Without reference to any specific people who may or may not be coming into our country, we in the UK have a serious problem with immigration generally. This is primarily because under EU rules we can no longer turn away a citizen from any other EU nation, and the EU is expanding to include nations with vastly different economic strength to its original members. This creates a bias in the direction of population flow from the poorer nations to the richer ones that is ultimately harmful to both, because it strains the resources and capacity of the wealthier nations while draining precisely the kind of skilled/talented/experienced people who would be needed in their home countries to help rapid development of their own economies.
The UK has been particularly badly hit by this for a number of reasons, including having a relatively high population density already and having relatively poor border controls and tracking of legal vs. illegal immigrants (ironically, considering that we're the ones who actually have a clear and defensible border). The same basic economic imbalance applies, to some degree, to many of the EU member states today, but the other factors mean the UK is also an attractive destination for those who have no intention of working legitimately and those who can find an excuse to come here from outside the EU.
The final nail in the coffin is that the strongest voices against immigration in the UK today tend to come from the far right, but the political parties with those views tend to be full of dubious characters you wouldn't necessarily want to support in general even if you agreed with their stance on immigration. This tends to make immigration a taboo subject: it's the political third rail, mention it without choosing your words extremely carefully and tomorrow you're "obviously" a racist according to half the papers and most other political parties. I'm sure the Pope would be very proud of our lack of transparency, moral absolutes and absence of reasoned debate. <sigh>
The reason that we avoid encrypting all e-mail messages is because it adds additional complexity and security which isn't necessary.
And that assumption is why we need harsh legal penalties to punish those who risk leaking sensitive personal data.
Why, exactly, can't we encrypt all e-mail? If we had proper encryption and signing of e-mails, the threat of virus infection (not to mention spam, phishing, and all the other junk that represents most of the e-mail traffic flying around today) would be dramatically reduced, and with it the burden on ISP infrastructures.
We could make public keys for both encryption and digital signatures as ubiquitous as e-mail addresses themselves, and use them as routinely as HTTPS, SSH or SFTP instead of HTTP, telnet and FTP. There is absolutely no technical problem with this. And I don't know where you get the idea that people would have to carry their public keys around everywhere: there are any number of mechanisms that could be used if you just installed keys on the mail servers that would be much more secure than anything we have today, and that's just the easy bit.
What would be the advantage of the extra layer of security for most people?
Their communications couldn't be routinely intercepted by everyone from abusive authorities to the 17-year-old work experience kid doing testing at the ISP.
There is no reason that everything has to be encrypted just because we can do it.
Sure, there is: most non-geeks assume that things like e-mail are private anyway, and the current situation is misleading them.
I guess what bugged me as I read through the Desire manual was that it seems like much of the basic phone functionality has been shoved a bit more deeply into the UI to make way for the pretty toys. On my trusty Nokia, I can speed dial by pushing and holding a single button. If I want to mute my phone while I'm calling a conference line, I push a real button with some physical feedback so I know when I clicked it without having to take the phone away from my ear to check the screen. It has a red button and a green button for answering/declining calls, and they always do the same thing whether the phone is locked or not when the call comes in.
With a big, high-res screen and a small selection of physical buttons, as on the Desire, it ought to be possible to do much the same things but more easily, but the manual makes it sound like the simple functions I mentioned above all take several clicks through tedious menus to get anything done. Is it just assumed that everyone will activate/download apps to customize the home screen extensively? I'm hoping to get an extended test of one of these phones when my local store has more of them in stock in the next few days, so if you can point me in the direction of what I should look for here, I'd appreciate that.
What swung it was Engadget riffing about integration with external services like Twitter/Facebook/etc - goes completely against Apple's principles, whereas Android actively works to do this.
I've been reading up on the Desire for the past couple of days, and funnily enough this is what really swung me against the phone. I don't want lots of social network integration. I don't want lots of integration with Google's cloud services. I deliberately avoid putting lots of data in the cloud and relying on third party services normally, so why would I want my phone to do this?
I want a phone that, first and foremost, makes calls well (good quality mic/speakers, simple controls for things like muting and conferencing people in). It also needs to handle messages well (good keyboard, good management of past messages, easy and ad-free integration with my e-mail systems) and manage contacts well (good address book, speed dialling).
There are plenty of other PDA features I wound find useful on a mobile device, but I want them to be generic and open. I'd like a calendar/alarms, but it's not worth much if it only syncs with MS formats and Google Calendar. Apps to do things like time zone conversion would be useful in my case, and a web browser is a useful addition and completely generic, but I don't need the bloat of lots of preconfigured apps on day one that tie in with specific services I will never use. (I appreciate that others would find this useful, and the right phones for me and for them will be different.)
Unfortunately, almost anything running Android seems (unsurprisingly, given Google's involvement) to be heavily biased towards lots of on-line working that I don't want. The iPhone is a non-starter because of Apple's closed system and their apparent willingness to append their own marketing to messages (hardly a professional image for a work phone!). So I'm back to looking at the established PDA brands again.
That's too bad, because the screen on the Desire looks really impressive, at least for those who don't want to use it in bright sunlight. It seems like small format mobile devices are finally pushing the envelope for high resolution full colour display technology in a way that only things like high-end medical imaging have done in the past. When they make a 24" widescreen version of that AMOLED screen, sign me up.:-)
I see where you're coming from, but it doesn't seem such a bad thing to presume that any personally identifiable information should be encrypted by default and then consider when exemptions are necessary (rather than merely convenient) for a system to function properly.
For example, there is no technical reason that we could not encrypt almost everything in an e-mail, with nothing but the actual addresses required for delivery and error handling sent in the clear. There is no reason we could not digitally sign e-mails as standard so anyone can verify that a message claiming to come from a certain source really did. The world would be a better place if we put the nice, trusting protocols of yesterdecade to rest and created a secure communications medium for this century. Of course this would require a lot more cooperation in the industry than just one state in the US putting its foot down, but hey, we built the Internet.
By the way, I'm not in the telephone book, nor is my address visible on the version of the local electoral register that is widely published. A random stranger would have to go to significant manual effort to look me up without already knowing who I was, and to very significant effort to look up lots of people if everyone chose to opt out. This is no great loss: I can't remember the last time I used the phone book to look up an individual person's number, and these resources are basically just tools to help marketing firms spam you more these days. As I said before, a lot of personal data just gets collected by default today because companies can, and anything that reduces that effect is only going to make life more pleasant for most people anyway.
