply to people who could have fixed the problem without paying their own money to do so. i.e. the company produces a free upgrade that fixes it and NOTHING ELSE. It's also no fair to be tying mandatory fine-avoiding upgrades to features the customers don't want. "Get the latest security update now on our website or you could get fined for the hole! Oh, and the update installs Spyware Bendover Plus 2.1 as well, for your convenience."
My other concern is with companies that make antivirus software. Can't they secretly make viruses and release them into the wild, and then magicaly come out with the patch that works on them a few days later? If there is no law forcing you to buy their stuff you can just say 'screw you' and not buy their software. But if the law says you must patch or be fined, then the anti-virus company just wrote itself a blank check.
If you want to use it for another purpose then fine, but you are on your own.
The fact that Microsoft does not have that mentality is precisely the problem here. They do NOT think it is fine that you use it for some other purpose.
Why didn't I see anyone complaining about this when Sega did it with the Dreamcast?
1 - It was not publicised. 2 - Nobody was actually making use of the Dreamcast to do anything other than run the published games, and I don't think there were any cases where an update caused an older game to fail (were there?).
You did agree to update the system, you isntalled the particular game that the update came on.
Only if the fact that it would update your system that way was well advertised.
If the terms of service for using Live differ from the terms of service of using an Xbox in general, then it is deceptive (possibly criminally so) to fail to inform you that you are about to cross the boundry from one to the other, and to fail to give you the chance to control when you are operating under one and when you are operating under the other. Just because you agreed to operate under the terms of service of Live when you use Live doesn't mean you agreed to *always* operate under those terms whether you are trying to use Live or not. If you have Live installed, then this update in question occurs WITHOUT WARNING YOU THAT YOU ARE ABOUT TO CONNECT TO LIVE. Therefore it is crossing from the jurisdiction of one set of terms of service into another without giving you the chance to stop it, or even telling you that it is doing it. That's like changing the speed limit on a road from 55 miles per hour down to 25 miles per hour and not posting it on a sign.
Those people who used the internet before it became well known to the general public know that the whole f-ing thing was p2p already. This notion of some people being content providers exclusively and others being content consumers exclusively is something that only happened after it gained the notice of the commercial sector. Consider old fashioned usenet, for example. It was a P2P system long before p2p was a buzzword. The only thing that modern p2p does in addition to what the raw IP protocol already provides is that it makes a management system that helps to *find* the other hosts out there to connect to, instead of asking people to always have to go to a well-known site. Once a connection is established between client and server, all the traffic is completely peer-to-peer. Any machine can be a server, any can be a client.
What's happening is NOT that P2P is going away. What's happening is that it's becoming dumb to keep using that buzzword for what is essentially the way the internet was designed to work in the first place.
If someone didn't have an XBOX Live account, why the HELL would they have an ethernet cable jacked into their box with a connection to the outside world?
Because they're using the computer for what it is: a computer. Perhaps because they are the very people the article was actually talking about - people wanting to use the Xbox hardware as a computer, running Linux, which perhaps might actually have some value to being plugged into the internet in some way. (The parent was most certainly not insightful as the moderater thought. People running Linux on the machine were the very people affected by the bug this article is talking about.)
But games are forcing you to connect to it long enough to obtain the patch even if you never use Xbox live, without informing you beforehand that they are going to do this. Read the article.
I agree that if Microsoft wants to make updated, patched boxes a requirement of using their Live service, that this is within their rights. Especially since if a buffer under/overflow error exists it can be exploited to do more that just put Linux on the box. It can exploited to put a cheat into a game, which becomes a problem if you are playing it against other people. BUT, None of that gives them the right to install the patch in secret, regardless of whether you ever plan to use the Live service. Use of the Live service is NOT a requirement to use the XBox. It is not advertised as such in any way, and no license agreement says as such either.
[The google toolbar does this] Yet nobody complains that it updates without authorization.
