If you leave an employer, you are obligated to not reveal any trade secrets you may have learned. This is a well-accepted part of business law. Where it gets fuzzy is your knowledge of things like clients, pricing, and other knowledge you simply remember. Certainly you cannot take any raw data with you, either in electronic or paper form.
There HAVE been suits arguing over the "inevitable disclosure doctrine" which states that working for a competitor means you almost certainly cannot help disclosing trade secrets you may have learned. This is a stupid way of trying to sneak in a non-compete after the fact. However, I do not believe this doctrine has withstood scrutiny of appeals courts.
I did some checking online of labor law, and you were right. An exempt employee can only have their pay docked for an absence of a whole day. Of course, you can still be fired, but your pay cannot be docked.
How on earth was docking you for two hours worth of pay when you left early illegal? I think you are confused as to what it means to be a salaried employee. If you are an "exempt" employee, it just means your employer doesn't have to pay you overtime. It does not mean that if you are finished with your work, you get to go home early.
Being a salaried employee means that you have significant freedom as to how you perform your job, and it usually means that you have some flexibility as to the timing of work week. It does not mean that you can take off from work for two hours and expect to be paid for it.
If you had complete scheduling freedom and all your employer was paying for was skills and your work product, you would be an independent contractor, not an employee. (Which would make your employer very happy, as they would no longer be responsible for pesky things like your payroll taxes, workmen's comp, etc.)
It is impossible to generalize that "Smaller companies have happier employees doing more interesting work, while large companies are full of melancholy drones."
There is nothing inherent in the size of the company that dictates if the work or the environment will be good or bad. There are large companies that are great to work for, and there are small companies that are soul-sucking pits of despair.
When I was in college, we talked about this specific question in regards to a non-compete agreement signed during employment with no additional pay offered. The question being: "Does your continued gainful employment constitute the 'consideration' necessary to form a legally binding contract, or contract amendment?" The answer from the professor was that it probably varies wildly from state to state, and no assumptions can be made on a national level. They clearly cannot force you to sign something on the way out the door with no more money, but everything else is a grey area.
I don't think this would qualify for "duress" either, since you are free to not sign and quit your job.
Yeah, I've never understood why more folks don't repair their own appliances. For instance, Whirlpool has been using the exact same basic design for their top load washers for about thirty years. All the major parts are accessible without even moving the washer away from the wall. In addition there are very few parts in the entire machine that are cost-prohibitive to replace compared to the cost of a new machine. Complete parts lists and exploded diagrams are at the Sears website for free. To top it off, you can purchase the service manual (geared towards DIY's) for about fifteen bucks. Same thing goes with most American-brand dryers, dishwashers, ranges and refrigerators. (Although no DIY is going to be able to fix a sealed-system problem with their fridge.)
This is not so much the case for the fancy imported brands from Europe or Korea... You may be able to get parts, but service manuals will be tougher to find.
Many folks have compared MS to the IBM of old. Nothing could be further from the truth. Why? MS is a bunch of weak pansies compared to the old IBM. When IBM was sued by the government, they not only did not lose, their legal fight literally outlived the judge in charge of the case. IBM stretched it out for thirteen years, IIRC, and the government has not come near it since. MS fought, and lost, in what, three, four years? Sure, the eventual judgment was largely voided, but that was due to Posner more than any strategy on MS's part.
And when you break the deed restrictions on your house, the homeowners association is fully within their rights to burn it down, with or without you inside of it.
Well, if you break the deed restrictions on your house, the homeowners association usually can, and sometimes does, put a lien on your house for fines, which must be paid before you can sell it. In some states they can even force a sale.
If you mod your phone and it gets bricked, Apple makes you pay to replace it... not much difference.
Apple bricking the phone is not illegal, nor should it be. When Apple sold the phone, they were crystal clear that its only supported use was with AT&T and Apple-approved apps. Those that disagree with the policy should not have bought the phone.
Now, if Apple was suing folks for unlocking the phone, that would have been something else (and certainly brings to the forefront debates on shrinkwrap, reverse engineering rights, etc.) but they have not. The proper response to this bricking is another hack, not a lawsuit.
Apple is also perfectly within their rights to not give warranty service to those that modded their phone. The Magnuson-Moss Act only provides protection to those whose aftermarket bits did not cause the phone to die. If these folks had not modded their phone, the update would not have killed it. The act was meant to protect those that say, bought ordinary aftermarket headphones... automatically denying warranty service for THAT would be a blatant violation of the Act. For folks that would avail themselves of the Act, even a liberal interpretation would mean they would have to prove that Apple's update deliberately disabled the phone. Given how many things that can go wrong with code updates, I would be surprised if Apple simply just did not test on an unlocked phone, and the process just happens to brick the thing. Apple probably bricked many legit phones during their testing process until they got the bugs worked out...
