Ann Lai, a former employee, said in her lawsuit filed in San Mateo Superior Court in California that she had complained to her bosses about sexism, discrimination and inappropriate behavior in the workplace, and that Binary used the nondisparagement provision in her employment contract to threaten her and prevent her from talking about why she had quit her job.
If these threats come in, it is time to double down.
Call the police to report the sexual harassment AND file a lawsuit.
Both of these (reporting a crime to the police and filing a lawsuit) are immune to any silly non-disparagement clause.
An anonymous tip to local and national media reporters about the court docket where the case was filed?
That's just the icing on the cake.
These types of agreements are always about the threat rather than the act.
That is, they exist not to actually stop people from reporting, but instead to discourage them. No reasonable judge would let you sue someone for reporting a crime.
But most of the time it is not entirely clear their is enough evidence of a crime going on, not until after the trial has begun.
So when your boss fires you after verbally demanding sex, you will think twice about suing, because you know that if you can't prove it, they might go after you. Honestly, chances are very low they would sue you for speaking out and even less that they would succeed.
But the threat of the law suit is enough to stop you from trying, at least unless you have a smoking gun email. (and now adays it is almost always an email.).
No reasonable judge would let you sue someone for reporting a crime.
What guarantee do you have that you'll get a reasonable judge? Besides, who said anything about a crime? It is entirely possible for companies to engage in highly unethical, but completely legal, activity e.g. hiring child labourers in third world sweat shops to make their products which now does not happen because it was brought to the publics attention. Zero hour contracts are another example.
Large companies are beginning to have as much power over our lives as governments and this means that they need to start having the same limits on that power as a government.
Employees increasingly "have to give up their constitutional right to speak freely about their experiences if they want to be part of the work force,"
It would seem that the U.S. has a pretty poor constitution if it can be superceded by contract law.
Isn't the whole point of a country's constitution that it stands above all "lesser" principles and laws.
...except it was a severance agreement. I'd been fired, and there was a reasonably decent (6 weeks of pay) severance agreement. However, it included both the clause that I would never ever make an disparaging statement about the company, nor that I would admit the existence of this severance agreement or disclose any terms in it. This was for a small (few hundred employee) tech company in San Francisco.
I pushed back. I thought it was completely unreasonable to give up a part of my freedom of speech for this. At the time, I thought I might stay in the same general field (I haven't), and it would have been very constraining to never be able to criticize this company again. But, also, on principle, I did not like signing away my freedom of speech like that. What makes me sad is that almost everybody I talked to told me not to be ridiculous, to sign it. I was potentially giving up four weeks of severance pay (beyond the "two week notice" requiredby law), at a time when I'd just been fired and had no other job lined up. I was told by friends that it was irresponsible not to think about my wife and my own economic need for a stupid stand on principle. This makes me so sad, because at least nominally it was exactly these kinds of principles -- freedom of expression -- on which this country was supposedly founded. But, now, people find it childish and unrealistic to stand on principle.
I didn't have any serious complaints about the company at the time. Over the previous ~year it had undergone some reorganization that I thought was destructive, and I thought the circumstances leading up to my firing were particularly stupid, but I didn't have any sexual harassment complaints or anything like that. But, still, just because you don't have a big issue right now does not mean you should sign away a fraction of your freedom of speech for all time.
The other sad thing was that at one point, somebody from HR told me on the phone, "we're not trying to limit your freedom of expression, we just want you to manage your communication". People in the corporate world really believe things like this, which is rather alarming.
In the end, I managed to convince them to change it to "no disparaging statements for a year, no untrue disparaging statements ever". I decided I could live with that. Technically, I'm breaking the agreement right now by talking about it, which is why I post anonymously and don't name the company. I think that's stupid too, but I also know more than to risk putting myself up against the lawyers of even a small company.
I know a few EE faculty who have moved from using Matlab to using Python. Some of the grad students think the department should take a more active role in encouraging students to do the same - or to eliminate Matlab from courses entirely.
GIGO still applies.
Not be owned by Oracle.
The number of spaces preceding a statement determines the scope of that statement? Wow. That seems totally nonsensical to me.
Any more than the presence of a curly bracket 42 lines earlier determines the scope of a statement in C++? I agree it seems strange at first but it is actually really easy to adapt to and by forcing correct indentation it actually makes code easier to read.
These surveys are strictly for idiots. For example (to use one of the data sources in the article), information drawn from what recruiting companies say they are looking for are complete garbage, as anyone who has spent much time here knows. Some recruiters are just trolling for new applicants to add to their slushpile, some are adding stuff that's totally irrelevant to the underlying job so that their candidate will look more well-rounded, some are bogus posts to supply HR with practice interviews, some are just posted as a way to be able to say "we looked for expertise in x and y before we hired an H1B (who doesn't know x or y, but it's rarely investigated) ".10 years experience in Java 9 or Windows 10? 5 years experience with Red Hat linux 7.3? We've all seen these shit listings, the same as we've seen the same job suddenly pop up from a dozen different recruiters. It doesn't mean they're looking for 12 people with that experience.
