Bullshit. I'd rather live on welfare than let a company chip me.
My point was that eventually it will be the government mandating chipping, not a company. Before you say that will never happen, consider Venezuela's new "fatherland card", the social engineering that China conducts based on surveillance of its citizens, and even the automatic licence plate recognition systems that are increasingly common even in small towns here in North America. Governments the world over are engaged in detailed tracking of their citizens' movements; in some places that tracking is being used to control behaviour and to discourage, or even punish, activities that the state finds objectionable. Universal chipping is a logical next step.
When the goose that lays the golden eggs gets cancer and dies, and your company is bereft of ideas for creating anything that's even innovative, never mind disruptive - how can you keep the lights on? If even the great courage required to dispense with a headphone jack doesn't grow your market fast enough, what choice do you have other than to sign a lucrative deal with a firm whose practices you openly revile? Poor Tim Cook!
My stuff lives in the cloud, and I own it. I own both the cloud it is in and the data I put there. lol
Fair point. To address the ambiguity you've just identified, I propose using 'The Cloud' (with caps) to refer to servers and services that companies rent out to subscribers, and 'the cloud' (all lower case) to refer to personal cloud setups like yours.
If you're old enough to remember how things were in the early 90s, you know that the cloud is really a marvelous thing. It's astounding how far we've come in the past 25 years. The real challenge with 'the cloud' is making sure to put the right things in it, and perhaps more importantly, not putting the wrong things in it.
I guess my objection isn't so much with the cloud per se, it's with the toll-collecting gatekeepers who keep growing fatter on the artificial scarcities they create. As for 'the wrong things', I feel that applications such as MS Office don't belong entirely in the cloud. Using the cloud as an extension of an office suite, for sharing among team members, for file backup, and for running applications when you don't have enough horsepower to do it locally - these things I have no problem with. Using the cloud in place of standalone programs that can easily be run locally with existing and readily available resources - that I DO have a problem with. And it's not just the rent-seeking aspect that I object to. Perhaps more importantly, I am against centralization of most things as a matter of principle, because excessive centralization leads to non-resilience and vulnerability.
then you don't own it, no matter how much you paid for it. Cloud storage, (where you can maintain local backups), is one thing. Cloud applications, (where you can be denied the use of software you paid for, either through technical difficulties or at the whim of the provider), are quite another. 'The Cloud ate my homework!'. Too bad kid, you should have known better than to trust your homework to The Cloud. You'd have had a better chance with the dog - at least he might feel some loyalty toward you. Microsoft and its brethren don't give a rat's ass about your welfare.
Real question: is "how the fuck is this actually better than biometrics?" Biometrics are relatively difficult to clone or spoof. A chip is just an ID card implanted in a person -- it can be cloned or otherwise spoofed more easily than the alternative.
In the early days of security theatre, when being told to remove your shoes at the airport was a new thing, a friend of mine used to say that it had nothing to do with security, and everything to do with conditioning people to do ridiculous and unreasonable things reflexively when directed to do so by people in authority. I think this chipping idea is more of the same - not in the sense that the people initiating it are conspiring to brainwash people, but in the sense that our culture is (d)evolving to minimize individual freedom and autonomy.
As far as the employers, I agree with other posters' sentiments. Requiring employees to modify their bodies in such a way should be grounds for a massive lawsuit, or simply hanging from the nearest lamppost.
Anything short of the latter will be utterly ineffective. I believe the only way to reverse society's march toward universal fascism is through full-scale bloody revolution. I also believe that such revolution is no longer possible. I've literally lost sleep and cried tears over what I foresee for humanity in the coming decades. It's been one of my great sorrows that I never had kids, but that regret is now tempered with relief that I don't have any offspring who will be thrown into the bonfire that is mankind's future.
Well, change employers, or it needs an upgrade - ugly scarring.
It's early days. It won't be long until these become universal, and you'll have the same one from job to job - IF you're allowed to change jobs. They'll be the new birth certificates and passports and SSN's and drivers' licenses and...
