All I can figure is that there must have been some terms of service associated with the login process that I am unaware of, but even that seems illegal.
It probably is but our nation has made a history of creating lesser laws which ignore limitations. For example, read and apply the 9th and 10th Amendments to nearly anything Congress has done since 1800.
I'm not a lawyer but maybe someone who understands this stuff could explain it for us normal folk so we don't get into trouble reading things about ourselves we aren't entitled to
Even a lowly click-through EULA can supersede Constitutionally guaranteed rights. It's a wonderful world when business interests have the Supreme Court in their pocket.
BLame the victim isn't just/. groupthink. It's prevalent throughout our society--indeed even our world.
If you're a victim there's only one sure way out: leave. It may suck. It may be cold and wet and hungry outside. Leave. Don't look back. Don't look for lawsuits (lawyers are not your friend. they're human. they're after profit). Just leave, tough it out, and hope to God that you find something better.
You read in a public bulletin board detailed instructions for robbing a bank by typing in an unpublished keycode into an ATM machine and you get arrested???
Honestly, I don't agree that anyone should get arrested for that.
Life is all about solving puzzles and riddles in order to get the easy reward. That's a concept taught from preschool on. What makes banks so special that they get protection from thuggee guards?
Screw 'em. If they used such a weak ATM with a backdoor, they deserve to get robbed. I suppose people would say "But but but what if it's my money that they lose?" Well, IMHO, the CEO and board of directors should be held personally liable for every dollar AND additional money for the lawyers.
This line of thought gives us a view into the nature of legal money laundering.
Part of my current job is tracking down information on people that most would consider fairly confidential
Any industry that makes a business out of toeing the legal line which borders invasion of privacy, stalking, and identity theft should be hauled into court and put down like a rabid dog.
I realize you're probably a decent human being and all... what am I saying? If you were a decent human being, you'd have a real job that doesn't test the limits of morals, values, and ethics.
Without GNU's GPL MS would've openly pirated various free implementations of UNIX. As it is they have to hide that information in material covered and protected by patents. Consider a world where tough-guy government protection is available to anyone. Even the cost of the required political maneuverings is second seat to the most influential factor: winning the footrace to the patent officer's desk.
basic cable modem or DSL service is about $30 a month.
Considering that I paid (through taxes) to implement the system upon which cable modems/DSL provide their service...
And considering that federal government subsidies for the high-technology market come out of my taxpayer dollars...
and considering the federal subsidies for infrastructure development...
and considering that major telecom conglomerates (who laid the cable and subcontract all the copper and fiber lines which carry the network) knew how to maneuver through the stock market debacle (through cooking the books a la Xerox/Tyco/Enron/etc.etc.etc.)...
And considering that 401(k) funding helped subsidize these businesses into existence and then subsequently tanked (I'm sorry, weren't those business loans which were supposed to be repaid? or do we just use the bankruptcy insurance policies as a proxy to screw the people who paid into those national investment funds?)...
Even $30 month is crap.
Say you give your neighbor $1000 so that he can excavate his backyard and grow corn, or tomatos, or whatever... How much is a fair price for him to charge when he sells that stock to you in autumn?
OEMs are now free to bundle a media player other than WMP
Oh good. XMMS and Mplayer for everyone.
(or Joe's Hardware Store's Shiny Media Player Version 0.45BETA)
Or they'll just use this as a business opportunity to infect the end users' computers with more spyware, broadcastware, phone-home-ware... more half-butt coded junk that crashes half the time, has buggy codecs which are susceptible to serious exploits, is impossible to maintain.
Seriously. The only real solution for Windows is to switch to something which has a sane competence of network distribution, upgrade, and requires end user maintenance. I'm seriously of the opinion that, if the end user doesn't want to maintain their machine, they can go back to living without it. Really. 10 years ago half the population was able to slack off just fine without computers. What's so important about them now?
That's a marketing ploy. It's a logical fallacy. It makes sense that if you get the whole bundle, it costs the company less in bookkeeping and setup and anything else the marketing department feels like adding on.
But... that's just not the way it works. RR in Milwaukee and Comcast in Chicago told me that, to get cable internet, I MUST subscribe to digital cable or pay an extra $20/mo. Comcast here on the East Coast was happy to give me standard cable, cable internet, and no extra "no digital cable" surcharge. The hook? All three have come up to the same price within $10/mo.
I'm not longer buying any excuse cooked up by marketing departments or by people who are thinking about it logically. The only real explanation is,"Yes, they're coming up with any cock-and-bull story possible to justify fleecing us for every dollar we're worth". And to think we're subsidizing those industries with tax money to boot.
it's because the credit card companies double-dip; they charge you for using the credit card, and they charge the business for running it through
Just like the internet. They used taxpayer dollars to set it up, 401(k) money to subsidize its commercialization, and now we pay through every possible pocket to use it.
