This is why they need a reasonable, commonsense system like our electoral college.
Your electoral college was probably based on the UK parliament. We vote for MPs who then effectively determine the prime minister. The only difference is that the 'electoral college' then hangs around to pass laws in place of a separate house of representatives. In this way we have fewer elections and avoid the deadlock that would result from having a prime minister without legislative support.
I should also point out that the original article is wrong in that the UK is not 'at risk' of a hung parliament (not government): it already has a hung parliament. No need to get excited though: there is a word of difference between a hung and hanged!;-)
And what politician in their right mind would want to have an election over copyright law?
Unless they make it a vote of confidence that is not required. Simply defeating a proposed law does not mean that the government has lost the confidence of the house....and if they turn it into a confidence motion then there is the risk it will blow up in their faces. All it would need is the libs and NDP to vote against it and no law plus no election.
....And you Canadians always give us Yanks crap about thinking bigger is better....sheesh.
Perhaps they were trying to emulate this which is an 18km long dam also in Northern Alberta. All they need now is to fill their pond with toxic sludge....
It's cheaper to generate heat than cold. So I'd go for cold containment.
Actually containing both might be best since then you will have a "room temp" air gap between the two and air is a fantastic insulator. IF you do not contain the hot then the heat will diffuse and the air on the other side of the vinyl curtain will be warmer than room temp. This will warm your incoming cool air. The effect may not be particularly noticeable but it would be an interesting test to see if there is a noticeable improvement to doing both.
Doctors, lawyers etc. are professionals and are governed by a code of ethics. Break that code and you end up being unable to practice that profession anywhere so the situation is very different compared to a company where once you stop working for them you have almost no obligations to them other than what the law requires. If a doctor left a hospital and started sharing former patients' data with others they would end up in a lot of trouble and probably get struck off.
All it takes is one employee with a virus and you're set for a lawsuit
Exactly...so the network should be treated as unsecured and private data should only be sent between verified machines using encryption (e.g. Kerberos' philosophy). That way having unauthorized machines connect is not an issue because they cannot get at the sensitive data and you can still let employees check their email which, itself, is inherently insecure. If having an unauthorized machine connect to the network will compromise it then you are in serious trouble because, unless you physically secure every wired port, there is no way to guarentee that this will not happen...even patients could do it!
In most places in the world... the first world included... visitors are required to have documentation on them of some kind, be it visa papers or a passport.
The US government already requires green card holders to have their green card on them - or at least it did 6 years ago when I was living there. There was even some relatively large fine if an official asked for it and you are unable to immediately produce it. Of course in practice you are never asked for it except at the airport but it meant that I had to carry it with me wherever I went "just in case".
The problem with this law is that I imagine that many US citizens will end up being hassled by police. It is easy for immigrants to prove that they are legal by showing their papers but unless US citizens start carrying passports or birth certificates how can they prove that they are NOT immigrants?
"This is motion tracking data, format is X Y Z, its from..."
You seem to have the impression that science is just like the physics you may have done at school. The experiment I work on has 1MB data per event using a complex, compressed data format and even then you need access to a parameter database to know the configuration of the detector given any particular data run. A couple of comments at the top of the file, or even a document describing the format is not enough. You have to understand the detector and have access to the database. It would require CONSIDERABLE effort to make this even accessible to the general public....but I tell you what if you have the tens of petabytes of data storage needed and the budget to fund the required development we'll give it a try.
So you are the grand arbiter, eh? YOU decide whats useless to others and what isn't, on my dime?
No, I do not get to decide, governments do based on the public interest (at least that's the theory). The reason for this is the it is not just your money but mine and every other taxpayer's as well. So as both a taxpayer and a scientist I certainly have a right to express an opinion. If governments want to up research expenditure to pay to make raw data available then that is their decision but as a tax payer I think it would be a complete waste of money (that's an opinion based on experience of actually using scientific data myself which, since you seem to be very anti-science I suspect you lack). As a scientist I am not bothered as long as extra funds are made available to hire people and buy the equipment to do it.
We expect you folks to spend some time thinking up a way so that you don't spend any time at all on "preparing" the supposedly "raw" data _and_ still make it available to the desirous public. Like you know putting up a file on a website with some footnotes. I hear universities have some websites.
Congratulations - you have identified two media by which the information could be disseminated.
