1) my contractual duties do not include book writing. So if I write a book, I do that in my own spare time, and I should be able to reap the benefits, just like anybody else who takes on a second job.
Yes and no. My contractual duties don't require anything *in particular*, but they do require that I do several of a list things to get promotion or tenure. On that list is writing a textbook.
I don't know about where you work, but for me the distinction between "spare time" and "work time" is extremely blurry. Other than for classes and meetings, I don't ever have to come to campus. But, of course, I'm expected to do a significant amount of work -- probably more than I could accomplish if I only worked 9-5 M-F.
2) most research monographs don't make a lot of money, but undergrad textbooks are a big business. If you can get a bunch of universities to adopt your book for first year intro classes, that can easily double your university salary.
That's only true in two cases: 1. the textbook is for a big market class like an introductory class. No matter how widely adopted, I don't think an advanced textbook on, say, the philosophy of biology is going to make much money. The market is too small.
2. You have to get the book adopted at a lot of universities. My parents wrote an introductory physics textbook that was adopted at a good number (more than 10), but they never made much money at it. We have a friend that has the majority of the introductory physics market and he's rich, but he's a rarity.
There is ZERO reason why a Prof should have the expectation that they can be Paid to work for a school and on that school's money/time work and produce a book in which the Prof can sell for self gain.
Except that in my contract (as a professor) it explicitly says that any intellectual property I create while employed is mine alone.
The good thing about the open-source education market is that if we can find a truly good way around the publication industry *many* professors would happily switch. Very few people make any real money on textbooks, and most of us would be happy to publish our research and educational materials for free. But there are two roadblocks that have nothing to do with congress or the publication industry.
First, if I work hard on writing a textbook I want to be sure that others will use it. Right now there is no good way to have my textbook "certified" other than using the publishing industry. If we could get a system going where other people could vet a book, and that fact could be advertised, then I think a lot people would release their books for free. In fact, people are already releasing books for free, but they aren't widely adopted because people don't know about them.
Second, we need to have a way of judging the quality of a textbook. Right now, if a good publisher publishes my book, my university can say "look he wrote a good book." But, if I release it under an open license, they have no way of knowing if what I wrote was crap.
There are clear ways around these problems, and once one or two systems become widely accepted I expect most of the textbook industry to disappear with or without the help of congress.
If this bill passes, it won't change anything. The professors that write these books will simply reject the U.S. funds
That's just not possible. Almost all universities run on federal funds. If a given professor's research isn't sponsored by federal funds, the cost of the building in which she works almost certainly is (at least in part). The concept of "rejecting" U.S. funds is like rejecting your paycheck, you worked hard to earn it, you take it.
and get money from other places like IBM, Microsoft, Ford, and so on.
These places are giving out money for biology, chemistry, theoretical high energy physics, english, history, philosophy, sociology, psychology?!? Maybe a little, but not much.
Professors want to be reimbursed for their many hours of work, not give books away for free (or cheap).
First, we (professors) are reimbursed, we're paid by our university to produce exactly this sort of work. So, professors who are being paid for their textbooks are (in a sense) double dipping. We are also grossly underpaid for the amount of work and the level of qualifications, so I can't really fault someone for this, but it is double dipping.
Second, we don't get much for books. We do give them away for cheap.
I think there is one other problem as well. When you have a vaccine that isn't 100% effective, at least a subset of the population might treat it as if it was 100%. People might engage in more risky behaviors assuming that they're immune. If you take the full effect of a vaccine into account, it might even cause an *increase* in HIV.
Hopefully this is just a step to a better vaccine.
Conferences are another similar situation. I've attended and been involved in organizing numerous conferences. The one next month is 14 timezones away. Hundreds of people will still make the trip because of the value of talking to people face-to-face, and especially the value of talking to many people simultaneously face-to-face. Video links are also terrible at providing lucky chances for unplanned conversations. I can't count the number of productive partnerships that have germinated over a stale lunch and a cold beer in between sessions.
It's precisely this fact that makes me discourage students from online distance education whenever possible. Both in undergrad and grad school, I learned way more from random discussions, be they with other students or professors, than I ever did during the official class time. So much of an education is had by being around others who are also interested in the same things and eager to talk about it.
Thank you. I get really tired of hearing people claim that professors are teaching out of their textbooks to make money. VERY FEW textbook authors make any real money, and none of them make much from their own classes.
