And herein we run into a problem. When I read always-on, I read "is available 24/7, doesn't require explicit on-demand connection to instantiate", you read "can utilize line at 100% 24/7".
The two are not the same thing. The first is exactly what they are offering.
Ok, well what do you read when you read "unlimited", which you quoted from my original post (so you presumably saw it)?
"Reserve the right to terminate at any time..." For any reason...
That works for one user, but that doesn't work once a pattern is established.
The cable companies are using terms in their marketing materials like "Always On" and "Unlimited". If that is what they are advertising, but it is not what they are selling, then that is bait and switch (claimed "unlimited", but the contract says really it's limited). If that is what they are advertising and selling, but then the product doesn't live up to the claims (claimed unlimited, contract says it's unlimited, but really it is limited), then that is false advertising. Both are illegal, and anyone harmed by this can sue.
Of course, it's difficult to prove what they are doing by yourself, but if you can get a few hundred folks who were terminated for using unlimited service "excessively", which is impossible since it's unlimited, they can bring a class-action suit and all of a sudden the preponderance of the evidence starts looking very different.
You see something similar all the time in one of my businesses: Landlording. A question that comes up a lot is what to do about an applicant who "just doesn't sit right". The app looks good enough, but your gut just says "no". The common mantra is: "Find a legal reason to reject." This is fine, but only to a point.
A guy asked once what to do about a fair housing complaint he received. It turns out Hispanic people "just didn't sit right" with him, and he was finding "legal" reasons to reject them all. Well, that is blatantly illegal (see the federal fair housing act), and I don't know what ever happened to him, but my guess is his overt racism cost him an awful lot of money in fines, judgments, and legal fees, not to mention lost rent (he turned away paying customers!).
My point is, if you do it once, you'll get away with it. But if you do it as a matter of policy, you're in big trouble.
Oh, by the way, I *think* I'm one of the poisonous people they're referring to.
You're probably right about that.
Is it really necessary to troll such a helpful forum, though? Why not troll someplace where people just flame you for not RTFMing? Those response are usually more entertaining for you, and you don't waste the time of those who are genuinely trying to help people. A regular win-win.
Voluntary commission based sales people are at best one step above lawyers who are exactly the same except they also ruin other peoples lives at the same time..
Chances are you work at a company.
Chances are that company sells something.
Chances are you help build whatever your company sells.
Chances are if your company had no sales force, it would sell no products.
Chances are if your company sold no products, it would go out of business.
Chances are if your company went out of business, it would not be able to pay you.
Chances are if you were not being paid, you would not be able to pay your ISP to allow you to make ignorant comments in web forums.
So give those sales people some love. Your flamebating depends on it.
Your federal government buggers up the school system and universal education and you win by taking it away from them. Change you government to one that looks after your school system properly.
You don't know much about the US education system, so I don't fault you for saying this. But realize that the federal government never had control of schools. Local school boards have always had a huge amount of autonomy and that is the way we like it here. NCLB was a huge encroachment by the federal government into local business, and people are rightly indignant about it.
Seriously you want the education system in a country to be as uniform as possible
This is absolutely wrong. High quality, yes, but uniform, no. The US is a big, diverse country. The third most populous in the world. To say that Alaska's schools should teach the exact same as New York's is ludicrous. It's like saying Hungary and France should be teaching the exact same. Education is an extremely personal thing and individual communities should be deciding how their schools should be run.
It is far from appropriate that all the poorer children in one particular state get a substandard third world education while wealthier children from another state manage to get a first world education.
This is just silly. Kentucky, one of the poorest states, has one of the best school systems. This just makes no sense.
Also, there is not a strong correlation between money spent on schools and quality of education. Anyone doubting this should look directly at our nation's capital. Washington DC spends more per student than any other state, yet has the worst schools in the nation. Yay DC.
All privatisation does is strip profits out of the system and adds a layer of B$ marketing which you have to pay for... The administration destroys the functionality of one government department after another, on purpose, gets kickbacks from privatising those functions, where corporations manage...
A decent rant, but save it for another discussion where it's more relevant. No one is talking about privatizing schools. Sure, there are private schools, but this whole discussion is about public schools.
but of course teachers in Australia are paid far more than the US minimum wage by almost a factor of 5. I am frankly, really surprised that huge numbers of suitably qualified US teachers don't just give up and emigrate.
