Yostivanich

“Employee non­com­pete agree­ments pro­hibit employ­ees from engag­ing in con­duct com­pet­i­tive with their employ­ers after the employ­ment rela­tion­ship ter­mi­nates. In many states, such agree­ments have his­tor­i­cally been the most effec­tive way for a com­pany to pro­tect a company’s invest­ment in train­ing, the devel­op­ment of spe­cial skills, trade secrets, con­fi­den­tial infor­ma­tion and good­will. Now, that’s all chang­ing. In recog­ni­tion of our cur­rently dis­mal econ­omy and the need to per­mit peo­ple to work, some courts — even in states that gen­er­ally enforce non­com­pete agree­ments — have demon­strated a reluc­tance to enforce these agree­ments.” I’m not a fan of non-competes for just this reason.

“Last.fm and CBS respond in no uncer­tain terms to rumors that the two com­pa­nies were involved in trans­fer­ring user data to either the RIAA or a music label. Last.fm spec­u­lates that the com­pany may be the tar­get of slan­der.” That’s pretty much that.

“Houston-based blog­ger Lyn­dal Har­ring­ton was jailed last week for fail­ing to turn over her com­puter as part of a defama­tion case involv­ing the late Anna Nicole Smith. The 53-year-old grand­mother claimed that her house was bro­ken into and her com­puter was stolen after the court had sub­poe­naed it for evi­dence. US Dis­trict Judge Tony Lind­say didn’t buy the story, how­ever, and jailed her for con­tempt.” A police offi­cer isn’t col­lab­o­rat­ing her story about the lap­top being stolen, so she may be lying regard­ing that.

“The National Asso­ci­a­tion of Real­tors said its sea­son­ally adjusted index of sales con­tracts signed in April rose 6.7 per­cent, to 90.3, far exceed­ing ana­lysts’ fore­casts. It was the biggest monthly increase since Octo­ber 2001, when pend­ing sales rose 9.2 per­cent.” That’s good news.

“Inspired by his exam­ple, I pro­pose curb­ing gun vio­lence not by fur­ther restrict­ing the avail­abil­ity of guns but by expand­ing and reori­ent­ing it. Men would still be for­bid­den to walk the streets armed, in accor­dance with cur­rent laws, but women would be required to carry pis­tols in plain sight when­ever they are out and about. Were I to board the sub­way late at night, around Lin­coln Cen­ter per­haps, and find it filled with women openly car­ry­ing Met­ro­pol­i­tan Opera pro­grams and Glock auto­mat­ics, I’d feel snug and secure. A train packed with armed men would not pro­duce the same com­fort­ing sen­sa­tion. Maybe that’s because men have a dis­con­cert­ing ten­dency to shoot peo­ple, while women dis­play admirable restraint. Depart­ment of Jus­tice fig­ures show that between 1976 and 2005, 91.3 per­cent of gun homi­cides were com­mit­ted by men, 8.7 per­cent by women.” Unique idea.

“She decided to use her time to talk about Jesus. School offi­cials didn’t like the break­ing of rules. They told her she had to apol­o­gize before she could get her diploma (a fairly light pun­ish­ment, I think).” The dis­trict court ruled that she broke the school rules on hav­ing her speech pre-approved not that it was reli­gious in nature.

“Scott Roeder, 51, was charged with the first-degree mur­der of Dr George Tiller, who was shot dead on Sun­day at a church in Wichita. Mr Roeder is also charged with aggra­vated assault against two peo­ple who tried to inter­vene in the attack.”

“So, is TheFoxNation.com sim­ply the seedy under­belly of Fox News par­ent com­pany chair­man Rupert Murdoch’s evil, right-wing media empire?” They’re just asking.

“Sci­en­tists have located 38 emperor pen­guin colonies in Antarc­tica by using satel­lites to look for stains from the ani­mals’ drop­pings. It is impos­si­ble to track the pen­guins them­selves using stan­dard satel­lite imag­ing because they are too small. How­ever, pen­guins clus­ter for up to eight months on sea ice; as their guano builds up it leaves a reddish-brown mark on sea ice that is eas­ier to spot.” Okay that’s cool.

Some sober­ing sta­tis­tics on this issue.

“India’s par­lia­ment is to have its first woman Speaker after a sweep­ing win for the Con­gress party in recent elec­tions.” Good job India.

“Google has obvi­ously cho­sen XMPP for its appli­ca­tion layer data exchange because it’s open, exten­si­ble, or maybe that’s just where the dart landed when they dis­cussed their options. But let’s face facts: HTTP is the de facto appli­ca­tion layer trans­port pro­to­col of the Inter­net and it’s highly unlikely that a com­pany that’s built its for­tunes upon that fact is sud­denly going to turn around and aban­don it. HTTP is the only almost-surefire method of tra­vers­ing fire­walls in any kind of bi-directional com­mu­ni­ca­tion exchange between clients and servers, and rou­tinely car­ries on its back any num­ber of “layer 7+” pro­to­cols such as SOAP, JSON, and XML.” Pretty much says it all.