And the top investors still ran off with all the initial startup capital when the markets tanked.
And they still can't keep from selling our private information around in every possible database.
And they still can't stop spam outfits from being profitable.
Don't let yourself be fooled. The businesses pass the savings on to the customer. I wish more people would grasp this concept and apply it to their thinking of taxes. Maybe we'd get a sane fiscal policy that didn't "pass the savings" onto the middle class.
because they knew the cards wouldn't take off if customers had to pay the fee
Sort of like the called pays/receiver pays for long distance charges on cell phone usage. In the end the service provider is never losing money.
If you're financially secure enough to turn down work then you have no ground to stand on when arguing the details of the case of someone who makes $45k/year in SF.
But then I'm not as bitter of a person as you appear to be
Reading my employee agreement and keeping track of the number of rights delegated to both me and my employer makes me bitter how?
And if you share something that you are not supposed to, then you deserve to be smacked
If you don't want employees to share details of their relocation package then don't give them a relocation package. Quibbling over whether or not a financial package should be public information is childish. Firing someone for it is flat out Wrong.
It's about image
I agree. How about the company takes a proactive approach to its image and works with employees. I don't want to hear about tax credits or accounting ledgers or anything else. Google could've avoided this very easily had they paid his relocation expenses up front. That is a proactive approach to solving the problem.
I'm talking about drawing a line between sharing work stuff and personal stuff
By all rights that line stops at technical details about my daily duties. That line does not include the area which covers the number or urinals in the men's bathroom. That line should also not include relocation packages.
How many times have you been relocated by a company? You do understand that these critical details about his relocation package are, in reality, trivial blabberings? There is nothing to get fired over in them.
He talked about private company business, of a publicly traded company, which has trade secrets, internal forecasts, etc, that they don't want reveled, and the SEC doesn't want them to randomly reveal.
I have yet to see that backed up. There are vague allusions to relocation practices at best. If that's the case then 80% of new hires in the US should be terminated tomorrow since that's what new hires do--they talk about the new hire process.
That's too bad, try to get over it, but it doesn't mean this was a bad contract
Any contract which isn't equally portioned between rights of side A and rights of side B is a bad contract. Every employment contract I've seen amounts to four pages of rights retained by the company and one last line that says (pph),"You, as the employee, have the right to go get fscked."
So why sign the contract?... No one twisted his arm.
This is the clique/frat mentality that says (pph),"We can ridicule and intimidate anyone as long and as brutally as we want--no one forced them to be here."
I can't believe there are human beings still plying this argument. What's even more surprising is that the courts happily follow along with it wherever employment is concerned.
If you agree to abid by a contract, don't, and get fired. Don't be shocked or upset
The contract sucked. All contracts suck.
My first experience with a contract was at age 6. My mother had my allowance fixed at $0.35 for 5 years until I finally got a paper route, at which point my allowance went to zero because now I was making my own money.
Insults are a sign of an amateur troll. Ridicule is more accomplished and elicits a greater emotional response from the target. A greater emotional response results in greater perturbation of their daily function and makes for a more effective troll.
It's also known as harassment and, according to federal law, is illegal. It never gets enforced without the proper paper trail, however. That paper trail is impossible to keep unless the troll network is flat-out stupid.
Rule number one: Your compensation, benefits, terms of employment, etc. are confidential information
That's just the sort of stuff that the State Supreme Courts and the Federal Supreme Court should strike down. My employer has no moral right (laws are a different story) to keep me from perusing the open market by discussing the terms of my current employment.
If we extrapolate, soon Target will have a shopper non-disclosure agreement on the front door so that you can't go price-shopping at Wal-Mart.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd be willing to bet that a few Enron ex-executives tried to use the "everybody else is doing it..." non-justification, too.
That's entirely the point of discrimination. Why are these people being targeted when everyone else is allowed to get away with bloody murder?
the fact is that you knowingly broke the rules to take advantage of a technical error for personal gain
I'm sorry. Which rule regulates which URLs I'm allowed to visit?
If you can't play by the rules
Become a federal lawyer, federal politician, or Supreme Court judge. They've been ignoring the 9th and 10th Amendments for over 200 years.
Most enlightening. Thanks for the info Vince.
All I can figure is that there must have been some terms of service associated with the login process that I am unaware of, but even that seems illegal.
It probably is but our nation has made a history of creating lesser laws which ignore limitations. For example, read and apply the 9th and 10th Amendments to nearly anything Congress has done since 1800.
I'm not a lawyer but maybe someone who understands this stuff could explain it for us normal folk so we don't get into trouble reading things about ourselves we aren't entitled to
Even a lowly click-through EULA can supersede Constitutionally guaranteed rights. It's a wonderful world when business interests have the Supreme Court in their pocket.
