No one flies on airliners, or does work in locations with minimal or no internet connectivity. I'm sure there is a way to turn it off, but now I'm going to have to spend time making absolutely sure that it really is off and that I'm not going to lose access to files when I'm at a remote site. (by which time its too late to do anything about it).
Maybe - but maybe not. As more and more devices record / monitor you will find that you either have to give up being part of modern society, or accept being tracked. Do you not have a cell phone? (OK if you don't, and I admire your resolve, but most people give in eventually).
It is pretty impressive - even Orwell couldn't imagine people paying to have telescrenes put in their homes. The other thing he missed (because it didn't exist yet) is the power of recording everything. Now, if you do something "bad", its possible to look back at your records and the records of everyone you interacted with to see who else is culpable.
No, that's not how it works in a really oppressive society. It always listens and rates you on your conversations - secretly. You never know for sure what is OK, you just know that if you say the wrong things too often your social credit score will go down and eventually bad things (tm) will happen to you and your family and friends. That way you go out of your way to be extra careful. You report on neighbors because you don't know if failure to report might be what puts you over the edge.
I can see where this is going. We will get popups asking us to check "we give [company] permission to [spy on us]". Completely voluntary - except if you don't accept you can't use the TV. It will be like the "accept cookies" boxes when browsing in Europe. You can accept cookies, or you can not browse.
The fine print will of course allow you to return your TV for a full refund - in the original packaging etc etc. (which almost no on e will do).
Other manufactures will soon follow so you will basically have to accept a spying device if you want to watch TV. Same way you do if you want to use a cell phone, use a modern car, ride on public transport, etc etc .
You basically need to agree to surveillance, or not interact with modern society.
Its not clear from the article what the effective collection area or noise temperature is for this. Its possible that it works with laser cooled atoms to provide an extremely low noise receiver that could be useful for scientific applications.
That said, they seem to be measuring ~6V/M field levels, which is far larger than the signals received by conventional radios. (usually micro-volts/meter), so its not clear what they would do to improve the power sensitivity by ~12 orders of magnitude.
Still, its sort of a cool trick and might have some application.
If the NSA, one of the worlds largest and most sophisticated intelligence organizations failed to keep some extremely sensitive and classified information secret, how can any other organization be trusted. I'm afraid that we *CAN* fault the entire program for a single slip up. if government agencies have backdoors to data, then those backdoors would be very valuable to a wide range of organizations.
I say we give the government another chance in say 50 years after this last breach. That should give them time to clean up their mistakes.
Spending more time working will get more done which in many cases will improve your pay. Companies could pay for all hours worked, but at a lower rate, but I don't think that helps anything.
For minimum wage employees, the situation is different, but I don't know what percentage of minimum wage employees are expected to answer work emails after hours.
Sometimes people feel so strongly about a cause, for example the dangers of electronic voting, that they think its ok to distort information or even outright lie for that cause. Its becoming very common - and I think its always wrong.
Cyber warfare has the potential be extremely destructive - collapsing economies, destroying means of production, destroying critical information, etc - and that is without the possibility of direct damage. I don't see cyber warfare as necessarily a step down in damage potential from conventional weapons, it may be a step up. Meanwhile various nations seem to feel free to launch cyber attacks, on other countries nuclear facilities, election systems and critical infrastructure, without any sort of declaration of war. Cyber weapons seem completely ungoverned by international rules of war.
Its a type of conflict that could escalate very quickly, and which could cause so much damage to a country that a conventional or possibly even nuclear reprisal might seem warranted.
"Rules of war" may seem pointless, but they have at least helped over the last century. There has been limited use of gas, at least by the major powers, no use of nuclear after WWII, no large scale bio weapons attacks etc . They don't prevent violations, but they help clarify what sort of responses might be expected after various types of cyber attacks
Its very strange that in the US men get more pockets, but women get purses. I don't know if the difference in pocket size can be attributed to different hip shapes. I can't think of any reason men don't typically carry purses.
Can you imagine if there were some sort of mechanism that could extract CO2 from the atmosphere, and then......(I know this is crazy)....use the CO2 to build *more* CO2 extracting mechanisms. They could exponentiate and cover entire continents or oceans.
If people always concentrated on solving the most immediate problems rather than looking toward the future, we'd still be chipping flints in central Africa.
I hope they succeed, I'm always happy to see progress in space technology.
Unless the US gets its act together, we will need other countries to launch our astronauts. India sounds like a better bet than Russia or China. I'd love to see us get our own launch capability back, but its been a while. (Yes, I know the various efforts under way but I'm still waiting to see it actually happen).