The US Minimum wage is $5.15/hr and teachers work roughly 3/4 of the year which works out to roughly 1500 hours. Multiply that by 5.15 and you get a little less than $8,000. So if US teachers were paid minimum wage, they would earn roughly $8,000.00 per year. The median salary for a US middle school or high school teacher is $40,000.00 per year, or roughly 5x the US minimum wage.
So what was your point, again? It sounds like teachers in the US and Australia are similarly compensated. Why should competent US teachers get up and emigrate to Australia where everyone has a supersize chip on their shoulder?
For instance, no matter how good of a programmer you are, it is difficult to get a job without a certification.
This is false. For programming, experience trumps everything. If you've got strong experience, no one cares if you are certified.
The certifications are put up merely as a barrier to maximize the already excessive pay of coders and serve no real purpose to one that really knows the trade of computer work. If it weren't for certification course in computers, we would have real people coding, and not just those that want the money so bad that they take the exam.
This is just silly and betrays a lack of understand of economics.
Certification and Licensure as barriers to entry get lobbied for and enacted by trade groups themselves, not employers. Want to sell Real Estate? Gotta have a license, thanks to the National Association of Realtors. Want to practice law? Gotta have a license thanks to the American Bar Association. Want to be a plumber? An electrician? Or some other tradesman? Gotta have a license. And indeed, want to be a teacher? Gotta have a teaching certificate, thanks to the NEA and AFT.
Contrast that with programmers. There is no law that says you have to be a certified programmer in order to program like there is with these other professions. Any certificate requirements are up to the individual employer. Employers, like you, know that these certificates are largely worthless and don't put a lot of stock in them. I don't, that's for sure.
Do you really think a PhD mathematician has the skill to teach a middle school math course?
After all those college math courses I took, I can say I agree with you 100% here. No way a PhD mathematician could teach Jr. High.
It kind of reminds me of a person I once knew that hated to pay the plumber, but had no idea of take apart pipe. It is easy to think that things one are completely ignorant of are simple. After all, how hard could it be to cut silicon.
I always laugh at people who hate to pay the plumber. I am a landlord, so I know my way around home depot pretty well, but the only plumbing tool I use anymore is my cell phone. Whatever my plumbers charge, it is not possibly enough to cover the cost of digging around in my tenants' fecal matter. Plumbers earn every cent they charge and then some.
I think what you're trying to say is that people should be rewarded according to the market value of their work. That makes sense, but the guy who read all those novels can still turn around and write one himself. If it's a best-seller, he'll do better than the guy who hasn't solved a differential equation in 10 years.
I don't like the odds on the novelist, though.
Rather than dream about best-sellers, I'd frame the question a different way: "Take one guy who read a lot of novels and one guy who solved a lot of differential equations. Which one is more likely to be able to feed his family?"
I, for one, would definitely like to keep control of the schools away from the federal government.
Look at the No Child Left Behind debacle? Slowly, county by county, districts are telling the Department of Education to "shove it". My county is among those who have done so, and I'm proud of that.
For now, the federal government only funds like 2% of school budgets, so schools can defy the feds relatively painlessly. But what if the federal government provided 20% of the funding? 80%? You'd get the same mess we are in with the highway funds. As it stands right now, all congress has to do is tell a state, "Change XYZ state law for us, or you can build your own damn roads." I don't want to see that happen with education.
Man, Ab Initio must spend a boatload on their lawyers. You can't even get end user documentation on their product without pledging up your first born son and his first born son. What a crazy company.
Never worked with their product directly, but I have tangentially.
Fortunately, non-competes are generally unenforceable in California, and after I was later laid off, I went to work at a direct competitor.
Who had me sign that draconian non-compete? A big software company that is not terribly popular on Slashdot.
The non-compete could have been enforceable.
If you live in California and you work for a company headquartered in another state like, say, WA, your case could be removed from CA state court into federal court. Once in federal court, for whatever reason, the 9th circuit don't really give a shirt about CA's anti-anti-compete law. The 9th will generally uphold any reasonable non-compete, whereas a CA state court will kill it.
In fact I can't understand how can US workers comply and go away with such a draconian practice like a "non compete" clause. What do they think you are supposed to do for a year? Washing cars?
Nobody's forcing you to sign. If it's unreasonable, it's time to negotiate.
