the people who own the company and therefore have a very real stake in how the company is percieved
If they're so concerned about how their company is perceived then they could choose to placate their employee. Did they offer him $10k just to STFU for a little while? $10k isn't much more than lunch moeny to these very important people you're talking about. That'd be a more positive solution than firing someone.
If you have a design that would actually work and nobody begins work on it
That's entirely outside of my realm of control. I designed the reactor. I filled out all the proper legal forms and intellectual property disclosures with our legal department. I put the design in their database and they sent to me the paperwork confirming that it is now on file. If a head engineer ever looks at it and thinks that he can make a case for a better business model based upon it then the company may decide to develop it.
As it is, pebble bed reactors are all the rage and current regulations on both building the infrastructure and handling the material lend themselves to building pebble bed reactors. Implementing my design, while safer and arguably more efficient, would require a complete restructuring of regulations for the surety of tracking and handling the radioactive material. There's also the development time of the actual reactor to consider. There probably aren't many contractors in the nation who are qualified and certified to build a nuclear reactor core. There are probably no contractors in the nation who are qualified and certified to build a reactor core such as the one I have designed.
then you've violated your trust with the human race
Someday, you'll grow up and work in the real world.
people with real big ideas feel an obligation which you obviously don't
I had the idea, I felt the obligation, I filled out all the legal paperwork. My hands are tied. If I try to do any more with my idea, now that it is the legal property of my employer, I'm infringing on my employee agreement. Unless one of the top engineers in our company wants to chat with me about my reactor design I cannot discuss it with anyone outside of my company.
My last contract had some verbage which was (pph.),"Employee agrees not to tell anyone when the managerial staff decides to beat him daily with 16-gauge unshielded copper speaker wire."
It's at that point that I started to question the legitimacy of such contracts--and the ethics of the entire legal system.
Your resignation will be expected on my desk in the morning
I know this game. You get my resignation with my request for my remaining two weeks of vacation. You deny my vacation and have me escorted off of the property. You then deny my unemployment.
Don't be surprised if you find a nice steaming present on your keyboard, as well.:)
Don't forget, that in America, you're no longer allowed to give 'references.'
HR is not an above board world.
Re:Free drinks and he left ? - whaaat ?
on
Google Fires Blogger?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
anyone who leaves a party with FREE drinks and booze because it's a "little bit like a frat party" deserves to have thier ass fired
Right. We'd much rather that they stick around so that we can send gossip down the corporate grapevine about how he drove home after having 3 drinks in 2 hours.
in the UK, anyone fired for something completely unrelated to job performance and/or the company, can bring a case for wrongful dismissal
The UK companies need to learn from their US counterparts. Under reason for termination, the company checks the "other" box. They then sit back and wait for the destitute employee to pay an attorney to jump through the legal hoops and hurdles of attempting to get any information out of them... or for hell to freeze over, whichever comes first.
Hey, they are free to express their opinions just as Google is free to fire them for expressing them
I'd say the real issue is who gets to settle the score when it comes time to find the next job.
If Google gives him a bad reference letter then he's screwed. If Google gives him a good reference letter then the next employer is going to wonder what the hitch is. If Google gives him no reference letter then he's screwed.
I doubt the 189 Enron execs who walked away scott free think they're very strict.
And the Xerox execs, and the Tyco execs, and the WorldCom execs. Sure, there are a few sacrificial lambs with Martha Stewart, Sam Waksell, and a handful of others. I hope no one is fooled by these. Wall Street brokers, investors, executives, and even janitors were raking in billions using this strictly regulated insider trading.
Stand up for yourself. How long before your employment contract states quite clearly that you will provide free and open access for your supervisor at all times?
Just about every other company has similar clauses in employment contracts
When are the courts going to start getting a clue?
If the guy has been sacked then its his fault
This may be true. What does that say about Google? It sounds like they're trying to hide dirty laundry if they need to sack a guy.
I can't see what Google has done wrong here
If they've done nothing wrong then they have nothing to hide. Why be so sensitive about this guy's blog?
People create works because they understand that under US law they will be protected by copyright
Are you saying that in a world without some vacuous governmental law which is outside the enforcement price for the vast majority of people no one would create anything?
Bull-honkety.
You just want free MP3s
I don't have a single mp3 which I don't own on store-bought CD. I don't use common P2P software because I don't trust it from a security standpoint.
