Not free with the commercial prison industrial complex, they charge you, pile on interest during your sentence, and even sue states that aren't sending enough prisoners their way. Sound familiar? It better, because now they can argue that the prisons have precedent if this thing passes to sue the states over profit margins. Anyone not calling into their reps and demanding a fight over threat of voting the incumbent out should be shot.
Here's an unpopular opinion, but all those holes cut into the tax code that were supposed to "create jobs" are exactly what will bankrupt the USA because that's exactly what was happening - bank robbery. The treasury would easily be able to have upkept the infrastructure here if it weren't for the taxes and jobs vanishing to off shore locations. Global companies thought globally, which meant getting out of tax puzzle boxes, to keep their wealth away from the systems that enabled such wealth in the first place (unsustainable thought pattern), and now, the threat of not being able to meet obligations is looming while the politicians who pushed the ideology that enabled the tax holes are putting pressure on the last vestiges or modern public society the USA has left under the banner of "moochers taking what we can't afford to give".
All while conveniently sweeping under the rug the fact that all those "deferments" and "shelters" written into the code are now coming home to roost, picking the bones of the society that enabled them in the first place.
The rest of the world isn't laughing. It's looking on in horror at the train wreck in slow motion. Similar politics are trying to take hold in Canada, but I'm glad there are many who are fighting hard to reverse this trend.
Those cynical don't all have hard reasons like the/. crowd. This is not about naivete, this is likely a psy ops to soften the just-coalescing opinions of those who are still fence sitters.
My bet is this is going to shift some of the media coverage on the topic towards painting them in positive light, which will have a cascading effect on the ones a little further from the fence.
My distrust of this agency is absolute, manipulation of the people they're supposedly protecting is not beyond their agenda when it comes to preserving them or those they favor.
So they broadcast a common abusive partner's reaction to growing a spine - feign indignant treatment and ignorance. Those closer to the fence are more likely to turn around, change their tune, start back into the dance of the damned, as it were. The agencies are the abuser in their relationship with the public they supposedly serve.
The argument of ROI decrease is a sound one, eventually the promised throughput will vanish.
Having said that, I wonder if the TV ad argument could be taken to a study, where you're looking at age and income groups that still watch TV, and the targeting of ads played on TV. My money would be on the extremes: Young of lower to middle income (automatic babysitter), and approaching retirement and beyond of lower to middle income (low-energy past time reminiscent of their younger years).
There's a lot better targeting on the web via ads, but what the industry seems to be missing (either in rise of new companies or "revitilization" efforts of old ones) is the intrusiveness of ads compared to the target page is directly proportional to the malcontent of the receiver. In this way, the "new" "hip" way to play sounds and be the thing on the page that speaks to you, literally! is the ad that drives users to AdBlock Plus. Any of the other techniques mentioned here are also a problem. The trick is mental shock, and how to avoid it. but it seems that this factor is something ad producers are trying to increase, rather than decrease, and they're losing the battle of psychology.
Your presumption is that storage would be lead-acid. Graphene is on the rise, and while not industrialized yet, it will be, and it'll then overtake other storage methods for the improvements already seen in the labs.
There is a lot to be said for this train of thought. To someone who's knowledge is high enough, nearly anything in a given room can be used to advantage, be it exfiltration of data using a custom binary on a smart phone to read RFID cards, or psychological tricks and manipulation to get information that would normally be guarded (cousins of what evolved into phishing).
Using a popular example, admins like Edward Snowden are necessary to make the advanced systems run. With his knowledge, yes, he was always capable of doing what he eventually did, but he was essential, and was trusted. The breakdown occurred when the ethics of group didn't match the ethics of the one. He was highly skilled, and some would argue more ethical than the group he was serving, and this dichotomy drove him to use his skill and position against the group.
Corporations are similar, but lower stakes. A pivotal admin of security ops can easily wreck any organization who either handles finances or uses a distributed (work from home) workforce. They're not known for this potential because for the most part, it's a pay check and something fun in the career, but if one of these admins stumbled on message content that revealed top level institutionalized overt criminal activity? Now there may be an ethical dichotomy that they care about.
In the end, if the organization loses trust of people pivotal to their operations in such a way as to incur attempts at sabotage or espionage (regardless of success rate) as opposed to resignation? There is something deeply wrong in the human dimension of the structure, not the security dimension.