Now, would you like to explain how it is possible to write the documentation, in a form that the general public can understand, without taking any time?...and before you claim that we scientists should just find a way please remember that we are scientists, not magicians, and so are limited by physical reality. I could also point out that time spent designing any such system would also be time NOT spent doing science which is what we are actually getting paid to do.
If only that were true - it amazed me as well but the rules are very clear: if you have not been registered to vote in the UK within the past 15 years you do not get to vote. I am a British citizen (and it is my only citizenship) and yet I cannot vote in this election because I was last registered in the UK in April 1995. What it REALLY irritating is that Canadian citizens resident in the UK get to vote in both the UK and Canadian elections whereas because I am a Brit living in Canada I get to vote in neither the UK nor Canadian elections. It really is high time that Britain updated its voting and citizenship laws which seem far more suited for 18th century and the time of the British Empire that the 21st century world. I do still get to vote in European elections - although even that is messed up because I used to live in France but was not allowed to vote there and had to vote back in the UK!
But you haven't given a reason why it's actually bad
It wastes scientists' time that would be better spent analysing the data rather than releasing it, it wastes money collecting and disseminating the data, it pollutes the real scientific results with those of nutters trying to prove their pet theory and, in the case of commercially useful data, it risks having companies use the data to develop something commercially useful that will then be locked away behind patents and the public will be charged through the nose for.
There is also the more subjective, human issue that if you don't let people who have worked like crazy to get the data have at least the first shot at analysis then recruiting scientists is going to become extremely hard and motivating them to perform large-scale experiments will be even harder if they just have to give the data away - why would you bother if you can just sit around and get the data as soon as it is collected?
Is that bad enough? There are ways you could mitigate some of the above but the bottom line is that nothing is free: it will cost more money to make the data publically available and, as a taxpayer myself, I see no real benefit from doing it and some serious potential pitfalls.
Really? Even if you work on a large particle detector like ATLAS and have a dataset of several petabytes? Although I've been out of the UK too long to be allowed to vote any more Phil Willis is technically my local MP so I'd be tempted to write to him....but he is not standing in the current election so its unlikely to do any good.
Science journals have long fought this, because their profit model is strongest when they own copyright and are the exclusive publishers of a paper. Peer review and scientific principles don't mesh well....
You are getting somewhat confused: raw data is not the same as published papers. If anything releasing raw data would increase the number of papers being published - although likely at the cost of greatly reducing the signal to noise ratio! Peer review and scientific principles mesh incredibly well. Science is founded on reproducibility so you have to explain your work in a manner that your peers can understand and follow in order for them to be able to reproduce and check your conclusions: without that it is not science. That does not mean that peer review cannot be abused but if you find a rotten apple that does not mean that you should never eat an apple again.
Regarding copyrights you are correct that many of us academics are finding ways to get around the restrictions and/or getting increasingly annoyed with them. However this only applies to published, scientific papers NOT the raw data. So far nobody has come up with a good way to still provide peer review without ending up with a paid journal or one in which you pay to publish (which raises different ethical issues) but I have heard that people are working on developing solutions.
If a lab has been spending my tax money for 10 years, I want my employees to give me my data right Goddamn now......if you're taking my money, you work for me.
Just stop and think for a second about exactly what it is that us scientists are being paid to do. We are NOT being paid to collect data we are being paid to figure out how the world works and how to apply that knowledge for the betterment of mankind. The data is an end towards that means.
Now, do you REALLY want us to spend a serious fraction of our time and money preparing and making available the raw data in a form which will probably be useless to you instead of analysing and coming up with results which you are far more likely to find useful? Is that REALLY the best way for us to serve the public interest?
Examples of how this could go horribly wrong immediately come to mind: it could delay finding medical cures as researchers spend time releasing, instead of analysing data, companies could request the data and develop/patent drugs which YOU will then pay through the nose for, nutters will start horribly misrepresenting the data to "prove" their pet theory on warp drive etc. etc. How does any of this serve the public interest?
If you want an even clearer example: taxpayers fund each country's intelligence agencies. So does this mean that since you own all the data every tax payer should be able to request to see it whenever they want? Obviously not because it would not be in YOUR best interest for such data to be public. While the reasons are different the conclusion is the same for scientific data. It may be your data but you are paying us to collect it, analyse it and come up with results which ultimately improve yours, and everyone else's, standard of living.
