a company did not have the right to read emails from an employee's personal account even through the account was accessed on a company computer.
I agree with the general principle - if someone doesn't use the company account there should be a reasonable expectation of privacy for a personal webmail account. However she still may be violating company policy about using work assets for personal affairs. The computer is owned by the company and they have every right to reprimand her for making the emails regardless of the content.
I wasn't aware that they did "research and medical breakthroughs" It's the difference between reading a book and writing a book..
You think there were no technology developments that went into the HGP? You think nothing was learned about the human genome in the process? By your definition all research is just "reading a book" because after all, we didn't invent relativity or quantum mechanics or biochemistry.
No need. For most of us it's a trade secret! Probably protected under copyright too. Only you have the right to distribut... hmm, this took a bad turn somewhere...
I'm not sure having a PhD in math grants expertise in computer and network security.
It doesn't but you're going to find a pretty heavy correlation between the two. Someone good in math is far more likely than average to have or be able to develop expertise in any given use of computers. The skill sets are different but the skills do overlap to a non-trivial degree. I'm sure a PhD is not required to work in computer security at the NSA but I also suspect they have more PhDs in that role than most employers. Just a guess I'll admit but it seems likely.
My guess is their expertise is used largely in encryption efforts.
I think you are probably correct.
I really see no evidence that the NSA has scooped up the smartest math PhDs.
Certainly they have no monopoly on smarts. Academia, private industry, finance, NASA and others employers unquestionably have a big share. The only safe thing to say is that the NSA apparently has a goodly number of very bright individuals working there. What portion of the talent pool they have is something that I'm sure is heavily classified if anyone even knows.
My solution, isolate China and then abolish copyright.
Ignoring for a moment whether that is a good idea or not, explain how you plan to do that. How are you going to isolate 1/5 of the world's population and one of largest economies on earth? How are you going to do it without causing a global economic meltdown and possibly a shooting war in the process? Seriously, I'd love to hear you come up with an answer to that one.
(for the record I think your suggestion to isolate China is both impossible and pointless)
Perhaps we could live on less or stretch our dollar farther if we could experience the last century of words, sounds and images without having our wallets maimed for the "privilege".
I'm sure we could if you have some solution to the free rider problem. Copyright and patents exist specifically because of that problem. Solve it and there is no need for copyright to exist. But I'm pretty sure you have no solution and just want to get stuff for free.
I was sourcing components for alternators. Looked into doing some valves and a few other items. Spent a lot of time in Mexico and a few weeks in China and southeast Asia. One of my associates was from India and he looked there for the same components.
Getting metal from China is always a crapshoot and you have to test everything you get. They can produce good stuff but you are just as likely to get some alloy completely different from what you ordered. My father-in-law owns a wire weaving business and he's always complaining about stuff sourced from China.
OK, how are you planning to isolate China and who do you think can replace 1/5 of the worlds population as a work force?
It's just nice to have cheap stuff, and they make stuff cheap.
It goes well beyond "nice". People don't shop at Walmart because it's "nice". All those thing you buy have a labor component to them and if you spend more on labor you have less to spend elsewhere. That's called an opportunity cost. You can spend more if you want to and I'm sure someone will take your money. Spend more at the local hardware store, you have less to spend in the local bookstore. And both will probably go out of business anyway because artificially propping them up is an inefficient use of capital.
If no one was buying, they couldn't sell.
That's exactly the predicament the US economy is currently in. We have more supply than demand.
Taiwan follows the old government that existed prior to the "cultural revolution" that spawned the current Chinese Communist Party government.
When you say cultural revolution in the context of China, you are actually talking about a fairly specific event that occurred long after the civil war that resulted in the schism between Taiwan and mainland China. The Cultural Revolution occurred in the late 60s whereas the KMT's retreat to Taiwan occurred around 1950. The communist party in China preceded the cultural revolution.
Apparently you are uninformed about the situation. It's extremely complicated.