Agreed about the professionalism. Eventually your figures will speak for themselves and you'll lose the position to someone who can perform even one and a half times as well as the luke-warm corpse. Working from home does provide opportunities to flex hours, but those hours should still be made up, and the projects still completed.
Given the popularity of the propensity away from this standard, employers are generally not willing to give just anyone a chance. It's their numbers that you impact as well. Basically, if you treat working from home as a free ticket to shirk work, then you are the very reason why the option has a bad reputation. The rest of us start feeling pressure against the option that we've had experience setting up and working before because someone in their past had a shameful work ethic.
It's a valid option as far as I'm concerned for IT work, but it takes the right culture, people, and infrastructure.
Safe Zones are no more than explicit response of organized free speech and labor to protect those who would try to use the same to harm those they don't like. Trigger Warnings are no more than content warnings seen on movies and TV taken to lecture level where the audience can thereby exercise informed consent to attend. Shouting lecturers down is yet another form of the whole free speech paradigm you hold so highly. Pulling fire alarms to end speeches is no different than a democratized version of taking a speaker off-air when their opinion is unpopular with the executives of a new network, it's also a crime to falsely pull one, but it's one hell of an uphill fight to find that person.
Examining our own biases is a good exercise to ensure the principles we're trying to talk about aren't marred by our own dislikes of other people using their rights in different ways than we do ourselves.
Which is exactly why this thread has 400+ comments in an age of Slashdot where typical stories get less than 100. It's a debate of principles and biases. Ultimately whether one agrees or not, there are going to be future events like this.
If the brand itself didn't end up purchasing their name in.sucks first, and some upstart made a viral site that was protected enough legally to resist DMCA notices, how much would the market bear to purchase a domain from a viral nay-sayer? $2500 is cheap in that light.
With the funds used to acquire or build the weapons in use in any attack, an upgrade to sat phone service might not be out of the question. Or, VOIP involving localized WiFi (provided non-warzone conditions) There are many methods of communicating wirelessly, GSM and other cell technologies aren't the only one.
Agreed. While their thinking behind the cell service is likely the distance factor of offender from scene, there are a host of technologies involving radio frequencies that could be used. Hell, a home automation switch-flipper that you have within distance of WiFi coverage, and the offender could be in China before activating it in England or the USA. The other thing is, if the cell service towers go down, that doesn't prevent rogue transmitters, so a frequency jammer would be needed, of sufficient power to get past whatever transmitters are in use in the area they're interested in. Once the detonation happens, you think locking down cell service is going to prevent another one? Why would the offender ever need to space out the execution by more than 3 seconds? You're only harming potential emergency calls from people who need help.
Sorry DoSH, you missed too many details for this to be viable. Also, get off your police state rhetoric.
Based on the same lies regarding WMDs in Iraq by the previous administration. I'm not saying the Dems aren't at fault for not doing due diligence, but there was a lot of screaming from the previous administration's side that pushed a lot of unhealthy decisions for the country.
What is your analysis on the current state of graphene batteries as a possible next step in EV design, particularly in regards to the production methods you've studied versus their resistance to the shock of driving on the road?
Right, Project start date projected as H1B clearance time + justifiable search time for domestic workers, then pluck a close-enough candidate who can do the job, but also command a salary that is comparable for their region, but is 1/3 the cost for the domestic region, or less. Particularly for medium or large businesses.
I really can't believe what I'm seeing. There are literally 7 highlighted instances of the phrase "I run a recruiting company. And, I am genuinely sorry to hear such criticisms." (besides this one) on this page. The poster even went through the trouble of checking the post anonymously checkbox and then signed the above comment with -Cork, implying relation to the original briancork user. This is either a masterful troll, or one of the worst cases of canned responses I've ever seen.
Read the abstract of the actual study. The abstract results summarize that the telomere length issue was not correlated with non-carbonated sugar-sweetened beverages, or carbonated non-sugar-sweetened beverages. It's only when both traits are present that this happens.
Sadly there are no more detailed results to look at HFCS or Sucrose. My guess is the study used HFCS pops, but bear in mind that numerous juice brands use HFCS as a sweetening additive, which would count here as a non-carbonated sugar-sweetened beverage. The next question is what's the interaction that causes this from these two traits?
This is much more poignant than other arguments. I once had someone on the road intentionally try to force me to rear end his vehicle because he saw I was on my phone at the time. Not only did I avoid his shenanigans, I pulled some combat driving to get out ahead of his crazy ass and leave the safety problem behind me, and away from my insurance premium.