They will not automatically lose all uninsured funds. You will see that the FDIC has already authorized payment for 50% of the uninsured funds out of the expected proceeds from the sale of the loan assets. (The deposits were purchased by ING, but not the loans.) The FDIC also states that they expect further dividends beyond the 50% will be made available as things wind down.
While the folks with uninsured assets will lose a bit, it won't be the end of the world.
Sure, in the middle of a meeting, kissing a co-worker would be a very bad idea, likewise doing the same thing to a subordinate. But what I do on my own time is none of my employer's business. Personally, I dated and ended up marrying a coworker, and our managers were not the least bit upset, nor were there any rules against it (as long as it was not a relationship with a subordinate).
If you worked in the same department, I could see that causing issues that you (not your employer) are going to be responsible for solving, but otherwise, I don't see the problem, and neither did our managers at the time we were dating. (We work in very different parts of our company now, so it isn't the least bit of an issue.) We still work just down the hall from each other, car pool and see one another for lunch every day. We even got to go on a business trip for a month to Hawaii. (The customer needed both of our skills for a consulting project)
There are indeed many issues with the mind that can be fixed purely through therapy, meditation, religion, what-have-you... However, why is it so difficult for you to accept that there possibly are problems that simply cannot be fixed that way? Chronic pain can also be managed under some circumstances via the same means, but that does not make the pain caused by chronic disease any less real, or have any less of a physical cause.
There are plenty of folks who know a heck of a lot more about medicine than you or me that also believe that depression can be caused by chemical regulation issues:
There is evidence that the chemical imbalances have a genetic nature, which would certainly suggest a physical issue with the structure of the brain of victims.
That the emotions experienced by the human brain can be affected by physical phenomena, is commonly accepted, and doesn't require a belief in anything.
Can you provide evidence that a common root cause of depression is a physical disorder?
Certainly.
Until tests were developed for Thyroid malfunction, many people were simply thought to be lazy, unmotivated, and/or gloomy folk. (or hyper-active and irritable, depending on what was wrong with it) (There are other symptoms of Thyroid malfunction, but not all sufferers have the more obvious physical ones.) When the Thyroid was discovered to be the cause of these problems, treatment became relatively straightforward. (One medical test almost all people with suspected clinical depression (or anxiety) undergo is a test of Thyroid function for just this reason.) Just because we don't know the trigger for most clinical depression and can't find crap visibly falling apart in the brain doesn't mean it does not have a physical cause; it could just mean we haven't found it yet.
There are plenty of other well-known physical problems in the brain that can cause depression: Alzheimer's, tumors, malformed glands, physical trauma...
In my somewhat limited experience with those close to me, I have seen that for clinically depressed folks, therapy works to help the patient cope with the mind-breaking stress of a depressive episode; helps to keep them from killing themselves, even when every instinct is screaming that all is hopeless; it can help the patient live something outwardly resembling a normal life, even when they can barely pry themselves out of bed. In that way, depressive patients are lucky that it is a disease of the mind... the disease can managed to keep it from killing you while a drug regimen is sought. But when a proper drug regimen is found, the problem simply goes away (or at least gets quite a bit better). Drugs don't always work, but they are the best tool we have right now when therapy doesn't work either.
It is absolutely correct that treating the brain purely as a physical organ can lead to grave errors in diagnosis and treatment. Anti-depressants are completely ineffective in those that are not suffering from depression. Anti-depressants will not cure grief caused by the loss of a loved one, they will not cure apathy caused by the loss of a job, they will not fix anxiety caused by a big test coming up. Grief is a natural response to loss, anxiety is a natural response to stress. A doctor prescribing anti-depressants in those circumstances is being lazy and likely hoping the placebo affect will fix things. Likewise, a therapist that does not refer a patient to a MD for chronic depression where there are no triggers in their life and the therapy is utterly ineffective in curing the depression is also not making a correct decision.
The brain is, in the end, a physical organ that can have physical issues, just like the rest of the body; it is not immune from defect
They must be "taught" how to think positive thoughts? No, that usually doesn't work. Yes, therapy is effective in some cases, but there are a great many people for which it is an expensive total waste of time. For those people, their depression is just as real as the delusions and paranoid thoughts of a schizophrenic. To the sufferer of depression, the depressive thoughts are just as genuine as how you felt on the worst day of your life. They aren't caused by a poor outlook on life, they are caused by certain neurotransmitters not being regulated properly in the brain. During a depressive episode, they are simply unable to feel joy or happiness. Those parts of the brain are simply not working. Period. These malfunctioning parts of the brain cannot be coaxed into working by talking, any more than a weak pancreas can be talked into producing insulin. They are BOTH physical problems.
"Negative Thoughts" for most people are just mental hang-ups. For somebody suffering from clinical depression, they are caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain, and no amount of talking will make it go away. Depression is just as physical as any other chronic disease. Just because a disease strikes the brain and effects emotions does not magically make it non-physical.