Its almost impossible to come up with well defined performance evaluation criteria for many jobs. Lines of code per day? Bugs found??? Papers published? How can you even produce a a training data set where former employees performance is rated.
If humans do that evaluation, then whatever bias the humans had will just be trained into the algorithm.
If you are hiring factory workers, you might be able to measure productivity or error rate or something, but that seems fraught with running afoul of age discrimination, ADA restrictions etc.
The other problem is that the criteria will be leaked, and some applicants will just tweak their resumes to score higher on the algorithm.
OTOH if you use an AI to select employees, its likely that your manager has already done a terrible job at hiring, so maybe it would be an improvement....
One of the large SLAC accelerators is run by a distributed control system from the early 80s. It would cost millions to replace and we have better places to spend the money.
Its not that we don't know about or want newer systems, its just that in any situation with limited budgets, you have to prioritize.
Not that simple. Minimum wage and workplace conditions laws exist because when they are lacking you can have very abusive situations - think Victorian factories. Individual jpeople may still prefer those abusive conditions to losing their jobs, but collectively its generally thought to be better to have laws that eliminated that sort of situation.
There is an argument that Uber and the like were taking advantage of their drivers by providing a workplace that doesn't meet normal workplace standards for minimum wage and benefits.
In well run organizations managers are rewarded for *success*. That means doing work that is valuable to the organization at quickly and efficiently as possible - overall. Part of that is motivating employees to work, and that is done by a combination of direct compensation, benefits, and intangible motivations.
I don't think all or even most blue collar workers take the highest paying job available. They also consider working conditions, commute etc when they pick a job. People with no choice may take whatever job they can get, but it a choice shows up, many will consider non-monetary compensation as well.
I want fair compensation but I also want and have a job that I enjoy and which I think does something with a positive impact on the world. Iâ(TM)ve turned down higher paying jobs because they didnâ(TM)t offer these things
There are a very wide variety of things that get bundled as "software development". Some are extremely simple and repetitive and required little background. Some require a lot of very specific training for a specific job, but are otherwise simple. Others are complex is a variety of ways - complex architecture, complex algorithms, complex interfaces.
Add to that the some CS graduates are exceptionally good, others manage to get out of school with very little knowledge - similar to other fields. Some self taught "physicists" are also very good, others are terrible. The good ones though usually command rather high salaries.
It really boils down to managers needing to know enough about a project to hire a person with the right skills FOR THAT PROJECT, and of course with an eye toward any future projects.
True, but result of the added complexity is the need for improved documentation. I find that much of the difficulty of programming today is due to badly documented tools and interfaces that result in the need to do "experimental computer science", a recipe for unreliable code.
Too many companies create useless "auto-generated" documentation , which simply tells you what you can already read from the function declaration. The result is that in order to program in some particular environment you need to learn a great deal of trivia from experience, rather that being able to derive it from documentation an from a general understanding of programming.
This is very different from most other forms of engineering. If I buy an ADC chip, it will have its functions described in excruciating detail, often in multi-hundred page data sheets. This is in contrast to the few-page data sheets for old simple ADC chips. If I"m careful, I should be able to build a functional board on the first try.
If I look up the documentation on some development tools or callable libraries, often the documentation is extremely thin and poorly written, with only very brief descriptions of complex functions. This creates a large barrier to entry for any particular type of coding. Does SPIReadWrite(*inbuffer, *outbuffer, nbytes) block, or return immediately? The only way to know is to try, or to talk to someone who already knows.
Its a strong natural monopoly. If you work at a site that has used windows / office for years, its very difficult to change. LibreOffice / OpenOffice are fine applications but they are not able to interact well with complex MS office docs. Some organizations like ours have lots of documentation in MS systems like sharepoint. When you have many years of infrastructure and documentation, its very expensive to switch.
Some applications work better on Windows than on LInux, (Matlab for example), and others like Photoshop and Itunes won't run on linux at all (except in a windows emulation environment which sort of misses the point).
Windows is still easier than Linux for non-expert users to use.
I really dislike W10, and would switch to Linux if it did what I needed to do - but it doesn't.
The risk of terrorism is not high enough that I'm willing to weaken the free speech protections. I'm only willing to limit speech in the most extreme cases.
You, are I are both far more likely to die while drooling and soiling ourselves in a nursing home bed, than we are to be killed by terrorists.