In a region where cartoonists and fornicators are stoned to death for two very different acts, holding a public viewing of a movie along the lines of what got the cartoonist killed is a sure recipe for lynch mob, except this mob has RPGs and anti-vehicular weaponry in their back yards.
Don't underestimate a religion's ability to mobilize killers. Christianity had its bout, and it would seem now it's time for Islam to try. Personally, I could live without all religions, but that's wishful thinking.
IANAL, but my reading of the quoted article 10.1, particularly the phrases "...that the form in which a program is, whether in source or object code, does not affect the protection..." and "...obligation to protect computer programs as literary works means e.g. that only those limitations that are applicable to literary works may be applied to computer programs..."
The first phrase appears to apply to efforts such as re-factoring in that the new form of the code does not spawn a new copyright, but instead the old copyright applies to the new form.
The second phrase appears to preclude other forms of protection by declaring that only limitations applied to literary works may be applied to computer programs.
Together with the 50-year term (precluding shorter terms for "applied art" in the last sentence), this article appears to extend the length of time a piece of code can be protected (from a renewed 20 year coverage of 40 years to 50 years without re-application), and also implicitly broadens what counts as a single work from one file of code to all forms that do the same thing. So in other words, any new invention in software that gets applied is not only protected for longer (and under copyright infringement), but also under a fuzzier definition to only include other "forms" of the same computation. I.E. any code that returned the Fibonacci number for any given number n, regardless of the implementation, could now be called the Fibonacci Code, and would be protected as a work by the first implementer (again, any language). This would appear to be in line with the idea that under traditional copyright, the work of the adaption of a creative work also belongs to the copyright holder. So, not only does this make the Fibonacci Code in Fortran owned by the same person as the Fibonacci Code in PHP (regardless if the author may only know Assembly), but also any other derivative work of the Fibonacci Code . Such as one that outputs the numbers as it runs, one that caches an array of values to save on processing time, one that calculates the number by looking up in a table or by recursive calculation, all of it is generally reserved for the copyright holder.
Fibonacci was used as a work old enough to be beyond even this treaty's coverage, but if this could apply to something more recent, say the code that enables spawning new threads of arbitrary code. This interpretation would mean 50 years of copyright claims to any implementation of thread-spawning code (machine up through scripting) by 1 individual (or, hey, the "other" kind of individual - the corporation), and damages/fees as high as the absurdity seen in recent RIAA cases on 1 song, let alone many code translations in use on an idea like thread spawning for arbitrary code.
But, again, we're looking at how far you sub-divide the subject matter in question. A copy of Apache? Definitely whole-sale copying. Using some of the same libraries as Apache in a manor that's similar to one of the functions at Apache's core? Not so much. If one divides "a computer program" to only mean anything one can order the operating system to run and it'll perform the stated task, then the broad definition doesn't affect languages that don't compile to Assembly such as Java. If one divides it too far to mean any function or subroutine which a computer can run, then you basically have software patents with broadened scope (across all languages, and right to create derivatives reserved) and lengthened protection.
This nightmare scenario is essentially over-extrapolation from the starting point above to the legally absurd extreme. I recognize it as such, but not every judge making calls on a related case will see this side when it's spun the right way by the prosecution attorney. The end of software patents may be desirable, but I see the sentence about the code's form not affecting the protection as a very slippery-slope in the wrong direction. Be careful what you wish for. The devil you know may actually be less tyrannical than the devil you don't.
Agreed. I've had exposure to many managers who's "good attitude for the company" involves looking at employees only as a set of ROI figures. I've also worked under the minority of managers who are interested in developing both the product and skill-set base of employees. The line about "bad attitude" is exactly the attitude that likely founded tech companies in the past - take a new product on the road. Calling this a bad attitude goes against the ideals of several states which have passed provisions protecting the little guys like the OP from being squashed or taken advantage of simply because the company they works for issues the salary checks they get.
Unless he lives in California, where such things are unenforceable, and prohibited from being used as a term of employment or continued employment. The down side to triggering these provisions is that you're responsible for showing that you didn't use the company's resources, including connections to their servers, I'd imagine.
I couldn't agree more. Perhaps this approach would bring about the next few waves of major advancements in other fields that have been stuck for decades.
