``Speaking of creepy voice tech... I recently called a doctorâ(TM)s office - a specialist Iâ(TM)d just recently seen for the first time - to reschedule an appointment. A woman answered. Every time Iâ(TM)d make a statement (e.g. `I need to reschedule an appointment') thereâ(TM)s be a pause of a couple seconds, then Iâ(TM)d get a response that was accurate but seemed stilted and a little off.''
My favorite--because it's so laughable--variant of this is the automated response that follows up every voice response with something like "OK... hang on while I look up your information..." followed by fake typing sounds. One day I'll listen more carefully to see if I can detect whether the typing sounds exactly the same each time.
... its customers find that, after getting the run-around, their best recourse is to take the company to court for a remedy, perhaps those details ought to be made public and the company deserves to have its business harmed a little. That would, at least, give the rest of us the opportunity to decide whether we want to begin or continue dealing with that company.
... CGI-ification of human actors so that, in the future when movie studio profits need a boost, they can get rid of the human actors altogether---by then we won't recognize the difference. There's no Actor's Guild pay scale like no pay at all.
"Whether by generating alerts about... unfastened seat belts"
Hell, my '73 Vega howled like a banshee if I put a stack of textbooks on the passenger seat on the way to class. I had to fasten the seat belt around them to shut the warning off. No effin' video camera needed.
I predict that there will a healthy aftermarket for ways to defeat/disable these cameras. For DIYers, there's a piece--or pieces--of duct tape.
I'll probably be in the market for a new car in a few years and I will greatly enjoy explaining to the salescritter what a dumbass idea it is for the car I'm paying huge $$$ for to be spying on me so that they can sell data to third parties. And I'll be sure to point out that if they want to make this an optional feature--er, so sorry... they're not called "optional" any more they're called "available"--then I might be interested in their car. If new cars won't run without these interior cameras working then they're simply broken as designed and my response will be: No Sale.
You can be sure that law enforcement is drooling over the ability of gaining access to the cameras in your car.
All a company has to do is testify that they're idiots to avoid penalty.
Yeah but that should only be usable once in any court:
Lawyer: Your Honor, we were unaware...
Judge: [interrupting lawyer] Hold it right there. That was last time. When you claimed you were an idiot in your previous trial, it was your responsibility to learn from that experience. Now take your case and get out of here!
In a few years, governments and their corporate overlords may very well have turned the Internet into something that you may not even want to connect to if it's available in your locale.
At least one of the organizations listed in the FA seem to be working fine. I just visited nasa.gov and the site seems functional. (No... I didn't hit all the.gov sites listed looking for broken certs.) Did/. shame them into finding someone to bring the site back?
As for the value of college, there is a current advertising campaign in this area pointing out the large number of jobs begging for workers that don't need even one day of college, like welders and electricians and carpenters.
Alternatively, there are even bigger campaigns pushing HS grads to go into STEM---year after year. Corporate America has an insatiable appetite for college grads in their early 20s so they can let older workers go at earlier and earlier ages. As another poster pointed out, STEM majors are graduating at rates 1.5X demand. But at least they're young, eh?
A casual conversation I had while renting a car some years ago revealed that the company required a 4-year college degree for the people working behind the counter assisting you in filling out the rental forms. I was fairly flabbergasted at hearing that so I forgot to ask whether the guy out back washing the returns needed a degree for that job. If anything is cheapening the value of a college degree, it's corporate policies like that. Such jobs used to get "taught" at the high school level in some form of a "diversified occupations" class where teens would work at local businesses learning basic work skills---the idea at the time was that, hey, not everyone's cut out for the rigors of a college education or the families couldn't afford it or that some teens don't even want to go to college. Now businesses expect office workers to have saddled themselves with tens of thousands in debt in order to get a job pushing paper around.
``How did you confirm that disabling them stopped them from sharing data?''
That's the question 'o' the day: I disabled the FB App Manager on Day 1 of getting my latest phone (~2 years ago) and today I note that the phone is reporting that there's been considerable--well... a few MB which I label as "considerable" for a supposedly disabled app--data usage by FB App Manager since mid-October. Did it get re-enabled by an update? Why should I need to keep checking crap like this?
Apparently, other than the wallpaper/ringtone settings, the data we decide to download onto them, and a few others, our phones have "no user serviceable parts inside" any more and everything is up for grabs by the phone vendors.