Yes, anti-depressants are over-prescribed; yes, some people are diagnosed with depression when instead they just have some personal issues, and for which therapy would be quite effective. That does not mean that all depression can be cured with therapy; nor will anti-depressants have much effect on somebody that is just having a bad time of it. They are two separate conditions, and the treatment for one does not work for the other.
You are confusing clinical depression with pessimism. Telling somebody who is suffering from clinical depression to "modify their opinions" or "control their emotional state" is mostly useless. Somebody suffering from clinical depression is simply unable to feel happy. It doesn't matter at all what their circumstances are, or how a normally functioning person would feel about them. Yes, psychotherapy is at least partially effective for some forms of depression, but it is totally ineffective for others. (And usually psychotherapy is far more expensive than drugs.)
Real life isn't as neat and clean as 10-minute therapy on "Dr. Phil". Telling a depressed person that they should just be happier is about as effective as telling somebody who is drunk off their ass to "think sober".
It is silly to argue against anti-depressants because they "create a dangerous dependency on the supplier". You could say that about medication for just about any chronic medical condition. Anti-depressants are not like narcotics, you do not need to continually increase your dosage to maintain effectiveness. Most anti-depressants on the market today are not particularly expensive either, as most are available in generic form.
While I am not depressed, I am very close to some who are, and they universally describe the feeling of getting on the proper drug regimen as "having a curtain lifted from my eyes", or "feeling a great weight off of my shoulders". Not high, not weird, just no longer crushingly depressed most of the time. On a properly tuned, working, medication regimen, anti-depressants enable the patient to again experience a "normal" range of emotion. Working, properly tuned, anti-depressants don't make you feel happy; instead they enable you to be happy under circumstances that most folks would be happy in, and you feel normal on normal days. You still feel like crap on crappy days.
That said, everyone does react differently, and some can have the side-effect of sending you into a manic state (which can include the symptoms you described). Usually a dosage or timing adjustment can fix this.
Drug tuning is still more art than science. A new drug to treat depression is considered a great success if 50% of the users experience a 50% improvement. Many successful regimens involve combinations of drugs, and it can take a year or more to find the right combination. (It doesn't help that many common drugs take over a month to have any effect.)
There is a well-known case of some bad guys convincing their friend to walk into a bank with a bomb visibly strapped to his body to rob the place. They told him the bomb was fake. It wasn't. The robbery went south, and the friend wasn't able to meet up with the bad guys to get the bomb off. The police didn't round up the bomb squad in time. The bomb went off, and the guy died.
Sometimes folks want to make a statement before doing bad things. No, not necessarily terrorists, but they aren't the only murderous folks in the world.
What about the IR tracking setup? The whole reason that exists is to provide calibration updates to the WiiMote posisitioning every time the camera in the front can see the sensor bar.
It is the SixAxis that has nothing other than accelerometers.
If you actually read the ruling, it has absolutely nothing to do with allowing, or not allowing, legitimate research into decryption technologies. The case concerned DirectTV's attempts to find the defendants liable under sections of the statute meant to cover distributors of piracy devices, in addition to the parts of the statute meant to cover individual possession and use of piracy devices.
There is no argument mentioned that the defendants were not liable under the parts of the law covering individual use of piracy devices.
The article by the EFF is also wrong/misleading. Yes, they have been fighting "DirectTV's heavy-handed legal tactics", but in this case, it just prevented them from using a bigger hammer against folks already found to have violated the law. (Did they actually do so? Who knows. They did not respond or appear for the original complaint, so default judgement was entered against them.)
The problem with pissing off employees based on health conditions (especially ones over which the employee has no control) is that you run a high likelihood of driving off employees that are worth far more to the company than the extra money it costs to provide them health insurance. To make policies fair to employees, they have to be applied evenly (or you are in lawsuit city.) What do you do when your Joe Blow, a superstar engineer who is on the cusp of finishing the design for the most promising product in your company's history, quits because you decided to charge him extra for packing on a few pounds and having the "wrong" parents?
How is forcing a paycut any better than firing? They are just different degrees of the exact same thing, and will get you in equal trouble if you step outside the bounds of the law. (which these policies are on the very edge of)
And I consider nickel and diming employees for things out of their control to be harassment. "Oh, Mr. Employee, you have high blood sugar because of inherited Type I Diabetes? We're going to start taking $5 a week out of your paycheck." That isn't a big financial impact, but it is insulting.
By the way, I am not selfishly arguing something to benefit myself. My doctor told me it was a waste of his and my time for me to have a physical every single year. I have no continuing health conditions of any kind, no dependents, my spouse is not on my insurance, and I am sure that I am a profit machine for my health insurance company. The only way I could cost my company less in benefits would be to sign up for no insurance at all. Nevertheless, I would strongly consider finding a new job if my employer (consistently ranking at or near the top of all the lists of companies with progressive employment policies) suddenly had a lobotomy and started charging my coworkers extra money for being born with the wrong genetic package.