But: 1- You didn't pay for the google toolbar. 2- The toolbar only exists for I.E. Consider the set of all people who want to use I.E. Consider the set of all people who give a crap about avoiding MS dominance. Consider that there isn't much overlap between those two sets. Therefore few of the people who might care about this are using the tool in question. 3- Chages to the google toolbar don't render a purchase of several hundred dollars useless for what you were using it for, like fixing the Xbox bug that allows linux might for somebody.
If your afraid of MS patching your system for various reasons, and the bug that allows linux to be run on the system very well could be used for other things, then DONT BUY or USE AN XBOX!!!
The point is that they have no right to patch your system without asking. You bought the box. It's yours. They *DO* have a right to say that if you don't patch you can't use the Xbox Live service, but they don't have the right to patch people's boxes regardless of whether they want to use the service or not. There are legitimate reasons to insist on an unmodified box on the multiplayer network - it is likely that enough of the smarts of a game are in the client that if you can change the client you can put in cheats to make yourself more powerful than you should be. But none of that excuses their practice of putting on those patches without even asking or informing you.
Laws in a country do affect the ability to sell a product in that country even if it is produced elsewhere. So, Opera gets developed in Norway, and that's legal, but then it cannot be sold to people in the United States, and that cuts into it's market. Whether Opera decides that is important or not is up to them.
Finding a decent IT job in CA is tough, finding one in Utah, I can imagine is significantly more difficult.
I'm not so sure about that. California was hit hardest by the IT bust, because it had a lot more of the vaporware companies that went belly-up after enticing people to move to the area. Thus it has more out of work people competing for the jobs than in other areas.
To "discriminate" simply means to selectively choose something or somethings from a set, based on some selection criteria. The problem is that it is a word that became more widely used in association with unfair types of discrimination, as the civil rights movement caught on. Thus some people now think that connotation is actually part of the definition, when it is not. If you pick one programming language to use in your next project, you are discriminating. If you pick the big, ripe orange from the bin at the supermarket, passing over the green ones, you are discriminating. And if you choose an new employee from the set of available applicatants using race as a criteria, you are discriminating - NOT because of the fact that it's unfair, but because you are selecting from a set based on some criteria. Discrimination can be fair or unfair depending on whether the criteria should be relevant or not. If hiring for a job as an IT manager, then race, sex, and appearance are not relevant factors and it is unfair to discriminate based on them. But, if hiring for a job as an actor to play the role of Winston Churchil in a movie, then race, sex, and appearance are very relevant factors, and it is perfectly fair to discriminate based on them. If a skinny black woman wanted to play Winston Churchil, it would be perfectly fair to discriminate against her because of race, sex, and appearance.
It's not the act of discrimination that's unfair, or illegal. It's the act of doing it based on criteria that are not relevant to the task that's unfair and illegal.
(In summary, I'm not really arguing one way or the other about your point with regard to ex SCO employees, just saying you're using the terms wrong.)
I can trade my unused upstream bandwidth to a company that needs it (a colocation or web hosting facility) in return for downstream bandwidth (which they would have excess of).
That statement neither supports nor refutes your point. The fact that upstream and downstream bandwith are tradeable services doesn't necessarily mean one is worth more than the other. They could cost just as much as each other and still be tradeable one for the other.
One T3 plus some trading == slightly less than two T3's worth of downstream bandwidth. If users use up my upstream bandwidth, I can't trade it for more downstream and I would have to purchase another T3.
I think you misunderstand my point, and admittedly I wasn't very clear on it. Yes, I am aware that *everyone* is pricing upstream content differently from downstream content, and that includes everyone from the backbone down to the home user, so yes, the company higher up the chain from the ISP is doing the same thing to the ISP that the ISP does to the home user. You get more downstream bandwith with a T3 purchase than upstream. But this is NOT because one is inherently more costly than the other. It's because they don't have the same demand, and so the provider doesn't price them the same (note, price != cost) I didn't intend to make the claim that the price was the same, only that the COST was the same, and there is a slight but important difference.
Saying that the price difference is due to some inherent cost difference is like looking at a highway with 2 northbound lanes built and 4 southbound lanes built, and coming to the conclusion that cars must have some physical property that causes them to be unable to drive north as fast as they can drive south.