My LG had FB on it when I got it. I immediately went to delete it and found that the best I could do was disable the "Facebook App Manager". Whatever that is. (Don't bother explaining; not interested.) No idea if that is sufficient to totally block FB from tracking my phone use but it doesn't matter---every application and web page out there has the effin' FB icon on it and that's enough for FB to track how you're using the web. When that icon shows up on my dialer app, that's when I go back to a $20 dumb-as-a-post flip phone.
Addemdum: In this case they haven't threatened his tenure (though I seem to recall that some of those behind previous shenanigans like this did have their academic futures threatened). But they are making him attend a re-education session. I.e., being "returned for regrooving" so he'll "fit in". Maybe the University administration was worried that Elsevier wouldn't allow them access to their publications for pointing out the shoddiness of the reviewers.
No word on whether the people in charge of reviewing the intentionally bogus scholarly papers and dropped the ball in a major way will require a similar re-education.
... not a good idea to point out that the Emperor wears no clothes after all. The Emperor's minions will come after you with sharpened knives... and actions to revoke your tenure.
... but I'm looking forward to the day when I can dump it.
Why? Well... years ago, LI was known informally as "Facebook with a Tie". That wasn't really true as far as I could tell at the time when I first joined. There were some really useful aspects to LI that I wasn't finding anywhere else. Remember LI's exclusive job postings? I do but those are long gone now. Nowadays the job matching that LI does isn't any better than the crummy results that the large job sites--Indeed, Glassdoor, Careerbuilder, etc--provide. The rise of LIONS--which were, I thought, actually discouraged by LI--makes me cringe every time I get a request to be a connection from someone I've never worked with, ever heard of, and, certainly, never met. It harkens back to the days when people collected tons of business cards and thought that meant they were well connected.
As for the old "Facebook with a Tie" description of old... Since the Microsoft acquisition, I find that LI is becoming more and more like Facebook and less and less of a business/employee networking site. My "news" feed default defaults to the "Top" (i.e., most popular/trending) articles as opposed to "Recent". And "Recent" cannot be made to be your default setting so emphasizing popularity is the goal on LI now. Pity. Then there are the idiotic items that make it into my news feed that are allegedly "trending" in my city as though many people in my area care one whit, for example, about a new vice president of an obscure Hong Kong corporation. Add in all the come-ons for MBA programs, articles that seem to be appearing in the feed because of one word that is in my profile, self-pats on the back by people who managed to pass an exam who I don't know from Adam, and you have a recipe for a complete waste of my time.
That said, I do try top keep a browser window opened to LI in case a recruiter finds something interesting to discuss with me. I do wish, though, that recruiters would get it through their heads that most LI users (I suspect) are probably spending much, much more time monitoring other web sites and that instant messaging someone within LI may not get the quick response they're looking for. If they'd only dig down a tiny bit they'd find my email address and they could reach me much more quickly. Email instead IM? Yep. Recent experience has shown that attaching docs within LI's IM application doesn't always work so you have to use email anyway.
Last but far from least: The whole joke about "N people looked at your profile" that LI likes to tell you about. I can count on one hand the number of LI users whose identities were made known to me in the last year or so. So they really ought to cut out the silly requests that I become a Premium member to see who these mystery profile viewers were. It doesn't help because of LI's practice of allowing some members pay a little more to remain anonymous to even Premium members. All the Premium membership accomplishes is transferring more of my money to LI.
"Do not look at the laser light with your remaining eye."
Maybe it's just me but I still wonder about why anyone is putting so much valuable information on their phone that it needs this level of security. If I lose my phone or it's stolen, all the finder/thief is going to get is my contacts' phone numbers, some photos, and music I've copied onto the phone. No need to have laser facial scanning to protect that. (Nope... no online banking and definitely no social networking via my phone.)
... fighting the battle that only people who pass the PE exam are allowed to call themselves an '"engineer". The title has become so diluted over the years that continuing to come after people for describing their occupation using the "E" word is nothing less than ridiculous.
It'd sure be nice if they'd make that an option again. Would it kill them to allow users to set that as the displayed date/time format without making them jump through bizarre hoops of setting that up via specifying some decidedly non-intuitive locale? Recent versions have made even jumping through those hoops all but impossible. The developer input on the T-bird discussion forums seems to want to blame the removal of this format on external groups responsible for defining locales. (So... the buck stops over there, eh?) Come on, folks... Make it an "advanced" feature. Warn us about "voiding our warranty". But, shees, make it an option. (I have a sneaking suspicion that I'm part of a small minority, but I'd like to have all the Linux utilities that output timestamps include an option to use "yyyy-mm-dd" for the dates.)