GIGO still applies.
It still is relevant. As much as WE HATE HR they are the gatekeepers. Actually they are nto the gatekeepers. Taleo is the gatekeeper and SEO in LinkedIn and abunch of software programs are. They do the work so companies can be lazy and not have to do their job.
If you do not have that experience you will not be interviewed. That is a fact as your score will be below X and the application will be rejected and HR won't even know you applied.
Part of the problem isn't that they are bogus. It just that HR is incompetent and fall for the salespeople in Taleo who tell them software picks candidates for YOU, not it is there to assist you. Scenario one you need a SAP jr financial analyst assistant who can run reports?
They ask the IT manager and finance manager. IT manager says yeah it uses SQL Server on the backend etc ... BOOM 5 years of SQL Server administration is now required. HR wants to make sure you know office ... BOOM 5 years Excel macro programming experience required. Now add a shitty HR filter app like Taleo and it generates a job description:
-5 years SQL Server administration experience
-3 to 5 years of Excel financial analysis programming in VBA
- 3 to 5 years of actually doing SAP reports (part of the job that is important)
- Mentions $15/hr because that is net worth of a college kid in accounting as it is a JR. level assistant.
Taleo reports none are q ualified. CEO lobbies senator. They important an Indian H1B1 visa who meets these requirements as no American can do the job and whines how could this happen? etc.
So my guess is some positions do prototyping in python. The HR software now requires 5 years of python coding and you get filtered out if you do not have it even if the position is really a java developer etc.
Anyway done with rant :-)
Yes, exactly. I have the same problem with my Gmail account. Over the years many hundreds of people have mistaken it for their email address, distributed it far and wide, and entered it into all sorts of things. Sometimes I just let it go, especially if a site only sends one "thanks for registering" email. I hit delete and move on. But if the service is a particularly spammy one, I'll use the "forgot password" link, login, change the password, turn off all email-related options, etc.
I used to look for an option to delete the account entirely, but that invariably led to the same people signing back up for the same services again. Occasionally I'll try to do the other guy a favor and tell the sender that they have the wrong address. It usually isn't worth the effort. Someone has a Royal Bank of Scotland account registered to my email and no amount of emailing, filling out their contact form, or tweeting at them ever did any good so I just filtered that domain out.
Not much you can do about people sending random unsolicited communications, though. I've received some really interesting misdirected mail over the years, including some stuff from the European Space Agency, and being cc'd on an NFL player's contract negotiations with a new team.
This happened to me. Some lady signed up as first-initial.middle-initial.lastname@gmail.com when in fact mine is the exact same but with no periods. To this day I get random order confirmations from Sears and medical info. I even know her name and address from the registration to the sites. No, I'm not going to pay her a visit or anything. It only happens a few times a year. But people really need to be clued in on this behavior of GMail. And I agree, it needs to be put to an end from Google.
I think you'll find this turns out *not* to be true. What is significant in the "local part" of the email address is *up to the local system* as long as it is in the set of characters that are permitted. Of course, Google (and anyone else for that matter) is perfectly allowed to ignore dots in the local part. But everyone is also perfectly allowed to treat them as significant.
Also, your wiki link does not back up your assertion that "A.BC" and "ABC" must be the same mailbox. It only gives rules on where a dot can appear unquoted in the local part. It does not say that it is to be ignored when routing.
Additionally, decades of operational practice on the Internet also directly violates your assertion. Dots have *always* been potentially significant for a local part. They were required for compuserve addresses back in the beginning, for instance.
NOTE: I am NOT saying that Google is doing things wrong. What they are doing is allowed. They are free to interpret the local part however they want. However, they are NOT required to ignore dots.
This does not go to court. It goes to ICANN arbitration. And unless it is a valid complaint, it will just get rejected directly.
Thanks to Nuance voice recognition industry is effectively dead. If Mozilla can make this work in offline mode it would be awesome. Not requiring your every word to be recorded shipped off to third parties would be very useful.
Nope, Wine itself is enough, at least on installations which I looked at.
In the other hand, the exe thumbnailer is not an official Gnome project but comes from Ubuntu -- so with all of Gnome's insanities, this one is not their fault.
Linux of that era was robust and trustworthy.
It wasn't, you just believed that it was.
Grab a fresh install of that vintage, and the NSA and every script kiddie from here to eastern Europe will have three dozen working exploits for it.
Linux at the time was a VERY unimportant target. It wasn't established in the server space yet, and it was all but zero percent of the desktop. It wasn't worth bothering with.