“Last week, the Mass­a­chu­sets Supreme Court threw out the search war­rant” Thank good­ness, this was such a bs search war­rant, the logic behind it was fun­da­men­tally flawed as pointed out in the ruling.

“Pres­i­dent Obama announced on Tues­day that he would nom­i­nate Rep­re­sen­ta­tive John M. McHugh of upstate New York, the senior Repub­li­can on the House Armed Ser­vices Com­mit­tee, to be the next sec­re­tary of the Army.”

“A fed­eral court in Alabama ordered that a real estate agent and the owner of rental units the agent man­aged in Mont­gomery, Alabama, must pay dam­ages to a low-income renter for sex­ual harass­ment. The agent had repeat­edly tried to coerce the renter into hav­ing sex with him and then raised her rent and attempted to evict her when she refused.” Can you say messed up.

“Chi­nese sci­en­tists have given cells from adult pigs the abil­ity to turn into any tis­sue in the body, just like embry­onic stem cells.”

“The World Health Orga­ni­za­tion said Tues­day that it was mov­ing closer to declar­ing swine flu a world­wide pan­demic. The dis­ease has reached 64 coun­tries, and there have been dozens or hun­dreds of cases in sev­eral nations out­side North Amer­ica, includ­ing Britain, Spain, Japan, Chile and Aus­tralia. The South­ern Hemi­sphere coun­tries are now of chief inter­est because their win­ter flu sea­son is just begin­ning and another strain of the H1N1 virus, wide­spread last win­ter, was resis­tant to the antivi­ral drug Tam­i­flu.” Not good news.

“Amer­i­can blog­gers have reacted angrily to pro­pos­als for a new law that could poten­tially make it ille­gal to crit­i­cise or make fun of some­body online. Linda Sanchez, a Demo­c­ra­tic con­gress­woman for Cal­i­for­nia, is lead­ing a bill intended to com­bat cyber­bul­ly­ing – but oppo­nents say the law’s lim­its are vague and threaten free­dom of speech.” Stu­pid politicians.

“The Jus­tice Depart­ment has begun an inves­ti­ga­tion into whether the recruit­ing prac­tices of some of the largest tech­nol­ogy com­pa­nies vio­lated antitrust laws, accord­ing to two peo­ple with knowl­edge of the inves­ti­ga­tion. The inves­ti­ga­tion tar­gets some of Sil­i­con Valley’s best known com­pa­nies, includ­ing Google, Yahoo, Apple and sev­eral oth­ers, these peo­ple said. The exact focus of the inquiry is unclear, but the peo­ple famil­iar with it said Jus­tice Depart­ment lawyers appeared to be look­ing into whether the com­pa­nies involved agreed to not actively recruit employ­ees from each other.” Wow.

“Thirty-four mem­bers of the Orga­ni­za­tion of Amer­i­can States gath­ered here Tues­day to argue over whether to read­mit Cuba. By evening, an iso­lated United States was still strug­gling to fend off a vote to lift the ban on Havana. Sec­re­tary of State Hillary Rod­ham Clin­ton emerged from talks with the for­eign min­is­ters of nine North and South Amer­i­can coun­tries hav­ing failed to hash out a com­pro­mise that would give Cuba a path to mem­ber­ship, pro­vided its gov­ern­ment accepted demo­c­ra­tic principles.”

“Bill O’Reilly claimed of his pre­vi­ous ref­er­ences to George Tiller as “the baby killer”: “I reported what groups were call­ing him. I reported accu­rately.” In fact, O’Reilly him­self has repeat­edly referred to Tiller as “the baby killer.””

“Unem­ploy­ment in the 16 coun­tries using the euro increased in April to its high­est level in nearly ten years, offi­cial data has shown.”

“How­ever today Chi­nese author­i­ties have come down like a tonne of bricks on a num­ber of ser­vices includ­ing Twit­ter, Flickr, Bing, Live.com, Hotmail.com, Blog­ger and a num­ber of other sites.”

“.dp50 {width:50%; float:left; dis­play: inline; *margin-right:-1px; }” That’s the entire framework.

“A UN report says hunger in South Asia has reached its high­est level in 40 years because of food and fuel price rises and the global eco­nomic down­turn. The report by the UN children’s fund, Unicef, says that 100 mil­lion more peo­ple in the region are going hun­gry com­pared with two years ago.”

“Its sales of 155,954 vehi­cles in May were down 24% from the same month last year, but up 20% from April.” Good job Ford.

“Elec­tronic Arts (EA) on Tues­day announced the simul­ta­ne­ous world­wide release of The Sims 3 for Mac and Win­dows. A ver­sion devel­oped to run on the iPhone and iPod touch is also available.”