BLame the victim isn't just /. groupthink. It's prevalent throughout our society--indeed even our world.
If you're a victim there's only one sure way out: leave. It may suck. It may be cold and wet and hungry outside. Leave. Don't look back. Don't look for lawsuits (lawyers are not your friend. they're human. they're after profit). Just leave, tough it out, and hope to God that you find something better.
You read in a public bulletin board detailed instructions for robbing a bank by typing in an unpublished keycode into an ATM machine and you get arrested???
Honestly, I don't agree that anyone should get arrested for that.
Life is all about solving puzzles and riddles in order to get the easy reward. That's a concept taught from preschool on. What makes banks so special that they get protection from thuggee guards?
Screw 'em. If they used such a weak ATM with a backdoor, they deserve to get robbed. I suppose people would say "But but but what if it's my money that they lose?" Well, IMHO, the CEO and board of directors should be held personally liable for every dollar AND additional money for the lawyers.
This line of thought gives us a view into the nature of legal money laundering.
Part of my current job is tracking down information on people that most would consider fairly confidential
Any industry that makes a business out of toeing the legal line which borders invasion of privacy, stalking, and identity theft should be hauled into court and put down like a rabid dog.
I realize you're probably a decent human being and all... what am I saying? If you were a decent human being, you'd have a real job that doesn't test the limits of morals, values, and ethics.
Without GNU's GPL MS would've openly pirated various free implementations of UNIX. As it is they have to hide that information in material covered and protected by patents. Consider a world where tough-guy government protection is available to anyone. Even the cost of the required political maneuverings is second seat to the most influential factor: winning the footrace to the patent officer's desk.
skeptical
basic cable modem or DSL service is about $30 a month.
Considering that I paid (through taxes) to implement the system upon which cable modems/DSL provide their service...
And considering that federal government subsidies for the high-technology market come out of my taxpayer dollars...
and considering the federal subsidies for infrastructure development...
and considering that major telecom conglomerates (who laid the cable and subcontract all the copper and fiber lines which carry the network) knew how to maneuver through the stock market debacle (through cooking the books a la Xerox/Tyco/Enron/etc.etc.etc.)...
And considering that 401(k) funding helped subsidize these businesses into existence and then subsequently tanked (I'm sorry, weren't those business loans which were supposed to be repaid? or do we just use the bankruptcy insurance policies as a proxy to screw the people who paid into those national investment funds?)...
Even $30 month is crap.
Say you give your neighbor $1000 so that he can excavate his backyard and grow corn, or tomatos, or whatever... How much is a fair price for him to charge when he sells that stock to you in autumn?
Just think about it for a few moments.
OEMs are now free to bundle a media player other than WMP
Oh good. XMMS and Mplayer for everyone.
(or Joe's Hardware Store's Shiny Media Player Version 0.45BETA)
Or they'll just use this as a business opportunity to infect the end users' computers with more spyware, broadcastware, phone-home-ware... more half-butt coded junk that crashes half the time, has buggy codecs which are susceptible to serious exploits, is impossible to maintain.
Seriously. The only real solution for Windows is to switch to something which has a sane competence of network distribution, upgrade, and requires end user maintenance. I'm seriously of the opinion that, if the end user doesn't want to maintain their machine, they can go back to living without it. Really. 10 years ago half the population was able to slack off just fine without computers. What's so important about them now?
you just aren't getting a bundled discount?
That's a marketing ploy. It's a logical fallacy. It makes sense that if you get the whole bundle, it costs the company less in bookkeeping and setup and anything else the marketing department feels like adding on.
But... that's just not the way it works. RR in Milwaukee and Comcast in Chicago told me that, to get cable internet, I MUST subscribe to digital cable or pay an extra $20/mo. Comcast here on the East Coast was happy to give me standard cable, cable internet, and no extra "no digital cable" surcharge. The hook? All three have come up to the same price within $10/mo.
I'm not longer buying any excuse cooked up by marketing departments or by people who are thinking about it logically. The only real explanation is,"Yes, they're coming up with any cock-and-bull story possible to justify fleecing us for every dollar we're worth". And to think we're subsidizing those industries with tax money to boot.
it's because the credit card companies double-dip; they charge you for using the credit card, and they charge the business for running it through
Just like the internet. They used taxpayer dollars to set it up, 401(k) money to subsidize its commercialization, and now we pay through every possible pocket to use it.
And the top investors still ran off with all the initial startup capital when the markets tanked.
And they still can't keep from selling our private information around in every possible database.
And they still can't stop spam outfits from being profitable.
They make businesses pay for it
Don't let yourself be fooled. The businesses pass the savings on to the customer. I wish more people would grasp this concept and apply it to their thinking of taxes. Maybe we'd get a sane fiscal policy that didn't "pass the savings" onto the middle class.
because they knew the cards wouldn't take off if customers had to pay the fee
Sort of like the called pays/receiver pays for long distance charges on cell phone usage. In the end the service provider is never losing money.