I have coworkers with chronic health conditions. I work with somebody that took months off (paid) to take care of a sick child. I have a cubemate that is Muslim and gets extra "time off" every year for religious celebrations that aren't charged to his vacation allowance. But I don't resent those costs because I am sure that collectively they make my employer more money than the extra costs for employing them, and I am equally sure that being treated well is one of the reasons they continue to work for my employer. Yes, some of them are more valuable than others, but I wouldn't want the better ones to quit to save a few insurance bucks on an average employee.
I agree with you, BMI is not an accurate measurement of health risk. Perhaps I should have said that charging insurance based on perceived health risk is not news.
My post was about the fact that insurance companies charging different rates to different perceived risks is not news. Employers charging different rates to different folks based on perceived risk is.
Many folks here are missing the point of the article. Insurance companies charging more, or even refusing to cover, unhealthy and/or high-risk folks is not news; it is in fact quite common in the private (as in, non-group) insurance market. (I'm not saying it isn't a problem, just that it is an entirely separate topic.)
The point of the article, which is news, is an employer charging their employees extra for the based on health risk. This makes not a great deal of sense. The essence of the group policy that employers buy for their employees is that each employee costs the same, and the premium is adjusted up and down year-to-year based on the overall claims history of the group as a whole. Yes, unhealthy employees cost their employer additional dough in premiums, but it could drive away valuable employees while only resulting in some trivial reduction in premiums.
Okay, giving discounts, bonuses, etc. to say, folks that don't smoke, or something of value for regular exercise, great! But charging for many conditions that are hereditary, and/or difficult to control is stupid, as it just pisses off perfectly good employees, who then may quit because you are nickel and diming them.
This is one reason so many companies pound diversity and non-discrimination into their employee's heads over and over. Why? Because it results in the hiring and retention of quality employees. If a quality employee is fired, paid less, harassed, or whatever because of some trivial or irrelevant factor, such as gender, hereditary high blood pressure, race, religion etc., some other, more intelligent employer can pick them up, and they will be making money for somebody them instead of Morons, Inc. It is a colossally stupid business mistake to drive away (or not hire employees) for factors not relevant to your business.
Yes, unhealthy employees drive up health insurance costs for a business. But driving away otherwise perfectly good employees costs a business a heck of a lot more. It is an obvious fact that employees who voluntarily quit are generally those good enough to get paid the same or better elsewhere; otherwise, they would be far less likely to leave to begin with.
Your experience was not unique. If you wanted to learn to specialize in one language, you didn't need to get a 4-yr CS degree to do it. Most decent 2-yr colleges with a program in programming (or, for that matter, your local bookstore) can teach you the syntax for the Language-of-the-month.
Instead, you probably chose a Computer Science degree. The name alone should tell you something, namely that your degree is going to be in science. Of course it is going to be theory-intensive! You were being given the tools you need to learn quickly just about any computer language, and solve a wide range of problems with them. If you concentrated in a single language, it is doubtful you would have been able to learn as much as to how computer languages work. Nothing gets you thinking about data structures, algorithms, methods, etc. like having to translate complex problems into a different language each semester.
That is what separates a quality degreed programmer from a self-taught programmer similar intelligence without the same training. That is not to say that all degree holders are good programmers, or that all non-degreed programmers are bad ones...
In fact, it is highly likely none of your professors even knew Ruby, or the LAMP stack. The job of a college professor is to perform original research work to advance the state-of-the-art, and to pass on the accumulated knowledge of the ages to students. If the students are any good whatsoever, they will be able to figure out for themselves how to apply it to practical work, if that is their chosen career path.
However, if all you did in college is take and pass your classes, you will indeed have a tough time "hitting the ground running" in most jobs. This would be the case even if your school did specialize in a single language, because there is a heck of a lot more to programming proficiency than the language itself. For myself, I had several school-year and summer jobs doing "front-lines" IT work, programming, and even a low-end retail mgmt. job. I learned things there that could not have been taught in any class, and conversely my classes taught me things that would have been difficult or impossible to pick up as part of on-the-job training.
Immediate employability is not the job or goal of college curriculums, nor should it be. It has always been my impression that it is a student's responsibility, via self-learning, personal programming projects and relevant part-time and summer work, to pick up where their theoretical classes left off.
Slashdot Mirror
If you leave an employer, you are obligated to not reveal any trade secrets you may have learned. This is a well-accepted part of business law. Where it gets fuzzy is your knowledge of things like clients, pricing, and other knowledge you simply remember. Certainly you cannot take any raw data with you, either in electronic or paper form.
