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Presence Systems Number One On Federal Wish List
coondoggie writes to tell us that top among feature requests for any next-gen communications system among federal network managers is the ability to identify and notify employees in real time. "Federal interest in presence technologies 'may come from the fact that agencies want to know where their workforce is to be able to look at the effectiveness and the efficiency of what they're able to do,' says Aaron Heffron, vice president of Market Connections. 'They want to be in contact with them at all times.'"
The government just loves to give citizens privacy.
Well, back to rejecting software patent applications.
Seriously, no one gets anything done in any job with their manager looking over their shoulder. Just think about it, every time the boss wanders into your office you stop what you're doing. And if you didn't, they'd start in with 'advice' until your productivity was shot to hell anyway. key-loggers and such are another great example. Any place I've ever been that used key-logging people spent more time trying to either get around it, or do the bare minimum WPM than they did in actual honest work. An invention that lets a boss micro-manage every employee on a second-by-second basis is going to bring our society grinding to a halt.
[PDF] Functional neurotransceiver.
Implant an RFID - obviously.
Is anyone at all skeptical of the profitable return, to the taxpayers, for the amount of money which will be spent on this type of micromanaging technology at the absurd level? The strain of micromonitoring employees will cause more harm and discord from people succumbing to the extra pressures without their usual outlets. Whether or not those outlets are on or off the clock, technically speaking, is irrelevent when considering that humans are not machines. Every human in every system, whether it be monks in a monastery, coders in a huge borg-like cube fortress, or workers on an assembly line, learns how and where they are able to sneak a few extra moments for themselves, by themselves, without the glaring eye of big brother breathing down their neck. Technologies like this tout performance gains and efficiency ratings which can only be expected of machines--not of humans--because humans inherently steal time for themselves.
Given that the advertised technical merits of these expenditures in no way properly align with ten thousand years of knowledge of basic human and social psychology the only explanation for these programs is: pork barrel boondoggle.
Stop wasting taxpayer money on high tech corporate welfare!!!
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
Connected? I'd like to think not...
Since they are only making it illegal for employers to demand implantation. It must be legal for the government.
Deleted
afforded by this system ... might government employees approach productivity levels somewhat equivalent to their compensation finally?
I am, therefore you think.
Am I the only one who doesn't like to be on call 24/7?
more concerned about the implications here. This is called eating your own dog food. Once this is done, the feds will push to have this put in ALL phone systems.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
After a fashion, and to an extent which increases daily, it already is.
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
Before everybody gets all worried about employee privacy (which I agree is a legitimate concern), consider the applications this would have for first responders, particularly in cases where more traditional networks and or critical infrastructure components may fail.
Until a specific application is discussed, dismissing the technology as invasive seems premature.
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Science -- Sealed, Delivered.
Lets start with congress.
... to not work for the U.S. government.
Yes, this has nothing to do with microsoft, but the borg tag seems so much more relevent...
for every little parts of there jobs and thinks like this will just end up having any time gained from this will lost to the paper work, overhead, and people doing the bare minimum. Works will just do the minimum amount of work not to get fired if they had a office with bosses like this.
The government keeps getting more and more paranoid.. and less and less relevant.. until they're sitting in their reinforced compound polygraphing their employees weekly and timing the average time it takes to page-down and read the latest memo on TPS reports.
Read it too fast and you're in trouble because you couldn't have adequately digested its fascinating implications. Read it too slowly and you're not being productive enough, slacker!
The IRS now taxes cell phones issued to you by your employer. If they tax cell phones, why not this? Dosen't your wife want to know where you are?
We're sorry. You seem to be under the misconception that employer workplaces are sovereign nations unto themselves and the humans inside of those sovereign nation compounds are no longer afforded the rights and protections of the Constitution. You're wrong.
"You're supposed to be..." is no excuse for maintaining a fascist ideology.
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
They already have this. They are called a blackberry and personal pager and my personal cell phone.
.... you get the idea.
Why reinvent the wheel when we have cell phones with gps?
And for the record, if the above three devices are unable to get a hold of me, I highly doubt another will help. If they want to go this route just issue everyone a blackberry with gps and require people carry it around all the time. Then when that doesn't work because half of the people forget to charge them or completely ignore them they can start on the implantable devices that run off our own electrical energy. Then when that
Of course, Inner Party members like Dick Cheney will be exempt from this program.
You know, so that they can get Frank and Candid Advice.
That used to work.
Nowadays, most bosses simply fire back with, "So how much does unemployment pay?"
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Number one on my list is an avatar that can autonomously handle the presence system.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
First off. This whole article is just FUD. This is not the tracking of citizenry. This is simply a replacement for the pager.
r o
Why Government Employees Make Less...
1. Pension. Government Employees earn a pension. Basically if you retire after 20 years you make 25%-up of the average of the last three years salaries. This is every year for the rest of your life. This varies greatly based on how long you work before retirement. To figure numbers for yourself take the last three years salaries average them. Take 1% (unless you are over 62 then use 1.1%) of that number and multiply that by your years of service. This is your annual benefit for the the rest of your life. http://www.opm.gov/fers_election/ri_90/f_bbp.htm#
2. Job Security. As a government employee your job is extremely stable. I have worked with many a government employee who needed to be fired. Even the supervisors cannot fire. Basically you don't get fired, you might get stuck in a horrible job. But short of commiting a crime your job is safe.