If you don't know a single Dem. presidential candidate, you obviously don't watch the news or read the paper regularly.
True. But your mistake is the implication that those activities are the only way to be informed. I obtain my news on-line - yes from mainstream sources, not some crank's blog. I read most everything on the BBC for my world news, and use CNN's website for more local things. I don't feel like wasting my time watching half an hour of TV to glean the 5 minutes of actual news buried in the newscast. I have little patience for news presented in it's slow verbal form because I can read much faster than the announcers can talk, and (here's the important bit) I can read the first paragraph or so and then skip it if I can tell that the article is just human-interest fluff (Like the media circus surrounding candidates for an election that won't happen any time soon.)
I'm not a child, therefore I can read fast enough to learn everything I need to about the candidates' platforms with only a few weeks of study prior to the election day. I don't need an entire year.
If in the process of mugging someone you also kill them, then you're both a murderer and a mugger.
And if in the process of mugging them you DON'T kill them, you are not a murderer, so it is still perfectly valid to complain when someone uses the term "murderer" to apply to a deathless mugging.
This is identical to complaining when someone uses "censorship" to apply to self-filtering. Yes, it's a difference of degree. But my point was that that "difference of degree" is a sufficient reason by itself to keep the distinction between terms clear. Just like you shouldn't use "murder" when you mean "mug", and the RIAA shouldn't use "theft" when they mean "copying".
To use a term that implies something much more severe than what is actually going on makes you look exactly like the tin-foil-hat-wearing-cave-dweller, and clearly from the intelligence of your reply, you aren't. So you shouldn't give off the impression you are.
There is good reason to have that stipulation in there - fear of IP mixing. SCO has a track record now of wanting to sue over the mixing of IP with other companies. To hire one of their ex-employees is to invite this kind of outrageous claim in the future. You know how most employment contracts have that little clause about not working for any opposing company after leaving the current one, for a period of at least a year? You know how most people feel that clause is total crap and ignore it? Well, SCO just might be the sort of company that would pursue it.
And, there's the fear that an "ex" employee might actually be a plant, to get some of SCO's IP mixed with your own on purpose as a prelude to suing you.
There are legitimate reasons to fear hiring an "ex" employee of SCO.
Slashdot Mirror
The one with the most impact by a good margin is water vapor . That's right folks, water.
BAN Dihydrogen Monoxide Now!
Dihydrogen Monoxide is the primary component of Acid Rain!
There exist thousands of factories across the US that dump thousands of gallons of Dihydrogen Monoxide a day into the sewer sytems!
Dihydrogen Monoxide has been found in large quantities in every water resivoir across the country.
Inhaling even small quantities of Dihydrogen Monoxide can be fatal as it clogs the respitory system and displaces oxygen.
BAN DIHYDROGEN MONOXIDE TODAY!
Start a petition. Call your Congressman. Don't let this travesty continue. After all, can we afford to take the risk and find that it is too late to stop it later?
This is no different than the short-sighted Pascal's Wager "proof" that you should worship god. It ignores likelyhoods and just says that since there's a *chance*, you should act on that chance, with no regard at all to how large that chance is. If that was the way we operated, everyone would be buying volcano insurance.
Three words: Totally irrelevant point.
The Big Problem has always been: What type of technology will allow us to simultaneously protect a consumer's right to Fair Use while preventing him from illegally distributing the entertainment he has purchased?
Nah, the bigger problem is this: How can that technology, if it gets invented, work in such a fashion that it doesn't criminalize open source software? Right now, every solution the industry comes up with depends on the software writers being 'trusted' by the recording industry. In other words, the techniques fail if you can write your own software from scratch. (For example, the technology that prevents you from fast-forwarding DVD's during certain sections, and the technology that prevents you from watching a DVD in the "wrong" country, both depend on the software author choosing to go out of his way to enforce it even though customers don't want it. This doesn't work in an open-source solution, which is why the MPAA hates DeCSS so much. It's not the copying, since that can happen anyway - it's the breaking of their ability to tell you exactly how you can and can't view the DVD.)