1. A vacuous term used to apply to any nation whose government isn't on GWB's Christmas card list. 2. A vacuous term used to apply to any group of people who we must liberate from their oppressors. 3. Any system of government which collects the resources of all citizens in the interest of redistributing those resources to those who are on GWB's Christmas card list.
pebble bed reactor would be the first radically new reactor design for several decades
Most anti-nuke arguments rely on popular misconceptions, improbable worst case scenarios, or audience ignorance and subsequent willingness to accept any "sounds good enough" fire and brimstone.
Nuclear waste storage/disposal isn't the biggest problem. The biggest problem is surety and transportation.
My nuclear reactor design streamlines surety and minimizes waste production but I can't tell you about it because my employee agreement says that I don't even own my own design anymore.
pebble bed reactor would be the first radically new reactor design for several decades
I know this is from the article, but that goes to show the hype. The pebble bed design isn't really new and it's certainly not radically new. For argument's sake, though, it is the first design in several decades to be implemented on a commercial scale.
I think most currently operating reactors are technically listed as experimental or testing.
I personally have a much better design for nuclear reactors but, due to our overbearing intellectual property clauses in our employee agreements, I can't tell you about it because some big vacuous company (who'll probably never develop it) now owns full rights to it. I could get sued just for shooting the breeze about better reactor design on/.
When they go down using pointers etc. you can be sure they introduce some overflow errors
Well, yes. But you can't slow down corporate profits or quarterly reports just because you need to go back and double-check a few mathematical idiosyncracies that _might_ happen sometime in the mysterious future. Progress. Come on. Let's go. Get that product out the door and...
That's the very first thing they taught him in politically correct school.
GWB's mindset is less iron-fisted, heavy-handed, etc. than AH's
Most of politically correct school is learning to be patient. Don't be so intense. Tone it down a little.
Your abuse of synedoche is out of control
It helps to see the little big in the big picture, the big picture as part of a larger picture, and to understand how it all affects any person at any level.
As long as your hyperbole and hysteria
I'm being pebbled by a sixth grade wannabe inventor of scrabble.
Our phone switch doesn't actually play the DTMF tones
I've seen that sort of option on telephones which insist on making some sort of noise for the user. How does that work on speakerphone, though? Unless you're using some sort of proprietary internal phone system which passes the numbers to the switchboard without using the standard tone signals.
I'm sitting here in the training cubicle. The guy in the cube next to me decides to check his voicemail... ON SPEAKERPHONE. After he dials in his password (for the entire office to hear) I call softly over the cube wall,"I now have your password."
A tense silence followed, and I could tell that the general perception was "Yeah right--you're just the new guy."
So I brought up my handy DTMF generator and started replaying his password over and over (at a low volume, but just loud enough so that people in adjacent cubes could hear).
How was I supposed to know that he had the Admin password for the e-mail server stored in his voicemail?
At the same time... What sort of dumbass checks their voice mail on speakerphone in public office space?
Does everyone do this on purpose out of some misguided doe-eyed love for Bush?
Bush is Hitler who has graduated from politically correct school. There are some things you just cannot do anymore which were, more or less, acceptable and tolerated 70 years ago. That doesn't mean that GWB's mindset is any less iron-fisted, heavy-handed, dictatorial, and complete blashpemy against the concept of a Constitutional Republic.
Dig Hitler up. Send him to politically correct school. Make him understand,"No. You just can't do it that way. If you want to rule the entire nation according to your own delerious whims you'll just have to figure out a different way to get to the goal." You'll end up with our current Federal Gov't.
Our small town bank, grocery and several other businesses donated more. No tax was imposed and no community member forced to support the playground expansion against his or her will
Well, except for the part where the price of milk went up $0.05 to pass along the cost savings of the donation. Or the part where the bank raised its overdraft fee to $40 from $20. Or the part where the "other small businesses" raised their miscellaneous line item costs by 5%.
A bar in my hometown had a bumper sticker: "We screw the other guy to pass the savings along to you."
Ah, so, in your small town, you're allowed to force me to abandon my property rights (make me leave town) if I disagree with your collective decision?
I'd be okay with that. It's easy to pick up and move to the next small town. It's a little more difficult when the moral arrogance of a small number of wealthy and well-connected imbeciles can dictate state or nationwide policies, though.
In the larger context, when the municipality decides what constitutes "acceptable" WIFI or other internet access, who's to say they won't also decide what you're allowed to access via that public-funded interenet connection?
In this vein I feel that government should do nothing more than light the fire under the bottoms of the available corporations to deploy effective WiFi systems for the community. IMHO, the government itself should not be directly involved in any oversight (other than to prevent price gouging) after implementation.