I'm not sure I understand your point. I don't want any company to be able to brush those fines under the table. I want the fines to be significant enough to present a serious threat to the company's financial well-being and the livelihoods of its directors. That way, they might pay some attention and fix the problem, instead of trying to hide it and pay off the few damaged parties who have enough legal knowledge and resources to bring a case for compensation.
Sure, the fine could run to millions. But it will only do so if thousands of people are at risk of spending months of their lives clearing up a mess of someone else's causing. As I said, the fine is still nothing next to that kind of damage.
Excuse me, but this is not correct. I'm a data service provider/developer in the EU, and we do NOT have any laws mandating that we keep user data on a server encrypted.
Excuse me, but I didn't say you did.:-)
There are, however, laws that limit what kinds of personal data may be collected, how it may be used, etc. They don't go into specifics, but it is a basic principle that the data must be handled securely. There is also a general rule that any personal data may not be exported to another jurisdiction that does not provide enough safeguards to meet EU standards.
That would be highly ridiculous; it would mean we'd basically have to encrypt *everything*, which would raise the hardware cost to a point where we could no longer compete with non-EU services
You don't have to compete with non-EU services that don't provide a similar level of protection. It is illegal for any EU business to export personal data to such a service anyway.
We're not being cavalier about this, we're just shocked that something like what we're currently reading could actually become a law. Make the people who actually are careless pay for their idiocy, and use that to set an example, but don't impose idiotic restraints on the rest of the industry.
The problem with this approach is that we've been trying it for a few years, and it isn't working. Poor data handling practice is widespread, identity theft is currently the fastest growing "white collar" crime in this country, and yet the number of effective sanctions imposed on companies (or governments) who were careless is very small.
Ultimately, no amount of money paid in compensation is going to give an individual back the weeks or months of their lives that were ruined due to identity theft, damaged credit rating, or other similarly disruptive experiences anyway, so prevention is essential. The industry had its chance, and it blew it. More significant deterrents appear to be required to force responsible behaviour, so heavy fines it is.
As with any widespread regulation, it is regrettable that this might impose an additional burden on those who did behave responsibly anyway. At least if they really were behaving responsibly and not risking leaks, they will never have to pay any fines. They might see an increase in their IT running costs, but amongst all the howls of protest from DB and system admins in this discussion, I haven't yet seen anyone explain why those costs would be prohibitively high.
You probably know more about the details here than I do, so can help on this point? How does requiring encryption of the physical storage for databases impose a burden that wouldn't be necessary in some form anyway to ensure that data does not leak when the business disposes of those boxes? If the argument is just that there should be physical security to prevent removal for the working life of the drives and then a process to ensure that drives are properly wiped/destroyed before disposal at the end of their life, then again, I understand the principle but in practice the existing incentives clearly aren't sufficient because the amount of sensitive data ripped from old hard drives is vast.
I bow to your wider experience. I have worked at a range of European companies of varying sizes and in a couple of countries, but obviously any personal anecdotes I have only represent a drop in the ocean.
Those companies I have worked for did seem to be aware of their legal obligations and took steps to comply, but I wouldn't be at all surprised to find that others did not. That is, after all, why I believe that a threat of a substantial financial penalties for failing to do things properly is appropriate.
I'm sorry, but I strongly disagree with your position on almost every count.
Firstly, your point about different territories with different rules is fundamentally flawed. Many places — all of Europe, for example — already have stronger data protection laws than most of the US. This causes no earth-shattering problem with compliance. Large companies keep the data they can't legally export within their European offices. Smaller companies just outsource things like payment collection to services that guarantee any personal data will be processed securely and not transferred outside of EU borders. They were going to outsource it anyway, so the only people who lose out are services that want to handle sensitive information but can't make the same guarantees as others about security, whose flawed business model just became obsolete.
Secondly, I think you (and several other DB admins and such in this Slashdot discussion) are far, far too casual about this subject. In my country, we have had a string of mismanagement or outright leaks of sensitive personal data in recent months. The number of people who have wound up losing money or suffering long-term hassle just to set their records straight is absurd, and rising every day. A $5,000 fine per leak is nothing compared to the hassle and indirect costs of someone suffering identity theft, even if they get everything put right in the end and recover their direct losses. To one side, it's several months of hell to get your identity back. To the other, it's a mere business expense, a footnote on page 172 of the annual financial statement.
In my not so humble opinion, both business and governments need to learn this lesson, and I have absolutely nothing against sending a business to the wall if it collects personal information but fails to secure it properly. We have allowed more-or-less unrestricted collection of personal data for a few years, easily long enough for the industry to gets its act together. The result has just been organisations hoarding personal information about people for reasons that are entirely self-serving, pretty much all of whom could just die and make the world a better place anyway, and the string of screw-ups I mentioned before from many organisations that do have a legitimate reason to hold that sort of data.
It is time for organisations that think this is OK to be taught otherwise, and frankly these fines are on the light side. I would have preferred an additional statutory duty of care with unlimited liability to cover the cost of putting right any damage done to an individual following a leak. Go ahead and reevaluate your security protocols and whether it is really impossible to do these things or just inconvenient/expensive, when the other side of the inequality you're testing looks like an 8 on its side instead of a $10 per person class action settlement.
I understand your argument, but I think it suffers from one fundamental flaw: almost any law relies on the understanding and acceptance of the majority of people and could be broken by any given individual. It is the social contract between us that prevents this, not the ability to enforce laws rigorously on a massive scale.
By your argument, any possessions are pretty much pointless, because it is relatively easy to steal from someone if you really want to. It is a combination of ethics and the threat of punishment if caught that prevents most people from doing it and allows the legal system to work on those who still do so.
Copyright is no different. A significant number of people don't follow the law because they just don't care, but most people don't understand it, or worse, think they understand it but haven't actually thought through the economics and the implications of allowing open-ended copying, or worse still, agree that what they are doing is wrong from an ethical point of view but do it because they think they will get away with it. If the underlying principle is reasonable and the implementation fair, then most of these things can be overcome through education and fair but strong enforcement, as with things like drink-driving or smoking in public places, both of which used to be considered the norm in my country but are now widely considered antisocial.
Of course, the implementation of copyright in law today is far from its original principle and has been horribly corrupted. That certainly won't stand if mass enforcement efforts begin, because it will immediately become a significant political issue. But I would like to know what the consensus would be if we reverted the law to reflect the intended spirit of copyright and then presented a short, unbiased presentation to everyone so they could see the reasoning. I suspect if the law were reformed so that the people doing the real work were the principal beneficiaries, most people would support that, and it's the corruption of the idea of copyright to benefit the middlemen that is the real problem.