Is it secure? Nope. Anyone can read the ID, and make a copy, just like a locksmith can duplicate your car transponder.
That's true for now, and will be true intermittently between security updates, for as long as these things are around. But the failure rates will be acceptable, keeping in mind the degree of control over people's lives that is possible when they become ubiquitous.
... may put Microsoft on the hook for potentially tens of millions of dollars in fines
When are the authorities going to understand that a mere 'tens of millions of dollars' represents a chump-change cost of business for companies like Microsoft? Wake me up when the fines start getting into the multi-billion dollar range - that's the kind of fine that might deter big corps from acting out their rampant psychopathic attitudes and anti-social practices. Until then, stories like this are just yawn-worthy, formulaic excuses for churning out yet more reams of journalistic boilerplate.
There ARE people who manage to set emotions aside and analyze the news and its sources as objectively as they can given the extant resources.
AmiMoJo is demonstrably not one of them and who that comment was directed towards.
Interesting that you should say that. I sensed an ad hominem attack against AmiMoJo, (whose posts I've usually found to be balanced and reasonable), in the post I was responding to, but chose to ignore it. Now that you've broached the subject, I just did a quick review of his recent posts. My opinion hasn't changed. Would you care to come out of AC stealth mode long enough for your posting history to be examined?
A "disreputable source" is one you disagree with, and do not consider as being part of the sainted Media.
A "disreputable source" is one which an emotionally reactive and intellectually dishonest person disagrees with, and does not consider as being part of the sainted Media.
FTFY. There ARE people who manage to set emotions aside and analyze the news and its sources as objectively as they can given the extant resources. BTW, your pejorative attitude toward the phrase "disreputable source" is uncalled for. While reputation, (good or bad), is no guarantor of propriety, (or impropriety), it is a useful and appropriate pre-screening criterion.
Only 22% of Americans will admit to trusting Facebook, yet 68% of Americans still use it. That says to me that a LOT of these 'untrusting' souls are in fact liars. If you truly distrust a company whose products and services you don't really need, then you simply don't maintain a relationship with them. If you DO continue to do business with them, then your protestations of mistrust are pretty much meaningless. Such people are likely motivated by conformism and/or wanting to be seen as informed citizens; if they REALLY distrusted FB, they'd simply opt out.
if only someone would actually make a distribution that works on every f**king machine I have without it f**king up on some or other thing on at least every computer I have, except for that single one computer, which gets f**ked up after the first upgrade.
SERIOUSLY WTF:tableflip:
passphrase : artifact
That's a pretty good job of trolling you did there. Good enough, in fact, that I can use it as a springboard for something useful. Microsoft has the active and willing co-operation of virtually every hardware vendor in the space, while Linux devs get very little of that co-operation, and in fact often have to resort to very complex and time-consuming reverse engineering. Many of the people who do this volunteer their time, and as much as I swear at Linux for its various deficiencies, I always feel deep gratitude for those who provide and maintain it, and I always keep in mind how much worse Windows is in so, so many ways. Not the least of which is that, whenever I'm forced to use Windows, I feel as though I've been slimed and need to take a shower. In particular, using Windows 10 makes me feel viscerally disgusted, and I only do it when the need is extreme. Linux never provokes that reaction in me.
As an old school tech guy (can't believe I just said that), I see your point. But here's the thing, at the first sign there is anything "big brother-ish" happening, I'll unplug them and throw them in the closet or out with the trash.
First, how can you be sure that you'll be able to detect 'anything "big brother-ish" happening' before it's too late? Second, when you buy a new car and discover that you can't turn off or disable all of its privacy-invading tech, will you throw the very act of driving 'in the closet or out with the trash'?
All in all I'm not worried, and if I ever become worried, like I said they will be tossed out. And I'm sure Amazon knows this (not about me specifically but in general), and they probably would rather not have that happen.
Amazon isn't worried either - they're quite sure that people will press this kind of tech to their bosoms and hold on tight, just as they have with cell phones. History is on Amazon's side, and they know it. Besides, Amazon doesn't even have to emulate Big Brother to be dangerous to our freedom - they only have to provide, (willingly or not), the infrastructure and the data to whomever does want to rule the world.