Slashdot Mirror
the people who own the company and therefore have a very real stake in how the company is percieved
If they're so concerned about how their company is perceived then they could choose to placate their employee. Did they offer him $10k just to STFU for a little while? $10k isn't much more than lunch moeny to these very important people you're talking about. That'd be a more positive solution than firing someone.
Just a thought...
people with real big ideas feel an obligation which you obviously don't
Reality is a skew turn and a 180 degree twist away.
The laws work but not to do what you think they should be doing.
So what do you do about it?
Abolish the laws which lend credibility and legitimacy to the abuses.
Abolishing laws isn't real popular in the US, though. Everyone's a control freak. I'll get tarred and feathered for this.
If you have a design that would actually work and nobody begins work on it
That's entirely outside of my realm of control. I designed the reactor. I filled out all the proper legal forms and intellectual property disclosures with our legal department. I put the design in their database and they sent to me the paperwork confirming that it is now on file. If a head engineer ever looks at it and thinks that he can make a case for a better business model based upon it then the company may decide to develop it.
As it is, pebble bed reactors are all the rage and current regulations on both building the infrastructure and handling the material lend themselves to building pebble bed reactors. Implementing my design, while safer and arguably more efficient, would require a complete restructuring of regulations for the surety of tracking and handling the radioactive material. There's also the development time of the actual reactor to consider. There probably aren't many contractors in the nation who are qualified and certified to build a nuclear reactor core. There are probably no contractors in the nation who are qualified and certified to build a reactor core such as the one I have designed.
then you've violated your trust with the human race
Someday, you'll grow up and work in the real world.
people with real big ideas feel an obligation which you obviously don't
I had the idea, I felt the obligation, I filled out all the legal paperwork. My hands are tied. If I try to do any more with my idea, now that it is the legal property of my employer, I'm infringing on my employee agreement. Unless one of the top engineers in our company wants to chat with me about my reactor design I cannot discuss it with anyone outside of my company.
(check your contract)
My last contract had some verbage which was (pph.),"Employee agrees not to tell anyone when the managerial staff decides to beat him daily with 16-gauge unshielded copper speaker wire."
It's at that point that I started to question the legitimacy of such contracts--and the ethics of the entire legal system.
Your resignation will be expected on my desk in the morning
:)
I know this game. You get my resignation with my request for my remaining two weeks of vacation. You deny my vacation and have me escorted off of the property. You then deny my unemployment.
Don't be surprised if you find a nice steaming present on your keyboard, as well.
Don't forget, that in America, you're no longer allowed to give 'references.'
HR is not an above board world.
anyone who leaves a party with FREE drinks and booze because it's a "little bit like a frat party" deserves to have thier ass fired
Right. We'd much rather that they stick around so that we can send gossip down the corporate grapevine about how he drove home after having 3 drinks in 2 hours.
Damn party p00pers
Damn yuppies.
in the UK, anyone fired for something completely unrelated to job performance and/or the company, can bring a case for wrongful dismissal
The UK companies need to learn from their US counterparts. Under reason for termination, the company checks the "other" box. They then sit back and wait for the destitute employee to pay an attorney to jump through the legal hoops and hurdles of attempting to get any information out of them... or for hell to freeze over, whichever comes first.
Hey, they are free to express their opinions just as Google is free to fire them for expressing them
I'd say the real issue is who gets to settle the score when it comes time to find the next job.
If Google gives him a bad reference letter then he's screwed.
If Google gives him a good reference letter then the next employer is going to wonder what the hitch is.
If Google gives him no reference letter then he's screwed.
There are very strict SEC rules about that stuff.
:)
I doubt the 189 Enron execs who walked away scott free think they're very strict.
And the Xerox execs, and the Tyco execs, and the WorldCom execs. Sure, there are a few sacrificial lambs with Martha Stewart, Sam Waksell, and a handful of others. I hope no one is fooled by these. Wall Street brokers, investors, executives, and even janitors were raking in billions using this strictly regulated insider trading.
Guess who gets to pay for it?
My employment contract states quite clearly
Stand up for yourself. How long before your employment contract states quite clearly that you will provide free and open access for your supervisor at all times?
Just about every other company has similar clauses in employment contracts
When are the courts going to start getting a clue?
If the guy has been sacked then its his fault
This may be true. What does that say about Google? It sounds like they're trying to hide dirty laundry if they need to sack a guy.
I can't see what Google has done wrong here
If they've done nothing wrong then they have nothing to hide. Why be so sensitive about this guy's blog?
People create works because they understand that under US law they will be protected by copyright
Are you saying that in a world without some vacuous governmental law which is outside the enforcement price for the vast majority of people no one would create anything?