You got lucky. In another courtroom on another day, the judge could have just as easily said, "You're a sysadmin, go work for a company that is not an ISP, as you agreed to do. This is not unreasonable. Plenty of such companies exist."
This is because Right to work means just that, the State recognizes that you have the right to earn a living by your trade and that no entity save the State itself may revoke that right nor confine or restrict that right in anyway.
This is patently and blatantly false.
Right to Work means that you can't be forced to join a union as a condition of employment. It has nothing to do with non-compete agreements.
This is a royally bad idea. Of course, later on you say that you generally try to abide by them, so it's not really fair to say you just "forget about them".
Generally it is a really bad idea to sign something you don't agree to. Judges hate it, and will screw you if they feel you were acting in bad faith. Signing something with your fingers crossed (oh, sure, I'll sign... and just get it invalidated if you try to hold me to what I just told you I agreed to) would be an example of bad faith, since your employer is then acting on the assumption that you agreed not to work for a competitor.
A judge's job when enforcing a contract, is to try to be as fair to the agreement as possible, within the confines of the law. So if the law says a noncompete can only be for 6 months, but the noncompete is for two years, the judge might just change the duration from 24 months to 6 and call it a day. After all, it was the intent of both parties to enter into a non-compete agreement, no? They must just not have known that 24 months was too long, so let's have it be the maximum allowable of 6 months.
All I'm saying is that on any given day in court, you do not know what a judge is going to do. Do you want to pay an attorney $300/hr for the privilege of finding out? Or would you rather just not sign something that you feel is unfair?
In your case, your employee was protected by the reality of your company's business situation, but you can't depend on this. What if that client became a former client? What if having that employee go work for the client caused the severance of the business relationship? Your company would have suffered a (possibly) huge, quantifiable loss and it might then be worth the legal fees and burnt bridges to enforce the non-compete.
Another form of noncompete simply states that the employee must buy out the contract. Those tend to be viewed as much more reasonable and enforceable by judges. Say, "If employee wants to go work for a client, employee must pay employer $50,000." That way, you're not preventing her from working, you're just making her pay for your loss. If she, and your client, want her to go work for them that badly, they can pay the fee and be done with it. Client is happy, employee is happy, company is happy, and judge is happy.
Ultimately, after asking a couple of HR people I know, I found out that these things are pretty much only valid if you're getting something in return.
This varies widely by jurisdiction. Also, HR people tend to be conservative by nature. It's part of their job not to get the company in legal hot water, after all. Your HR contact is right in a way, of course. Because they are rarely enforced, he sees them as worthless as a practical matter. This is a perfectly reasonable outlook for an HR person.
On the other hand, my father in law is an attorney and he has litigated these before (although this is no longer the area of his practice). His take is that most people believe noncompetes are unenforceable since they are rarely enforced. But the fact of the matter is they are enforceable, and he has seen them be enforced, so don't sign anything you're not comfortable with. You don't know what the situation will be when you part ways with your employer. If the business situation warrants, or if you step on the wrong set of toes, you are going to find yourself in a courtroom paying $300/hr to your lawyer to try to explain why you signed something with your fingers crossed. Do this at your own peril.
You have the freedom to be screwed over by companies. You have the freedom to sign away your liberties to everybody but the government. Now, is that really freedom, or just really advanced serfdom?
This is very much not the case.
In the US, if I sign a document that says I give up something to which I am entitled by law, it can invalidate that part of the contract. It can even invalidate the entire contract. It's very much up to the judge.
For instance, I am a landlord, and tenants have certain entitlements granted to them by law. They vary from state to state, county to county, city to city, but they are there. Take, for example, my responsibility to provide heat in the winter. Between certain months (they vary), I have to make sure there is heating in my buildings above a certain temperature (it varies). Let's say I wrote in my lease agreement that the landlord is not required to heat the building at all, ever. Well, a tenant could take me to court, and the judge would look at me like I was from another planet before invalidating that clause.
Regarding non-competes in the US, the enforceability varies widely from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, industry to industry, etc. The bottom line: typically a judge will not deny a person a means for survival. If you have a non-compete that says you can't work for 12 months and the employer is paying your salary for those 12 months, that will normally be enforceable. Agreements that you can't work for a direct competitor due to your access to trade secrets can also be enforced.