Sure, and indeed one of my favourite quotations of all time is Margaret Mead's:
"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."
Unfortunately, Mead didn't specify a time frame, and while I'm pretty sure she was right in the long run, I don't think a few students ripping songs are quite in the same league as Rosa Parks.
No, I think they will sacrifice the relatively free and open Internet we have today in favour of a system they control with compulsory censorship and/or supervision, combined with laws that allow for major punishment of those who commit minor infringements without the usual safeguards and due process.
If you don't think this can happen because "the Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it", I would remind you that:
The biggest international copyright negotiations since the WIPO treaties are currently underway, in secret, and clearly influenced by special interest groups.
Several countries, including the US and several in the EU, have recently passed consumer-hostile legislation imposing increasingly draconian measures for copyright infringement regardless of the scale or actual damages caused.
Several countries have already introduced mandatory filtering/censorship capabilities, usually under the heading "think of the children" but that doesn't matter because the technology is there.
Several countries already have their own "Great Firewall" and more are lining up to provide it, so expecting that you can keep things like P2P hubs or Wikileaks in foreign countries without such laws and maintain the links to them may be unwise.
Laws are being proposed to mandate spyware, which you can bet will also restrict the use of "dubious" alternative systems like Linux and OSS if they get passed, but they may not matter because everyone from Microsoft to Apple is already sucking up to Big Media and locking down their platforms voluntarily anyway.
And of course, there are a very small number of very large service providers who ultimately run the show, and it is relatively easy to coerce such organisations into doing the government's bidding in all these ways, as we saw with, for example, the whole illegal wiretapping scandal in the US.
This sucks, and it's completely undemocratic, and it's completely unethical. But it's also the reality, and it's going to be for the immediate future, until enough people in the real world get upset that it becomes a big enough issue to register at election time and the political climate starts to change.
And the legal profession will fight for any side; they're hired guns in this, not interested parties.
Sure they are. And more of them have been hired by any one of the big record labels than by all the geeks in the world, and they are on retainers, and they have all the time in the world to make your life a misery, and as it stands today the legal system is so one-sided in some places (notably including the US) that this is sufficient for them to win.
Excessive use of antibiotics just gets you antibiotic resistant strains.
Sure, and if you have an incurable disease affecting one limb, as a last resort you amputate rather than allow the disease to endanger the entire system.
If you think the pirate community is going to overcome the entire weight of the legal profession, the political players and the big money spinners through sheer force of arrogant denial, then I suspect some time in the next two or three years, you are going to learn a painful lesson. I'm only sorry that quite a few innocent people are going to be deeply inconvenienced when the remaining healthy tissue in the limb is sacrificed to be sure the disease is contained.
In the long run, of course copyright in its current form will have to evolve. That is already recognised and as the political climate adapts to this reality the balance will slowly but surely swing back to something more reasonable. But first, I expect there are going to be some nasty, nasty laws passed, and some horrendous and high profile punishments handed down to people as examples, and a lot of people are going to get scary letters and realise that they aren't as safely anonymous and immune to consequences as they thought, and a lot of mostly young people are going to get the point.
I suspect that regardless of the ethics or practical merits of copyright reform, such a shock would be no bad thing in the long run. We have a generation growing up today who have never known a world without the Internet and mobile phones and social networks and P2P. In far too many cases, they have a sense of assumed entitlement, a lack of awareness of privacy, poor manners, problems with social interactions in the real world, an obvious dependence on technology instead of self-reliance, an assumption that the way to do well academically is to cheat on-line instead of actually learning stuff, poor fitness and health because they spend more time playing with electronics and less time playing sport, and a whole bunch of other unhealthy trends. If this continues, that whole generation is going to be royally screwed, but because they are effectively children thrown into an adult world before they are fully prepared for the consequences, they are like the frogs that haven't noticed the water around them boiling. The kind of discussion about copyright here is just one symptom of a greater malaise, and the longer it goes untreated, the worse the prognosis becomes.
It's sad that your conception of music is so small that you think it necessarily has to involve "dancing around".
It's not worth debating rationally with a lot of the posters in this thread. They are just trying to justify ripping off the work of others without giving anything back to those who did the hard work, so they don't have to feel guilty. Recently, they have latched onto this whole live performance thing, but of course there is all that diversity you mentioned, and the live performance argument doesn't work for movies, software, or indeed just about anything protected by copyright other than certain types of music. It's like the pirates' previous favourite straw man, the duration of copyright, where someone would claim they were somehow protesting because Disney bought copyright extension until doomsday, while ignoring the fact that a huge proportion of the stuff on P2P networks is new releases or prerelease material and relatively little of it would have been out of copyright even if the protection only lasted 5–10 years.
The sad thing is that in the next thread over, you'll find the same sort of person arguing vehemently about how unreasonable it is to change the law so there is a burden on service providers whose systems are widely used for these illegal activities to monitor their customers, and in the thread after that, you'll find more sensible people upset about draconian measures to have ISPs forced to cut off alleged copyright infringers after three strikes because from an outside perspective that's a crazily disproportionate penalty to impose and even worse without following due process first. Meanwhile, though no doubt Big Media aren't losing as much as they claim in their fantasy maths, they are still watching millions of people flagrantly break the law and being told they can't do anything about it because of legal technicalities.
A certification is proof of expertise that you can show without your present employer having to know you're looking for work
Does anyone really still believe that a certificate is proof of anything other than having paid some money for a piece of paper? A few might have genuinely demanding standards applied in the test, but IME most of them are just an excuse so CYA managers who can't judge real skill levels and the value of different candidates' past experiences can point to something to justify hiring someone who didn't work out.
But the training is only worth anything, from a purely financial perspective, if it tranlates into a higher income. If you provide training for someone but don't then bump their salary to match their new skills afterwards, sure, they might leave for someone who will, and that's why you have a clause in the contract to protect your investment. For a $10k training course, obviously a period of more than six months is reasonable before the employee can leave without giving anything back.
Of course, you'd have to question the business sense of anyone who paid $10k for any single training course/certification in this industry anyway, but that is a different matter.:-)
There is certainly a difference approach to paying for treatment, which I'm sure does explain some of the discrepancy in overheads.
That said, for any contractor, there is still the question of insurance against lost income: if you're unlucky, you might have to reduce or stop work for an extended period due to illness, or your capacity might be reduced by a disability following an accident. Even little things like losing two weeks for jury duty can be a factor. There is also life insurance to look after the family if the worst happens. Typically these burdens are carried by the employer here in the UK, but if you're freelance you have to look after them yourself.
