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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.
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
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.
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!
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.
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.