I fear DRM because it *does* result in information (not just entertainment) being stifled. Tell someone the information needed to write their own content playing software and go to jail, even though there are reasons for doing so that have nothing to do with piracy.
...you dishonest prick! Your article cited problems with Java's interface to databases and the web, and then drew a conclusion about the language itself from that. Nope. Doesn't fly. Does JDBC suck compared to embedded SQL? Yes. Do servlets suck compared to PHP? Yes. Does Java suck compared to C++ or Perl? No. C++ and Perl have had better interfaces written for them, but this has nothing to do with anything inherent in the language.
You aren't listening. I'm not talking about deliberate, manually started connections to Live. I'm talking about the game software doing it for you when it told you it was doing something different. It's like Smith & Wesson not telling you that inserting the bullet causes it to automatically fire.
The shed didn't "glow" to the naked eye. That was a misreading of the article, and now an urban legend. It "glowed" on radiation detectors. The government noticed when their methods normally used to search for rouge nuclear programs came up with a major source of radiation that was not registered. (Normally anything that might show up on such a scan has to be registered, so that the spy equipment doesn't issue panic alarms every time someone gets an X-ray done or a university runs a small physics experiment.)
So let's say that a company produces a product that they know has holes. Let's say they put them there on purpose. Later, they charge for an update to the product that fixes them. Customers are stuck having to either (a) stop using the product which by now they probably have already committed to in ways that are hard to back out of, or (b) be fined by this rule when their machine is used in an attack, or (c) buy the upgrade.
Sounds like a sweet deal for the company - planned obsolescence where the customer is fined for being out of date.
This law should be written so it will only apply to people who could have fixed the problem without paying their own money to do so. i.e. the company produces a free upgrade that fixes it and NOTHING ELSE. It's also no fair to be tying mandatory fine-avoiding upgrades to features the customers don't want. "Get the latest security update now on our website or you could get fined for the hole! Oh, and the update installs Spyware Bendover Plus 2.1 as well, for your convenience."
My other concern is with companies that make antivirus software. Can't they secretly make viruses and release them into the wild, and then magicaly come out with the patch that works on them a few days later? If there is no law forcing you to buy their stuff you can just say 'screw you' and not buy their software. But if the law says you must patch or be fined, then the anti-virus company just wrote itself a blank check.
If you want to use it for another purpose then fine, but you are on your own.
The fact that Microsoft does not have that mentality is precisely the problem here. They do NOT think it is fine that you use it for some other purpose.
Why didn't I see anyone complaining about this when Sega did it with the Dreamcast?
1 - It was not publicised.
2 - Nobody was actually making use of the Dreamcast to do anything other than run the published games, and I don't think there were any cases where an update caused an older game to fail (were there?).
You did agree to update the system, you isntalled the particular game that the update came on.
Only if the fact that it would update your system that way was well advertised.
If the terms of service for using Live differ from the terms of service of using an Xbox in general, then it is deceptive (possibly criminally so) to fail to inform you that you are about to cross the boundry from one to the other, and to fail to give you the chance to control when you are operating under one and when you are operating under the other. Just because you agreed to operate under the terms of service of Live when you use Live doesn't mean you agreed to *always* operate under those terms whether you are trying to use Live or not. If you have Live installed, then this update in question occurs WITHOUT WARNING YOU THAT YOU ARE ABOUT TO CONNECT TO LIVE. Therefore it is crossing from the jurisdiction of one set of terms of service into another without giving you the chance to stop it, or even telling you that it is doing it. That's like changing the speed limit on a road from 55 miles per hour down to 25 miles per hour and not posting it on a sign.
Those people who used the internet before it became well known to the general public know that the whole f-ing thing was p2p already. This notion of some people being content providers exclusively and others being content consumers exclusively is something that only happened after it gained the notice of the commercial sector. Consider old fashioned usenet, for example. It was a P2P system long before p2p was a buzzword. The only thing that modern p2p does in addition to what the raw IP protocol already provides is that it makes a management system that helps to *find* the other hosts out there to connect to, instead of asking people to always have to go to a well-known site. Once a connection is established between client and server, all the traffic is completely peer-to-peer. Any machine can be a server, any can be a client.