Of course, quite a few people dp take out private health insurance in the UK as well, since it typically does provide a significantly better service than the NHS if you're unfortunate enough to need it. Again, that is a benefit some employers offer in its entirety or at a subsidised rate, but contractors need to pay for themselves.
Sure, I work freelance in the UK, and give or take our different systems of regulation and taxation, I have broadly similar concerns.
However, the bottom line is that I expect to make a similar amount of take-home income after costs and overheads this year as I did working as a full-time employee, maybe a bit more if things go well. Meanwhile, my working arrangements are much more pleasant in just about every respect: I make my own decisions, I can set up my work environment in whatever way I find most effective, I don't work unpaid hours, etc. All my clients require is a working relationship that generates good results, and that's
fine with me.
Of course, there is a little added stress in terms of the management side, dealing with finances and contracts and all that jazz. However, I've found that in practice the overheads in both time and money are far less than I expected. I do pay out a few hundred each year to get my contracts properly vetted by a real lawyer and to have an account prepare the serious paperwork and advise me on when and how to fill in the minor stuff, and this also takes out a few half-days so I'm not earning during those hours. I do pay a bit for professional insurance policies and membership of certain professional groups that offer me useful benefits. I do have to pay for my own equipment, including computer hardware and software that is a different spec to what I would buy if it was just for personal use. I do have to earn more on work days to make up for not being paid on holidays or sent on company-funded training or whatever. I'm not sure my overheads reach the 40–50% you're talking about, mine will probably be more like 20–25% this year, but I just factor those into the rates I charge.
I suppose I have been lucky, in that I seem to have found good clients and good professional contacts fairly easily. Presumably not everyone is so fortunate. But from my own experience, I don't know why I didn't do this years ago. Perhaps more significantly, looking at the kinds of behaviour many of my friends seem to accept from their employers, which I would describe as abusive, I don't understand why many more people don't make the same jump I did. If someone is good at their job in this sort of industry, if they are organised and multi-skilled enough to handle some modest overheads without the stress getting them down, and most importantly if the lifestyle would suit them, I don't understand why they wouldn't make the switch. For these reasons, it's not for everyone, but I figure in a lot of cases it's just lack of awareness and concern about the unknown that holds people back.
How do you keep an employee from taking that training you just paid for and leaving for what the employee sees as greener pastures?
Over here (in the UK), it seems common to agree that if an employee leaves within, say, six months of taking company-funded training, then they pay back a proportion of the cost depending on how early they leave. It doesn't lock anyone into anything but guarantees that a company either gets some return on its investment or gets its money back.
It is far easier requiring a certified new hire than to go to the expense of training someone who will only leave after they are trained.
Well, I don't accept your premise, but even if I did, why would someone suddenly want to leave just because they completed one training course? If an employer has that little appeal to their staff, they have bigger problems than just whether to run a training course or not...
There is a much simpler argument for not replacing people all the time, too: hiring is expensive. The total administrative cost of recruiting a single member of staff can easily be the equivalent of paying that staffer's salary for a year, once you include the costs for HR, legal, time lost by senior staff reading CVs and conducting interviews, agency/referral fees, the administrative burden of filing whatever employment/tax paperwork are required in your jurisdiction, inefficiency for maybe several months before the new guy gets up to full speed...
No sane employer would voluntarily have high staff turnover. It's just bad business.
The thing I don't understand is why people continue to be employees once you start crossing those lines.
Employment is a two-way relationship. The employer takes on the risks while the employee gets a fixed income, the employer provides the work environment and carries the other costs, but in return the employer gets to keep any profits beyond the agreed fixed payments.
In industries like manufacturing, transportation or services (of the electricity/gas/water/etc. kind) there is no way any one person could do things on their own. Here, an employment relationship as part of a larger organisation has the additional advantage of being practical, where co-ordinating hundreds or thousands of freelance workers with individual commercial arrangements might be too much of an administrative burden.
However, in creative or knowledge-based industries such as programming, sales, marketing or training, that is no barrier. It is relatively easy for one person, or a small group of people, to set out on their own and provide the same services that they could as employees of someone else's business. For larger projects, there are few overheads in dividing up the project and assigning each part to an individual or small team; this is, after all, what would probably happen in a large company doing everything in-house anyway.
In these industries, the workers gain relatively little benefit from an employer's physical resources and scale, yet they will still wind up leaving most of the money they generate for the employer. The only reason for such people to accept an employment relationship in these industries is the risk trade-off: an employer takes on the risk and all the general costs of running the show, but in return the employee only takes a fixed salary even if the business makes a lot of profit.
In the US, AIUI, there is relatively little employee protection in some states anyway because of "at will" employment and limited legal rights for employees. So the only thing left is providing a ready-made work environment and covering the associated costs and administrative burdens.
Once employees start having to sort out their own equipment anyway... Well, why would they still be employees instead of going freelance, forming their own business (perhaps with a few others with complementary skills) where they will directly take a share of the profits, or signing up as contractors (and with contractors' rates) instead of as employees?
I think I understand what you're saying, but perhaps your examples are unfortunate. I have seen little evidence that either non-competes or NDAs do bring any commercial benefits to a business.
Broad non-competes aren't enforceable in many jurisdictions anyway.
As for NDAs, they're rather like patents: the original idea might have been reasonable, but in practice they are mostly just a legal tool that the big guys use to hammer the little guys. Try getting any serious VC or angel investor to sign up to one before you pitch your idea and see how far you get. Meanwhile, look at how any business that has had a "meteoric rise" conducted itself. To pick some from the software business, did Google or Facebook rely on NDAs, for example? Probably not, because as those investors I mentioned know, there are plenty of good ideas in the world, but what really counts is having the will and the ability to execute them well. And if you have a good idea and you're executing it well, it's unlikely that a few details leaking out is going to pose a serious threat, because by the time anyone else understands their significance and acts on them, you've already moved on to the next stage anyway.
And you probably appreciate that and in return you're doing the certification. Everyone gets something they feel is valuable out of it. That's the way it's supposed to work.
Meanwhile, companies who expect staff to spend their own time and money on compulsory company-related activities that weren't part of the original deal are likely to find that, regardless of the legal position, the reality is high employee turnover, few staff having the qualities the company is looking for, and ultimately a less successful business. That is also the way it's supposed to work.