This is a good thing. It allows for more flexibility in employment. Remember, you don't have the just sign the dotted line. You can, and should, negotiate. This is basically what other commenters are telling the OP: the employer has made their offer, now it's time for you to counter. Counter with striking the clause or with adding a clause that states that employer will pay the employee's full salary for the period of the noncompete. This is standard for nocompetes.
Biggest problem is Java. For whatever reason, Sun decided to code its own DST routines instead of relying on the native OS routines. Stupid stupid stupid stupid Java.
Upgrading the JVM for production apps means full regression retesting. Sometimes upgrading appservers because they are incompatible with certain JVMs (stupid stupid stupid BEA).
No car explosions, please - found at LookyLuc [Flickr]
When you're watching an action flick, all it takes is a crash, or maybe a stream of leaky gasoline that acts like a fuse, and suddenly, bang! You see a terrific explosion that's complete and violent. But gasoline doesn't explode unless mixed with about 93% air. Gas-induced car explosions were discovered on film relatively recently (you don't see them in the old black-and-white movies), and now audiences just take them for granted. In general, there's no need to rush out of a crashed car, risking injury, because you fear an imminent explosion - it's probably not gonna happen.
Try telling that to owners of the Ford Pinto.
For those who remember, the Pinto tended to explode during rear-end collisions due to a rupture in the fuel system. Ford discovered this flaw during early crash tests, but decided not to fix the design flaw.
As Lee Iacocca was fond of saying, "Safety doesn't sell."
Anyhow, great example of how cars can explode during accidents.
Both will graduate High School with upto two years of college credits, something not even offered in public schools.
False.
I graduated public high school with 39 college credits and I wasn't doing anything fancy-pants. Just regular AP classes that were taught in public high school. Furthermore, check out the dual-enrollment post-secondary programs where students may take courses at a local college or university for both college and high school credit. But your kids, of course, are unique. Just like everybody else's kids.
Hope the rest of your post was good. I generally stop reading when a comment presents as fact something that is blatantly false. If you don't know, say you don't know.
Slashdot Mirror
The cable companies are using terms in their marketing materials like "Always On" and "Unlimited". If that is what they are advertising, but it is not what they are selling, then that is bait and switch (claimed "unlimited", but the contract says really it's limited). If that is what they are advertising and selling, but then the product doesn't live up to the claims (claimed unlimited, contract says it's unlimited, but really it is limited), then that is false advertising. Both are illegal, and anyone harmed by this can sue.
Of course, it's difficult to prove what they are doing by yourself, but if you can get a few hundred folks who were terminated for using unlimited service "excessively", which is impossible since it's unlimited, they can bring a class-action suit and all of a sudden the preponderance of the evidence starts looking very different.
You see something similar all the time in one of my businesses: Landlording. A question that comes up a lot is what to do about an applicant who "just doesn't sit right". The app looks good enough, but your gut just says "no". The common mantra is: "Find a legal reason to reject." This is fine, but only to a point.
A guy asked once what to do about a fair housing complaint he received. It turns out Hispanic people "just didn't sit right" with him, and he was finding "legal" reasons to reject them all. Well, that is blatantly illegal (see the federal fair housing act), and I don't know what ever happened to him, but my guess is his overt racism cost him an awful lot of money in fines, judgments, and legal fees, not to mention lost rent (he turned away paying customers!).
My point is, if you do it once, you'll get away with it. But if you do it as a matter of policy, you're in big trouble.
Is it really necessary to troll such a helpful forum, though? Why not troll someplace where people just flame you for not RTFMing? Those response are usually more entertaining for you, and you don't waste the time of those who are genuinely trying to help people. A regular win-win.
I'm just sayin'.
Maybe if you would just implement SVN Obliterate, you'd be pestered less. ;)
If you're using adblock plus, you can use both filtersets. You just have to update filterset.g manually from time to time.
Good thing the judge wasn't fooled like you were.
Chances are that company sells something.
Chances are you help build whatever your company sells.
Chances are if your company had no sales force, it would sell no products.
Chances are if your company sold no products, it would go out of business.
Chances are if your company went out of business, it would not be able to pay you.
Chances are if you were not being paid, you would not be able to pay your ISP to allow you to make ignorant comments in web forums.
So give those sales people some love. Your flamebating depends on it.