Slashdot Mirror
Not free with the commercial prison industrial complex, they charge you, pile on interest during your sentence, and even sue states that aren't sending enough prisoners their way. Sound familiar? It better, because now they can argue that the prisons have precedent if this thing passes to sue the states over profit margins. Anyone not calling into their reps and demanding a fight over threat of voting the incumbent out should be shot.
... I was pretty unhappy with the surveillance society up to this point but it just got a great deal worse...
Yup, now we have a surveillance society WITH a crowd-sourced anonymous secret police. What could possibly go wrong?
Here's an unpopular opinion, but all those holes cut into the tax code that were supposed to "create jobs" are exactly what will bankrupt the USA because that's exactly what was happening - bank robbery. The treasury would easily be able to have upkept the infrastructure here if it weren't for the taxes and jobs vanishing to off shore locations. Global companies thought globally, which meant getting out of tax puzzle boxes, to keep their wealth away from the systems that enabled such wealth in the first place (unsustainable thought pattern), and now, the threat of not being able to meet obligations is looming while the politicians who pushed the ideology that enabled the tax holes are putting pressure on the last vestiges or modern public society the USA has left under the banner of "moochers taking what we can't afford to give".
All while conveniently sweeping under the rug the fact that all those "deferments" and "shelters" written into the code are now coming home to roost, picking the bones of the society that enabled them in the first place.
The rest of the world isn't laughing. It's looking on in horror at the train wreck in slow motion. Similar politics are trying to take hold in Canada, but I'm glad there are many who are fighting hard to reverse this trend.
Those cynical don't all have hard reasons like the /. crowd. This is not about naivete, this is likely a psy ops to soften the just-coalescing opinions of those who are still fence sitters.
My bet is this is going to shift some of the media coverage on the topic towards painting them in positive light, which will have a cascading effect on the ones a little further from the fence.
My distrust of this agency is absolute, manipulation of the people they're supposedly protecting is not beyond their agenda when it comes to preserving them or those they favor.
So they broadcast a common abusive partner's reaction to growing a spine - feign indignant treatment and ignorance. Those closer to the fence are more likely to turn around, change their tune, start back into the dance of the damned, as it were. The agencies are the abuser in their relationship with the public they supposedly serve.
The argument of ROI decrease is a sound one, eventually the promised throughput will vanish.
Having said that, I wonder if the TV ad argument could be taken to a study, where you're looking at age and income groups that still watch TV, and the targeting of ads played on TV. My money would be on the extremes: Young of lower to middle income (automatic babysitter), and approaching retirement and beyond of lower to middle income (low-energy past time reminiscent of their younger years).
There's a lot better targeting on the web via ads, but what the industry seems to be missing (either in rise of new companies or "revitilization" efforts of old ones) is the intrusiveness of ads compared to the target page is directly proportional to the malcontent of the receiver. In this way, the "new" "hip" way to play sounds and be the thing on the page that speaks to you, literally! is the ad that drives users to AdBlock Plus. Any of the other techniques mentioned here are also a problem. The trick is mental shock, and how to avoid it. but it seems that this factor is something ad producers are trying to increase, rather than decrease, and they're losing the battle of psychology.
Your presumption is that storage would be lead-acid. Graphene is on the rise, and while not industrialized yet, it will be, and it'll then overtake other storage methods for the improvements already seen in the labs.
There is a lot to be said for this train of thought. To someone who's knowledge is high enough, nearly anything in a given room can be used to advantage, be it exfiltration of data using a custom binary on a smart phone to read RFID cards, or psychological tricks and manipulation to get information that would normally be guarded (cousins of what evolved into phishing).
Using a popular example, admins like Edward Snowden are necessary to make the advanced systems run. With his knowledge, yes, he was always capable of doing what he eventually did, but he was essential, and was trusted. The breakdown occurred when the ethics of group didn't match the ethics of the one. He was highly skilled, and some would argue more ethical than the group he was serving, and this dichotomy drove him to use his skill and position against the group.
Corporations are similar, but lower stakes. A pivotal admin of security ops can easily wreck any organization who either handles finances or uses a distributed (work from home) workforce. They're not known for this potential because for the most part, it's a pay check and something fun in the career, but if one of these admins stumbled on message content that revealed top level institutionalized overt criminal activity? Now there may be an ethical dichotomy that they care about.
In the end, if the organization loses trust of people pivotal to their operations in such a way as to incur attempts at sabotage or espionage (regardless of success rate) as opposed to resignation? There is something deeply wrong in the human dimension of the structure, not the security dimension.