Apparently not, at least not for the debating part. That's rather the objection to shoving things through during "washing up": it's more about backroom deals between the leaders where the opposition let the government have their bills but only with their pet concessions than it is about allowing the elected MPs do their jobs and legislate, because the number of MPs available is tiny (they all just learned they're about to lose their jobs and have to reapply...) and the time allowed it absurd ("debating" dozens of pages and hundreds of provisions in an hour or two).
The actual vote had much higher turn-out, though it was still only 189 votes to 47 out of more than 600 MPs, but any such votes during washing up appear to be formalities, given that anyone who goes against their party whip in an embarrassing way at the start of a general election campaign is probably ending their careers by inviting deselection.
Slashdot Mirror
Without reference to any specific people who may or may not be coming into our country, we in the UK have a serious problem with immigration generally. This is primarily because under EU rules we can no longer turn away a citizen from any other EU nation, and the EU is expanding to include nations with vastly different economic strength to its original members. This creates a bias in the direction of population flow from the poorer nations to the richer ones that is ultimately harmful to both, because it strains the resources and capacity of the wealthier nations while draining precisely the kind of skilled/talented/experienced people who would be needed in their home countries to help rapid development of their own economies.
The UK has been particularly badly hit by this for a number of reasons, including having a relatively high population density already and having relatively poor border controls and tracking of legal vs. illegal immigrants (ironically, considering that we're the ones who actually have a clear and defensible border). The same basic economic imbalance applies, to some degree, to many of the EU member states today, but the other factors mean the UK is also an attractive destination for those who have no intention of working legitimately and those who can find an excuse to come here from outside the EU.
The final nail in the coffin is that the strongest voices against immigration in the UK today tend to come from the far right, but the political parties with those views tend to be full of dubious characters you wouldn't necessarily want to support in general even if you agreed with their stance on immigration. This tends to make immigration a taboo subject: it's the political third rail, mention it without choosing your words extremely carefully and tomorrow you're "obviously" a racist according to half the papers and most other political parties. I'm sure the Pope would be very proud of our lack of transparency, moral absolutes and absence of reasoned debate. <sigh>
The reason that we avoid encrypting all e-mail messages is because it adds additional complexity and security which isn't necessary.
And that assumption is why we need harsh legal penalties to punish those who risk leaking sensitive personal data.
Why, exactly, can't we encrypt all e-mail? If we had proper encryption and signing of e-mails, the threat of virus infection (not to mention spam, phishing, and all the other junk that represents most of the e-mail traffic flying around today) would be dramatically reduced, and with it the burden on ISP infrastructures.
We could make public keys for both encryption and digital signatures as ubiquitous as e-mail addresses themselves, and use them as routinely as HTTPS, SSH or SFTP instead of HTTP, telnet and FTP. There is absolutely no technical problem with this. And I don't know where you get the idea that people would have to carry their public keys around everywhere: there are any number of mechanisms that could be used if you just installed keys on the mail servers that would be much more secure than anything we have today, and that's just the easy bit.
What would be the advantage of the extra layer of security for most people?
Their communications couldn't be routinely intercepted by everyone from abusive authorities to the 17-year-old work experience kid doing testing at the ISP.
There is no reason that everything has to be encrypted just because we can do it.
Sure, there is: most non-geeks assume that things like e-mail are private anyway, and the current situation is misleading them.
Thanks, that's really helpful.
Thanks for the notes.
I guess what bugged me as I read through the Desire manual was that it seems like much of the basic phone functionality has been shoved a bit more deeply into the UI to make way for the pretty toys. On my trusty Nokia, I can speed dial by pushing and holding a single button. If I want to mute my phone while I'm calling a conference line, I push a real button with some physical feedback so I know when I clicked it without having to take the phone away from my ear to check the screen. It has a red button and a green button for answering/declining calls, and they always do the same thing whether the phone is locked or not when the call comes in.
With a big, high-res screen and a small selection of physical buttons, as on the Desire, it ought to be possible to do much the same things but more easily, but the manual makes it sound like the simple functions I mentioned above all take several clicks through tedious menus to get anything done. Is it just assumed that everyone will activate/download apps to customize the home screen extensively? I'm hoping to get an extended test of one of these phones when my local store has more of them in stock in the next few days, so if you can point me in the direction of what I should look for here, I'd appreciate that.
What swung it was Engadget riffing about integration with external services like Twitter/Facebook/etc - goes completely against Apple's principles, whereas Android actively works to do this.
I've been reading up on the Desire for the past couple of days, and funnily enough this is what really swung me against the phone. I don't want lots of social network integration. I don't want lots of integration with Google's cloud services. I deliberately avoid putting lots of data in the cloud and relying on third party services normally, so why would I want my phone to do this?
I want a phone that, first and foremost, makes calls well (good quality mic/speakers, simple controls for things like muting and conferencing people in). It also needs to handle messages well (good keyboard, good management of past messages, easy and ad-free integration with my e-mail systems) and manage contacts well (good address book, speed dialling).
There are plenty of other PDA features I wound find useful on a mobile device, but I want them to be generic and open. I'd like a calendar/alarms, but it's not worth much if it only syncs with MS formats and Google Calendar. Apps to do things like time zone conversion would be useful in my case, and a web browser is a useful addition and completely generic, but I don't need the bloat of lots of preconfigured apps on day one that tie in with specific services I will never use. (I appreciate that others would find this useful, and the right phones for me and for them will be different.)
Unfortunately, almost anything running Android seems (unsurprisingly, given Google's involvement) to be heavily biased towards lots of on-line working that I don't want. The iPhone is a non-starter because of Apple's closed system and their apparent willingness to append their own marketing to messages (hardly a professional image for a work phone!). So I'm back to looking at the established PDA brands again.
That's too bad, because the screen on the Desire looks really impressive, at least for those who don't want to use it in bright sunlight. It seems like small format mobile devices are finally pushing the envelope for high resolution full colour display technology in a way that only things like high-end medical imaging have done in the past. When they make a 24" widescreen version of that AMOLED screen, sign me up. :-)
I see where you're coming from, but it doesn't seem such a bad thing to presume that any personally identifiable information should be encrypted by default and then consider when exemptions are necessary (rather than merely convenient) for a system to function properly.
For example, there is no technical reason that we could not encrypt almost everything in an e-mail, with nothing but the actual addresses required for delivery and error handling sent in the clear. There is no reason we could not digitally sign e-mails as standard so anyone can verify that a message claiming to come from a certain source really did. The world would be a better place if we put the nice, trusting protocols of yesterdecade to rest and created a secure communications medium for this century. Of course this would require a lot more cooperation in the industry than just one state in the US putting its foot down, but hey, we built the Internet.