There HAVE been suits arguing over the "inevitable disclosure doctrine" which states that working for a competitor means you almost certainly cannot help disclosing trade secrets you may have learned. This is a stupid way of trying to sneak in a non-compete after the fact. However, I do not believe this doctrine has withstood scrutiny of appeals courts.
SirWired
I did some checking online of labor law, and you were right. An exempt employee can only have their pay docked for an absence of a whole day. Of course, you can still be fired, but your pay cannot be docked.
SirWired
How on earth was docking you for two hours worth of pay when you left early illegal? I think you are confused as to what it means to be a salaried employee. If you are an "exempt" employee, it just means your employer doesn't have to pay you overtime. It does not mean that if you are finished with your work, you get to go home early.
Being a salaried employee means that you have significant freedom as to how you perform your job, and it usually means that you have some flexibility as to the timing of work week. It does not mean that you can take off from work for two hours and expect to be paid for it.
If you had complete scheduling freedom and all your employer was paying for was skills and your work product, you would be an independent contractor, not an employee. (Which would make your employer very happy, as they would no longer be responsible for pesky things like your payroll taxes, workmen's comp, etc.)
SirWired
It is impossible to generalize that "Smaller companies have happier employees doing more interesting work, while large companies are full of melancholy drones."
There is nothing inherent in the size of the company that dictates if the work or the environment will be good or bad. There are large companies that are great to work for, and there are small companies that are soul-sucking pits of despair.
YMMV
SirWired
I meant to say "They cannot enforce anything you sign on the way out the door with no more money."
SirWired
When I was in college, we talked about this specific question in regards to a non-compete agreement signed during employment with no additional pay offered. The question being: "Does your continued gainful employment constitute the 'consideration' necessary to form a legally binding contract, or contract amendment?" The answer from the professor was that it probably varies wildly from state to state, and no assumptions can be made on a national level. They clearly cannot force you to sign something on the way out the door with no more money, but everything else is a grey area.
I don't think this would qualify for "duress" either, since you are free to not sign and quit your job.
SirWired
Yeah, I've never understood why more folks don't repair their own appliances. For instance, Whirlpool has been using the exact same basic design for their top load washers for about thirty years. All the major parts are accessible without even moving the washer away from the wall. In addition there are very few parts in the entire machine that are cost-prohibitive to replace compared to the cost of a new machine. Complete parts lists and exploded diagrams are at the Sears website for free. To top it off, you can purchase the service manual (geared towards DIY's) for about fifteen bucks. Same thing goes with most American-brand dryers, dishwashers, ranges and refrigerators. (Although no DIY is going to be able to fix a sealed-system problem with their fridge.)
This is not so much the case for the fancy imported brands from Europe or Korea... You may be able to get parts, but service manuals will be tougher to find.
SirWired
Many folks have compared MS to the IBM of old. Nothing could be further from the truth. Why? MS is a bunch of weak pansies compared to the old IBM. When IBM was sued by the government, they not only did not lose, their legal fight literally outlived the judge in charge of the case. IBM stretched it out for thirteen years, IIRC, and the government has not come near it since. MS fought, and lost, in what, three, four years? Sure, the eventual judgment was largely voided, but that was due to Posner more than any strategy on MS's part.
SirWired
5 * 10^12 != 10^60
SirWired
And when you break the deed restrictions on your house, the homeowners association is fully within their rights to burn it down, with or without you inside of it.
Well, if you break the deed restrictions on your house, the homeowners association usually can, and sometimes does, put a lien on your house for fines, which must be paid before you can sell it. In some states they can even force a sale.
If you mod your phone and it gets bricked, Apple makes you pay to replace it... not much difference.
SirWired
Apple bricking the phone is not illegal, nor should it be. When Apple sold the phone, they were crystal clear that its only supported use was with AT&T and Apple-approved apps. Those that disagree with the policy should not have bought the phone.
Now, if Apple was suing folks for unlocking the phone, that would have been something else (and certainly brings to the forefront debates on shrinkwrap, reverse engineering rights, etc.) but they have not. The proper response to this bricking is another hack, not a lawsuit.
Apple is also perfectly within their rights to not give warranty service to those that modded their phone. The Magnuson-Moss Act only provides protection to those whose aftermarket bits did not cause the phone to die. If these folks had not modded their phone, the update would not have killed it. The act was meant to protect those that say, bought ordinary aftermarket headphones... automatically denying warranty service for THAT would be a blatant violation of the Act. For folks that would avail themselves of the Act, even a liberal interpretation would mean they would have to prove that Apple's update deliberately disabled the phone. Given how many things that can go wrong with code updates, I would be surprised if Apple simply just did not test on an unlocked phone, and the process just happens to brick the thing. Apple probably bricked many legit phones during their testing process until they got the bugs worked out...
