A New York judge has just ruled employees can’t be fired for surfing the Internet at work, as long as it doesn’t interfere with their productivity – he talked about it as an activity similar to using the phone. Techdirt has the details on this. He is to be lauded for his wonderful ruling! Allowing employees to surf the net increases their productivity; it doesn’t decrease it. Those people who surf the net to waste time would find other ways to waste it, so they can’t be used as a reason to curtail Internet access for the productive employees.
Category Archives: Thoughts
On demand airflight to arrive by at least end of year
A company called DayJet will start taking orders from customers later this year for “on demand flying”. They have these light, 4-passenger airplanes called the Eclipse 500, and will let passengers book them for flights between cities that don’t normally offer commercial flights. CNET has the details in this article. I’m curious to find out what their pricing looks like, and how safe it’d be to fly in their airplanes.
Google's live tests
Just stumbled onto another entry on the Google Blog which helps explain why I’ve been seeing reports on other blogs of different interfaces for Google’s Search or other products. Apparently they choose to use (at random) sets of live users, and open the additional functionality to them for a limited time, to see how they’d interact with it. The reason is simple: there’s no substitute for real-world testing. This is pretty cool. See the entry here.
Congress readies new digital copyright bill
I find this unbelievable, yet Congress seems poised to pass another revision of the DMCA, expanding the reach of this already-controversial bill. It only goes to show the power that special-interest groups have in Washington.
For example, under this new law, if Sony’s rootkit malware were removed by anti-virus software, Sony would have the right to sue those companies! Sounds very silly, doesn’t it!
Just talking about or attempting to bypass copyright protection on anything can land you in jail for up to 10 years! This parallels a French law that their legislature wanted to pass late last year.
I am left to ponder whether lack of forethought and absence of logic have hopped on the back of the bird flu swans and have now infected our politicians… Maybe they’ve been here all along, ever since the 1st version of the DMCA was passed years ago.
Here’s a link to the CNET News article.
RIAA sues family that doesn't own a PC
This is funny, but in a very sad and surreal sort of way. The RIAA has now filed suit against a family that doesn’t even own a computer. (!) They maintain the family shared songs illegally online, and they even published a list of those songs. I have to wonder how they shared the songs… telepathically, perhaps? Boing Boing has the details on this.
Raoul Pop 