Some, I'm sure, do it for an ego boost, but most people I know that teach out of their own textbook do it for completely honest reasons. They really think they know the best way to teach material and want to teach it that way. Often there is lots of nuance that they want to teach that isn't captured in any particular book.
If a professor honestly thinks they have the best way to teach some subject, they have to write a book. And, if they want that book adopted by others, they have to get the book published. While we have gone a long way with free textbooks on the web, the fact is that you're very unlikely to get that book adopted by others unless you have the publishing industry sending out representatives pushing your book. So -- while it may seem silly that professors don't give away their books given how little they make on them -- many use publishers because they honestly want the material to be taught in a better way.
I have to think a similar dual effect happened with regards to Dan Quayle.
I don't think it did, primarily because the media wasn't as partisan then as it is now. There was no Fox News or MSNBC.
At the same time, none of Biden's gaffes have suggested that he can't spell.
Not that I'm interested in defending Quayle, but I always found the spelling bit a red herring. Lots of *very* smart people can't spell. The ability to memorize a large list of words (or the unwillingness to do so) doesn't convey intelligence one way or the other. I always find it strange that people want to equate knowing lots of little bits of information with intelligence.
It's not so easy as you think. People can often modify the apparent plagiarism my changing words around, substituting synonyms, adding in extra words. Then you have to search for different parts of the sentence, considering different wordings. Sometimes people purchase papers from their friends or a service who never posted their paper online.
When you have a class of 100 students with 2-3 potential plagarism cases, it can take significant time to track down. All this is taking away from time the instructor could be giving helpful feedback to students who are interested in learning.
The services that exist now are already very good at saving time by focusing one's attention on particular cases that can be proven. If those tools get better it can reduce that time even more. Overall this will significantly improve the quality of education by both freeing up time and also preventing the incentive to cheat yourself out of an education by plagarizing.
I watched the video, and it provides a compelling argument assuming that you're interested in only one thing: not going to jail. And while that is a pretty big thing that we all care about, we often usually care about other things as well.
For instance, if I'm not a serial killer but the police think I am, I would certainly want to talk to the police even if doing so increased my risk of going to jail by a small percent chance because I have a larger interest in helping the police find the guilty party. And lets be clear, the lawyer on video provides some scenarios about how talking to the police could hurt you, but he provides no statistics or any evidence whatsoever about how likely those things are to occur.
Certainly no disciplinary action should be taken unless plagarism can be proven.
Turnitin is not disciplinary action. If the turnitin report comes back indicating plagarism, then the instructor investigates using the turnitin report and then takes disciplinary action. Many papers come back flagged by turnitin, but they are often false positives (quotations, commonly used phrases, etc.) Any university that doesn't require some additional effort on the part of the instructor is a joke.
My point is, if a student feels that the instructor doesn't trust him/her to be honest on an assignment, how can he/she in turn trust that instructor to be fair in other things?
That's a bit of leap in logic. For the sake of argument, suppose that requiring turnitin.com submission signals a lack of trust. Why does a lack of trust on the part of an instructor signal a willingness to be unfair? It seems to be like being overly diligent to maintain honesty signals exactly the opposite, that the instructor cares about the legitimacy of her grade.
In a constitutional democracy, one should hope that the government (in particular the courts) work against the will of the people. That is the entire point of having a constitution which guarantees civil liberties to minorities. If the government never worked against the will of the people, then we wouldn't have any guarantees for groups which have been excluded from the political process.
The market will work it out, as they go out of business, replaced by employers with saner hiring policies.
Right, like the market worked out overpaid idiotic executives and badly designed operating systems. People put way to much faith in the markets ability to solve small inefficiencies like this.
Like natural selection, the market only acts on what's there and cannot make individual companies totally efficient. A company only needs to be resistant to being out-competed to survive. And this can be done in a variety of ways that have nothing to do with efficiency (intellectual property, anyone?).
Thank you! I'm a PhD working in academia and nothing makes me angrier than listening to doctors, lawyers, and (shudder) MBAs justify their outrageous salaries by saying "we have to work so hard." I entered a field where less than 50% of those who seek jobs in the field can find them, our pay stinks, and we have to spend 5-6 years after undergrad as basically indentured servants.
Universities that train doctors, lawyers, and MBAs survive because of us. We spent equally long or longer training, but we're perfectly happy to take lower salaries because we love what we do.
That sounds like a post from someone who has nothing, and only has himself to blame for it.