SirWired
They will not automatically lose all uninsured funds. You will see that the FDIC has already authorized payment for 50% of the uninsured funds out of the expected proceeds from the sale of the loan assets. (The deposits were purchased by ING, but not the loans.) The FDIC also states that they expect further dividends beyond the 50% will be made available as things wind down.
While the folks with uninsured assets will lose a bit, it won't be the end of the world.
SirWired
Sure, in the middle of a meeting, kissing a co-worker would be a very bad idea, likewise doing the same thing to a subordinate. But what I do on my own time is none of my employer's business. Personally, I dated and ended up marrying a coworker, and our managers were not the least bit upset, nor were there any rules against it (as long as it was not a relationship with a subordinate).
If you worked in the same department, I could see that causing issues that you (not your employer) are going to be responsible for solving, but otherwise, I don't see the problem, and neither did our managers at the time we were dating. (We work in very different parts of our company now, so it isn't the least bit of an issue.) We still work just down the hall from each other, car pool and see one another for lunch every day. We even got to go on a business trip for a month to Hawaii. (The customer needed both of our skills for a consulting project)
SirWired
There are indeed many issues with the mind that can be fixed purely through therapy, meditation, religion, what-have-you... However, why is it so difficult for you to accept that there possibly are problems that simply cannot be fixed that way? Chronic pain can also be managed under some circumstances via the same means, but that does not make the pain caused by chronic disease any less real, or have any less of a physical cause.
There are plenty of folks who know a heck of a lot more about medicine than you or me that also believe that depression can be caused by chemical regulation issues:
http://www.biopsychiatry.com/serotonin/genetic.html
There is evidence that the chemical imbalances have a genetic nature, which would certainly suggest a physical issue with the structure of the brain of victims.
http://www.mpipsykl.mpg.de/pages/english/info/news/mpifirst.html
That the emotions experienced by the human brain can be affected by physical phenomena, is commonly accepted, and doesn't require a belief in anything.
Can you provide evidence that a common root cause of depression is a physical disorder?
Certainly.
Until tests were developed for Thyroid malfunction, many people were simply thought to be lazy, unmotivated, and/or gloomy folk. (or hyper-active and irritable, depending on what was wrong with it) (There are other symptoms of Thyroid malfunction, but not all sufferers have the more obvious physical ones.) When the Thyroid was discovered to be the cause of these problems, treatment became relatively straightforward. (One medical test almost all people with suspected clinical depression (or anxiety) undergo is a test of Thyroid function for just this reason.) Just because we don't know the trigger for most clinical depression and can't find crap visibly falling apart in the brain doesn't mean it does not have a physical cause; it could just mean we haven't found it yet.
There are plenty of other well-known physical problems in the brain that can cause depression: Alzheimer's, tumors, malformed glands, physical trauma...
In my somewhat limited experience with those close to me, I have seen that for clinically depressed folks, therapy works to help the patient cope with the mind-breaking stress of a depressive episode; helps to keep them from killing themselves, even when every instinct is screaming that all is hopeless; it can help the patient live something outwardly resembling a normal life, even when they can barely pry themselves out of bed. In that way, depressive patients are lucky that it is a disease of the mind... the disease can managed to keep it from killing you while a drug regimen is sought. But when a proper drug regimen is found, the problem simply goes away (or at least gets quite a bit better). Drugs don't always work, but they are the best tool we have right now when therapy doesn't work either.
It is absolutely correct that treating the brain purely as a physical organ can lead to grave errors in diagnosis and treatment. Anti-depressants are completely ineffective in those that are not suffering from depression. Anti-depressants will not cure grief caused by the loss of a loved one, they will not cure apathy caused by the loss of a job, they will not fix anxiety caused by a big test coming up. Grief is a natural response to loss, anxiety is a natural response to stress. A doctor prescribing anti-depressants in those circumstances is being lazy and likely hoping the placebo affect will fix things. Likewise, a therapist that does not refer a patient to a MD for chronic depression where there are no triggers in their life and the therapy is utterly ineffective in curing the depression is also not making a correct decision.
The brain is, in the end, a physical organ that can have physical issues, just like the rest of the body; it is not immune from defect
They must be "taught" how to think positive thoughts? No, that usually doesn't work. Yes, therapy is effective in some cases, but there are a great many people for which it is an expensive total waste of time. For those people, their depression is just as real as the delusions and paranoid thoughts of a schizophrenic. To the sufferer of depression, the depressive thoughts are just as genuine as how you felt on the worst day of your life. They aren't caused by a poor outlook on life, they are caused by certain neurotransmitters not being regulated properly in the brain. During a depressive episode, they are simply unable to feel joy or happiness. Those parts of the brain are simply not working. Period. These malfunctioning parts of the brain cannot be coaxed into working by talking, any more than a weak pancreas can be talked into producing insulin. They are BOTH physical problems.