Also, there is not a strong correlation between money spent on schools and quality of education. Anyone doubting this should look directly at our nation's capital. Washington DC spends more per student than any other state, yet has the worst schools in the nation. Yay DC.A decent rant, but save it for another discussion where it's more relevant. No one is talking about privatizing schools. Sure, there are private schools, but this whole discussion is about public schools.The US Minimum wage is $5.15/hr and teachers work roughly 3/4 of the year which works out to roughly 1500 hours. Multiply that by 5.15 and you get a little less than $8,000. So if US teachers were paid minimum wage, they would earn roughly $8,000.00 per year. The median salary for a US middle school or high school teacher is $40,000.00 per year, or roughly 5x the US minimum wage.
So what was your point, again? It sounds like teachers in the US and Australia are similarly compensated. Why should competent US teachers get up and emigrate to Australia where everyone has a supersize chip on their shoulder?
Certification and Licensure as barriers to entry get lobbied for and enacted by trade groups themselves, not employers. Want to sell Real Estate? Gotta have a license, thanks to the National Association of Realtors. Want to practice law? Gotta have a license thanks to the American Bar Association. Want to be a plumber? An electrician? Or some other tradesman? Gotta have a license. And indeed, want to be a teacher? Gotta have a teaching certificate, thanks to the NEA and AFT.
Contrast that with programmers. There is no law that says you have to be a certified programmer in order to program like there is with these other professions. Any certificate requirements are up to the individual employer. Employers, like you, know that these certificates are largely worthless and don't put a lot of stock in them. I don't, that's for sure.After all those college math courses I took, I can say I agree with you 100% here. No way a PhD mathematician could teach Jr. High.I always laugh at people who hate to pay the plumber. I am a landlord, so I know my way around home depot pretty well, but the only plumbing tool I use anymore is my cell phone. Whatever my plumbers charge, it is not possibly enough to cover the cost of digging around in my tenants' fecal matter. Plumbers earn every cent they charge and then some.
Rather than dream about best-sellers, I'd frame the question a different way: "Take one guy who read a lot of novels and one guy who solved a lot of differential equations. Which one is more likely to be able to feed his family?"
I, for one, would definitely like to keep control of the schools away from the federal government.
Look at the No Child Left Behind debacle? Slowly, county by county, districts are telling the Department of Education to "shove it". My county is among those who have done so, and I'm proud of that.
For now, the federal government only funds like 2% of school budgets, so schools can defy the feds relatively painlessly. But what if the federal government provided 20% of the funding? 80%? You'd get the same mess we are in with the highway funds. As it stands right now, all congress has to do is tell a state, "Change XYZ state law for us, or you can build your own damn roads." I don't want to see that happen with education.
Man, Ab Initio must spend a boatload on their lawyers. You can't even get end user documentation on their product without pledging up your first born son and his first born son. What a crazy company.
Never worked with their product directly, but I have tangentially.
If you live in California and you work for a company headquartered in another state like, say, WA, your case could be removed from CA state court into federal court. Once in federal court, for whatever reason, the 9th circuit don't really give a shirt about CA's anti-anti-compete law. The 9th will generally uphold any reasonable non-compete, whereas a CA state court will kill it.
Sounds like water under the bridge now, though.
You got lucky. In another courtroom on another day, the judge could have just as easily said, "You're a sysadmin, go work for a company that is not an ISP, as you agreed to do. This is not unreasonable. Plenty of such companies exist."
I'm just sayin'.
Right to Work means that you can't be forced to join a union as a condition of employment. It has nothing to do with non-compete agreements.
If you'd like to read more about Right to Work, I found 813 million articles here.
Generally it is a really bad idea to sign something you don't agree to. Judges hate it, and will screw you if they feel you were acting in bad faith. Signing something with your fingers crossed (oh, sure, I'll sign... and just get it invalidated if you try to hold me to what I just told you I agreed to) would be an example of bad faith, since your employer is then acting on the assumption that you agreed not to work for a competitor.
A judge's job when enforcing a contract, is to try to be as fair to the agreement as possible, within the confines of the law. So if the law says a noncompete can only be for 6 months, but the noncompete is for two years, the judge might just change the duration from 24 months to 6 and call it a day. After all, it was the intent of both parties to enter into a non-compete agreement, no? They must just not have known that 24 months was too long, so let's have it be the maximum allowable of 6 months.