Actually, it's exactly the opposite. I certainly have studied my fair share (Ph.D.) and I have a good job. I'm just capable of recognizing that I have much of what I do through immoral actions of people before me, and so I don't develop the righteous indignation of libertarians when others come to try and "take" my "property" in order to do things for those who were not lucky enough to have things stolen for them.
Contemporary libertarians remind me of children who never learned to share. Or more on point, people who never learned the difference between possession and ownership.
John Locke, who was one of the first to defend property rights, required that privatizing natural resources required that you leave "as much and as good" for others. He recognized that allowing individuals to monopolize particular types of property would be disastrous. Ironically, monopolies are exactly what would result if contemporary libertarians were to succeed at achieving the "free" markets they desire.
Regarding "your" property. While you happen to currently possess lots of it, it's not clear that it is necessarily yours. Given the history of property acquisition in the US, I'm guessing it probably isn't. Do you currently possess land? Likely that land was owned by native Americans before it was stolen by someone. That money you "own"? There is a good chance it was acquired by someone at sometime through some practice that would void their right to property (recall the 20s, slavery, theft from natives, war, etc.).
Personally I would be surprised if even 10% of the stuff you currently possess isn't tainted by some action in the past that would void one of the previous "owners" right to property. Which, according to Locke, voids your right to property as well since the object is currently the property of the person from whom it was stolen.
The problem isn't so much that the information isn't reliable, just that important parts are left out or not considered by the individual. For instance, the base rates of many diseases tell you a lot about what your likely to have given a particular set of symptoms. Most websites don't give you that information, or when they do individuals ignore it. As a result, they tend to believe that they have a terrible disease based on true but incomplete information.
The only thing insider traders do is lead to a more accurate market.
No, I think it will lead to no market at all. If I know that someone else can make use of insider information against me, then I have an incentive to put my money somewhere else.
In this case think about those people who bought stock from Cubin. If they had known that Cubin knew more than them, they would probably have opted not to buy in the first place.
The idea is that spambots do not attempt to redeliver rejected emails, whereas regular "legit" mail servers do.
One problem with this system is that not all "legit" servers do. My old university adopted grey listing, and once that happened nothing from another university ever arrived. This is pretty bad when you have two research university actively engaged in many cooperative projects and all of a sudden they can't talk to one another.
It eventually got sorted out, but after a few angry phone calls from friends, colleagues, etc.
So here's a question. Other than attacks, racism, unverifiable information and such (which are already banned under other Wikipedia guidelines), what real effect would it have on the encyclopedia other than another record in the database that nobody other than the author would ever access?
It's already very difficult to keep all the pages that are there free from "Johny is gay" type vandalism. If the number of articles increases significantly preventing this type of vandalism will be even more difficult.
Who wants to be the one who patrols the 1,000,000 articles about some kid's band? And, if you just let vandalism stay there, then your credibility as an encyclopedia declines. The more vandalism is successful the more people are encouraged to do it.
I don't know much about the field, but I'm curious to know how you feel about the research on natural selection and aging. I know that researchers have been able to significantly extend the lifespan of fruit flies by delaying reproduction. This suggests that some components of aging are acted on by natural selection, and not merely the accumulation of damage to cells. Is this view incompatible with your view about accumulated molecular damage, and if so, why do you prefer the cell damage view?
Not only does the government lose data, but there are plenty of companies that one is "forced" to do business with. Recently my (now former) health insurance company had a severe breach that led to literally hundreds of cases of identity theft.
The health insurance was provided by my school, and chosen by them largely based on cost. What can one do? Luckily I finished my degree, and so I'm no longer bound to that school. But if I was still there I would be without many options. A PhD student cannot just transfer, and I can only petition the school to change providers.
And what about cases where every single company in a given market is equally as bad. If one needs a service, one is forced to deal with a bad company.
While we like to imagine that we live in a world where all market transactions are voluntary, that really hasn't been the case for a long time.
Several years ago, my undergraduate university was planning on having officially licensed cell phones through a particular carrier. One of the features discussed was the ability to have instructors turn off text messaging and internet access on the phones during tests to reduce instances of cheating. They also considered blocking the cellphone use entirely during classes, but decided this wasn't appropriate because some students had legitimate reasons to have them on.
This seems pretty similar to me, but it never got out of the planning stage.
I wonder if this law has ever been challenged as a first amendment violation. From wikipedia's article on the Hatch Act
In 1947 and 1974, The Hatch Act was appealed to the Supreme Court; both times claiming it was a violation of free speech, and both times it was upheld.
And things get funny toward the end of the response, too. YouTube denies point #24, which reads:
Defendant YouTube, Inc., is a Delaware corporation with its principal place of business in San Bruno, California.