"Negative Thoughts" for most people are just mental hang-ups. For somebody suffering from clinical depression, they are caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain, and no amount of talking will make it go away. Depression is just as physical as any other chronic disease. Just because a disease strikes the brain and effects emotions does not magically make it non-physical.
Yes, anti-depressants are over-prescribed; yes, some people are diagnosed with depression when instead they just have some personal issues, and for which therapy would be quite effective. That does not mean that all depression can be cured with therapy; nor will anti-depressants have much effect on somebody that is just having a bad time of it. They are two separate conditions, and the treatment for one does not work for the other.
SirWired
You are confusing clinical depression with pessimism. Telling somebody who is suffering from clinical depression to "modify their opinions" or "control their emotional state" is mostly useless. Somebody suffering from clinical depression is simply unable to feel happy. It doesn't matter at all what their circumstances are, or how a normally functioning person would feel about them. Yes, psychotherapy is at least partially effective for some forms of depression, but it is totally ineffective for others. (And usually psychotherapy is far more expensive than drugs.)
Real life isn't as neat and clean as 10-minute therapy on "Dr. Phil". Telling a depressed person that they should just be happier is about as effective as telling somebody who is drunk off their ass to "think sober".
It is silly to argue against anti-depressants because they "create a dangerous dependency on the supplier". You could say that about medication for just about any chronic medical condition. Anti-depressants are not like narcotics, you do not need to continually increase your dosage to maintain effectiveness. Most anti-depressants on the market today are not particularly expensive either, as most are available in generic form.
SirWired
While I am not depressed, I am very close to some who are, and they universally describe the feeling of getting on the proper drug regimen as "having a curtain lifted from my eyes", or "feeling a great weight off of my shoulders". Not high, not weird, just no longer crushingly depressed most of the time. On a properly tuned, working, medication regimen, anti-depressants enable the patient to again experience a "normal" range of emotion. Working, properly tuned, anti-depressants don't make you feel happy; instead they enable you to be happy under circumstances that most folks would be happy in, and you feel normal on normal days. You still feel like crap on crappy days.
That said, everyone does react differently, and some can have the side-effect of sending you into a manic state (which can include the symptoms you described). Usually a dosage or timing adjustment can fix this.
Drug tuning is still more art than science. A new drug to treat depression is considered a great success if 50% of the users experience a 50% improvement. Many successful regimens involve combinations of drugs, and it can take a year or more to find the right combination. (It doesn't help that many common drugs take over a month to have any effect.)
SirWired
There is a well-known case of some bad guys convincing their friend to walk into a bank with a bomb visibly strapped to his body to rob the place. They told him the bomb was fake. It wasn't. The robbery went south, and the friend wasn't able to meet up with the bad guys to get the bomb off. The police didn't round up the bomb squad in time. The bomb went off, and the guy died.
Sometimes folks want to make a statement before doing bad things. No, not necessarily terrorists, but they aren't the only murderous folks in the world.
Google for Brian Douglas Wells for full details.
SirWired
What about the IR tracking setup? The whole reason that exists is to provide calibration updates to the WiiMote posisitioning every time the camera in the front can see the sensor bar.
It is the SixAxis that has nothing other than accelerometers.
SirWired
If you actually read the ruling, it has absolutely nothing to do with allowing, or not allowing, legitimate research into decryption technologies. The case concerned DirectTV's attempts to find the defendants liable under sections of the statute meant to cover distributors of piracy devices, in addition to the parts of the statute meant to cover individual possession and use of piracy devices.
There is no argument mentioned that the defendants were not liable under the parts of the law covering individual use of piracy devices.
The article by the EFF is also wrong/misleading. Yes, they have been fighting "DirectTV's heavy-handed legal tactics", but in this case, it just prevented them from using a bigger hammer against folks already found to have violated the law. (Did they actually do so? Who knows. They did not respond or appear for the original complaint, so default judgement was entered against them.)
SirWired
The problem with pissing off employees based on health conditions (especially ones over which the employee has no control) is that you run a high likelihood of driving off employees that are worth far more to the company than the extra money it costs to provide them health insurance. To make policies fair to employees, they have to be applied evenly (or you are in lawsuit city.) What do you do when your Joe Blow, a superstar engineer who is on the cusp of finishing the design for the most promising product in your company's history, quits because you decided to charge him extra for packing on a few pounds and having the "wrong" parents?
How is forcing a paycut any better than firing? They are just different degrees of the exact same thing, and will get you in equal trouble if you step outside the bounds of the law. (which these policies are on the very edge of)
And I consider nickel and diming employees for things out of their control to be harassment. "Oh, Mr. Employee, you have high blood sugar because of inherited Type I Diabetes? We're going to start taking $5 a week out of your paycheck." That isn't a big financial impact, but it is insulting.