DRM will be helpful in allowing much smaller entities to enjoy the same power as large corporations because it will be much cheaper to enforce
Never mind cost of implementation and the cost of membership to the various certified consortiums.
What? I'm supposed to roll over because you said it would be cheaper? DRM will not result in anything being cheaper.
I won't sign one if it doesn't seem fair to me
If you're financially secure enough to turn down work then you have no ground to stand on when arguing the details of the case of someone who makes $45k/year in SF.
But then I'm not as bitter of a person as you appear to be
Reading my employee agreement and keeping track of the number of rights delegated to both me and my employer makes me bitter how?
And if you share something that you are not supposed to, then you deserve to be smacked
If you don't want employees to share details of their relocation package then don't give them a relocation package. Quibbling over whether or not a financial package should be public information is childish. Firing someone for it is flat out Wrong.
It's about image
I agree. How about the company takes a proactive approach to its image and works with employees. I don't want to hear about tax credits or accounting ledgers or anything else. Google could've avoided this very easily had they paid his relocation expenses up front. That is a proactive approach to solving the problem.
I'm talking about drawing a line between sharing work stuff and personal stuff
By all rights that line stops at technical details about my daily duties. That line does not include the area which covers the number or urinals in the men's bathroom. That line should also not include relocation packages.
How many times have you been relocated by a company? You do understand that these critical details about his relocation package are, in reality, trivial blabberings? There is nothing to get fired over in them.
He talked about private company business, of a publicly traded company, which has trade secrets, internal forecasts, etc, that they don't want reveled, and the SEC doesn't want them to randomly reveal.
I have yet to see that backed up. There are vague allusions to relocation practices at best. If that's the case then 80% of new hires in the US should be terminated tomorrow since that's what new hires do--they talk about the new hire process.
That's too bad, try to get over it, but it doesn't mean this was a bad contract
Any contract which isn't equally portioned between rights of side A and rights of side B is a bad contract. Every employment contract I've seen amounts to four pages of rights retained by the company and one last line that says (pph),"You, as the employee, have the right to go get fscked."
Maybe you didn't read yours...
Do they really think that it's okay to discuss work issues on a personal blog?
It's all life. People talk about life. That's life. Why can't companies cope with reality?
I think bloggers will learn, and some are learning the hard way, to keep work stuff out of personal forums
In Stalinist Russia?
I would never mention my worklpace in my blog unless I felt comfortable seeing my entire personal blog hanging in the break room
If companies aren't doing anything wrong then they have nothing to be worried about.
So why sign the contract? ... No one twisted his arm.
This is the clique/frat mentality that says (pph),"We can ridicule and intimidate anyone as long and as brutally as we want--no one forced them to be here."
I can't believe there are human beings still plying this argument. What's even more surprising is that the courts happily follow along with it wherever employment is concerned.
If you agree to abid by a contract, don't, and get fired. Don't be shocked or upset
The contract sucked. All contracts suck.
My first experience with a contract was at age 6. My mother had my allowance fixed at $0.35 for 5 years until I finally got a paper route, at which point my allowance went to zero because now I was making my own money.
I reiterate. Contracts suck.
That wasn't trolling: that was insulting
Insults are a sign of an amateur troll. Ridicule is more accomplished and elicits a greater emotional response from the target. A greater emotional response results in greater perturbation of their daily function and makes for a more effective troll.
It's also known as harassment and, according to federal law, is illegal. It never gets enforced without the proper paper trail, however. That paper trail is impossible to keep unless the troll network is flat-out stupid.
Rule number one: Your compensation, benefits, terms of employment, etc. are confidential information
That's just the sort of stuff that the State Supreme Courts and the Federal Supreme Court should strike down. My employer has no moral right (laws are a different story) to keep me from perusing the open market by discussing the terms of my current employment.
If we extrapolate, soon Target will have a shopper non-disclosure agreement on the front door so that you can't go price-shopping at Wal-Mart.
oyu raise your kids this way, you've got a world of hurt coming.
If I beat my kids daily, they have a legitimate reason to dissent.
If you reward dissention
No one's rewarding dissention. This blogger had legitimate concerns.
By your solution, people who piss and moan about work get... paid off?
Anyone who disagrees with your point of view is complaining? As long as you're perfect there's no reason for me to discuss this with you.
Sorry, but your response was just dumb
You're always right.
No law means a company is free to lie as much as they care to
Are you saying that Google is lying about something?
It appears that he was fired for violating an NDA
That seems to be the prevailing rumor but I've yet to see any posted information to back it up.
I'd say the NDA excuse is an easy-out PR run.