Agreed about the professionalism. Eventually your figures will speak for themselves and you'll lose the position to someone who can perform even one and a half times as well as the luke-warm corpse. Working from home does provide opportunities to flex hours, but those hours should still be made up, and the projects still completed.
Given the popularity of the propensity away from this standard, employers are generally not willing to give just anyone a chance. It's their numbers that you impact as well. Basically, if you treat working from home as a free ticket to shirk work, then you are the very reason why the option has a bad reputation. The rest of us start feeling pressure against the option that we've had experience setting up and working before because someone in their past had a shameful work ethic.
It's a valid option as far as I'm concerned for IT work, but it takes the right culture, people, and infrastructure.
Safe Zones are no more than explicit response of organized free speech and labor to protect those who would try to use the same to harm those they don't like. Trigger Warnings are no more than content warnings seen on movies and TV taken to lecture level where the audience can thereby exercise informed consent to attend. Shouting lecturers down is yet another form of the whole free speech paradigm you hold so highly. Pulling fire alarms to end speeches is no different than a democratized version of taking a speaker off-air when their opinion is unpopular with the executives of a new network, it's also a crime to falsely pull one, but it's one hell of an uphill fight to find that person.
Examining our own biases is a good exercise to ensure the principles we're trying to talk about aren't marred by our own dislikes of other people using their rights in different ways than we do ourselves.
Which is exactly why this thread has 400+ comments in an age of Slashdot where typical stories get less than 100. It's a debate of principles and biases. Ultimately whether one agrees or not, there are going to be future events like this.
If the brand itself didn't end up purchasing their name in .sucks first, and some upstart made a viral site that was protected enough legally to resist DMCA notices, how much would the market bear to purchase a domain from a viral nay-sayer? $2500 is cheap in that light.
With the funds used to acquire or build the weapons in use in any attack, an upgrade to sat phone service might not be out of the question. Or, VOIP involving localized WiFi (provided non-warzone conditions) There are many methods of communicating wirelessly, GSM and other cell technologies aren't the only one.
Agreed. While their thinking behind the cell service is likely the distance factor of offender from scene, there are a host of technologies involving radio frequencies that could be used. Hell, a home automation switch-flipper that you have within distance of WiFi coverage, and the offender could be in China before activating it in England or the USA. The other thing is, if the cell service towers go down, that doesn't prevent rogue transmitters, so a frequency jammer would be needed, of sufficient power to get past whatever transmitters are in use in the area they're interested in. Once the detonation happens, you think locking down cell service is going to prevent another one? Why would the offender ever need to space out the execution by more than 3 seconds? You're only harming potential emergency calls from people who need help.
Sorry DoSH, you missed too many details for this to be viable. Also, get off your police state rhetoric.
Based on the same lies regarding WMDs in Iraq by the previous administration. I'm not saying the Dems aren't at fault for not doing due diligence, but there was a lot of screaming from the previous administration's side that pushed a lot of unhealthy decisions for the country.
What is your analysis on the current state of graphene batteries as a possible next step in EV design, particularly in regards to the production methods you've studied versus their resistance to the shock of driving on the road?
Right, Project start date projected as H1B clearance time + justifiable search time for domestic workers, then pluck a close-enough candidate who can do the job, but also command a salary that is comparable for their region, but is 1/3 the cost for the domestic region, or less. Particularly for medium or large businesses.
I really can't believe what I'm seeing. There are literally 7 highlighted instances of the phrase "I run a recruiting company. And, I am genuinely sorry to hear such criticisms." (besides this one) on this page. The poster even went through the trouble of checking the post anonymously checkbox and then signed the above comment with -Cork, implying relation to the original briancork user. This is either a masterful troll, or one of the worst cases of canned responses I've ever seen.
Read the abstract of the actual study. The abstract results summarize that the telomere length issue was not correlated with non-carbonated sugar-sweetened beverages, or carbonated non-sugar-sweetened beverages. It's only when both traits are present that this happens.
Sadly there are no more detailed results to look at HFCS or Sucrose. My guess is the study used HFCS pops, but bear in mind that numerous juice brands use HFCS as a sweetening additive, which would count here as a non-carbonated sugar-sweetened beverage. The next question is what's the interaction that causes this from these two traits?
This is much more poignant than other arguments. I once had someone on the road intentionally try to force me to rear end his vehicle because he saw I was on my phone at the time. Not only did I avoid his shenanigans, I pulled some combat driving to get out ahead of his crazy ass and leave the safety problem behind me, and away from my insurance premium.