Taiwan is it's own country by all measures except that China still thinks it has a right to it.
Which is precisely what makes it complicated. When one of the most powerful countries on earth thinks they own your land, life gets interesting and not in the good way.
No one outside China thinks Taiwan is part of China.
Taiwan does not have a seat in the UN. Almost no countries on earth have recognized Taiwan as an independent country including the US. Despite Taiwan being de-facto independent, there are many even within Taiwan who think the two should reunite.
Try reading something other that Chinese source-free propaganda posted to Wikipedia.
Try going there like I have. I've been to China and spoken with both mainlanders and Taiwanese about this issue. It's not simple and anyone familiar with the situation will think you an idiot for calling it simple. A shooting war in the Taiwan straight is a small but very real possibility and would be a global problem. Peaceful reunification is also a possibility. Continuation of the status-quo is likely for the immediate future but no one knows long term.
There's simply nowhere else that makes these things but China.
Nowhere? As someone who has sourced items from numerous countries I can say with authority that you are quite mistaken. China is an excellent (if difficult) place to source things cheaply but it is hardly the only place to make things. There are places with cheaper labor (Vietnam), better engineering (Japan/Germany), comparable/better logistics (Singapore), and the list goes on. China is an important option but not even close to the only option.
Remember too that the US has a $2.7 TRILLION manufacturing sector. The US manufacturing sector is larger than the GDP of all but 5 other countries on earth. Lots of stuff is made here - just not the labor intensive stuff. The notion that manufacturing in the US is dead is laughably wrong.
You may not realize this, but Taiwan is part of China.
The truth of that statement depends very much on whom you ask. As things stand Taiwan is de-facto an independent country. The People's Republic of China (mainland) maintain that Taiwan is a part of China, whereas the Republic of China (Taiwan) maintains that they are actually the legitimate government of China and that the PROC has no sovereign authority. However Taiwan has had to take great care to not antagonize the PROC due to the threat of invasion.
We live in the present. The sons/daughters are not responsible for the sins of the great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandfathers/mothers.
Great. Then by your logic we can stop complaining about illegal immigrants because they have effectively invaded and assimilated. It's a done deal. You aren't going to kick 10 million out that are already here and working.
This being MY country and MY birthright, fuck them.
Your birthright? Your ancestors were immigrants too. There were people here for 10,000 years before your ancestors came here and claimed land that wasn't theirs originally. You don't have any more intrinsic right to be here than anyone else.
If I find a person in my home without my permission (i.e. an intruder), I'm going to warn him to leave voluntarily. If he refuses then he will eat a bullet.
Someone immigrating to find work (legally or not) isn't remotely the same thing as someone breaking into your personal house. Nice sound bite but it has nothing to do with the actual problems.
I see no reason to treat intruders from Mexico or Canada or any part of the World differently - Leave voluntarily or face the consequences.
And that is basically what happens. Problem is that there are too many immigrants coming. The police forces are overwhelmed. Want to send them all home tomorrow? Go ahead. Good luck finding them all. And when you do enjoy your higher prices for food, construction, manufactured goods and pretty much anything else you want to buy. You take 10 million people out of the economy suddenly that is going to hurt you too.
To be fair, if his ancestors came on a boat, they probably immigrated legally.
Hah! Tell that to the next Native American you meet. I'm sure that argument will carry a lot of water with the people who actually were here first.
If we only had legal immigrants competing for the jobs, wages would not have fallen as steeply, simply because there would be 10 million or so less workers available to do the work.
And a lot of work simply would not get done. Do you work in the fields? Construction? Do you think those cheap food prices you enjoy happen because of high wages? Do you do all your food shopping at Whole Foods? You seem to have a very simplistic view of a very complicated situation.
But with the mandate for coverage of pre-existing conditions, I don't see how there is a contingent aspect of this anymore. It is like selling "fire insurance" coverage for houses that are already on fire. That is not really "insurance".