EVERYTHING I SAID WOULD HAPPEN, IS HAPPENING *NOW*. You all LET IT HAPPEN.
Over-the-top hyperbole doesn't serve you well here. In the first place, your use of the the word "all" is a bit misplaced, as there were many of us who recognized this trend and its ramifications, and even discussed it here on Slashdot. We're the ones who refuse to own IoT devices, 'smart' TV's, voice assistants, and the like, avoiding them like the plague, because that's what they are. So shouting at us isn't cool.
In the second place, this kind of diatribe isn't likely to convince anyone who has already drunk the Kool-Aid. I'm not sure there is anything that can convince them, but I am fairly sure that nobody will be convinced by an insulting 'I told you so!'. I totally get your anger - it sucks that we're being sold out by friends and neighbours who seem to cling to their blindness so tightly. But I also get their side. For us humans, comfort, convenience, and belonging are all powerful drives, and we excel at opting for short-term gain and ignoring the prospect of long-term pain. I'm tempted to give in to these things on a daily basis - I've been close several times to opening an FB account, signing in to Google so I stop getting captchas on my searches, using Google calendar, and any number of similar cave-ins. So far I haven't succumbed, but I hear that siren song all the time, and it's pretty compelling. So I can easily see how effective it is on people who aren't as smart and/or suspicious and/or as contrarian as we are, or who don't have the analytical habits of mind that offer some degree of immunity from being 'Borged'.
Not re-electing someone is NOT holding them accountable, it is only preventing their future elected-official-actions. Not re-electing them does nothing for actions they have already completed.
Not re-electing someone also does nothing about the next bastard whose primary allegiance is to the deep-pocketed special interests who paid for his office. The problem isn't accountability per se. The problem is that politicians don't feel accountable to the voters - they feel accountable to the folks who funded the propaganda that convinced the voters to hand power to them.
The last thing I want in a car are more stupid gadgets.
The last thing I want in a car is an "Operating System" without which the car won't run, which also tracks my car's every move and gives all kinds of personal data to an advertising company. When the spyware in my car is also the software that allows the car to run, then I might as well be driving a Windows 10 computer with wheels but no power switch.
And, why do I need more electronics that can break? Consumer-grade software today is so incredibly shitty (just ship it, we'll fix it later), that I couldn't imagine having something as buggy as Android running my car. No thanks. My dials and gauges work just fine, and never need software updates.
Not to mention that your car could become the next victim of the people responsible for Gnome 3, Unity, Australis, and the like. Wouldn't it be fun to wake up and discover that you have to learn how to use your car all over again? "Oh, we put the speedometer on the passenger side because we thought the new dark-grey-on-black 12-point text theme looked cooler over there. And BTW, your radio volume control is now a toothpick-thin virtual slider on the edge of the screen-that-is-your-dashboard. We could say that we hope you like these design changes, but frankly, we don't care".
... The question then becomes is the state contradicting Federal law or are they merely setting more stringent requirements for businesses operating in their state? If it is the latter they are well within their rights.
Unfortunately, the question isn't really 'is California contradicting federal law' - it's 'will a federally appointed judge rule that California is contradicting federal law'. These days, what passes for justice is anything but blind, and 'the law' is distressingly partisan.
but I think it would be great for sleep studies. The non-sleep I got on that crappy little cot, while I was wired up and had a rubber band around by belly, was in no way representative of a typical night's sleep. I would expect better, more accurate results with less invasive equipment, and this development sounds as though it would help. We might even gain the ability to do sleep studies in the patient's home, resulting in results both more representative of a typical night's sleep, and less disruptive.
I suggest we rename master/slave to simon/player...
I'm sure some people named Simon will be offended by the association of their name with being controlling. The problem here isn't the nomenclature per se. The problem is that people get all fucked up when they are reminded of social hierarchy power relationships, especially involuntary ones.
