I recently signed one of those agreements, lucky for me the agreement is null and void, if some of what I'm reading on /. is true, since I'm in California. Of course I didn't know about California's section 2870 when I signed the thing, but I signed it anyway because I've been out of work a couple of months and I've got family to support.

About 8 or 9 years ago, I remember reading a copy of a California Labor law that said basically that you had even had a right to use company property for personal purposes, e.g., if your job is to produce spreadsheets but you want to learn word processing, you could use your work computer to do that, if it wasn't being used for anything else anyway, for x hours a day, on your own time. Don't quote me on that though, since I don't know what law that was, if it's still in effect, or what relevance it has here...

If I ever move out of state and add anything to CPAN, tell Trimbach that my wife did it :-)

signed (despite the smiley),
a very sad runrig