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No one flies on airliners, or does work in locations with minimal or no internet connectivity. I'm sure there is a way to turn it off, but now I'm going to have to spend time making absolutely sure that it really is off and that I'm not going to lose access to files when I'm at a remote site. (by which time its too late to do anything about it).
Maybe - but maybe not. As more and more devices record / monitor you will find that you either have to give up being part of modern society, or accept being tracked. Do you not have a cell phone? (OK if you don't, and I admire your resolve, but most people give in eventually).
It is pretty impressive - even Orwell couldn't imagine people paying to have telescrenes put in their homes. The other thing he missed (because it didn't exist yet) is the power of recording everything. Now, if you do something "bad", its possible to look back at your records and the records of everyone you interacted with to see who else is culpable.
No, that's not how it works in a really oppressive society. It always listens and rates you on your conversations - secretly. You never know for sure what is OK, you just know that if you say the wrong things too often your social credit score will go down and eventually bad things (tm) will happen to you and your family and friends. That way you go out of your way to be extra careful. You report on neighbors because you don't know if failure to report might be what puts you over the edge.
I can see where this is going. We will get popups asking us to check "we give [company] permission to [spy on us]". Completely voluntary - except if you don't accept you can't use the TV. It will be like the "accept cookies" boxes when browsing in Europe. You can accept cookies, or you can not browse.
The fine print will of course allow you to return your TV for a full refund - in the original packaging etc etc. (which almost no on e will do).
Other manufactures will soon follow so you will basically have to accept a spying device if you want to watch TV. Same way you do if you want to use a cell phone, use a modern car, ride on public transport, etc etc .
You basically need to agree to surveillance, or not interact with modern society.
Its not clear from the article what the effective collection area or noise temperature is for this. Its possible that it works with laser cooled atoms to provide an extremely low noise receiver that could be useful for scientific applications.
That said, they seem to be measuring ~6V/M field levels, which is far larger than the signals received by conventional radios. (usually micro-volts/meter), so its not clear what they would do to improve the power sensitivity by ~12 orders of magnitude.
Still, its sort of a cool trick and might have some application.
If the NSA, one of the worlds largest and most sophisticated intelligence organizations failed to keep some extremely sensitive and classified information secret, how can any other organization be trusted. I'm afraid that we *CAN* fault the entire program for a single slip up. if government agencies have backdoors to data, then those backdoors would be very valuable to a wide range of organizations.
I say we give the government another chance in say 50 years after this last breach. That should give them time to clean up their mistakes.
Spending more time working will get more done which in many cases will improve your pay. Companies could pay for all hours worked, but at a lower rate, but I don't think that helps anything.
For minimum wage employees, the situation is different, but I don't know what percentage of minimum wage employees are expected to answer work emails after hours.
Sometimes people feel so strongly about a cause, for example the dangers of electronic voting, that they think its ok to distort information or even outright lie for that cause. Its becoming very common - and I think its always wrong.
Cyber warfare has the potential be extremely destructive - collapsing economies, destroying means of production, destroying critical information, etc - and that is without the possibility of direct damage. I don't see cyber warfare as necessarily a step down in damage potential from conventional weapons, it may be a step up. Meanwhile various nations seem to feel free to launch cyber attacks, on other countries nuclear facilities, election systems and critical infrastructure, without any sort of declaration of war. Cyber weapons seem completely ungoverned by international rules of war.
Its a type of conflict that could escalate very quickly, and which could cause so much damage to a country that a conventional or possibly even nuclear reprisal might seem warranted.
"Rules of war" may seem pointless, but they have at least helped over the last century. There has been limited use of gas, at least by the major powers, no use of nuclear after WWII, no large scale bio weapons attacks etc . They don't prevent violations, but they help clarify what sort of responses might be expected after various types of cyber attacks
Its very strange that in the US men get more pockets, but women get purses. I don't know if the difference in pocket size can be attributed to different hip shapes. I can't think of any reason men don't typically carry purses.
Can you imagine if there were some sort of mechanism that could extract CO2 from the atmosphere, and then......(I know this is crazy)....use the CO2 to build *more* CO2 extracting mechanisms. They could exponentiate and cover entire continents or oceans.
If people always concentrated on solving the most immediate problems rather than looking toward the future, we'd still be chipping flints in central Africa.
I hope they succeed, I'm always happy to see progress in space technology.
Unless the US gets its act together, we will need other countries to launch our astronauts. India sounds like a better bet than Russia or China. I'd love to see us get our own launch capability back, but its been a while. (Yes, I know the various efforts under way but I'm still waiting to see it actually happen).