The solution is to exercise a little intellectual and emotional discipline, to consciously differentiate between contexts, and to actively avoid the impulse to go looking for butt-hurt. The solution is definitely NOT to go all SJW on everyone's ass in a futile attempt to revise history by enforcing spurious and awkward PC-speak.
I'd love to have that guy locked in an airtight room. "I can sell you some air - it only costs $5000 per litre, cash up front." "But, but... I don't have that much cash on me!" "Well, I'm sorry sir, but it's a moral imperative for me to make as much money as I possibly can. Ten thousand people who suffered badly because of your drug-price gouging want to do a group buy of all these air tanks. Unless you can beat what they're offering, I'll have to sell it all to them - it's just the right thing to do!"
Well, I really don't know what the survey says, because none of the links provided in TFS leads to a copy of the actual survey. Without being able to look at the survey, it's impossible to evaluate the claims made in the overly-slick and somewhat glib 'executive summary'. That summary, in the absence of the actual questionnaire on which its conclusions are ostensibly based, is utterly meaningless and not at all newsworthy. Nothing to see here, move along please...
Another possibility is to use universal resource names (e.g., "urn:isbn:978-0471117094") with some kind of global directory. But that directory would have to return to the browser something that is an awful lot like a URL, even though the user doesn't see it.
For me, that part that I've bolded is the entire problem with URL alternatives. I don't WANT the damned thing hidden from my sight, and I want it to be MORE explicit and transparent than it is, not less. I want to be able to view and edit it, so I can see and eliminate the bits that encode my recent history on that particular site, and so I can do things like alter a YouTube URL for an age-restricted video, to a URL that allows me to view that content without logging in to Google.
Killing or hiding the URL, is like substituting a promotional tourist placemat map for a cartographer's map, then making the latter totally unavailable. It puts power and information out of the reach of ALL Internet users, at a time when what we need is exactly the opposite.
Slashdot Mirror
They argue that people who are financially a mess are more likely to become a drain on the tax payer.
And yet Wall Street bankers are still allowed to roam free.
This, precisely.
Bullshit. I'd rather live on welfare than let a company chip me.
My point was that eventually it will be the government mandating chipping, not a company. Before you say that will never happen, consider Venezuela's new "fatherland card", the social engineering that China conducts based on surveillance of its citizens, and even the automatic licence plate recognition systems that are increasingly common even in small towns here in North America. Governments the world over are engaged in detailed tracking of their citizens' movements; in some places that tracking is being used to control behaviour and to discourage, or even punish, activities that the state finds objectionable. Universal chipping is a logical next step.
When the goose that lays the golden eggs gets cancer and dies, and your company is bereft of ideas for creating anything that's even innovative, never mind disruptive - how can you keep the lights on? If even the great courage required to dispense with a headphone jack doesn't grow your market fast enough, what choice do you have other than to sign a lucrative deal with a firm whose practices you openly revile? Poor Tim Cook!
My stuff lives in the cloud, and I own it. I own both the cloud it is in and the data I put there. lol
Fair point. To address the ambiguity you've just identified, I propose using 'The Cloud' (with caps) to refer to servers and services that companies rent out to subscribers, and 'the cloud' (all lower case) to refer to personal cloud setups like yours.
If you're old enough to remember how things were in the early 90s, you know that the cloud is really a marvelous thing. It's astounding how far we've come in the past 25 years. The real challenge with 'the cloud' is making sure to put the right things in it, and perhaps more importantly, not putting the wrong things in it.
I guess my objection isn't so much with the cloud per se, it's with the toll-collecting gatekeepers who keep growing fatter on the artificial scarcities they create. As for 'the wrong things', I feel that applications such as MS Office don't belong entirely in the cloud. Using the cloud as an extension of an office suite, for sharing among team members, for file backup, and for running applications when you don't have enough horsepower to do it locally - these things I have no problem with. Using the cloud in place of standalone programs that can easily be run locally with existing and readily available resources - that I DO have a problem with. And it's not just the rent-seeking aspect that I object to. Perhaps more importantly, I am against centralization of most things as a matter of principle, because excessive centralization leads to non-resilience and vulnerability.
then you don't own it, no matter how much you paid for it. Cloud storage, (where you can maintain local backups), is one thing. Cloud applications, (where you can be denied the use of software you paid for, either through technical difficulties or at the whim of the provider), are quite another. 'The Cloud ate my homework!'. Too bad kid, you should have known better than to trust your homework to The Cloud. You'd have had a better chance with the dog - at least he might feel some loyalty toward you. Microsoft and its brethren don't give a rat's ass about your welfare.