Slashdot Mirror
My favorite--because it's so laughable--variant of this is the automated response that follows up every voice response with something like "OK... hang on while I look up your information..." followed by fake typing sounds. One day I'll listen more carefully to see if I can detect whether the typing sounds exactly the same each time.
Just sayin'.
... its customers find that, after getting the run-around, their best recourse is to take the company to court for a remedy, perhaps those details ought to be made public and the company deserves to have its business harmed a little. That would, at least, give the rest of us the opportunity to decide whether we want to begin or continue dealing with that company.
So the makeup box from The Fifth Element is coming to a store near you?
... CGI-ification of human actors so that, in the future when movie studio profits need a boost, they can get rid of the human actors altogether---by then we won't recognize the difference. There's no Actor's Guild pay scale like no pay at all.
Hell, my '73 Vega howled like a banshee if I put a stack of textbooks on the passenger seat on the way to class. I had to fasten the seat belt around them to shut the warning off. No effin' video camera needed.
I predict that there will a healthy aftermarket for ways to defeat/disable these cameras. For DIYers, there's a piece--or pieces--of duct tape.
I'll probably be in the market for a new car in a few years and I will greatly enjoy explaining to the salescritter what a dumbass idea it is for the car I'm paying huge $$$ for to be spying on me so that they can sell data to third parties. And I'll be sure to point out that if they want to make this an optional feature--er, so sorry... they're not called "optional" any more they're called "available"--then I might be interested in their car. If new cars won't run without these interior cameras working then they're simply broken as designed and my response will be: No Sale.
You can be sure that law enforcement is drooling over the ability of gaining access to the cameras in your car.
Isn't that just what conservatives have been working toward for decades?
... and misappropriate one of their songs for their ads.
Yeah but that should only be usable once in any court:
Lawyer: Your Honor, we were unaware...
Judge: [interrupting lawyer] Hold it right there. That was last time. When you claimed you were an idiot in your previous trial, it was your responsibility to learn from that experience. Now take your case and get out of here!
In a few years, governments and their corporate overlords may very well have turned the Internet into something that you may not even want to connect to if it's available in your locale.
At least one of the organizations listed in the FA seem to be working fine. I just visited nasa.gov and the site seems functional. (No... I didn't hit all the .gov sites listed looking for broken certs.) Did /. shame them into finding someone to bring the site back?
Alternatively, there are even bigger campaigns pushing HS grads to go into STEM---year after year. Corporate America has an insatiable appetite for college grads in their early 20s so they can let older workers go at earlier and earlier ages. As another poster pointed out, STEM majors are graduating at rates 1.5X demand. But at least they're young, eh?
A casual conversation I had while renting a car some years ago revealed that the company required a 4-year college degree for the people working behind the counter assisting you in filling out the rental forms. I was fairly flabbergasted at hearing that so I forgot to ask whether the guy out back washing the returns needed a degree for that job. If anything is cheapening the value of a college degree, it's corporate policies like that. Such jobs used to get "taught" at the high school level in some form of a "diversified occupations" class where teens would work at local businesses learning basic work skills---the idea at the time was that, hey, not everyone's cut out for the rigors of a college education or the families couldn't afford it or that some teens don't even want to go to college. Now businesses expect office workers to have saddled themselves with tens of thousands in debt in order to get a job pushing paper around.
Asimov reference? ;^)
"best experience" seems to be the new "rich experience".
That's the question 'o' the day: I disabled the FB App Manager on Day 1 of getting my latest phone (~2 years ago) and today I note that the phone is reporting that there's been considerable--well... a few MB which I label as "considerable" for a supposedly disabled app--data usage by FB App Manager since mid-October. Did it get re-enabled by an update? Why should I need to keep checking crap like this?
Apparently, other than the wallpaper/ringtone settings, the data we decide to download onto them, and a few others, our phones have "no user serviceable parts inside" any more and everything is up for grabs by the phone vendors.
Indeed.
My LG had FB on it when I got it. I immediately went to delete it and found that the best I could do was disable the "Facebook App Manager". Whatever that is. (Don't bother explaining; not interested.) No idea if that is sufficient to totally block FB from tracking my phone use but it doesn't matter---every application and web page out there has the effin' FB icon on it and that's enough for FB to track how you're using the web. When that icon shows up on my dialer app, that's when I go back to a $20 dumb-as-a-post flip phone.
