A lot of companies do have something like this in the US, including my employer, and the problem you mention isn't a big deal.

From the company's point of view, the worry is basically that after paying for a shiny new MBA they get screwed when the employee immediately leaves for a higher-paying job. So you risk being out the tuition cost *and* a good employee. At a minimum, the clause gives the employee an incentive to stay for a couple years, so you at least get something out of him in return for the bonuses you paid him. Ideally, you've transferred more responsibilities to them during that period and they want to stay.

In this context, an employee trying to get fired isn't a huge risk. Being fired from your last job for incompetence will hurt you on the market more than the extra credential or degree helps. And you certainly can't interview while still employed, then explain that you can't set a start date because you aren't sure how long it will be until you get yourself fired.

Really, the only good-faith issue that will come up in this situation is if the employee leaves for personal reasons (spouse takes a job somewhere else?) in which case the employee may be on the hook, as in leaving halfway through a year-long lease. I'd assume larger companies do try to cut a deal in those cases, to split the costs and leave on good terms.

In California, the rule is actually that you cannot enter an intersection unless you can clear it before the light turns red. It doesn't matter if the light is yellow or green before you enter. So any photo of a car in an intersection, after the light is red, is nominally enough to show a violation.

I'm sure there are laws on how long a yellow has to be, given the speed limit. Just as there are laws on stop sign visibility. If you could show that the yellow doesn't follow those guidelines (as per TFA) it makes sense you'd get off.

Those numbers say absolutely nothing, certainly not with "logical certainty".

If you could quantify how likely intelligent life is to evolve over a given time on some star, you could then use the numbers you toss about to estimate the probability of alien life at some time. You basically have a denominator but no numerator, and you're claiming you know the value of the ratio. You don't.

Common sense, actually. No spacefaring species at all for the last 2 billion or 10 billion years or so (depending how you want to score), and then another "just now coming into space travel," within a few thousand years. As a hypothesis, this is weak--and violates Occam's razor. If you propose, as a solution to Fermi, that there was no spacefaring life for 9.999950 billion years, then it's far simpler to assume that there is no other spacefaring life for the last 0.000050 billion years as well.

I realize Slashdot loves the ET thing, but who modding the parent as a troll? Really? For suggesting we're alone and tosssing in a sci-fi cliche?

Beyond that, I don't even think it's a ridiculous suggestion on the merits. Life itself seems to have risen quickly, but it did take life a long time for any intelligence to appear on Earth--billions of years with life, but no technology and no intelligence. That certainly suggests it's not inevitable. It might really be a one in a billion fluke--we don't know.

I heard a nice interview with the Lancet editor on this matter. I can't remember where--some podcast, probably AAAS or On the Media.

Anyway, it wasn't unconscionable at all. It's actually a change in the role of scientific journals, and kind of a sad one.

The idea that a scientific journal has a duty to retract a paper just because it's wrong is new ground. As all scientists know, a lot of papers are wrong. The most interesting ones are the most likely to be wrong. Being published by "The Lancet" (or "Science" or "Nature" or "Cell" or whatever) doesn't mean anyone thinks you're right--not the editors and not even the peer reviewers. It means (in addition to "noteworthiness") that you meet certain editorial standards about what data you've presented and how you've communicated it, and what conclusions you've drawn.

As I understand it, the original paper wasn't convincing, but it was interesting. Small group of patients, a surprising correlation, no real mechanism--exactly the sort of thing that warrants further study but means nothing on its own. And scientists in the field would have known exactly how to interpret it. The simple lack of further confirmatory papers--you don't even need debunking papers--would have been a signal to experts that there wasn't any "there" there.

Unfortunately, in between aggressive lobbying by advocacy groups, poor understanding of the scientific process by laymen, a worship of the phrase "peer reviewed paper" and IMHO horrible scientific reporting standards in most non-scientific outlets, a single peer reviewed paper gets weight in policy debates. Examples of using papers to misinform comes up in global warming, creationism, GM foods, and anything else that gets people riled up.