What's happening is NOT that P2P is going away. What's happening is that it's becoming dumb to keep using that buzzword for what is essentially the way the internet was designed to work in the first place.
They're upgrading your video game console...although you do consent when you sign up for Live, if you actually read the Terms of Service.
They're doing the upgrade regardless of whether you are using Live, if you actually read the article.
If someone didn't have an XBOX Live account, why the HELL would they have an ethernet cable jacked into their box with a connection to the outside world?
Because they're using the computer for what it is: a computer. Perhaps because they are the very people the article was actually talking about - people wanting to use the Xbox hardware as a computer, running Linux, which perhaps might actually have some value to being plugged into the internet in some way. (The parent was most certainly not insightful as the moderater thought. People running Linux on the machine were the very people affected by the bug this article is talking about.)
Nobody is forcing you to use XBox Live.
But games are forcing you to connect to it long enough to obtain the patch even if you never use Xbox live, without informing you beforehand that they are going to do this. Read the article.
I agree that if Microsoft wants to make updated, patched boxes a requirement of using their Live service, that this is within their rights. Especially since if a buffer under/overflow error exists it can be exploited to do more that just put Linux on the box. It can exploited to put a cheat into a game, which becomes a problem if you are playing it against other people. BUT, None of that gives them the right to install the patch in secret, regardless of whether you ever plan to use the Live service. Use of the Live service is NOT a requirement to use the XBox. It is not advertised as such in any way, and no license agreement says as such either.
A "reasonable person" would expect that an intel PC would work like an intel PC regardless of what the case looks like, even if it says "Xbox" on it.
[The google toolbar does this]
Yet nobody complains that it updates without authorization.
But:
1- You didn't pay for the google toolbar.
2- The toolbar only exists for I.E. Consider the set of all people who want to use I.E. Consider the set of all people who give a crap about avoiding MS dominance. Consider that there isn't much overlap between those two sets. Therefore few of the people who might care about this are using the tool in question.
3- Chages to the google toolbar don't render a purchase of several hundred dollars useless for what you were using it for, like fixing the Xbox bug that allows linux might for somebody.
If your afraid of MS patching your system for various reasons, and the bug that allows linux to be run on the system very well could be used for other things, then DONT BUY or USE AN XBOX!!!
The point is that they have no right to patch your system without asking. You bought the box. It's yours. They *DO* have a right to say that if you don't patch you can't use the Xbox Live service, but they don't have the right to patch people's boxes regardless of whether they want to use the service or not. There are legitimate reasons to insist on an unmodified box on the multiplayer network - it is likely that enough of the smarts of a game are in the client that if you can change the client you can put in cheats to make yourself more powerful than you should be. But none of that excuses their practice of putting on those patches without even asking or informing you.
Laws in a country do affect the ability to sell a product in that country even if it is produced elsewhere. So, Opera gets developed in Norway, and that's legal, but then it cannot be sold to people in the United States, and that cuts into it's market. Whether Opera decides that is important or not is up to them.
Finding a decent IT job in CA is tough, finding one in Utah, I can imagine is significantly more difficult.
I'm not so sure about that. California was hit hardest by the IT bust, because it had a lot more of the vaporware companies that went belly-up after enticing people to move to the area. Thus it has more out of work people competing for the jobs than in other areas.
To "discriminate" simply means to selectively choose something or somethings from a set, based on some selection criteria. The problem is that it is a word that became more widely used in association with unfair types of discrimination, as the civil rights movement caught on. Thus some people now think that connotation is actually part of the definition, when it is not.
If you pick one programming language to use in your next project, you are discriminating. If you pick the big, ripe orange from the bin at the supermarket, passing over the green ones, you are discriminating. And if you choose an new employee from the set of available applicatants using race as a criteria, you are discriminating - NOT because of the fact that it's unfair, but because you are selecting from a set based on some criteria. Discrimination can be fair or unfair depending on whether the criteria should be relevant or not. If hiring for a job as an IT manager, then race, sex, and appearance are not relevant factors and it is unfair to discriminate based on them. But, if hiring for a job as an actor to play the role of Winston Churchil in a movie, then race, sex, and appearance are very relevant factors, and it is perfectly fair to discriminate based on them. If a skinny black woman wanted to play Winston Churchil, it would be perfectly fair to discriminate against her because of race, sex, and appearance.