Opening the data up for free access means that other groups, who have more interest in scooping than being right, have more ability to do that scooping. That leaves the people who did the work in the cold.
That is not hard to achieve: someone has to make an FoI request, the cost to prepare the data has to be estimated, someone has to get hired to collect and format the data and then the data is released. That can take a considerable amount of time.....but that's not the only issue. In my field of particle physics raw data is generally useless unless you understand how it was collected and how to analyse it.
Even assuming that you had several petabytes of disk/tape available to store it, raw data from ATLAS would be completely useless to you unless you really understand the detector "warts and all". Trying to understand this data without access to the detector itself and the ability to test and cross-check ideas looking at (and sometimes carefully tweaking) the hardware is literally impossible....and that is before you get into the thorny international issues about who did what and so whether it falls under any one country's laws.
These issues were discussed on a previous experiment I worked on in the US and the conclusion was that it did not serve the public to have data released in just about any form: the raw data was useless and even the processed data still had considerable "quirks" which required understanding (e.g. acceptance drops at detector boundaries etc.). This was aptly demonstrated by a pilot project which resulted in no interest at all from the public but which worryingly attracted a few nutters who were more interested in proving their pet theory than in doing science.
So while I am very sympathetic to the "the public paid for it the public should be able to access it" argument I do not think that the public's interest is best served by releasing raw data in all (most?) cases. The best way to serve the public interest is to ensure that results and ideas arising from that research are freely available to all and allow the public to build on that.
"No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title."
Doesn't sound like it effectively controls anything if it can be so easily bypassed.
Rather than the effectiveness of the measure what about "the work" itself? The iPhone OS controls access to what you can run on the hardware device but does not protect it from being copied. So if I want to write and run my own program on the iPhone/iTouch surely the DMCA would not apply since my work is not protected from me and the iPhone OS does not protect the device from being copied and so you are circumventing a measure that does not prevent copying of anything that is protected. Of course this would need a clever lawyer and lots of money to argue in court but fortunately I live in Canada where (at least so far) there is no DMCA.
If (and I say if..) a company has spent years and a lot of its money training someone up to be highly valuable in a specific area, what happens to the investment that company has made when the employee jumps straight to their competitor
There are two issues here: the lost investment and the damage to the company's competitive edge. The latter can be mitigated by the company continuing to pay money to the individual for them not to work - afterall if it is to their financial benefit they would want to do this and this way the individual does not have to worry about their livelihood.
As for the investment risk it is just that: an investment risk. If I buy the stock of a company I don't get a guarantee that it will hold its value for any period of years. I clearly think it will be worth buying in the hopes that it will increase value but it is a risk I accept when buying the stock. The same is the case when training someone. Perhaps if companies were exposed to that risk they might be more careful in whom they hire and train and have a good incentive to treat them well. I realize that inspiring and valuing loyalty seems to be utterly out of fashion in the current business world but it seems to have worked for thousands of years before now so clearly it has some useful benefits.
If you say "indentured servitude is not acceptable" for a very broad definition of "indentured servitude", you invalidate quite a lot of contracts, such as the noncompete clauses, nondisclosure agreements, etc. that are meant to reduce the unknowns of running a business.
Non-competes SHOULD be invalid unless the company is willing to pay the person a salary in compensation for the length of the non-compete duration i.e. they pay them NOT to work for the competition. Non-competes might reduce the unknowns of running a business but it also prevents an individual from working: if that is worth something to the business then they should be willing to pay, if not then why should the individual suffer on the whim of the company they once worked for?
Arguing that they accepted the contract at the start is nor reasonable either: employers generally have the upper hand and, particularly in hard economic times, can be very persuasive. For example we would not allow employment contracts requiring a full, frontal lobotomy if an employee left a company would we? Although I don't doubt some companies in the US might jump at the chance were legal!
I'm not in the habit of checking my bank balance daily to see if someone's been stealing from me.
You don't have to - the time starts counting after you have NOTICED the loss/theft, not from when it occurs. So if your card is cloned and you don't notice unauthorized transactions until you get your statement then that is when the 2 days starts. What amazes me is that the US still has magnetic-only cards. Canada, UK, France and Switzerland now all have chips in the card (at least my bank cards from those countries do) so it is amazing that the US is so far behind.