In this particular case, the primary author apparently committed phenomenally bad work, if not outright fraud, his co-authors were embarrassed, and the Lancet withdrew it a few months after the misconduct/fraud was established. Fair enough.

What's sad is what the editor said about future papers--they've learned their lesson, and can no longer assume they are publishing for a scientific audience. The "interesting but probably wrong" hypothesis can no longer be printed, at least not in certain topics. As that happens, the end result of all this is going to be less visibility into the process and more isolation--scientists will communicate interesting ideas verbally at conferences, over e-mail, and through their social networks. People with groundbreaking hypotheses will find it harder to get published, and the non-expert, the scientist on the margins of the field (maybe in industry, maybe in a different field) will find it even harder to learn about the latest thinking.

It's not completely specious. "What people do at conferences" is talk about things that they are authorized to talk about. It's not the most important rule in the world, but it's not "minor" either, and it's not the sort of thing you "overlook". Anyone who works for a bureaucracy knows there are rules about what you are allowed to talk about and what you aren't. I certainly could say honest, non-embarrassing things about my employer that would get me fired instantly, just on general principles, and I know far less sensitive information that a state CISO. We're not talking about some mystery regulation that no one would know about.

And "past incident" isn't quite right either. He ad-libbed about a security problem that's the subject of a current police investigation, as the article makes clear. Even if this security hole is closed, all internal investigations are done and it's established no similar vulnerabilities exist (none of which are established) the incident is still open in this sense. If this really were an "oversight" of some sort, it's a phenomenally dumb one by someone whose job is to know better, and it might be reason to question his judgment.

All that being said, I'm not at all convinced he should be fired. It is easy to imagine that this was really a non-incident, motivated a bureaucracy embarrassed and trying to cover up. But it's also easy to imagine that someone higher up the chain sees someone nominally in charge of security yapping about open criminal matters, maybe gets complaints, and decides to cut his losses and let him go.

As far as I can tell, anyway, this didn't go to trial. Basically exactly what you wanted to happen, happened. Except instead of "a panel of retired judges," it was one non-retired judge who's actually paid to make these decisions.

In terms of ending discovery or other interminable (and expensive) pre-trial research & investigation--if you could make a suggestion that would do that without granting a virtual 'shield law' to civil fraudsters who don't want to be forced to cough up evidence they've committed fraud, I'd listen. I occasionally wonder if a system with much more active & stronger regulation and much less litigation would be a worthwhile trade-off. I don't know, but I haven't thought of any others.

Translated: "In a laboratory setting, we demonstrated we couldn't magically persuade people of whatever we wanted about hot-button issues by selectively presenting facts."

Good.

The full answer is rather shifty. Trimming it down to "no" makes it looks unequivocal. The "district," whatever that means, didn't access it, but did the vice principal? Other unauthorized people? Were activations done in violation of policy by authorized people? It's made clearer later in the article that they have not reviewed logs at this point.

Possibly missing your point, but I don't get the relevance. A security system that lets you turn on a GPS or a camera is distinct from a "security system" that consists of remote root access.

As far as I can tell, what actually was installed was the former.. Of course having remote root access would also let you do all that, but that's not what the complaints are about.

This is incorrect. It was not "just" some setup where a laptop could be located. It was a setup where other things could be done, such as having pictures taken of the user in their own home. This was admitted The fact that the stated intent was to only perform some minor, legitimate function does not mean the illegitimate functions did not exist.

And the responses you quote are bureaucrateeze for an organization that screwed up trying to backpedal. I'll do a gloss on some:

Note the shiftiness here. They don't believe the administrator did it, the district would never do such a thing.

It sounds like a flat-out denial because of the wording, but there's nothing about the facts of this case. This really boils down to a general statement that the official district policy is not to break the law.