Bull-honkety.
You just want free MP3s
I don't have a single mp3 which I don't own on store-bought CD. I don't use common P2P software because I don't trust it from a security standpoint.
Try again.
but legally it doesn't matter if your employer "owns" the idea unless you are actually under an NDA
If I disclose my design here and some other entity begins work on it then I have violated my trust with my employer.
So I'm willing to bet that you're just a troll
Oooooh.
No wait, communism is bad, right?
Communism is:
1. A vacuous term used to apply to any nation whose government isn't on GWB's Christmas card list.
2. A vacuous term used to apply to any group of people who we must liberate from their oppressors.
3. Any system of government which collects the resources of all citizens in the interest of redistributing those resources to those who are on GWB's Christmas card list.
Multiple choice. Pick one.
pebble bed reactor would be the first radically new reactor design for several decades
Most anti-nuke arguments rely on popular misconceptions, improbable worst case scenarios, or audience ignorance and subsequent willingness to accept any "sounds good enough" fire and brimstone.
Nuclear waste storage/disposal isn't the biggest problem. The biggest problem is surety and transportation.
My nuclear reactor design streamlines surety and minimizes waste production but I can't tell you about it because my employee agreement says that I don't even own my own design anymore.
I think most currently operating reactors are technically listed as experimental or testing.
I personally have a much better design for nuclear reactors but, due to our overbearing intellectual property clauses in our employee agreements, I can't tell you about it because some big vacuous company (who'll probably never develop it) now owns full rights to it. I could get sued just for shooting the breeze about better reactor design on
but the job requires that they be a prick - they even take courses in it
Just the kind of person I want looking out for my freedom, liberty, and rights as a citizen.
Yeah.
When they go down using pointers etc. you can be sure they introduce some overflow errors
Well, yes. But you can't slow down corporate profits or quarterly reports just because you need to go back and double-check a few mathematical idiosyncracies that _might_ happen sometime in the mysterious future. Progress. Come on. Let's go. Get that product out the door and...
Profit!
GWB is not motivated by hatred
That's the very first thing they taught him in politically correct school.
GWB's mindset is less iron-fisted, heavy-handed, etc. than AH's
Most of politically correct school is learning to be patient. Don't be so intense. Tone it down a little.
Your abuse of synedoche is out of control
It helps to see the little big in the big picture, the big picture as part of a larger picture, and to understand how it all affects any person at any level.
As long as your hyperbole and hysteria
I'm being pebbled by a sixth grade wannabe inventor of scrabble.
Our phone switch doesn't actually play the DTMF tones
I've seen that sort of option on telephones which insist on making some sort of noise for the user. How does that work on speakerphone, though? Unless you're using some sort of proprietary internal phone system which passes the numbers to the switchboard without using the standard tone signals.
How was I supposed to know?
I'm sitting here in the training cubicle. The guy in the cube next to me decides to check his voicemail... ON SPEAKERPHONE. After he dials in his password (for the entire office to hear) I call softly over the cube wall,"I now have your password."
A tense silence followed, and I could tell that the general perception was "Yeah right--you're just the new guy."
So I brought up my handy DTMF generator and started replaying his password over and over (at a low volume, but just loud enough so that people in adjacent cubes could hear).
How was I supposed to know that he had the Admin password for the e-mail server stored in his voicemail?
At the same time... What sort of dumbass checks their voice mail on speakerphone in public office space?
Does everyone do this on purpose out of some misguided doe-eyed love for Bush?
Bush is Hitler who has graduated from politically correct school. There are some things you just cannot do anymore which were, more or less, acceptable and tolerated 70 years ago. That doesn't mean that GWB's mindset is any less iron-fisted, heavy-handed, dictatorial, and complete blashpemy against the concept of a Constitutional Republic.
Dig Hitler up. Send him to politically correct school. Make him understand,"No. You just can't do it that way. If you want to rule the entire nation according to your own delerious whims you'll just have to figure out a different way to get to the goal." You'll end up with our current Federal Gov't.
What if IBM had been a little more reasonable with their licensing demands?
A bar in my hometown had a bumper sticker: "We screw the other guy to pass the savings along to you."
I'd be okay with that. It's easy to pick up and move to the next small town. It's a little more difficult when the moral arrogance of a small number of wealthy and well-connected imbeciles can dictate state or nationwide policies, though.
In this vein I feel that government should do nothing more than light the fire under the bottoms of the available corporations to deploy effective WiFi systems for the community. IMHO, the government itself should not be directly involved in any oversight (other than to prevent price gouging) after implementation.