By the way, I'm not in the telephone book, nor is my address visible on the version of the local electoral register that is widely published. A random stranger would have to go to significant manual effort to look me up without already knowing who I was, and to very significant effort to look up lots of people if everyone chose to opt out. This is no great loss: I can't remember the last time I used the phone book to look up an individual person's number, and these resources are basically just tools to help marketing firms spam you more these days. As I said before, a lot of personal data just gets collected by default today because companies can, and anything that reduces that effect is only going to make life more pleasant for most people anyway.
I'm not sure I understand your point. I don't want any company to be able to brush those fines under the table. I want the fines to be significant enough to present a serious threat to the company's financial well-being and the livelihoods of its directors. That way, they might pay some attention and fix the problem, instead of trying to hide it and pay off the few damaged parties who have enough legal knowledge and resources to bring a case for compensation.
Sure, the fine could run to millions. But it will only do so if thousands of people are at risk of spending months of their lives clearing up a mess of someone else's causing. As I said, the fine is still nothing next to that kind of damage.
Excuse me, but this is not correct. I'm a data service provider/developer in the EU, and we do NOT have any laws mandating that we keep user data on a server encrypted.
Excuse me, but I didn't say you did. :-)
There are, however, laws that limit what kinds of personal data may be collected, how it may be used, etc. They don't go into specifics, but it is a basic principle that the data must be handled securely. There is also a general rule that any personal data may not be exported to another jurisdiction that does not provide enough safeguards to meet EU standards.
That would be highly ridiculous; it would mean we'd basically have to encrypt *everything*, which would raise the hardware cost to a point where we could no longer compete with non-EU services
You don't have to compete with non-EU services that don't provide a similar level of protection. It is illegal for any EU business to export personal data to such a service anyway.
We're not being cavalier about this, we're just shocked that something like what we're currently reading could actually become a law. Make the people who actually are careless pay for their idiocy, and use that to set an example, but don't impose idiotic restraints on the rest of the industry.
The problem with this approach is that we've been trying it for a few years, and it isn't working. Poor data handling practice is widespread, identity theft is currently the fastest growing "white collar" crime in this country, and yet the number of effective sanctions imposed on companies (or governments) who were careless is very small.
Ultimately, no amount of money paid in compensation is going to give an individual back the weeks or months of their lives that were ruined due to identity theft, damaged credit rating, or other similarly disruptive experiences anyway, so prevention is essential. The industry had its chance, and it blew it. More significant deterrents appear to be required to force responsible behaviour, so heavy fines it is.
As with any widespread regulation, it is regrettable that this might impose an additional burden on those who did behave responsibly anyway. At least if they really were behaving responsibly and not risking leaks, they will never have to pay any fines. They might see an increase in their IT running costs, but amongst all the howls of protest from DB and system admins in this discussion, I haven't yet seen anyone explain why those costs would be prohibitively high.
You probably know more about the details here than I do, so can help on this point? How does requiring encryption of the physical storage for databases impose a burden that wouldn't be necessary in some form anyway to ensure that data does not leak when the business disposes of those boxes? If the argument is just that there should be physical security to prevent removal for the working life of the drives and then a process to ensure that drives are properly wiped/destroyed before disposal at the end of their life, then again, I understand the principle but in practice the existing incentives clearly aren't sufficient because the amount of sensitive data ripped from old hard drives is vast.
I bow to your wider experience. I have worked at a range of European companies of varying sizes and in a couple of countries, but obviously any personal anecdotes I have only represent a drop in the ocean.
Those companies I have worked for did seem to be aware of their legal obligations and took steps to comply, but I wouldn't be at all surprised to find that others did not. That is, after all, why I believe that a threat of a substantial financial penalties for failing to do things properly is appropriate.
I'm sorry, but I strongly disagree with your position on almost every count.
Firstly, your point about different territories with different rules is fundamentally flawed. Many places — all of Europe, for example — already have stronger data protection laws than most of the US. This causes no earth-shattering problem with compliance. Large companies keep the data they can't legally export within their European offices. Smaller companies just outsource things like payment collection to services that guarantee any personal data will be processed securely and not transferred outside of EU borders. They were going to outsource it anyway, so the only people who lose out are services that want to handle sensitive information but can't make the same guarantees as others about security, whose flawed business model just became obsolete.
Secondly, I think you (and several other DB admins and such in this Slashdot discussion) are far, far too casual about this subject. In my country, we have had a string of mismanagement or outright leaks of sensitive personal data in recent months. The number of people who have wound up losing money or suffering long-term hassle just to set their records straight is absurd, and rising every day. A $5,000 fine per leak is nothing compared to the hassle and indirect costs of someone suffering identity theft, even if they get everything put right in the end and recover their direct losses. To one side, it's several months of hell to get your identity back. To the other, it's a mere business expense, a footnote on page 172 of the annual financial statement.
In my not so humble opinion, both business and governments need to learn this lesson, and I have absolutely nothing against sending a business to the wall if it collects personal information but fails to secure it properly. We have allowed more-or-less unrestricted collection of personal data for a few years, easily long enough for the industry to gets its act together. The result has just been organisations hoarding personal information about people for reasons that are entirely self-serving, pretty much all of whom could just die and make the world a better place anyway, and the string of screw-ups I mentioned before from many organisations that do have a legitimate reason to hold that sort of data.
It is time for organisations that think this is OK to be taught otherwise, and frankly these fines are on the light side. I would have preferred an additional statutory duty of care with unlimited liability to cover the cost of putting right any damage done to an individual following a leak. Go ahead and reevaluate your security protocols and whether it is really impossible to do these things or just inconvenient/expensive, when the other side of the inequality you're testing looks like an 8 on its side instead of a $10 per person class action settlement.
I understand your argument, but I think it suffers from one fundamental flaw: almost any law relies on the understanding and acceptance of the majority of people and could be broken by any given individual. It is the social contract between us that prevents this, not the ability to enforce laws rigorously on a massive scale.
By your argument, any possessions are pretty much pointless, because it is relatively easy to steal from someone if you really want to. It is a combination of ethics and the threat of punishment if caught that prevents most people from doing it and allows the legal system to work on those who still do so.
Copyright is no different. A significant number of people don't follow the law because they just don't care, but most people don't understand it, or worse, think they understand it but haven't actually thought through the economics and the implications of allowing open-ended copying, or worse still, agree that what they are doing is wrong from an ethical point of view but do it because they think they will get away with it. If the underlying principle is reasonable and the implementation fair, then most of these things can be overcome through education and fair but strong enforcement, as with things like drink-driving or smoking in public places, both of which used to be considered the norm in my country but are now widely considered antisocial.