What does "could" mean? Policy? De facto practice? Number of people your admin said you should call when you want this done? How many people had the password to the web site? Under what conditions would they use it

Again, a non-answer: "How many times was the system used?" and the answer is "Forty-two laptops went missing, and we used the system all of those times." This doesn't address the main issue: Were there other times? Can administrators even tell?

Hmm. Quick for a bureaucracy to do review of policy, investigation of authorization requests, logs & electronic audit trails, and interviews to see how the system was used in practice. At this point I'm wondering if they even have those things.

Aah. Here we go; so there are logs. Maybe they are good electronic ones held by a third party, maybe editable ASCII text that wasn't backed up, and maybe just paper notebooks. Still better than nothing.

But--they haven't been reviewed yet. Which explains why every other paragraph is so evasive. They don't actually know squat at this point.

The district is basically blustering. I consider it a warning sign anytime a response to a credible claim of a serious violation is "No one did anything wrong!" before that can possibly be known; it implies to me a culture where it's just *assumed* everything acts correctly, and the people who should be enforcing good behavior are more interested in PR. Good organizations I've worked with say things like they are "reviewing logs to confirm that our stringent safeguards were followed" and "we take all violations seriously". Flat-out support comes after the facts are in.

It is possible that they are in this mode because of the lawsuit. I happily don't have experience with them, definitely not on the inside of such a public one, where immediate response seems mandatory. But my guess that they weren't on the ball, didn't think through possible abuses of their system (the intent was good, right?) and wouldn't have a clue if people had started using the feature for other reasons.

That quote derived from the plaintiffs, not from the vice principal. Read the article you linked to again, it clearly identifies the source of this complaint.

The school district still seems to be sticking to the claims that the instances of activation all refer to "lost or stolen" laptops, and that they were never photographed for other reasons.

Now, if I had to guess which story is more credible, I'm absolutely going with the plaintiff's. The district's claims all sound like they are based on theory--there's no mention, say, of a review of activation logs or safeguards to prevent this abuse of the system, so it's not even clear how they'd know it wasn't abused in this one case.

But you are misinforming people about the facts when you say news organizations have independently confirmed the act in question took place by speaking with the vice principal.

Can you give one example of a core role that becomes obsolete? I assume there must be something. The post? That was a core role a couple centuries ago, I guess.

Most state funds go to transportation infrastructure, "physical defense" (ie, military), law enforcement & prisons, education, health care, retirement pensions and other social safety nets (not in that order). Research funding, parks, civil courts, disaster recovery aid & regulatory enforcement and the like are a few of the other less-expensive things that get money.

*None* of those vanish when the internet connects individuals. [I understand that some will pick their least favorite (the military, or the social safety net) and say the government shouldn't be doing it anyway, but that desire's independent of 'connectivity'.] A few clerks may lose their jobs due to on-line requests being filled, but I'm not even sure what people are imagining when they think the internet will somehow obsolete governments--let alone why a state bureaucrat would be living in existential dread.

I assume this particular case boils down to people evading taxation, which is going to be an issue as long as the government spends any money at all. It'll be, unavoidably, the very last state function that becomes obsolete.

Because Wired magazine doesn't sell more copies when they spew idiotic hype about the telegraph?

Seriously. There are hundreds of distinct "nominees" for the Nobel Peace Prize each years. The committee solicits recommendations from thousands of people. Good for them that they cast a wide net to look for ideas. A lot of them will be at this level of idiocy; the Nobel committee will simply ignore them.

Wired apparently chose to nominate "The Internet," a transparently self-serving attempt to make the subject of their reporting seem more important. The Nobel committee itself won't release lists of who's been recommended for 50 years (see http://nobelprize.org/nomination/peace/), but Wired is free to announce that they nominated it, then cover a story which they created themselves. This is entirely consistent with their tradition a tradition of superficial gee-whiz features about things that sound possibly intriguing in a summary and are found to be inaccurate, irrelevant or meaningless after two seconds of thought.