If you can't even get that right, you may as well just give up! Ironically, in the very next paragraph (paragraph 25) YouTube says, "Defendants admit that YouTube is a Delaware limited liability company with its principle place of business in San Bruno, California".
Brilliant.
Slashdot Mirror
1) my contractual duties do not include book writing. So if I write a book, I do that in my own spare time, and I should be able to reap the benefits, just like anybody else who takes on a second job.
Yes and no. My contractual duties don't require anything *in particular*, but they do require that I do several of a list things to get promotion or tenure. On that list is writing a textbook.
I don't know about where you work, but for me the distinction between "spare time" and "work time" is extremely blurry. Other than for classes and meetings, I don't ever have to come to campus. But, of course, I'm expected to do a significant amount of work -- probably more than I could accomplish if I only worked 9-5 M-F.
2) most research monographs don't make a lot of money, but undergrad textbooks are a big business. If you can get a bunch of universities to adopt your book for first year intro classes, that can easily double your university salary.
That's only true in two cases: 1. the textbook is for a big market class like an introductory class. No matter how widely adopted, I don't think an advanced textbook on, say, the philosophy of biology is going to make much money. The market is too small.
2. You have to get the book adopted at a lot of universities. My parents wrote an introductory physics textbook that was adopted at a good number (more than 10), but they never made much money at it. We have a friend that has the majority of the introductory physics market and he's rich, but he's a rarity.
There is ZERO reason why a Prof should have the expectation that they can be Paid to work for a school and on that school's money/time work and produce a book in which the Prof can sell for self gain.
Except that in my contract (as a professor) it explicitly says that any intellectual property I create while employed is mine alone.
The good thing about the open-source education market is that if we can find a truly good way around the publication industry *many* professors would happily switch. Very few people make any real money on textbooks, and most of us would be happy to publish our research and educational materials for free. But there are two roadblocks that have nothing to do with congress or the publication industry.
First, if I work hard on writing a textbook I want to be sure that others will use it. Right now there is no good way to have my textbook "certified" other than using the publishing industry. If we could get a system going where other people could vet a book, and that fact could be advertised, then I think a lot people would release their books for free. In fact, people are already releasing books for free, but they aren't widely adopted because people don't know about them.
Second, we need to have a way of judging the quality of a textbook. Right now, if a good publisher publishes my book, my university can say "look he wrote a good book." But, if I release it under an open license, they have no way of knowing if what I wrote was crap.
There are clear ways around these problems, and once one or two systems become widely accepted I expect most of the textbook industry to disappear with or without the help of congress.
If this bill passes, it won't change anything. The professors that write these books will simply reject the U.S. funds
That's just not possible. Almost all universities run on federal funds. If a given professor's research isn't sponsored by federal funds, the cost of the building in which she works almost certainly is (at least in part). The concept of "rejecting" U.S. funds is like rejecting your paycheck, you worked hard to earn it, you take it.
and get money from other places like IBM, Microsoft, Ford, and so on.
These places are giving out money for biology, chemistry, theoretical high energy physics, english, history, philosophy, sociology, psychology?!? Maybe a little, but not much.
Professors want to be reimbursed for their many hours of work, not give books away for free (or cheap).
First, we (professors) are reimbursed, we're paid by our university to produce exactly this sort of work. So, professors who are being paid for their textbooks are (in a sense) double dipping. We are also grossly underpaid for the amount of work and the level of qualifications, so I can't really fault someone for this, but it is double dipping.
Second, we don't get much for books. We do give them away for cheap.
I think there is one other problem as well. When you have a vaccine that isn't 100% effective, at least a subset of the population might treat it as if it was 100%. People might engage in more risky behaviors assuming that they're immune. If you take the full effect of a vaccine into account, it might even cause an *increase* in HIV.
Hopefully this is just a step to a better vaccine.
\
Conferences are another similar situation. I've attended and been involved in organizing numerous conferences. The one next month is 14 timezones away. Hundreds of people will still make the trip because of the value of talking to people face-to-face, and especially the value of talking to many people simultaneously face-to-face. Video links are also terrible at providing lucky chances for unplanned conversations. I can't count the number of productive partnerships that have germinated over a stale lunch and a cold beer in between sessions.
It's precisely this fact that makes me discourage students from online distance education whenever possible. Both in undergrad and grad school, I learned way more from random discussions, be they with other students or professors, than I ever did during the official class time. So much of an education is had by being around others who are also interested in the same things and eager to talk about it.