Now that it is, if you use a Linux of that vintage it can be pwned with little more difficulty than Windows 95.
Any OS requires constant security updates to stay in the game.
"Mission Control at Johnson Space Center is a wreck " is highly misleading. I don't think there has been unlimited access to the area since I was a kid. Last time I went there you had to pay Space Center Houston a fee and take a lame tour. The kickstarter money, according to the linked article, will be spent acquiring equipment and furniture so they can"accurately portraying how the area looked the moment the moon landing took place on July 20, 1969." While this is a fine goal, I really doubt that they are going to do any net good. Tearing out fragile equipment that no one understand anymore and replacing it with even more fragile equipment that someone got off eBay, claiming that it is original. Seems like someone is obsessed with period instruments.
I am really concerned with a bunch of unskilled amateurs tearing apart mission control. It is part of my life and part of the gulf coast legacy. Sure, if there is damage and existing items need to stabilized or restored go for it. But if we are going to recreate something to make it better tourist trap, that it a problem.
I think that the priority will be tourist over historical integrity. The area has been really pushing for tourist dollars, heavily advertising i the boardwalk and expanding amenities. It is embarrassing to admit, but Space Center Houston is crap, and one reason is that it does prioritize aesthetics over the science. This is fine for the audience, little kids, but now they want to destroy mission control. Restore, yes. Try to return it to a the way it looked on a certain day? Madness. Like all engineering pursuit, Mission Control was always a work in progress, and pretending you can retcon it for tourist dollars is delusional.
I've been to the Santa Fe Opera many times. They put on great productions in an awesome setting. It might be the greatest summer opera company anywhere. Each summer they do four operas from the (more or less) usual repertoire and one new or innovative production. One great example maybe 15 years back was "L'amour de loin" with Dawn Upshaw singing the principal role.
But an opera about Steve Jobs? Have the hipsters taken over even the southwest?
Granted, there was once an opera about Richard Nixon ("Nixon in China"). Maybe some day there will be an opera about Donald Trump; who knows?
But I think I'd skip the Steve Jobs opera.
Floating, falling
Sweet intoxication
Touch me, trust me
Savor each sensation
Let the dream begin
Let your darker side give in
To the power of the music that I write
The power of the music of the night
Not only is it BS, it's the exact opposite.
Having in the past gotten a DV certificate through a normal vendor and now getting them through LetsEncrypt, it is quite clear that the process for LetsEncrypt is far more robust (actual proof I have access to the server by modifying it's contents as part of the handshake) than what most other CA's offer which for DV is based on little more than faith, and for EV based on talking to someone in an Indian call centre who can't understand you anyway.
There is a solution to this: have two grades of certificates
You're right. There is a solution to this. It was developed 12 years ago in the form of EV certificates and has been in use for a long while along with a far better indicator than the one you proposed:
If you go to https://www.slashdot.org/ you will see a little green lock and the word "Secure"
If you go to https://www.bankofamerica.com/ you will see a little green lock and the words "Bank of America Corporation [US]"
No need for any fancy domain name URL checking.
>Words have meaning
Yes, and you're getting the meaning wrong.
>Secured was never ment to mean 'Encryypted', it was ment 'encrypted and you're talking to who you think you are'
That's still encrypted.
Personally I believe DANE is the future of secure websites.
CA's could still be useful for vetting entities and ensuring the domain you are connecting to is owned by the Entity you are trying to connect to.
Much like how Extended Validation certs are made, but the CA's would really need to step up their game.
It's a different type of ADC, one that resets when it reaches saturation. So you can forget about using this 'new algorithm' in your existing equipment.
Their paper seems to ignore that this technique isomorphic to the well known phase unwrapping problem. The hard part has always been implementing it at the pixel level. This requires extra transistors, calibrations (because every pixel needs to be the same) and perfect uniformity in manufacturing, as well as a new source of noise. Finally the mathematical problem produces nasty noise unless you can also implement hystersis at the point of the amplitude wrap. If you don't it's going to suck, and if you do then you have even more transistors to implement for each pixel since it's now having to be stateful (know it's earlier state to implement the hysteresis)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
This is an interesting approach, and it would work pretty well for things like audio. It might help with the dynamic range of cameras when used at higher ISO settings, but it will not solve the problem by any means. The problem, though, is that in modern cameras, the sensor's pixels also have a maximum capacity, called the full well capacity. The sensor can't physically accumulate more of a charge than its full well capacity, and the DAC is designed so that its clipping point matches the full well capacity of the sensor at its base ISO. So you would still get clipping when the brightness exceeds what would otherwise by the sensor's clipping point at its base ISO, and if it is already at its base ISO, this wouldn't make any difference at all.