What's even more ironic is that a rant goes on about the restrictions on Apple employees: ".... Apple employees are forbidden from blogging, posting to social networks, or other things that we at companies with an open culture take for granted." and yet also has "[Sentence regarding Apple's intentions redacted at request from Adobe].". Frankly censored/restricted blogs are worse than no blogs at all since they may omit important information and so be far more misleading than no information at all and it encourages employees to only say positive things since they know they are being watched.
That being said why can't Apple just provide a "I don't care about my battery-life" switch which will allow unsigned programs to run? If, as they say, all they care about is providing good battery performance and a carefully controlled environment then there is no reason not to provide an opt-out switch for those of us who want to do something else....or at least don't go after the jail breakers so aggressively which amounts to the same thing.
Results certainly matter but to the exclusion of all else, really? To take your mechanic example suppose the effective one had had a miserable experience at school, hated being a mechanic but was extremely good at it vs. the incompetent one who really should not be a mechanic but loved learning about it at school, had a wonderful time there and loves his job (lets assume he is not quite as terrible as you make out otherwise he would not be a mechanic for too long!).
Clearly as a customer you want the very unhappy but extremely competent guy....but if you were the mechanic's parent which child would you want? Cramming information into a brain is not the only thing we want out of an education - we want the process to be enjoyable and engaging as well and lead to people who are happy doing what they do. So while it is an interesting experiment don't fool yourself that results are the only thing that anyone cares about with education - although it might be nice if people cared about results more.
It doesn't fucking matter if it "loses touch with what education should be" - all that matters is RESULTS.
In that case forget the money. It has long been shown that negative feedback works far better for motivating learning than positive pats on the back (determined from experiments along the lines of 'get a question wrong and you get a small electric shock'). So if you really want results and care about nothing else then this is clearly the way to go....of course most of us would have serious problems with this approach. From this we can conclude that results are not the only thing that matters for the vast majority of us when it comes to education: we want our kids to have fun, have a chance to explore new ideas, find out what subjects they like (and hate!) etc. Neither of which are achieved by either paying them or shocking them.
Slashdot Mirror
This is why they need a reasonable, commonsense system like our electoral college.
Your electoral college was probably based on the UK parliament. We vote for MPs who then effectively determine the prime minister. The only difference is that the 'electoral college' then hangs around to pass laws in place of a separate house of representatives. In this way we have fewer elections and avoid the deadlock that would result from having a prime minister without legislative support.
;-)
I should also point out that the original article is wrong in that the UK is not 'at risk' of a hung parliament (not government): it already has a hung parliament. No need to get excited though: there is a word of difference between a hung and hanged!
And what politician in their right mind would want to have an election over copyright law?
Unless they make it a vote of confidence that is not required. Simply defeating a proposed law does not mean that the government has lost the confidence of the house....and if they turn it into a confidence motion then there is the risk it will blow up in their faces. All it would need is the libs and NDP to vote against it and no law plus no election.
....And you Canadians always give us Yanks crap about thinking bigger is better....sheesh.
Perhaps they were trying to emulate this which is an 18km long dam also in Northern Alberta. All they need now is to fill their pond with toxic sludge....
..well, actually you could use recursive abstraction layers!
That's where you make a webpage link back to the users own desktop.
It's cheaper to generate heat than cold. So I'd go for cold containment.
Actually containing both might be best since then you will have a "room temp" air gap between the two and air is a fantastic insulator. IF you do not contain the hot then the heat will diffuse and the air on the other side of the vinyl curtain will be warmer than room temp. This will warm your incoming cool air. The effect may not be particularly noticeable but it would be an interesting test to see if there is a noticeable improvement to doing both.
Doctors, lawyers etc. are professionals and are governed by a code of ethics. Break that code and you end up being unable to practice that profession anywhere so the situation is very different compared to a company where once you stop working for them you have almost no obligations to them other than what the law requires. If a doctor left a hospital and started sharing former patients' data with others they would end up in a lot of trouble and probably get struck off.
All it takes is one employee with a virus and you're set for a lawsuit
Exactly...so the network should be treated as unsecured and private data should only be sent between verified machines using encryption (e.g. Kerberos' philosophy). That way having unauthorized machines connect is not an issue because they cannot get at the sensitive data and you can still let employees check their email which, itself, is inherently insecure. If having an unauthorized machine connect to the network will compromise it then you are in serious trouble because, unless you physically secure every wired port, there is no way to guarentee that this will not happen...even patients could do it!