You forgot the important qualifier. "a form of risk management PRIMARILY used to hedge against the risk of a contingent loss". Insurance can be to hedge against gains, it can be to share risk, it can be to shift risk to another party. It's not so simple as a single sentence quoted from wikipedia. You cannot cover pre-existing conditions unless you force everyone to have coverage, otherwise the smart play is to buy insurance only after you get sick which destroys the financial structure of insurance (no premiums being paid in).
Most of us have health insurance that we purchase through our employers, provided by insanely profitable corporations.
Except for the 35-50 million who don't and can't get health insurance. Never mind that losing your job has meant a double whammy of losing your health insurance too. Happened to me. It also matters for those who can't get coverage because of pre-existing conditions. Has happened to members of my immediate family.
Does this bill cure everything? Of course not. But it does change things for a lot of people, hopefully for the better. If you have been lucky not to be affected by the broken parts of the US healthcare system, consider yourself lucky.
I've never had my desk crash, losing all pieces of paper on it. Contrast that to Windows.
Likewise I can easily and quickly back up my computerized work, whereas making photocopies of all my paper documents is so time consuming as to be infeasible.
As far as i know there is no way to electronically sign formal contracts in a generally accepted fashion.
This hasn't been true for some years now. See the Uniform Electronic Transactions Act and the Electronic Signatures in Global and National Commerce Act. Contracts can be formalized by signature, words or even actions. There are cases where the parties involved require a paper signed but there is no universal legal requirement for that to be the case. Heck, every time I go to the grocery store I sign a digital signature pad - there is no paper signature involved and I guarantee you that is a legally binding contract.
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a company did not have the right to read emails from an employee's personal account even through the account was accessed on a company computer.
I agree with the general principle - if someone doesn't use the company account there should be a reasonable expectation of privacy for a personal webmail account. However she still may be violating company policy about using work assets for personal affairs. The computer is owned by the company and they have every right to reprimand her for making the emails regardless of the content.
I wasn't aware that they did "research and medical breakthroughs" It's the difference between reading a book and writing a book..
You think there were no technology developments that went into the HGP? You think nothing was learned about the human genome in the process? By your definition all research is just "reading a book" because after all, we didn't invent relativity or quantum mechanics or biochemistry.
Plus, a lot of the sequencing was done by a private for-profit company, Celera, at a fraction of the cost of the public effort.
The projects were not cooperative. The HGP mapped a genome and Celera did the same. They did not pool their data.
why can't I patent my own genes?
No need. For most of us it's a trade secret! Probably protected under copyright too. Only you have the right to distribut... hmm, this took a bad turn somewhere...
I'm not sure having a PhD in math grants expertise in computer and network security.
It doesn't but you're going to find a pretty heavy correlation between the two. Someone good in math is far more likely than average to have or be able to develop expertise in any given use of computers. The skill sets are different but the skills do overlap to a non-trivial degree. I'm sure a PhD is not required to work in computer security at the NSA but I also suspect they have more PhDs in that role than most employers. Just a guess I'll admit but it seems likely.
My guess is their expertise is used largely in encryption efforts.
I think you are probably correct.
I really see no evidence that the NSA has scooped up the smartest math PhDs.
Certainly they have no monopoly on smarts. Academia, private industry, finance, NASA and others employers unquestionably have a big share. The only safe thing to say is that the NSA apparently has a goodly number of very bright individuals working there. What portion of the talent pool they have is something that I'm sure is heavily classified if anyone even knows.
My solution, isolate China and then abolish copyright.
Ignoring for a moment whether that is a good idea or not, explain how you plan to do that. How are you going to isolate 1/5 of the world's population and one of largest economies on earth? How are you going to do it without causing a global economic meltdown and possibly a shooting war in the process? Seriously, I'd love to hear you come up with an answer to that one.
(for the record I think your suggestion to isolate China is both impossible and pointless)
Perhaps we could live on less or stretch our dollar farther if we could experience the last century of words, sounds and images without having our wallets maimed for the "privilege".