All I'm saying is that on any given day in court, you do not know what a judge is going to do. Do you want to pay an attorney $300/hr for the privilege of finding out? Or would you rather just not sign something that you feel is unfair?
In your case, your employee was protected by the reality of your company's business situation, but you can't depend on this. What if that client became a former client? What if having that employee go work for the client caused the severance of the business relationship? Your company would have suffered a (possibly) huge, quantifiable loss and it might then be worth the legal fees and burnt bridges to enforce the non-compete.
Another form of noncompete simply states that the employee must buy out the contract. Those tend to be viewed as much more reasonable and enforceable by judges. Say, "If employee wants to go work for a client, employee must pay employer $50,000." That way, you're not preventing her from working, you're just making her pay for your loss. If she, and your client, want her to go work for them that badly, they can pay the fee and be done with it. Client is happy, employee is happy, company is happy, and judge is happy.This varies widely by jurisdiction. Also, HR people tend to be conservative by nature. It's part of their job not to get the company in legal hot water, after all. Your HR contact is right in a way, of course. Because they are rarely enforced, he sees them as worthless as a practical matter. This is a perfectly reasonable outlook for an HR person.
On the other hand, my father in law is an attorney and he has litigated these before (although this is no longer the area of his practice). His take is that most people believe noncompetes are unenforceable since they are rarely enforced. But the fact of the matter is they are enforceable, and he has seen them be enforced, so don't sign anything you're not comfortable with. You don't know what the situation will be when you part ways with your employer. If the business situation warrants, or if you step on the wrong set of toes, you are going to find yourself in a courtroom paying $300/hr to your lawyer to try to explain why you signed something with your fingers crossed. Do this at your own peril.
In the US, if I sign a document that says I give up something to which I am entitled by law, it can invalidate that part of the contract. It can even invalidate the entire contract. It's very much up to the judge.
For instance, I am a landlord, and tenants have certain entitlements granted to them by law. They vary from state to state, county to county, city to city, but they are there. Take, for example, my responsibility to provide heat in the winter. Between certain months (they vary), I have to make sure there is heating in my buildings above a certain temperature (it varies). Let's say I wrote in my lease agreement that the landlord is not required to heat the building at all, ever. Well, a tenant could take me to court, and the judge would look at me like I was from another planet before invalidating that clause.
Regarding non-competes in the US, the enforceability varies widely from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, industry to industry, etc. The bottom line: typically a judge will not deny a person a means for survival. If you have a non-compete that says you can't work for 12 months and the employer is paying your salary for those 12 months, that will normally be enforceable. Agreements that you can't work for a direct competitor due to your access to trade secrets can also be enforced.
This is a good thing. It allows for more flexibility in employment. Remember, you don't have the just sign the dotted line. You can, and should, negotiate. This is basically what other commenters are telling the OP: the employer has made their offer, now it's time for you to counter. Counter with striking the clause or with adding a clause that states that employer will pay the employee's full salary for the period of the noncompete. This is standard for nocompetes.
- All of the slaves would find it more fair to be freed, irrespective of duration of servitude
- Baby boomers won't think it's fair to pay a 30% sales tax
- Both groups will tell you your analogy was lousy, irrelevant, and made no sense
I agree with both groups.Biggest problem is Java. For whatever reason, Sun decided to code its own DST routines instead of relying on the native OS routines. Stupid stupid stupid stupid Java.
Upgrading the JVM for production apps means full regression retesting. Sometimes upgrading appservers because they are incompatible with certain JVMs (stupid stupid stupid BEA).
Stupid stupid stupid stupid Java.
For those who remember, the Pinto tended to explode during rear-end collisions due to a rupture in the fuel system. Ford discovered this flaw during early crash tests, but decided not to fix the design flaw.
As Lee Iacocca was fond of saying, "Safety doesn't sell."
Anyhow, great example of how cars can explode during accidents.
I graduated public high school with 39 college credits and I wasn't doing anything fancy-pants. Just regular AP classes that were taught in public high school. Furthermore, check out the dual-enrollment post-secondary programs where students may take courses at a local college or university for both college and high school credit. But your kids, of course, are unique. Just like everybody else's kids.
Hope the rest of your post was good. I generally stop reading when a comment presents as fact something that is blatantly false. If you don't know, say you don't know.