3. Lack of Productivity. This is purely anecdotal, but most government employees are nowhere near as productive as their salary gives them credit for. Now this is not always because the employee is lazy or whatever. It is a systemic problem that allows for the breeding of this kind of laziness and ineptitude. By the way I used to work in this system so I know a few things about it.
$diff terrorists hippies
$
$rm -rf *terrorists *hippies
They gps enabled all of the local taxi industry's fleet. All taxis are tracked at all times and jobs are handed out according to the position of the closest vehicle.
So what do the cab drivers do? Stop in the most profitable area, and remove the gps antenna from the car. The system assumes the cab's gps signal is blocked by a building and further assumes that the car is in the same location. The cab driver then goes home, to the pub, where ever, and waits for the jobs that he wants to come up.
To think that employees wont do similar things with this system is naive.
In Soviet Russia the insensitive clod is YOU!
What people don't know is that cell phones already have sophisticated built-in surveillance systems that work even when the phones seem to be off
A 16-year-old girl in Washington state, her mother, aunt, and friends, are going through a nightmare right now with a stalker recording conversations through the cell phone mic and viewing their actions through the cell phone camera even when the phone seemed to be off. Covering the camera lens with tape and taking out the battery from the phone seems to be the only defenses that work.
from the article:
If cell phone surveillance is so easy to abuse, then our intelligence agencies are probably abusing it.
What would be the best tool to track large numbers of US Citizens ("terrorists?") at once? "Presence Technologies" would make it very easy to abuse whole groups of people at once. The FBI made secret tapes of Martin Luther King to discredit him, then made preparations to promote someone "to assume the role of leadership of the Negro people when King has been completely discredited".
Once the technology is perfected, it won't be any harder to add to all the cell phones in the US than the remote listening capabilities were. Tools like this would reduce the amount of manpower it would need to track many thousands of people at once, and make recordings to privately threaten them with when necessary. Projects like the defunct "Total Information Awareness" demonstrate the desire of the government to know "everything" about it's citizens.
Wired magazine predicted all this in 2001 .
Because if it can be abused, it will.
At the federal level, I agree you might have to stretch for the usefulness of the technology, but at a state, or hell professional level, the technology could fit. Integral infrastructure and emergency response comes to mind.
"Hello 911! Theres a horrible 5 car pileup right in front of me off exit 2 of 95 with a bus filled with CHILDREN! Think of the children, ohhh the burning children!."
"Chill fool, we got 2 EMT responders, a fireman and 3 doctors car lengths behind you sitting in the traffic with an ambulance 2 blocks away from the exit.":
Walk with Music;
--"Zero Sum" by Nine Inch Nails
The Rapture is NOT an exit strategy.
Providing these misfits with technology that fulfills their wishes will lead to a long line of labor abuses. Not just now, but for years to come. Once the technology is in place, the maladjusted "boss" types will find it irresistable.
What a horrible idea.
The same system of reasoning can be appropriately applied to the military endeavors in Afghanistan and Iraq.
No, it can't.
For your interpretation to have merit, not only would a substantial majority of the federal government need to be as amoral as the wost governments in history, but they would also have to be so amazingly competent so as to hide this from neutral, disinterested observers.
If you have ever filed your taxes, much less served in the military, you know that "amazingly competent" is not a phrase applied to any part of the government that does not involve destroying something in a spectacular fashion.
I work for the Department of Transportation as an intern and I can vouch that they are definitely trying to keep tabs on EVERYTHING that you do. We have a ridiculous database that crashes every day that we have to 'create a new task' in every time we change what we're working on. They're very insistent on it, despite the fact that we could be working on 10 different things at the same time -- and the system only allows one task at a time.
The system in place takes more time up just using it than it's worth. If a manager wants to know what an employee is working on, they should stop by or call the employee's damn office phone. Forcing the employee to detail everything that they're doing at any given time is time-consuming and often times impossible.
And now phones come with GPS built in, it would only take a little Java app, a website, and some AJAX to glue it all together.
Get your own free personal location tracker
So how long before this translates into the comm badges from Star Trek? Will I have to wear one of these things on my ACUs in Iraq?
Interesting implications as far as the warfighter is concerned. I can't really see any true benefits for the civilian sector though.
Hmm, RFID implants anyone? /sigh...
In Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, there is a scene that it reminds me. Reading the rules for efficiency every morning to see what changes. Giving an average reading time for a document, which is a no-win scenario. She ends up scrolling down to read the times, then scans through it, scrolling back as if she was reading it to give the computer the impression she actually cared. There were other aspects of the US government from that book that also reminded me of the real-time presence indicators.
--- My novel, The Mummy's Girl is now for sa
...is not aboard the Enterprise.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
Perhaps he was implying that the people directly responsible for destroying things in spectacular fashion (read: the actual troops) are very competent at doing so, but that as one gets further away from that job description (read: officers, chain of command) one also gets further away from competence. In other words, it's a bunch of guys who are really competent at breaking stuff who are horribly mismanaged and frequently tasked to things which involve not breaking things.
That's pretty much the same story I've heard from all of my military (former and current) friends.
Try not to take me more seriously than I take myself.