Real question: is "how the fuck is this actually better than biometrics?" Biometrics are relatively difficult to clone or spoof. A chip is just an ID card implanted in a person -- it can be cloned or otherwise spoofed more easily than the alternative.
In the early days of security theatre, when being told to remove your shoes at the airport was a new thing, a friend of mine used to say that it had nothing to do with security, and everything to do with conditioning people to do ridiculous and unreasonable things reflexively when directed to do so by people in authority. I think this chipping idea is more of the same - not in the sense that the people initiating it are conspiring to brainwash people, but in the sense that our culture is (d)evolving to minimize individual freedom and autonomy.
As far as the employers, I agree with other posters' sentiments. Requiring employees to modify their bodies in such a way should be grounds for a massive lawsuit, or simply hanging from the nearest lamppost.
Anything short of the latter will be utterly ineffective. I believe the only way to reverse society's march toward universal fascism is through full-scale bloody revolution. I also believe that such revolution is no longer possible. I've literally lost sleep and cried tears over what I foresee for humanity in the coming decades. It's been one of my great sorrows that I never had kids, but that regret is now tempered with relief that I don't have any offspring who will be thrown into the bonfire that is mankind's future.
I refuse to speak to anyone who wears a surveillance device ...
So you don't have a cellular phone, and neither does any of your friends?
would never work anywhere where there are cameras or anything else spying on me ...
Perhaps not knowingly, but how could you ever be certain there are no cameras?
Well, change employers, or it needs an upgrade - ugly scarring.
It's early days. It won't be long until these become universal, and you'll have the same one from job to job - IF you're allowed to change jobs. They'll be the new birth certificates and passports and SSN's and drivers' licenses and...
Is it secure? Nope. Anyone can read the ID, and make a copy, just like a locksmith can duplicate your car transponder.
That's true for now, and will be true intermittently between security updates, for as long as these things are around. But the failure rates will be acceptable, keeping in mind the degree of control over people's lives that is possible when they become ubiquitous.
... may put Microsoft on the hook for potentially tens of millions of dollars in fines
When are the authorities going to understand that a mere 'tens of millions of dollars' represents a chump-change cost of business for companies like Microsoft? Wake me up when the fines start getting into the multi-billion dollar range - that's the kind of fine that might deter big corps from acting out their rampant psychopathic attitudes and anti-social practices. Until then, stories like this are just yawn-worthy, formulaic excuses for churning out yet more reams of journalistic boilerplate.
AmiMoJo is demonstrably not one of them and who that comment was directed towards.
Interesting that you should say that. I sensed an ad hominem attack against AmiMoJo, (whose posts I've usually found to be balanced and reasonable), in the post I was responding to, but chose to ignore it. Now that you've broached the subject, I just did a quick review of his recent posts. My opinion hasn't changed. Would you care to come out of AC stealth mode long enough for your posting history to be examined?
A "disreputable source" is one you disagree with, and do not consider as being part of the sainted Media.
A "disreputable source" is one which an emotionally reactive and intellectually dishonest person disagrees with, and does not consider as being part of the sainted Media.
FTFY. There ARE people who manage to set emotions aside and analyze the news and its sources as objectively as they can given the extant resources. BTW, your pejorative attitude toward the phrase "disreputable source" is uncalled for. While reputation, (good or bad), is no guarantor of propriety, (or impropriety), it is a useful and appropriate pre-screening criterion.