Thank you. I get really tired of hearing people claim that professors are teaching out of their textbooks to make money. VERY FEW textbook authors make any real money, and none of them make much from their own classes.
Some, I'm sure, do it for an ego boost, but most people I know that teach out of their own textbook do it for completely honest reasons. They really think they know the best way to teach material and want to teach it that way. Often there is lots of nuance that they want to teach that isn't captured in any particular book.
If a professor honestly thinks they have the best way to teach some subject, they have to write a book. And, if they want that book adopted by others, they have to get the book published. While we have gone a long way with free textbooks on the web, the fact is that you're very unlikely to get that book adopted by others unless you have the publishing industry sending out representatives pushing your book. So -- while it may seem silly that professors don't give away their books given how little they make on them -- many use publishers because they honestly want the material to be taught in a better way.
I have to think a similar dual effect happened with regards to Dan Quayle.
I don't think it did, primarily because the media wasn't as partisan then as it is now. There was no Fox News or MSNBC.
At the same time, none of Biden's gaffes have suggested that he can't spell.
Not that I'm interested in defending Quayle, but I always found the spelling bit a red herring. Lots of *very* smart people can't spell. The ability to memorize a large list of words (or the unwillingness to do so) doesn't convey intelligence one way or the other. I always find it strange that people want to equate knowing lots of little bits of information with intelligence.
It's not so easy as you think. People can often modify the apparent plagiarism my changing words around, substituting synonyms, adding in extra words. Then you have to search for different parts of the sentence, considering different wordings. Sometimes people purchase papers from their friends or a service who never posted their paper online.
When you have a class of 100 students with 2-3 potential plagarism cases, it can take significant time to track down. All this is taking away from time the instructor could be giving helpful feedback to students who are interested in learning.
The services that exist now are already very good at saving time by focusing one's attention on particular cases that can be proven. If those tools get better it can reduce that time even more. Overall this will significantly improve the quality of education by both freeing up time and also preventing the incentive to cheat yourself out of an education by plagarizing.
I watched the video, and it provides a compelling argument assuming that you're interested in only one thing: not going to jail. And while that is a pretty big thing that we all care about, we often usually care about other things as well.
For instance, if I'm not a serial killer but the police think I am, I would certainly want to talk to the police even if doing so increased my risk of going to jail by a small percent chance because I have a larger interest in helping the police find the guilty party. And lets be clear, the lawyer on video provides some scenarios about how talking to the police could hurt you, but he provides no statistics or any evidence whatsoever about how likely those things are to occur.
Certainly no disciplinary action should be taken unless plagarism can be proven.
Turnitin is not disciplinary action. If the turnitin report comes back indicating plagarism, then the instructor investigates using the turnitin report and then takes disciplinary action. Many papers come back flagged by turnitin, but they are often false positives (quotations, commonly used phrases, etc.) Any university that doesn't require some additional effort on the part of the instructor is a joke.
My point is, if a student feels that the instructor doesn't trust him/her to be honest on an assignment, how can he/she in turn trust that instructor to be fair in other things?
That's a bit of leap in logic. For the sake of argument, suppose that requiring turnitin.com submission signals a lack of trust. Why does a lack of trust on the part of an instructor signal a willingness to be unfair? It seems to be like being overly diligent to maintain honesty signals exactly the opposite, that the instructor cares about the legitimacy of her grade.
In a constitutional democracy, one should hope that the government (in particular the courts) work against the will of the people. That is the entire point of having a constitution which guarantees civil liberties to minorities. If the government never worked against the will of the people, then we wouldn't have any guarantees for groups which have been excluded from the political process.
The market will work it out, as they go out of business, replaced by employers with saner hiring policies.
Right, like the market worked out overpaid idiotic executives and badly designed operating systems. People put way to much faith in the markets ability to solve small inefficiencies like this.
Like natural selection, the market only acts on what's there and cannot make individual companies totally efficient. A company only needs to be resistant to being out-competed to survive. And this can be done in a variety of ways that have nothing to do with efficiency (intellectual property, anyone?).
Thank you! I'm a PhD working in academia and nothing makes me angrier than listening to doctors, lawyers, and (shudder) MBAs justify their outrageous salaries by saying "we have to work so hard." I entered a field where less than 50% of those who seek jobs in the field can find them, our pay stinks, and we have to spend 5-6 years after undergrad as basically indentured servants.