Of course, the implementation of copyright in law today is far from its original principle and has been horribly corrupted. That certainly won't stand if mass enforcement efforts begin, because it will immediately become a significant political issue. But I would like to know what the consensus would be if we reverted the law to reflect the intended spirit of copyright and then presented a short, unbiased presentation to everyone so they could see the reasoning. I suspect if the law were reformed so that the people doing the real work were the principal beneficiaries, most people would support that, and it's the corruption of the idea of copyright to benefit the middlemen that is the real problem.
Sure, and indeed one of my favourite quotations of all time is Margaret Mead's:
"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."
Unfortunately, Mead didn't specify a time frame, and while I'm pretty sure she was right in the long run, I don't think a few students ripping songs are quite in the same league as Rosa Parks.
No, I think they will sacrifice the relatively free and open Internet we have today in favour of a system they control with compulsory censorship and/or supervision, combined with laws that allow for major punishment of those who commit minor infringements without the usual safeguards and due process.
If you don't think this can happen because "the Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it", I would remind you that:
This sucks, and it's completely undemocratic, and it's completely unethical. But it's also the reality, and it's going to be for the immediate future, until enough people in the real world get upset that it becomes a big enough issue to register at election time and the political climate starts to change.
And the legal profession will fight for any side; they're hired guns in this, not interested parties.
Sure they are. And more of them have been hired by any one of the big record labels than by all the geeks in the world, and they are on retainers, and they have all the time in the world to make your life a misery, and as it stands today the legal system is so one-sided in some places (notably including the US) that this is sufficient for them to win.
Excessive use of antibiotics just gets you antibiotic resistant strains.
Sure, and if you have an incurable disease affecting one limb, as a last resort you amputate rather than allow the disease to endanger the entire system.
If you think the pirate community is going to overcome the entire weight of the legal profession, the political players and the big money spinners through sheer force of arrogant denial, then I suspect some time in the next two or three years, you are going to learn a painful lesson. I'm only sorry that quite a few innocent people are going to be deeply inconvenienced when the remaining healthy tissue in the limb is sacrificed to be sure the disease is contained.
In the long run, of course copyright in its current form will have to evolve. That is already recognised and as the political climate adapts to this reality the balance will slowly but surely swing back to something more reasonable. But first, I expect there are going to be some nasty, nasty laws passed, and some horrendous and high profile punishments handed down to people as examples, and a lot of people are going to get scary letters and realise that they aren't as safely anonymous and immune to consequences as they thought, and a lot of mostly young people are going to get the point.
I suspect that regardless of the ethics or practical merits of copyright reform, such a shock would be no bad thing in the long run. We have a generation growing up today who have never known a world without the Internet and mobile phones and social networks and P2P. In far too many cases, they have a sense of assumed entitlement, a lack of awareness of privacy, poor manners, problems with social interactions in the real world, an obvious dependence on technology instead of self-reliance, an assumption that the way to do well academically is to cheat on-line instead of actually learning stuff, poor fitness and health because they spend more time playing with electronics and less time playing sport, and a whole bunch of other unhealthy trends. If this continues, that whole generation is going to be royally screwed, but because they are effectively children thrown into an adult world before they are fully prepared for the consequences, they are like the frogs that haven't noticed the water around them boiling. The kind of discussion about copyright here is just one symptom of a greater malaise, and the longer it goes untreated, the worse the prognosis becomes.
It's sad that your conception of music is so small that you think it necessarily has to involve "dancing around".
It's not worth debating rationally with a lot of the posters in this thread. They are just trying to justify ripping off the work of others without giving anything back to those who did the hard work, so they don't have to feel guilty. Recently, they have latched onto this whole live performance thing, but of course there is all that diversity you mentioned, and the live performance argument doesn't work for movies, software, or indeed just about anything protected by copyright other than certain types of music. It's like the pirates' previous favourite straw man, the duration of copyright, where someone would claim they were somehow protesting because Disney bought copyright extension until doomsday, while ignoring the fact that a huge proportion of the stuff on P2P networks is new releases or prerelease material and relatively little of it would have been out of copyright even if the protection only lasted 5–10 years.
The sad thing is that in the next thread over, you'll find the same sort of person arguing vehemently about how unreasonable it is to change the law so there is a burden on service providers whose systems are widely used for these illegal activities to monitor their customers, and in the thread after that, you'll find more sensible people upset about draconian measures to have ISPs forced to cut off alleged copyright infringers after three strikes because from an outside perspective that's a crazily disproportionate penalty to impose and even worse without following due process first. Meanwhile, though no doubt Big Media aren't losing as much as they claim in their fantasy maths, they are still watching millions of people flagrantly break the law and being told they can't do anything about it because of legal technicalities.
A certification is proof of expertise that you can show without your present employer having to know you're looking for work
Does anyone really still believe that a certificate is proof of anything other than having paid some money for a piece of paper? A few might have genuinely demanding standards applied in the test, but IME most of them are just an excuse so CYA managers who can't judge real skill levels and the value of different candidates' past experiences can point to something to justify hiring someone who didn't work out.
But the training is only worth anything, from a purely financial perspective, if it tranlates into a higher income. If you provide training for someone but don't then bump their salary to match their new skills afterwards, sure, they might leave for someone who will, and that's why you have a clause in the contract to protect your investment. For a $10k training course, obviously a period of more than six months is reasonable before the employee can leave without giving anything back.
Of course, you'd have to question the business sense of anyone who paid $10k for any single training course/certification in this industry anyway, but that is a different matter. :-)
There is certainly a difference approach to paying for treatment, which I'm sure does explain some of the discrepancy in overheads.
That said, for any contractor, there is still the question of insurance against lost income: if you're unlucky, you might have to reduce or stop work for an extended period due to illness, or your capacity might be reduced by a disability following an accident. Even little things like losing two weeks for jury duty can be a factor. There is also life insurance to look after the family if the worst happens. Typically these burdens are carried by the employer here in the UK, but if you're freelance you have to look after them yourself.
Of course, quite a few people dp take out private health insurance in the UK as well, since it typically does provide a significantly better service than the NHS if you're unfortunate enough to need it. Again, that is a benefit some employers offer in its entirety or at a subsidised rate, but contractors need to pay for themselves.
Sure, I work freelance in the UK, and give or take our different systems of regulation and taxation, I have broadly similar concerns.