Its almost impossible to come up with well defined performance evaluation criteria for many jobs. Lines of code per day? Bugs found??? Papers published? How can you even produce a a training data set where former employees performance is rated.
If humans do that evaluation, then whatever bias the humans had will just be trained into the algorithm.
If you are hiring factory workers, you might be able to measure productivity or error rate or something, but that seems fraught with running afoul of age discrimination, ADA restrictions etc.
The other problem is that the criteria will be leaked, and some applicants will just tweak their resumes to score higher on the algorithm.
OTOH if you use an AI to select employees, its likely that your manager has already done a terrible job at hiring, so maybe it would be an improvement....
One of the large SLAC accelerators is run by a distributed control system from the early 80s. It would cost millions to replace and we have better places to spend the money.
Its not that we don't know about or want newer systems, its just that in any situation with limited budgets, you have to prioritize.
Not that simple. Minimum wage and workplace conditions laws exist because when they are lacking you can have very abusive situations - think Victorian factories. Individual jpeople may still prefer those abusive conditions to losing their jobs, but collectively its generally thought to be better to have laws that eliminated that sort of situation.
There is an argument that Uber and the like were taking advantage of their drivers by providing a workplace that doesn't meet normal workplace standards for minimum wage and benefits.
In well run organizations managers are rewarded for *success*. That means doing work that is valuable to the organization at quickly and efficiently as possible - overall. Part of that is motivating employees to work, and that is done by a combination of direct compensation, benefits, and intangible motivations.
I don't think all or even most blue collar workers take the highest paying job available. They also consider working conditions, commute etc when they pick a job. People with no choice may take whatever job they can get, but it a choice shows up, many will consider non-monetary compensation as well.
I want fair compensation but I also want and have a job that I enjoy and which I think does something with a positive impact on the world. Iâ(TM)ve turned down higher paying jobs because they didnâ(TM)t offer these things
There are a very wide variety of things that get bundled as "software development". Some are extremely simple and repetitive and required little background. Some require a lot of very specific training for a specific job, but are otherwise simple. Others are complex is a variety of ways - complex architecture, complex algorithms, complex interfaces.
Add to that the some CS graduates are exceptionally good, others manage to get out of school with very little knowledge - similar to other fields. Some self taught "physicists" are also very good, others are terrible. The good ones though usually command rather high salaries.
It really boils down to managers needing to know enough about a project to hire a person with the right skills FOR THAT PROJECT, and of course with an eye toward any future projects.
True, but result of the added complexity is the need for improved documentation. I find that much of the difficulty of programming today is due to badly documented tools and interfaces that result in the need to do "experimental computer science", a recipe for unreliable code.
Too many companies create useless "auto-generated" documentation , which simply tells you what you can already read from the function declaration. The result is that in order to program in some particular environment you need to learn a great deal of trivia from experience, rather that being able to derive it from documentation an from a general understanding of programming.
This is very different from most other forms of engineering. If I buy an ADC chip, it will have its functions described in excruciating detail, often in multi-hundred page data sheets. This is in contrast to the few-page data sheets for old simple ADC chips. If I"m careful, I should be able to build a functional board on the first try.
If I look up the documentation on some development tools or callable libraries, often the documentation is extremely thin and poorly written, with only very brief descriptions of complex functions. This creates a large barrier to entry for any particular type of coding. Does SPIReadWrite(*inbuffer, *outbuffer, nbytes) block, or return immediately? The only way to know is to try, or to talk to someone who already knows.
Its a strong natural monopoly. If you work at a site that has used windows / office for years, its very difficult to change. LibreOffice / OpenOffice are fine applications but they are not able to interact well with complex MS office docs. Some organizations like ours have lots of documentation in MS systems like sharepoint. When you have many years of infrastructure and documentation, its very expensive to switch.
Some applications work better on Windows than on LInux, (Matlab for example), and others like Photoshop and Itunes won't run on linux at all (except in a windows emulation environment which sort of misses the point).
Windows is still easier than Linux for non-expert users to use.
I really dislike W10, and would switch to Linux if it did what I needed to do - but it doesn't.
Not a lot of other ways to get from the US to Asia for a 2 day business trip.
The risk of terrorism is not high enough that I'm willing to weaken the free speech protections. I'm only willing to limit speech in the most extreme cases.
You, are I are both far more likely to die while drooling and soiling ourselves in a nursing home bed, than we are to be killed by terrorists.