In most places in the world... the first world included... visitors are required to have documentation on them of some kind, be it visa papers or a passport.
The US government already requires green card holders to have their green card on them - or at least it did 6 years ago when I was living there. There was even some relatively large fine if an official asked for it and you are unable to immediately produce it. Of course in practice you are never asked for it except at the airport but it meant that I had to carry it with me wherever I went "just in case".
The problem with this law is that I imagine that many US citizens will end up being hassled by police. It is easy for immigrants to prove that they are legal by showing their papers but unless US citizens start carrying passports or birth certificates how can they prove that they are NOT immigrants?
"This is motion tracking data, format is X Y Z, its from ..."
You seem to have the impression that science is just like the physics you may have done at school. The experiment I work on has 1MB data per event using a complex, compressed data format and even then you need access to a parameter database to know the configuration of the detector given any particular data run. A couple of comments at the top of the file, or even a document describing the format is not enough. You have to understand the detector and have access to the database. It would require CONSIDERABLE effort to make this even accessible to the general public....but I tell you what if you have the tens of petabytes of data storage needed and the budget to fund the required development we'll give it a try.
So you are the grand arbiter, eh? YOU decide whats useless to others and what isn't, on my dime?
No, I do not get to decide, governments do based on the public interest (at least that's the theory). The reason for this is the it is not just your money but mine and every other taxpayer's as well. So as both a taxpayer and a scientist I certainly have a right to express an opinion. If governments want to up research expenditure to pay to make raw data available then that is their decision but as a tax payer I think it would be a complete waste of money (that's an opinion based on experience of actually using scientific data myself which, since you seem to be very anti-science I suspect you lack). As a scientist I am not bothered as long as extra funds are made available to hire people and buy the equipment to do it.
We expect you folks to spend some time thinking up a way so that you don't spend any time at all on "preparing" the supposedly "raw" data _and_ still make it available to the desirous public. Like you know putting up a file on a website with some footnotes. I hear universities have some websites.
Congratulations - you have identified two media by which the information could be disseminated. Now, would you like to explain how it is possible to write the documentation, in a form that the general public can understand, without taking any time? ...and before you claim that we scientists should just find a way please remember that we are scientists, not magicians, and so are limited by physical reality. I could also point out that time spent designing any such system would also be time NOT spent doing science which is what we are actually getting paid to do.
If only that were true - it amazed me as well but the rules are very clear: if you have not been registered to vote in the UK within the past 15 years you do not get to vote. I am a British citizen (and it is my only citizenship) and yet I cannot vote in this election because I was last registered in the UK in April 1995. What it REALLY irritating is that Canadian citizens resident in the UK get to vote in both the UK and Canadian elections whereas because I am a Brit living in Canada I get to vote in neither the UK nor Canadian elections. It really is high time that Britain updated its voting and citizenship laws which seem far more suited for 18th century and the time of the British Empire that the 21st century world. I do still get to vote in European elections - although even that is messed up because I used to live in France but was not allowed to vote there and had to vote back in the UK!
But you haven't given a reason why it's actually bad
It wastes scientists' time that would be better spent analysing the data rather than releasing it, it wastes money collecting and disseminating the data, it pollutes the real scientific results with those of nutters trying to prove their pet theory and, in the case of commercially useful data, it risks having companies use the data to develop something commercially useful that will then be locked away behind patents and the public will be charged through the nose for.
There is also the more subjective, human issue that if you don't let people who have worked like crazy to get the data have at least the first shot at analysis then recruiting scientists is going to become extremely hard and motivating them to perform large-scale experiments will be even harder if they just have to give the data away - why would you bother if you can just sit around and get the data as soon as it is collected?
Is that bad enough? There are ways you could mitigate some of the above but the bottom line is that nothing is free: it will cost more money to make the data publically available and, as a taxpayer myself, I see no real benefit from doing it and some serious potential pitfalls.
That doesn't seem unreasonable to me.
Really? Even if you work on a large particle detector like ATLAS and have a dataset of several petabytes? Although I've been out of the UK too long to be allowed to vote any more Phil Willis is technically my local MP so I'd be tempted to write to him....but he is not standing in the current election so its unlikely to do any good.