Only 22% of Americans will admit to trusting Facebook, yet 68% of Americans still use it. That says to me that a LOT of these 'untrusting' souls are in fact liars. If you truly distrust a company whose products and services you don't really need, then you simply don't maintain a relationship with them. If you DO continue to do business with them, then your protestations of mistrust are pretty much meaningless. Such people are likely motivated by conformism and/or wanting to be seen as informed citizens; if they REALLY distrusted FB, they'd simply opt out.
if only someone would actually make a distribution that works on every f**king machine I have without it f**king up on some or other thing on at least every computer I have, except for that single one computer, which gets f**ked up after the first upgrade.
SERIOUSLY WTF :tableflip:
passphrase : artifact
That's a pretty good job of trolling you did there. Good enough, in fact, that I can use it as a springboard for something useful. Microsoft has the active and willing co-operation of virtually every hardware vendor in the space, while Linux devs get very little of that co-operation, and in fact often have to resort to very complex and time-consuming reverse engineering. Many of the people who do this volunteer their time, and as much as I swear at Linux for its various deficiencies, I always feel deep gratitude for those who provide and maintain it, and I always keep in mind how much worse Windows is in so, so many ways. Not the least of which is that, whenever I'm forced to use Windows, I feel as though I've been slimed and need to take a shower. In particular, using Windows 10 makes me feel viscerally disgusted, and I only do it when the need is extreme. Linux never provokes that reaction in me.
As an old school tech guy (can't believe I just said that), I see your point. But here's the thing, at the first sign there is anything "big brother-ish" happening, I'll unplug them and throw them in the closet or out with the trash.
First, how can you be sure that you'll be able to detect 'anything "big brother-ish" happening' before it's too late? Second, when you buy a new car and discover that you can't turn off or disable all of its privacy-invading tech, will you throw the very act of driving 'in the closet or out with the trash'?
All in all I'm not worried, and if I ever become worried, like I said they will be tossed out. And I'm sure Amazon knows this (not about me specifically but in general), and they probably would rather not have that happen.
Amazon isn't worried either - they're quite sure that people will press this kind of tech to their bosoms and hold on tight, just as they have with cell phones. History is on Amazon's side, and they know it. Besides, Amazon doesn't even have to emulate Big Brother to be dangerous to our freedom - they only have to provide, (willingly or not), the infrastructure and the data to whomever does want to rule the world.
EVERYTHING I SAID WOULD HAPPEN, IS HAPPENING *NOW*. You all LET IT HAPPEN.
Over-the-top hyperbole doesn't serve you well here. In the first place, your use of the the word "all" is a bit misplaced, as there were many of us who recognized this trend and its ramifications, and even discussed it here on Slashdot. We're the ones who refuse to own IoT devices, 'smart' TV's, voice assistants, and the like, avoiding them like the plague, because that's what they are. So shouting at us isn't cool.
In the second place, this kind of diatribe isn't likely to convince anyone who has already drunk the Kool-Aid. I'm not sure there is anything that can convince them, but I am fairly sure that nobody will be convinced by an insulting 'I told you so!'. I totally get your anger - it sucks that we're being sold out by friends and neighbours who seem to cling to their blindness so tightly. But I also get their side. For us humans, comfort, convenience, and belonging are all powerful drives, and we excel at opting for short-term gain and ignoring the prospect of long-term pain. I'm tempted to give in to these things on a daily basis - I've been close several times to opening an FB account, signing in to Google so I stop getting captchas on my searches, using Google calendar, and any number of similar cave-ins. So far I haven't succumbed, but I hear that siren song all the time, and it's pretty compelling. So I can easily see how effective it is on people who aren't as smart and/or suspicious and/or as contrarian as we are, or who don't have the analytical habits of mind that offer some degree of immunity from being 'Borged'.
Not re-electing someone is NOT holding them accountable, it is only preventing their future elected-official-actions. Not re-electing them does nothing for actions they have already completed.
Not re-electing someone also does nothing about the next bastard whose primary allegiance is to the deep-pocketed special interests who paid for his office. The problem isn't accountability per se. The problem is that politicians don't feel accountable to the voters - they feel accountable to the folks who funded the propaganda that convinced the voters to hand power to them.