It's not the act of discrimination that's unfair, or illegal. It's the act of doing it based on criteria that are not relevant to the task that's unfair and illegal.
(In summary, I'm not really arguing one way or the other about your point with regard to ex SCO employees, just saying you're using the terms wrong.)
I can trade my unused upstream bandwidth to a company that needs it (a colocation or web hosting facility) in return for downstream bandwidth (which they would have excess of).
That statement neither supports nor refutes your point. The fact that upstream and downstream bandwith are tradeable services doesn't necessarily mean one is worth more than the other. They could cost just as much as each other and still be tradeable one for the other.
One T3 plus some trading == slightly less than two T3's worth of downstream bandwidth. If users use up my upstream bandwidth, I can't trade it for more downstream and I would have to purchase another T3.
I think you misunderstand my point, and admittedly I wasn't very clear on it. Yes, I am aware that *everyone* is pricing upstream content differently from downstream content, and that includes everyone from the backbone down to the home user, so yes, the company higher up the chain from the ISP is doing the same thing to the ISP that the ISP does to the home user. You get more downstream bandwith with a T3 purchase than upstream. But this is NOT because one is inherently more costly than the other. It's because they don't have the same demand, and so the provider doesn't price them the same (note, price != cost) I didn't intend to make the claim that the price was the same, only that the COST was the same, and there is a slight but important difference.
Saying that the price difference is due to some inherent cost difference is like looking at a highway with 2 northbound lanes built and 4 southbound lanes built, and coming to the conclusion that cars must have some physical property that causes them to be unable to drive north as fast as they can drive south.
If you don't know a single Dem. presidential candidate, you obviously don't watch the news or read the paper regularly.
True. But your mistake is the implication that those activities are the only way to be informed. I obtain my news on-line - yes from mainstream sources, not some crank's blog. I read most everything on the BBC for my world news, and use CNN's website for more local things. I don't feel like wasting my time watching half an hour of TV to glean the 5 minutes of actual news buried in the newscast. I have little patience for news presented in it's slow verbal form because I can read much faster than the announcers can talk, and (here's the important bit) I can read the first paragraph or so and then skip it if I can tell that the article is just human-interest fluff (Like the media circus surrounding candidates for an election that won't happen any time soon.)
I'm not a child, therefore I can read fast enough to learn everything I need to about the candidates' platforms with only a few weeks of study prior to the election day. I don't need an entire year.
If in the process of mugging someone you also kill them, then you're both a murderer and a mugger.
And if in the process of mugging them you DON'T kill them, you are not a murderer, so it is still perfectly valid to complain when someone uses the term "murderer" to apply to a deathless mugging.
This is identical to complaining when someone uses "censorship" to apply to self-filtering. Yes, it's a difference of degree. But my point was that that "difference of degree" is a sufficient reason by itself to keep the distinction between terms clear. Just like you shouldn't use "murder" when you mean "mug", and the RIAA shouldn't use "theft" when they mean "copying".
To use a term that implies something much more severe than what is actually going on makes you look exactly like the tin-foil-hat-wearing-cave-dweller, and clearly from the intelligence of your reply, you aren't. So you shouldn't give off the impression you are.
(Condescending lies snipped.)
There is good reason to have that stipulation in there - fear of IP mixing. SCO has a track record now of wanting to sue over the mixing of IP with other companies. To hire one of their ex-employees is to invite this kind of outrageous claim in the future. You know how most employment contracts have that little clause about not working for any opposing company after leaving the current one, for a period of at least a year? You know how most people feel that clause is total crap and ignore it? Well, SCO just might be the sort of company that would pursue it.
And, there's the fear that an "ex" employee might actually be a plant, to get some of SCO's IP mixed with your own on purpose as a prelude to suing you.
There are legitimate reasons to fear hiring an "ex" employee of SCO.