However, the bottom line is that I expect to make a similar amount of take-home income after costs and overheads this year as I did working as a full-time employee, maybe a bit more if things go well. Meanwhile, my working arrangements are much more pleasant in just about every respect: I make my own decisions, I can set up my work environment in whatever way I find most effective, I don't work unpaid hours, etc. All my clients require is a working relationship that generates good results, and that's fine with me.
Of course, there is a little added stress in terms of the management side, dealing with finances and contracts and all that jazz. However, I've found that in practice the overheads in both time and money are far less than I expected. I do pay out a few hundred each year to get my contracts properly vetted by a real lawyer and to have an account prepare the serious paperwork and advise me on when and how to fill in the minor stuff, and this also takes out a few half-days so I'm not earning during those hours. I do pay a bit for professional insurance policies and membership of certain professional groups that offer me useful benefits. I do have to pay for my own equipment, including computer hardware and software that is a different spec to what I would buy if it was just for personal use. I do have to earn more on work days to make up for not being paid on holidays or sent on company-funded training or whatever. I'm not sure my overheads reach the 40–50% you're talking about, mine will probably be more like 20–25% this year, but I just factor those into the rates I charge.
I suppose I have been lucky, in that I seem to have found good clients and good professional contacts fairly easily. Presumably not everyone is so fortunate. But from my own experience, I don't know why I didn't do this years ago. Perhaps more significantly, looking at the kinds of behaviour many of my friends seem to accept from their employers, which I would describe as abusive, I don't understand why many more people don't make the same jump I did. If someone is good at their job in this sort of industry, if they are organised and multi-skilled enough to handle some modest overheads without the stress getting them down, and most importantly if the lifestyle would suit them, I don't understand why they wouldn't make the switch. For these reasons, it's not for everyone, but I figure in a lot of cases it's just lack of awareness and concern about the unknown that holds people back.
How do you keep an employee from taking that training you just paid for and leaving for what the employee sees as greener pastures?
Over here (in the UK), it seems common to agree that if an employee leaves within, say, six months of taking company-funded training, then they pay back a proportion of the cost depending on how early they leave. It doesn't lock anyone into anything but guarantees that a company either gets some return on its investment or gets its money back.
It is far easier requiring a certified new hire than to go to the expense of training someone who will only leave after they are trained.
Well, I don't accept your premise, but even if I did, why would someone suddenly want to leave just because they completed one training course? If an employer has that little appeal to their staff, they have bigger problems than just whether to run a training course or not...
There is a much simpler argument for not replacing people all the time, too: hiring is expensive. The total administrative cost of recruiting a single member of staff can easily be the equivalent of paying that staffer's salary for a year, once you include the costs for HR, legal, time lost by senior staff reading CVs and conducting interviews, agency/referral fees, the administrative burden of filing whatever employment/tax paperwork are required in your jurisdiction, inefficiency for maybe several months before the new guy gets up to full speed...
No sane employer would voluntarily have high staff turnover. It's just bad business.
The thing I don't understand is why people continue to be employees once you start crossing those lines.
Employment is a two-way relationship. The employer takes on the risks while the employee gets a fixed income, the employer provides the work environment and carries the other costs, but in return the employer gets to keep any profits beyond the agreed fixed payments.
In industries like manufacturing, transportation or services (of the electricity/gas/water/etc. kind) there is no way any one person could do things on their own. Here, an employment relationship as part of a larger organisation has the additional advantage of being practical, where co-ordinating hundreds or thousands of freelance workers with individual commercial arrangements might be too much of an administrative burden.
However, in creative or knowledge-based industries such as programming, sales, marketing or training, that is no barrier. It is relatively easy for one person, or a small group of people, to set out on their own and provide the same services that they could as employees of someone else's business. For larger projects, there are few overheads in dividing up the project and assigning each part to an individual or small team; this is, after all, what would probably happen in a large company doing everything in-house anyway.
In these industries, the workers gain relatively little benefit from an employer's physical resources and scale, yet they will still wind up leaving most of the money they generate for the employer. The only reason for such people to accept an employment relationship in these industries is the risk trade-off: an employer takes on the risk and all the general costs of running the show, but in return the employee only takes a fixed salary even if the business makes a lot of profit.
In the US, AIUI, there is relatively little employee protection in some states anyway because of "at will" employment and limited legal rights for employees. So the only thing left is providing a ready-made work environment and covering the associated costs and administrative burdens.
Once employees start having to sort out their own equipment anyway... Well, why would they still be employees instead of going freelance, forming their own business (perhaps with a few others with complementary skills) where they will directly take a share of the profits, or signing up as contractors (and with contractors' rates) instead of as employees?
I think I understand what you're saying, but perhaps your examples are unfortunate. I have seen little evidence that either non-competes or NDAs do bring any commercial benefits to a business.
Broad non-competes aren't enforceable in many jurisdictions anyway.
As for NDAs, they're rather like patents: the original idea might have been reasonable, but in practice they are mostly just a legal tool that the big guys use to hammer the little guys. Try getting any serious VC or angel investor to sign up to one before you pitch your idea and see how far you get. Meanwhile, look at how any business that has had a "meteoric rise" conducted itself. To pick some from the software business, did Google or Facebook rely on NDAs, for example? Probably not, because as those investors I mentioned know, there are plenty of good ideas in the world, but what really counts is having the will and the ability to execute them well. And if you have a good idea and you're executing it well, it's unlikely that a few details leaking out is going to pose a serious threat, because by the time anyone else understands their significance and acts on them, you've already moved on to the next stage anyway.
And you probably appreciate that and in return you're doing the certification. Everyone gets something they feel is valuable out of it. That's the way it's supposed to work.
Meanwhile, companies who expect staff to spend their own time and money on compulsory company-related activities that weren't part of the original deal are likely to find that, regardless of the legal position, the reality is high employee turnover, few staff having the qualities the company is looking for, and ultimately a less successful business. That is also the way it's supposed to work.
Apparently not, at least not for the debating part. That's rather the objection to shoving things through during "washing up": it's more about backroom deals between the leaders where the opposition let the government have their bills but only with their pet concessions than it is about allowing the elected MPs do their jobs and legislate, because the number of MPs available is tiny (they all just learned they're about to lose their jobs and have to reapply...) and the time allowed it absurd ("debating" dozens of pages and hundreds of provisions in an hour or two).
The actual vote had much higher turn-out, though it was still only 189 votes to 47 out of more than 600 MPs, but any such votes during washing up appear to be formalities, given that anyone who goes against their party whip in an embarrassing way at the start of a general election campaign is probably ending their careers by inviting deselection.