IMO, a better approach (which I proposed several years ago) is to sample the sensor and physically cancel out (subtract) the measured charge in the sensor itself, doing this multiple times per exposure to ensure that you don't hit the full well capacity. That approach also has the advantage of letting you do really cool time-based manipulation of the resulting photo. For example, you could do vector-based motion compensation of the individual subframes to dramatically reduce motion blur, compensate for some amount of camera shake, etc.
Even better, if you represent subsequent subframes relative to the previous subframe (e.g. -12 here, +2 there), you'll also usually get a high percentage of zeroes, which means you should be able to losslessly compress the additional subframes to be pretty small on average, potentially giving you the ability to adjust the image motion compensation after the fact to get an image in which motion is blurred more or less, according to taste.
In theory, you could even do bizarre, per-region motion compensation, such as making a baseball appear to be motionless while the bat is swinging at a high speed or vice versa. :-D But I digress.
I've skip read the Paper and /. comments, and this reads like mathematical wank by guys that have never touched an oscilloscope.
First, they are waving their hands in the are about a magic 'resetting ADC'... seriously...
Do they even know what reset means? It has to be performed at the hardware level, It has to performed with DC offsetting (from a D/A converter), it has to be performed to 1 least significant bit of accuracy, and the input signal has to be rate limited. No way this will happen for any practical systems without adding artefacts when the offsetting circuitry tries to slew the input within one sample period.
The only real world way I can think of, that still retains DC accuracy, is servoing the input.
This is where a 'counteracting' force is used to subtract from the input... but servoing has hairs all over it, as it has to be super accurate in terms of amplitude and frequency response.
They should have talked to an electrical engineer before spouting off this rubbish.
The reason they didn't use a cruise missile on Bin Laden wasn't civilian casualties. They've never been excessively concerned about collateral damage when going after lower level Al Qaeda officials, why start worrying then? Because they wanted the body -- hard physical evidence that the job was done. It could have been called either way.
While options might in principle be a good thing, how is this particular weapon system anything other than destabilizing? Short hang time, hair-trigger.
We already have hypersonic missiles, they're called ICBMs (US Trident 3) and MRBMs. Launch one, any everybody watching assumes multiple incoming thermonukes. With the new toys, it might just be conventional explosives. That's going to make anyone abandon "launch-on-warning"? Least of all the US!
Consider the current crop of countries the US considers [potential] hot-war enemies: Would hypersonics keep the Russians out of Ukraine, let alone Crimea? The Chinese off the Pacific sandbanks? The NorKs from developing missiles? ISIS out of Raqqa? Iran from developing nukes? Short-fuse helps _none_ of these situations, and it is tough to think of one which it would.
Look, once you got nukes, the purpose of advancing military tech is no longer to attack other super-powers.
Instead, it becomes a combination of two possibilities:
1) Defeat lesser powers, including both non-nuclear nations and terrorists. They can't match our tech, so we do not need to go head to head against them.
2) BANKRUPT your competitor superpowers. The idea is to force other super powers to spend so much on defense that to keep up, that it limits their other options.
We are not trying to shoot down Russia's missiles. Instead we are trying to make it damn expensive for them to match us.
Which is why they are using other means besides their regular army. Ukraine, hacking, etc.
I remember Google Plus! I hope after this, Linus gets a MySpace account!
> This is a ridiculous argument. The number of words in a document does not indicate how comprehensible that document is.
Or how safe. In many contracts, the devil is in the details. GPL has evolved to a longer license, and explicitly included patents in GPLv3, because various companies and individuals have tried to legally and illegally violate its stated goals. The more explicit license of GPL has helped protect us from monopoly control of media and of data, and is now helping protect developers and computer users from patent abuse.
Apache 2.0 could be tweaked like this to incorporate what Facebook is trying to do. They really should do it - it's an oversight and does not do enough to squash the patent trolls. Facebook is doing the right thing for the industry, even if the wording needs help. Apache Legal might forget what these licenses are for in a misguided quest for purity.
3. Grant of Patent License. Subject to the terms and conditions of this License, each Contributor hereby grants to You a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable (except as stated in this section) patent license to make, have made, use, offer to sell, sell, import, and otherwise transfer the Work, where such license applies only to those patent claims licensable by such Contributor that are necessarily infringed by their Contribution(s) alone or by combination of their Contribution(s) with the Work to which such Contribution(s) was submitted. If You institute patent litigation against any entity (including a cross-claim or counterclaim in a lawsuit) alleging that the Work or a Contribution incorporated within the Work constitutes direct or contributory patent infringement, then any patent and copyright licenses granted to You under this License for that Work shall terminate as of the date such litigation is filed.
Re:If It Weren't For Russia
If it weren't for Russia we'd be Germans.
And it would had been great!