Universities that train doctors, lawyers, and MBAs survive because of us. We spent equally long or longer training, but we're perfectly happy to take lower salaries because we love what we do.
That sounds like a post from someone who has nothing, and only has himself to blame for it.
Actually, it's exactly the opposite. I certainly have studied my fair share (Ph.D.) and I have a good job. I'm just capable of recognizing that I have much of what I do through immoral actions of people before me, and so I don't develop the righteous indignation of libertarians when others come to try and "take" my "property" in order to do things for those who were not lucky enough to have things stolen for them.
Contemporary libertarians remind me of children who never learned to share. Or more on point, people who never learned the difference between possession and ownership.
John Locke, who was one of the first to defend property rights, required that privatizing natural resources required that you leave "as much and as good" for others. He recognized that allowing individuals to monopolize particular types of property would be disastrous. Ironically, monopolies are exactly what would result if contemporary libertarians were to succeed at achieving the "free" markets they desire.
Regarding "your" property. While you happen to currently possess lots of it, it's not clear that it is necessarily yours. Given the history of property acquisition in the US, I'm guessing it probably isn't. Do you currently possess land? Likely that land was owned by native Americans before it was stolen by someone. That money you "own"? There is a good chance it was acquired by someone at sometime through some practice that would void their right to property (recall the 20s, slavery, theft from natives, war, etc.).
Personally I would be surprised if even 10% of the stuff you currently possess isn't tainted by some action in the past that would void one of the previous "owners" right to property. Which, according to Locke, voids your right to property as well since the object is currently the property of the person from whom it was stolen.
The problem isn't so much that the information isn't reliable, just that important parts are left out or not considered by the individual. For instance, the base rates of many diseases tell you a lot about what your likely to have given a particular set of symptoms. Most websites don't give you that information, or when they do individuals ignore it. As a result, they tend to believe that they have a terrible disease based on true but incomplete information.
The only thing insider traders do is lead to a more accurate market.
No, I think it will lead to no market at all. If I know that someone else can make use of insider information against me, then I have an incentive to put my money somewhere else.
In this case think about those people who bought stock from Cubin. If they had known that Cubin knew more than them, they would probably have opted not to buy in the first place.
The idea is that spambots do not attempt to redeliver rejected emails, whereas regular "legit" mail servers do.
One problem with this system is that not all "legit" servers do. My old university adopted grey listing, and once that happened nothing from another university ever arrived. This is pretty bad when you have two research university actively engaged in many cooperative projects and all of a sudden they can't talk to one another.
It eventually got sorted out, but after a few angry phone calls from friends, colleagues, etc.
So here's a question. Other than attacks, racism, unverifiable information and such (which are already banned under other Wikipedia guidelines), what real effect would it have on the encyclopedia other than another record in the database that nobody other than the author would ever access?
It's already very difficult to keep all the pages that are there free from "Johny is gay" type vandalism. If the number of articles increases significantly preventing this type of vandalism will be even more difficult.
Who wants to be the one who patrols the 1,000,000 articles about some kid's band? And, if you just let vandalism stay there, then your credibility as an encyclopedia declines. The more vandalism is successful the more people are encouraged to do it.
I don't know much about the field, but I'm curious to know how you feel about the research on natural selection and aging. I know that researchers have been able to significantly extend the lifespan of fruit flies by delaying reproduction. This suggests that some components of aging are acted on by natural selection, and not merely the accumulation of damage to cells. Is this view incompatible with your view about accumulated molecular damage, and if so, why do you prefer the cell damage view?
Not only does the government lose data, but there are plenty of companies that one is "forced" to do business with. Recently my (now former) health insurance company had a severe breach that led to literally hundreds of cases of identity theft.
The health insurance was provided by my school, and chosen by them largely based on cost. What can one do? Luckily I finished my degree, and so I'm no longer bound to that school. But if I was still there I would be without many options. A PhD student cannot just transfer, and I can only petition the school to change providers.
And what about cases where every single company in a given market is equally as bad. If one needs a service, one is forced to deal with a bad company.
While we like to imagine that we live in a world where all market transactions are voluntary, that really hasn't been the case for a long time.
Several years ago, my undergraduate university was planning on having officially licensed cell phones through a particular carrier. One of the features discussed was the ability to have instructors turn off text messaging and internet access on the phones during tests to reduce instances of cheating. They also considered blocking the cellphone use entirely during classes, but decided this wasn't appropriate because some students had legitimate reasons to have them on.
This seems pretty similar to me, but it never got out of the planning stage.