I'm sure we could if you have some solution to the free rider problem. Copyright and patents exist specifically because of that problem. Solve it and there is no need for copyright to exist. But I'm pretty sure you have no solution and just want to get stuff for free.
I was sourcing components for alternators. Looked into doing some valves and a few other items. Spent a lot of time in Mexico and a few weeks in China and southeast Asia. One of my associates was from India and he looked there for the same components.
Getting metal from China is always a crapshoot and you have to test everything you get. They can produce good stuff but you are just as likely to get some alloy completely different from what you ordered. My father-in-law owns a wire weaving business and he's always complaining about stuff sourced from China.
We don't need China
OK, how are you planning to isolate China and who do you think can replace 1/5 of the worlds population as a work force?
It's just nice to have cheap stuff, and they make stuff cheap.
It goes well beyond "nice". People don't shop at Walmart because it's "nice". All those thing you buy have a labor component to them and if you spend more on labor you have less to spend elsewhere. That's called an opportunity cost. You can spend more if you want to and I'm sure someone will take your money. Spend more at the local hardware store, you have less to spend in the local bookstore. And both will probably go out of business anyway because artificially propping them up is an inefficient use of capital.
If no one was buying, they couldn't sell.
That's exactly the predicament the US economy is currently in. We have more supply than demand.
Taiwan follows the old government that existed prior to the "cultural revolution" that spawned the current Chinese Communist Party government.
When you say cultural revolution in the context of China, you are actually talking about a fairly specific event that occurred long after the civil war that resulted in the schism between Taiwan and mainland China. The Cultural Revolution occurred in the late 60s whereas the KMT's retreat to Taiwan occurred around 1950. The communist party in China preceded the cultural revolution.
Maybe your life is borring? People I follow usually do more interesting things than just eat and run errands.
I very much doubt that...
Thanks! Thought I was signed in but oh well...
China doesn't sell us anything...
Lenovo will be very surprised to hear that. So will lots of other Chinese companies that you just aren't familiar with yet.
It's not complicated.
Apparently you are uninformed about the situation. It's extremely complicated.
Taiwan is it's own country by all measures except that China still thinks it has a right to it.
Which is precisely what makes it complicated. When one of the most powerful countries on earth thinks they own your land, life gets interesting and not in the good way.
No one outside China thinks Taiwan is part of China.
Taiwan does not have a seat in the UN. Almost no countries on earth have recognized Taiwan as an independent country including the US. Despite Taiwan being de-facto independent, there are many even within Taiwan who think the two should reunite.
Try reading something other that Chinese source-free propaganda posted to Wikipedia.
Try going there like I have. I've been to China and spoken with both mainlanders and Taiwanese about this issue. It's not simple and anyone familiar with the situation will think you an idiot for calling it simple. A shooting war in the Taiwan straight is a small but very real possibility and would be a global problem. Peaceful reunification is also a possibility. Continuation of the status-quo is likely for the immediate future but no one knows long term.
There's simply nowhere else that makes these things but China.
Nowhere? As someone who has sourced items from numerous countries I can say with authority that you are quite mistaken. China is an excellent (if difficult) place to source things cheaply but it is hardly the only place to make things. There are places with cheaper labor (Vietnam), better engineering (Japan/Germany), comparable/better logistics (Singapore), and the list goes on. China is an important option but not even close to the only option.
Remember too that the US has a $2.7 TRILLION manufacturing sector. The US manufacturing sector is larger than the GDP of all but 5 other countries on earth. Lots of stuff is made here - just not the labor intensive stuff. The notion that manufacturing in the US is dead is laughably wrong.
You may not realize this, but Taiwan is part of China.
The truth of that statement depends very much on whom you ask. As things stand Taiwan is de-facto an independent country. The People's Republic of China (mainland) maintain that Taiwan is a part of China, whereas the Republic of China (Taiwan) maintains that they are actually the legitimate government of China and that the PROC has no sovereign authority. However Taiwan has had to take great care to not antagonize the PROC due to the threat of invasion.