...and a way to catch it and throw it back out before it hits the ground.
Easier found through this link.
In a region where cartoonists and fornicators are stoned to death for two very different acts, holding a public viewing of a movie along the lines of what got the cartoonist killed is a sure recipe for lynch mob, except this mob has RPGs and anti-vehicular weaponry in their back yards.
Don't underestimate a religion's ability to mobilize killers. Christianity had its bout, and it would seem now it's time for Islam to try. Personally, I could live without all religions, but that's wishful thinking.
IANAL, but my reading of the quoted article 10.1, particularly the phrases "...that the form in which a program is, whether in source or object code, does not affect the protection..." and "...obligation to protect computer programs as literary works means e.g. that only those limitations that are applicable to literary works may be applied to computer programs..."
The first phrase appears to apply to efforts such as re-factoring in that the new form of the code does not spawn a new copyright, but instead the old copyright applies to the new form.
The second phrase appears to preclude other forms of protection by declaring that only limitations applied to literary works may be applied to computer programs.
Together with the 50-year term (precluding shorter terms for "applied art" in the last sentence), this article appears to extend the length of time a piece of code can be protected (from a renewed 20 year coverage of 40 years to 50 years without re-application), and also implicitly broadens what counts as a single work from one file of code to all forms that do the same thing. So in other words, any new invention in software that gets applied is not only protected for longer (and under copyright infringement), but also under a fuzzier definition to only include other "forms" of the same computation. I.E. any code that returned the Fibonacci number for any given number n, regardless of the implementation, could now be called the Fibonacci Code, and would be protected as a work by the first implementer (again, any language). This would appear to be in line with the idea that under traditional copyright, the work of the adaption of a creative work also belongs to the copyright holder. So, not only does this make the Fibonacci Code in Fortran owned by the same person as the Fibonacci Code in PHP (regardless if the author may only know Assembly), but also any other derivative work of the Fibonacci Code . Such as one that outputs the numbers as it runs, one that caches an array of values to save on processing time, one that calculates the number by looking up in a table or by recursive calculation, all of it is generally reserved for the copyright holder.
Fibonacci was used as a work old enough to be beyond even this treaty's coverage, but if this could apply to something more recent, say the code that enables spawning new threads of arbitrary code. This interpretation would mean 50 years of copyright claims to any implementation of thread-spawning code (machine up through scripting) by 1 individual (or, hey, the "other" kind of individual - the corporation), and damages/fees as high as the absurdity seen in recent RIAA cases on 1 song, let alone many code translations in use on an idea like thread spawning for arbitrary code.
But, again, we're looking at how far you sub-divide the subject matter in question. A copy of Apache? Definitely whole-sale copying. Using some of the same libraries as Apache in a manor that's similar to one of the functions at Apache's core? Not so much. If one divides "a computer program" to only mean anything one can order the operating system to run and it'll perform the stated task, then the broad definition doesn't affect languages that don't compile to Assembly such as Java. If one divides it too far to mean any function or subroutine which a computer can run, then you basically have software patents with broadened scope (across all languages, and right to create derivatives reserved) and lengthened protection.
This nightmare scenario is essentially over-extrapolation from the starting point above to the legally absurd extreme. I recognize it as such, but not every judge making calls on a related case will see this side when it's spun the right way by the prosecution attorney. The end of software patents may be desirable, but I see the sentence about the code's form not affecting the protection as a very slippery-slope in the wrong direction. Be careful what you wish for. The devil you know may actually be less tyrannical than the devil you don't.
Agreed. I've had exposure to many managers who's "good attitude for the company" involves looking at employees only as a set of ROI figures. I've also worked under the minority of managers who are interested in developing both the product and skill-set base of employees. The line about "bad attitude" is exactly the attitude that likely founded tech companies in the past - take a new product on the road. Calling this a bad attitude goes against the ideals of several states which have passed provisions protecting the little guys like the OP from being squashed or taken advantage of simply because the company they works for issues the salary checks they get.
Unless he lives in California, where such things are unenforceable, and prohibited from being used as a term of employment or continued employment. The down side to triggering these provisions is that you're responsible for showing that you didn't use the company's resources, including connections to their servers, I'd imagine.
I couldn't agree more. Perhaps this approach would bring about the next few waves of major advancements in other fields that have been stuck for decades.