The last thing I want in a car are more stupid gadgets.
The last thing I want in a car is an "Operating System" without which the car won't run, which also tracks my car's every move and gives all kinds of personal data to an advertising company. When the spyware in my car is also the software that allows the car to run, then I might as well be driving a Windows 10 computer with wheels but no power switch.
And, why do I need more electronics that can break? Consumer-grade software today is so incredibly shitty (just ship it, we'll fix it later), that I couldn't imagine having something as buggy as Android running my car. No thanks. My dials and gauges work just fine, and never need software updates.
Not to mention that your car could become the next victim of the people responsible for Gnome 3, Unity, Australis, and the like. Wouldn't it be fun to wake up and discover that you have to learn how to use your car all over again? "Oh, we put the speedometer on the passenger side because we thought the new dark-grey-on-black 12-point text theme looked cooler over there. And BTW, your radio volume control is now a toothpick-thin virtual slider on the edge of the screen-that-is-your-dashboard. We could say that we hope you like these design changes, but frankly, we don't care".
... The question then becomes is the state contradicting Federal law or are they merely setting more stringent requirements for businesses operating in their state? If it is the latter they are well within their rights.
Unfortunately, the question isn't really 'is California contradicting federal law' - it's 'will a federally appointed judge rule that California is contradicting federal law'. These days, what passes for justice is anything but blind, and 'the law' is distressingly partisan.
but I think it would be great for sleep studies. The non-sleep I got on that crappy little cot, while I was wired up and had a rubber band around by belly, was in no way representative of a typical night's sleep. I would expect better, more accurate results with less invasive equipment, and this development sounds as though it would help. We might even gain the ability to do sleep studies in the patient's home, resulting in results both more representative of a typical night's sleep, and less disruptive.
I suggest we rename master/slave to simon/player...
I'm sure some people named Simon will be offended by the association of their name with being controlling. The problem here isn't the nomenclature per se. The problem is that people get all fucked up when they are reminded of social hierarchy power relationships, especially involuntary ones.
The solution is to exercise a little intellectual and emotional discipline, to consciously differentiate between contexts, and to actively avoid the impulse to go looking for butt-hurt. The solution is definitely NOT to go all SJW on everyone's ass in a futile attempt to revise history by enforcing spurious and awkward PC-speak.
Somebody else created this possibility, can't blame the CEO for taking advantage of the situation.
Somebody else created these guns and liquor stores, can't blame the robbers for taking advantage of the situation.
I'd love to have that guy locked in an airtight room. "I can sell you some air - it only costs $5000 per litre, cash up front." "But, but... I don't have that much cash on me!" "Well, I'm sorry sir, but it's a moral imperative for me to make as much money as I possibly can. Ten thousand people who suffered badly because of your drug-price gouging want to do a group buy of all these air tanks. Unless you can beat what they're offering, I'll have to sell it all to them - it's just the right thing to do!"
Well, I really don't know what the survey says, because none of the links provided in TFS leads to a copy of the actual survey. Without being able to look at the survey, it's impossible to evaluate the claims made in the overly-slick and somewhat glib 'executive summary'. That summary, in the absence of the actual questionnaire on which its conclusions are ostensibly based, is utterly meaningless and not at all newsworthy. Nothing to see here, move along please...
Another possibility is to use universal resource names (e.g., "urn:isbn:978-0471117094") with some kind of global directory. But that directory would have to return to the browser something that is an awful lot like a URL, even though the user doesn't see it.
For me, that part that I've bolded is the entire problem with URL alternatives. I don't WANT the damned thing hidden from my sight, and I want it to be MORE explicit and transparent than it is, not less. I want to be able to view and edit it, so I can see and eliminate the bits that encode my recent history on that particular site, and so I can do things like alter a YouTube URL for an age-restricted video, to a URL that allows me to view that content without logging in to Google.
Killing or hiding the URL, is like substituting a promotional tourist placemat map for a cartographer's map, then making the latter totally unavailable. It puts power and information out of the reach of ALL Internet users, at a time when what we need is exactly the opposite.