In other words, it's complicated.
We live in the present. The sons/daughters are not responsible for the sins of the great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandfathers/mothers.
Great. Then by your logic we can stop complaining about illegal immigrants because they have effectively invaded and assimilated. It's a done deal. You aren't going to kick 10 million out that are already here and working.
This being MY country and MY birthright, fuck them.
Your birthright? Your ancestors were immigrants too. There were people here for 10,000 years before your ancestors came here and claimed land that wasn't theirs originally. You don't have any more intrinsic right to be here than anyone else.
If I find a person in my home without my permission (i.e. an intruder), I'm going to warn him to leave voluntarily. If he refuses then he will eat a bullet.
Someone immigrating to find work (legally or not) isn't remotely the same thing as someone breaking into your personal house. Nice sound bite but it has nothing to do with the actual problems.
I see no reason to treat intruders from Mexico or Canada or any part of the World differently - Leave voluntarily or face the consequences.
And that is basically what happens. Problem is that there are too many immigrants coming. The police forces are overwhelmed. Want to send them all home tomorrow? Go ahead. Good luck finding them all. And when you do enjoy your higher prices for food, construction, manufactured goods and pretty much anything else you want to buy. You take 10 million people out of the economy suddenly that is going to hurt you too.
To be fair, if his ancestors came on a boat, they probably immigrated legally.
Hah! Tell that to the next Native American you meet. I'm sure that argument will carry a lot of water with the people who actually were here first.
If we only had legal immigrants competing for the jobs, wages would not have fallen as steeply, simply because there would be 10 million or so less workers available to do the work.
And a lot of work simply would not get done. Do you work in the fields? Construction? Do you think those cheap food prices you enjoy happen because of high wages? Do you do all your food shopping at Whole Foods? You seem to have a very simplistic view of a very complicated situation.
I really am unsure if the government should take care of these people, as they are already a drain on our society to begin with...
If you have a better system, please let us know.
But with the mandate for coverage of pre-existing conditions, I don't see how there is a contingent aspect of this anymore. It is like selling "fire insurance" coverage for houses that are already on fire. That is not really "insurance".
You forgot the important qualifier. "a form of risk management PRIMARILY used to hedge against the risk of a contingent loss". Insurance can be to hedge against gains, it can be to share risk, it can be to shift risk to another party. It's not so simple as a single sentence quoted from wikipedia. You cannot cover pre-existing conditions unless you force everyone to have coverage, otherwise the smart play is to buy insurance only after you get sick which destroys the financial structure of insurance (no premiums being paid in).
Most of us have health insurance that we purchase through our employers, provided by insanely profitable corporations.
Except for the 35-50 million who don't and can't get health insurance. Never mind that losing your job has meant a double whammy of losing your health insurance too. Happened to me. It also matters for those who can't get coverage because of pre-existing conditions. Has happened to members of my immediate family.
Does this bill cure everything? Of course not. But it does change things for a lot of people, hopefully for the better. If you have been lucky not to be affected by the broken parts of the US healthcare system, consider yourself lucky.
There is no such thing as data ownership.
Pity the law doesn't agree with you. Not on medical records at the very least.
I've never had my desk crash, losing all pieces of paper on it. Contrast that to Windows.
Likewise I can easily and quickly back up my computerized work, whereas making photocopies of all my paper documents is so time consuming as to be infeasible.
As far as i know there is no way to electronically sign formal contracts in a generally accepted fashion.
This hasn't been true for some years now. See the Uniform Electronic Transactions Act and the Electronic Signatures in Global and National Commerce Act. Contracts can be formalized by signature, words or even actions. There are cases where the parties involved require a paper signed but there is no universal legal requirement for that to be the case. Heck, every time I go to the grocery store I sign a digital signature pad - there is no paper signature involved and I guarantee you that is a legally binding contract.