Science journals have long fought this, because their profit model is strongest when they own copyright and are the exclusive publishers of a paper. Peer review and scientific principles don't mesh well....
You are getting somewhat confused: raw data is not the same as published papers. If anything releasing raw data would increase the number of papers being published - although likely at the cost of greatly reducing the signal to noise ratio! Peer review and scientific principles mesh incredibly well. Science is founded on reproducibility so you have to explain your work in a manner that your peers can understand and follow in order for them to be able to reproduce and check your conclusions: without that it is not science. That does not mean that peer review cannot be abused but if you find a rotten apple that does not mean that you should never eat an apple again.
Regarding copyrights you are correct that many of us academics are finding ways to get around the restrictions and/or getting increasingly annoyed with them. However this only applies to published, scientific papers NOT the raw data. So far nobody has come up with a good way to still provide peer review without ending up with a paid journal or one in which you pay to publish (which raises different ethical issues) but I have heard that people are working on developing solutions.
If a lab has been spending my tax money for 10 years, I want my employees to give me my data right Goddamn now. .....if you're taking my money, you work for me.
Just stop and think for a second about exactly what it is that us scientists are being paid to do. We are NOT being paid to collect data we are being paid to figure out how the world works and how to apply that knowledge for the betterment of mankind. The data is an end towards that means.
Now, do you REALLY want us to spend a serious fraction of our time and money preparing and making available the raw data in a form which will probably be useless to you instead of analysing and coming up with results which you are far more likely to find useful? Is that REALLY the best way for us to serve the public interest?
Examples of how this could go horribly wrong immediately come to mind: it could delay finding medical cures as researchers spend time releasing, instead of analysing data, companies could request the data and develop/patent drugs which YOU will then pay through the nose for, nutters will start horribly misrepresenting the data to "prove" their pet theory on warp drive etc. etc. How does any of this serve the public interest?
If you want an even clearer example: taxpayers fund each country's intelligence agencies. So does this mean that since you own all the data every tax payer should be able to request to see it whenever they want? Obviously not because it would not be in YOUR best interest for such data to be public. While the reasons are different the conclusion is the same for scientific data. It may be your data but you are paying us to collect it, analyse it and come up with results which ultimately improve yours, and everyone else's, standard of living.
Opening the data up for free access means that other groups, who have more interest in scooping than being right, have more ability to do that scooping. That leaves the people who did the work in the cold.
That is not hard to achieve: someone has to make an FoI request, the cost to prepare the data has to be estimated, someone has to get hired to collect and format the data and then the data is released. That can take a considerable amount of time.....but that's not the only issue. In my field of particle physics raw data is generally useless unless you understand how it was collected and how to analyse it.
Even assuming that you had several petabytes of disk/tape available to store it, raw data from ATLAS would be completely useless to you unless you really understand the detector "warts and all". Trying to understand this data without access to the detector itself and the ability to test and cross-check ideas looking at (and sometimes carefully tweaking) the hardware is literally impossible....and that is before you get into the thorny international issues about who did what and so whether it falls under any one country's laws.
These issues were discussed on a previous experiment I worked on in the US and the conclusion was that it did not serve the public to have data released in just about any form: the raw data was useless and even the processed data still had considerable "quirks" which required understanding (e.g. acceptance drops at detector boundaries etc.). This was aptly demonstrated by a pilot project which resulted in no interest at all from the public but which worryingly attracted a few nutters who were more interested in proving their pet theory than in doing science.
So while I am very sympathetic to the "the public paid for it the public should be able to access it" argument I do not think that the public's interest is best served by releasing raw data in all (most?) cases. The best way to serve the public interest is to ensure that results and ideas arising from that research are freely available to all and allow the public to build on that.
"No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title."
Doesn't sound like it effectively controls anything if it can be so easily bypassed.
Rather than the effectiveness of the measure what about "the work" itself? The iPhone OS controls access to what you can run on the hardware device but does not protect it from being copied. So if I want to write and run my own program on the iPhone/iTouch surely the DMCA would not apply since my work is not protected from me and the iPhone OS does not protect the device from being copied and so you are circumventing a measure that does not prevent copying of anything that is protected. Of course this would need a clever lawyer and lots of money to argue in court but fortunately I live in Canada where (at least so far) there is no DMCA.