Addemdum: In this case they haven't threatened his tenure (though I seem to recall that some of those behind previous shenanigans like this did have their academic futures threatened). But they are making him attend a re-education session. I.e., being "returned for regrooving" so he'll "fit in". Maybe the University administration was worried that Elsevier wouldn't allow them access to their publications for pointing out the shoddiness of the reviewers.
No word on whether the people in charge of reviewing the intentionally bogus scholarly papers and dropped the ball in a major way will require a similar re-education.
... not a good idea to point out that the Emperor wears no clothes after all. The Emperor's minions will come after you with sharpened knives... and actions to revoke your tenure.
... but I'm looking forward to the day when I can dump it.
Why? Well... years ago, LI was known informally as "Facebook with a Tie". That wasn't really true as far as I could tell at the time when I first joined. There were some really useful aspects to LI that I wasn't finding anywhere else. Remember LI's exclusive job postings? I do but those are long gone now. Nowadays the job matching that LI does isn't any better than the crummy results that the large job sites--Indeed, Glassdoor, Careerbuilder, etc--provide. The rise of LIONS--which were, I thought, actually discouraged by LI--makes me cringe every time I get a request to be a connection from someone I've never worked with, ever heard of, and, certainly, never met. It harkens back to the days when people collected tons of business cards and thought that meant they were well connected.
As for the old "Facebook with a Tie" description of old... Since the Microsoft acquisition, I find that LI is becoming more and more like Facebook and less and less of a business/employee networking site. My "news" feed default defaults to the "Top" (i.e., most popular/trending) articles as opposed to "Recent". And "Recent" cannot be made to be your default setting so emphasizing popularity is the goal on LI now. Pity. Then there are the idiotic items that make it into my news feed that are allegedly "trending" in my city as though many people in my area care one whit, for example, about a new vice president of an obscure Hong Kong corporation. Add in all the come-ons for MBA programs, articles that seem to be appearing in the feed because of one word that is in my profile, self-pats on the back by people who managed to pass an exam who I don't know from Adam, and you have a recipe for a complete waste of my time.
That said, I do try top keep a browser window opened to LI in case a recruiter finds something interesting to discuss with me. I do wish, though, that recruiters would get it through their heads that most LI users (I suspect) are probably spending much, much more time monitoring other web sites and that instant messaging someone within LI may not get the quick response they're looking for. If they'd only dig down a tiny bit they'd find my email address and they could reach me much more quickly. Email instead IM? Yep. Recent experience has shown that attaching docs within LI's IM application doesn't always work so you have to use email anyway.
Last but far from least: The whole joke about "N people looked at your profile" that LI likes to tell you about. I can count on one hand the number of LI users whose identities were made known to me in the last year or so. So they really ought to cut out the silly requests that I become a Premium member to see who these mystery profile viewers were. It doesn't help because of LI's practice of allowing some members pay a little more to remain anonymous to even Premium members. All the Premium membership accomplishes is transferring more of my money to LI.
... than Larry Kudlow.
Apple's problem is that they think everyone on the planet has $1000+ to spend on a phone every couple of years.
"Do not look at the laser light with your remaining eye."
Maybe it's just me but I still wonder about why anyone is putting so much valuable information on their phone that it needs this level of security. If I lose my phone or it's stolen, all the finder/thief is going to get is my contacts' phone numbers, some photos, and music I've copied onto the phone. No need to have laser facial scanning to protect that. (Nope... no online banking and definitely no social networking via my phone.)
... fighting the battle that only people who pass the PE exam are allowed to call themselves an '"engineer". The title has become so diluted over the years that continuing to come after people for describing their occupation using the "E" word is nothing less than ridiculous.
It'd sure be nice if they'd make that an option again. Would it kill them to allow users to set that as the displayed date/time format without making them jump through bizarre hoops of setting that up via specifying some decidedly non-intuitive locale? Recent versions have made even jumping through those hoops all but impossible. The developer input on the T-bird discussion forums seems to want to blame the removal of this format on external groups responsible for defining locales. (So... the buck stops over there, eh?) Come on, folks... Make it an "advanced" feature. Warn us about "voiding our warranty". But, shees, make it an option. (I have a sneaking suspicion that I'm part of a small minority, but I'd like to have all the Linux utilities that output timestamps include an option to use "yyyy-mm-dd" for the dates.)
... stop the adoption of trickle-down economic policies?