By the way, I am not selfishly arguing something to benefit myself. My doctor told me it was a waste of his and my time for me to have a physical every single year. I have no continuing health conditions of any kind, no dependents, my spouse is not on my insurance, and I am sure that I am a profit machine for my health insurance company. The only way I could cost my company less in benefits would be to sign up for no insurance at all. Nevertheless, I would strongly consider finding a new job if my employer (consistently ranking at or near the top of all the lists of companies with progressive employment policies) suddenly had a lobotomy and started charging my coworkers extra money for being born with the wrong genetic package.
I have coworkers with chronic health conditions. I work with somebody that took months off (paid) to take care of a sick child. I have a cubemate that is Muslim and gets extra "time off" every year for religious celebrations that aren't charged to his vacation allowance. But I don't resent those costs because I am sure that collectively they make my employer more money than the extra costs for employing them, and I am equally sure that being treated well is one of the reasons they continue to work for my employer. Yes, some of them are more valuable than others, but I wouldn't want the better ones to quit to save a few insurance bucks on an average employee.
SirWired
I agree with you, BMI is not an accurate measurement of health risk. Perhaps I should have said that charging insurance based on perceived health risk is not news.
My post was about the fact that insurance companies charging different rates to different perceived risks is not news. Employers charging different rates to different folks based on perceived risk is.
SirWired
Many folks here are missing the point of the article. Insurance companies charging more, or even refusing to cover, unhealthy and/or high-risk folks is not news; it is in fact quite common in the private (as in, non-group) insurance market. (I'm not saying it isn't a problem, just that it is an entirely separate topic.)
The point of the article, which is news, is an employer charging their employees extra for the based on health risk. This makes not a great deal of sense. The essence of the group policy that employers buy for their employees is that each employee costs the same, and the premium is adjusted up and down year-to-year based on the overall claims history of the group as a whole. Yes, unhealthy employees cost their employer additional dough in premiums, but it could drive away valuable employees while only resulting in some trivial reduction in premiums.
SirWired
Okay, giving discounts, bonuses, etc. to say, folks that don't smoke, or something of value for regular exercise, great! But charging for many conditions that are hereditary, and/or difficult to control is stupid, as it just pisses off perfectly good employees, who then may quit because you are nickel and diming them.
This is one reason so many companies pound diversity and non-discrimination into their employee's heads over and over. Why? Because it results in the hiring and retention of quality employees. If a quality employee is fired, paid less, harassed, or whatever because of some trivial or irrelevant factor, such as gender, hereditary high blood pressure, race, religion etc., some other, more intelligent employer can pick them up, and they will be making money for somebody them instead of Morons, Inc. It is a colossally stupid business mistake to drive away (or not hire employees) for factors not relevant to your business.
Yes, unhealthy employees drive up health insurance costs for a business. But driving away otherwise perfectly good employees costs a business a heck of a lot more. It is an obvious fact that employees who voluntarily quit are generally those good enough to get paid the same or better elsewhere; otherwise, they would be far less likely to leave to begin with.
SirWired
Your experience was not unique. If you wanted to learn to specialize in one language, you didn't need to get a 4-yr CS degree to do it. Most decent 2-yr colleges with a program in programming (or, for that matter, your local bookstore) can teach you the syntax for the Language-of-the-month.
Instead, you probably chose a Computer Science degree. The name alone should tell you something, namely that your degree is going to be in science. Of course it is going to be theory-intensive! You were being given the tools you need to learn quickly just about any computer language, and solve a wide range of problems with them. If you concentrated in a single language, it is doubtful you would have been able to learn as much as to how computer languages work. Nothing gets you thinking about data structures, algorithms, methods, etc. like having to translate complex problems into a different language each semester.
That is what separates a quality degreed programmer from a self-taught programmer similar intelligence without the same training. That is not to say that all degree holders are good programmers, or that all non-degreed programmers are bad ones...
In fact, it is highly likely none of your professors even knew Ruby, or the LAMP stack. The job of a college professor is to perform original research work to advance the state-of-the-art, and to pass on the accumulated knowledge of the ages to students. If the students are any good whatsoever, they will be able to figure out for themselves how to apply it to practical work, if that is their chosen career path.
However, if all you did in college is take and pass your classes, you will indeed have a tough time "hitting the ground running" in most jobs. This would be the case even if your school did specialize in a single language, because there is a heck of a lot more to programming proficiency than the language itself. For myself, I had several school-year and summer jobs doing "front-lines" IT work, programming, and even a low-end retail mgmt. job. I learned things there that could not have been taught in any class, and conversely my classes taught me things that would have been difficult or impossible to pick up as part of on-the-job training.
Immediate employability is not the job or goal of college curriculums, nor should it be. It has always been my impression that it is a student's responsibility, via self-learning, personal programming projects and relevant part-time and summer work, to pick up where their theoretical classes left off.
SirWired