If (and I say if..) a company has spent years and a lot of its money training someone up to be highly valuable in a specific area, what happens to the investment that company has made when the employee jumps straight to their competitor
There are two issues here: the lost investment and the damage to the company's competitive edge. The latter can be mitigated by the company continuing to pay money to the individual for them not to work - afterall if it is to their financial benefit they would want to do this and this way the individual does not have to worry about their livelihood.
As for the investment risk it is just that: an investment risk. If I buy the stock of a company I don't get a guarantee that it will hold its value for any period of years. I clearly think it will be worth buying in the hopes that it will increase value but it is a risk I accept when buying the stock. The same is the case when training someone. Perhaps if companies were exposed to that risk they might be more careful in whom they hire and train and have a good incentive to treat them well. I realize that inspiring and valuing loyalty seems to be utterly out of fashion in the current business world but it seems to have worked for thousands of years before now so clearly it has some useful benefits.
If you say "indentured servitude is not acceptable" for a very broad definition of "indentured servitude", you invalidate quite a lot of contracts, such as the noncompete clauses, nondisclosure agreements, etc. that are meant to reduce the unknowns of running a business.
Non-competes SHOULD be invalid unless the company is willing to pay the person a salary in compensation for the length of the non-compete duration i.e. they pay them NOT to work for the competition. Non-competes might reduce the unknowns of running a business but it also prevents an individual from working: if that is worth something to the business then they should be willing to pay, if not then why should the individual suffer on the whim of the company they once worked for?
Arguing that they accepted the contract at the start is nor reasonable either: employers generally have the upper hand and, particularly in hard economic times, can be very persuasive. For example we would not allow employment contracts requiring a full, frontal lobotomy if an employee left a company would we? Although I don't doubt some companies in the US might jump at the chance were legal!
I'm not in the habit of checking my bank balance daily to see if someone's been stealing from me.
You don't have to - the time starts counting after you have NOTICED the loss/theft, not from when it occurs. So if your card is cloned and you don't notice unauthorized transactions until you get your statement then that is when the 2 days starts. What amazes me is that the US still has magnetic-only cards. Canada, UK, France and Switzerland now all have chips in the card (at least my bank cards from those countries do) so it is amazing that the US is so far behind.
What's even more ironic is that a rant goes on about the restrictions on Apple employees: ".... Apple employees are forbidden from blogging, posting to social networks, or other things that we at companies with an open culture take for granted." and yet also has "[Sentence regarding Apple's intentions redacted at request from Adobe].". Frankly censored/restricted blogs are worse than no blogs at all since they may omit important information and so be far more misleading than no information at all and it encourages employees to only say positive things since they know they are being watched.
That being said why can't Apple just provide a "I don't care about my battery-life" switch which will allow unsigned programs to run? If, as they say, all they care about is providing good battery performance and a carefully controlled environment then there is no reason not to provide an opt-out switch for those of us who want to do something else....or at least don't go after the jail breakers so aggressively which amounts to the same thing.
Of course - any display designed specifically with u in mind is bound to be better.
all that matters is RESULTS
Totally agree.
Results certainly matter but to the exclusion of all else, really? To take your mechanic example suppose the effective one had had a miserable experience at school, hated being a mechanic but was extremely good at it vs. the incompetent one who really should not be a mechanic but loved learning about it at school, had a wonderful time there and loves his job (lets assume he is not quite as terrible as you make out otherwise he would not be a mechanic for too long!).
Clearly as a customer you want the very unhappy but extremely competent guy....but if you were the mechanic's parent which child would you want? Cramming information into a brain is not the only thing we want out of an education - we want the process to be enjoyable and engaging as well and lead to people who are happy doing what they do. So while it is an interesting experiment don't fool yourself that results are the only thing that anyone cares about with education - although it might be nice if people cared about results more.
It doesn't fucking matter if it "loses touch with what education should be" - all that matters is RESULTS.
In that case forget the money. It has long been shown that negative feedback works far better for motivating learning than positive pats on the back (determined from experiments along the lines of 'get a question wrong and you get a small electric shock'). So if you really want results and care about nothing else then this is clearly the way to go....of course most of us would have serious problems with this approach. From this we can conclude that results are not the only thing that matters for the vast majority of us when it comes to education: we want our kids to have fun, have a chance to explore new ideas, find out what subjects they like (and hate!) etc. Neither of which are achieved by either paying them or shocking them.