“The algo­rithm that Ola Ågren has devel­oped ranks pages, instead, on the basis of each rel­e­vant start­ing page, and includes pages that are directly or indi­rectly linked to by the start­ing page. Then a nor­malised mean value of the rel­e­vance of the var­i­ous pages is cal­cu­lated. A page that has links to it from sev­eral dif­fer­ent pages is there­fore assigned a higher value than those that are found only once. In this way it is faster to find pages of inter­est. For ordi­nary stan­dard algo­rithms it takes more than seven days to go through and rank Web pages in a cer­tain data­base. Using his algo­rithm, Ola Ågren has man­aged to do this in 158 seconds.”

“Today we’re releas­ing the newest ver­sion of our solu­tion, the Google Search Appli­ance 6.0 (GSA), which has the capac­ity to search bil­lions of doc­u­ments. So whether you own a small busi­ness with a few thou­sand docs or belong to a huge orga­ni­za­tion with a bil­lion, the GSA can search them all.” Google throughly owns in the search arena.

“It goes with­out say­ing, but we’ll say it any­way: If the sight of an old man with bal­loons in a con­fined space, alone with a lit­tle boy doesn’t raise every anointed hair on your Godly neck, then you need to check your­self into a Bap­tist Men­tal Hos­pi­tal! It doesn’t mat­ter if a man-balloon-boy combo is pre­sented in a book, in a movie, or in real life — as True Chris­tians™, what might seem inno­cent to the untrained (unsaved) eye, when seen through the Eyes of Christ, calls forth images that could only be described as a pot­pourri of pedophilia! This sex­u­ally explicit and per­verted com­bi­na­tion of an old man, bal­loons, and a lit­tle boy is the sub­ject of Dis­ney PIXAR’s lewd lit­tle new film, Up. And yes, Chris­t­ian friends, we are liv­ing in the Last Days. So, it shouldn’t shock you to hear that Up is rated G and is mar­keted to your chil­dren.” This is insane. (Edit: almost cer­tainly a sar­cas­tic web­site — I am not tak­ing this seriously.)

“A mes­sage attrib­uted to the deputy leader of al-Qaeda has denounced Barack Obama as a “crim­i­nal” on the eve of the US president’s Mid­dle East trip.” I’m shocked.

“After Xbox 360’s Project Natal, Sony is also adding their own motion con­troller to the PS3, aptly named The PlaySta­tion Motion Con­troller. It’s the best motion con­trol demo that we have ever seen, but it may be arriv­ing a lit­tle too late.” Cool.

“US Pres­i­dent Barack Obama is head­ing to the Mid­dle East on a visit aimed at increas­ing US engage­ment with the Islamic world. Mr Obama trav­els first to Saudi Ara­bia and then to Egypt, where he will make a keynote speech on ties with the region.”

“UK con­sumers now believe broad­band is becom­ing as essen­tial a util­ity as elec­tric­ity or water, accord­ing to a panel of gov­ern­ment advis­ers.” I have to agree, broad­band is eas­ily a vital util­ity for me.

“As a co-inventor of sIFR, I’ve been get­ting a lot of emails this week ask­ing what I think of this new effort. In eval­u­at­ing its promise, it’s impor­tant to exam­ine the fol­low­ing char­ac­ter­is­tics, in order of impor­tance: com­pat­i­bil­ity, func­tion­al­ity, legal­ity, ease of use, and hack­i­ness. Type­kit is likely the best thing to hap­pen to web design since the re-emergence of browser com­pet­i­tive­ness.” That’s a nice endorse­ment for an unre­leased product.

Happy Birth­day.

“A robotic sub called Nereus has reached the deepest-known part of the ocean. The dive to 10,902m (6.8 miles) took place on 31 May, at the Chal­lenger Deep in the Mar­i­anas Trench, located in the west­ern Pacific Ocean. This makes Nereus the deepest-diving vehi­cle cur­rently in ser­vice and the first vehi­cle to explore the Mar­i­anas Trench since 1998.”

“Later today, you’ll be able to do just that, thanks to a new dash­board fea­ture we’re launch­ing in the Local Busi­ness Cen­ter (www.google.com/lbc). The LBC is a free tool that enables busi­ness own­ers to con­trol the con­tent of their busi­ness list­ings as they appear in Google Search and Google Maps.”

“Microsoft Corp said on Tues­day its new Win­dows 7 oper­at­ing sys­tem will be gen­er­ally avail­able on Octo­ber 22, well ahead of its orig­i­nal sched­ule and in time for the hol­i­day shop­ping season.”

“Debris spot­ted by planes in waters 650km (400 miles) off Brazil’s coast belongs to a miss­ing French air­liner, the Brazil­ian gov­ern­ment has confirmed.”

“Gen­eral Motors is to sell its Hum­mer brand to China’s Sichuan Tengzhong Heavy Indus­trial Machin­ery for an undis­closed amount.” Hmmm.

Good news for eas­ily one of the more pop­u­lar desk­top pro­gram­ming languages.

How good are you at dis­miss­ing your employees?

“The new ver­sion, called the PSP Go, is sched­uled to be intro­duced in the United States and Europe in Octo­ber and cost $249. The unit is smaller, lighter and more expen­sive than the cur­rent ver­sion, the PSP-3000, which costs $169.”