A member of Congress or the Senate on a day to day basis will deal with 100x the sensitive material you will. Furthermore there's the question of who gets access to the records & can they abuse it to blackmail govt. officials or otherwise effect policy decisions.
a) It's also smaller, so easier for an employee to put in their pocket and walk away with.
b) There is absolutely nothing wrong with a text based OS. As for it being proprietary, well so is iOS outside of a few BSD bits. The point is that it is a small dedicated device and you don't have to worry about some bored clerk cracking it to put his Facebook app on the thing or browse porn on it's built in browser.
c) Lots of handheld scanners used to use Palm devices and I'm sure they'll use Androids too. The lightness factor only matters in if you expected them to be at a station or carting the thing around the store.
You act as though the regulations came out of a vacuum. AT&T lobbyists created those regulations and their pet congressmen & senators enacted them. Because the regulations limit who can compete against AT&T.
If corporations had no influence on government, THEN you could cry about government intervention. Every person with a functioning brain, however, knows that corporations are deeply mired in our politics and they heavily influence what regulations will effect them.
This is why free market utopianism is such a crock. Business do not want to compete with each other and will use every ounce of their power & every legal trick they can create to prevent an upstart from disrupting their markets.
Ironically the only way to have a free market is if the government forces them to.
Now you're just being stupid. When we replaced farm work with industry, we were creating manufacturing jobs. Millions of them. This is the exact friggin' opposite of that. We are shrinking and offshoring those well paid manual labor jobs. They're not coming back, at least not in the form of employment for people. I'm sure we could rebuild with robots and use 1/100th the employee labor we used to use for the same tasks.
Also, in that time having a college degree, ANY college degree was a guarantee of a good career. Now? Now it might get you a job as checkout person at McDonald's.
Having an interest in technology does not mean you have to blind yourself to the pitfalls of technology. I love my cell phone, but I acknowledge that it was assembled through labor practices I would deem inhuman for laughable wages with unregulated toxic waste disposal. Technology is not a panacea.
Let's suppose 20-30% of Americans are employed as engineers, doctors, lawyers, CEO's. The non-trade jobs. What happens when we roboticize the other 70-80%'s jobs? Will ALL of them train to become robot repair techs? Doubtful. So where will they work? How will the economy keep moving? These are questions that NEED to be asked and answered instead of living in fantasy tech land.
I remember when the 'job creators' were busy creating jobs in China and shutting factories here. Every pundit was on and on about how we'd all be consultants and living in a service economy. Well now those people get mocked for not getting a STEM degree while they work in McDonald's or Wal-Mart next to all the other poors. Not everyone gets to live in Galt's Gulch buddy.
"Industrial robots have proven useful in reducing EMPLOYEES in large factories, with major enterprises enlisting their services to LAYOFF EMPLOYEES. The Factory-in-a-Day project, which kicked off in October, aims to also make robotic technology beneficial to small and medium enterprises (SMEs), by LAYING OFF EMPLOYEES within 24 hours."
Not one of those companies gives a damn about your privacy. They all collect and data-mine more information about you than the NSA does, it's why the NSA tapped them to begin with.
They are only doing this to a) prevent or at least minimize foreign countries using the privacy scandal to fund competition against them; b) prevent or at least minimize foreign countries from penalizing them legally; and c) for the slight bit of positive marketing with people who believe they care.
You complain about "piecemeal laws" then argue that we should have a bunch of local laws instead of one unifying national one. Then you want a new government body to go around inspecting everyone and making different regulations for different people.. Have you read the definition of piecemeal?
However, if I talk to someone and ask them for something and they consensually provide it, then the government has no right to influence that situation unless its willing to breach individual rights.
Right, so the liberty loving conservatives make no effort to interfere with abortion (between a woman & her doctor), homosexuality (who's business is it what two or more people do in their bedroom), drugs (it's a private transaction between you and your drug dealer!) etc etc.
One, many people will simply not follow the law and there is no means to actually enforce it. You're not going to inspect kitchens in rural house holds.
Which is exactly why there is a national ban. It's not to remove the equipment currently in place, it is to ensure that when that equipment is due to be replaced or in new construction that less polluting options are the only ones available on the market. Dumbass. I really wish you rural hick inbreds would get off of that "black helicopters coming to take mah guns and fireplace" nonsense and grow up.
The same right wing that feels fine regulating vagina's, Muslim mosques and that rampant voter fraud that nobody can find evidence of but is obviously happening or how did a black guy get to be president? That right wing?
..we've all suspected it was true a long time ago. Honestly I think the bigger surprise was that the surveillance wasn't worse. There have been people who've sworn for years that every time you lick a stamp the Post Office sequences your DNA....
The idea that broadcasters make their money off advertising is a bit simplistic. Advertising is just one aspect of their business. You have to include DVD sales, fees from streaming services, online sales of content, retransmission fees from cable operators, syndication fees, etc.
The industry pitches a fit every single time some new technological innovation comes around about how it will destroy them until they figure out how to monetize it. This is nothing new and I'm frankly tired of hearing these mewling quims beg for the government to guarantee their profits. The very industries where they make significant amounts of money are the same industries they had to be dragged kicking and screaming to. If it were up to the broadcasters we'd all still have B&W TV sets with rabbit ear antennas.
Hilarious that there's another thread today about how increased mechanization is destroying the job market, so let's see.. self driving cars/trucks replacing all the professional drivers, manufacturing robots taking over the factories that haven't already moved to China, car dealerships doomed so there goes the jobs AND the thousands of small businesses and their local taxes.. tell us again how this is all good and the displaced workers will all go into software consulting, robot repair and get engineering degrees and we'll all have well paying middle class lifestyles. Go on, I'm waiting.
My point using the VCR analog was to show that today, economically, there is a very small supply chain providing devices for the entire globe. Outside of mainland China nobody is building a cell phone. Apple 'plans' to assemble phones here soon but most of their plant will be highly mechanized, so they're just using the idea of "Made in America" as a prop, they will hire very few American workers.
Aside from the supply chain, the stock market does not reward companies for hiring masses of new employees. Most corporate management is outright antagonistic towards their employees and views the average worker only as a walking debit sheet, not a valuable piece of the fabric that holds the company together. Companies have never been leaner and there is absolutely no incentive for them to hire more employees. Nor are there penalties for massive layoffs, essentially flooding the job market with 'product'.
Who invents the tools? Who makes all the new tech-tech tools/gadgets? Who maintains them? Who fixes them?
An increasingly small number of highly trained people working for an increasingly small number of business, or are you going to tell me with a straight face that there are thousands and thousands of untapped engineers, software developers out there and that all of them will get meaningful, highly paid jobs? That there are millions of entrepreneurs out there that qualify for capital investment who will be plucky enough to compete against Apple and their billion dollar patent portfolios?
Everyone likes to say "Go to college for a STEM degree!!" but gloss over the fact that a lot of people are just not suited for that kind of thing in the first place, and that if everyone unemployed currently DID follow that advice, all we would get is a glutted field of engineers and lower wages, netting pretty much the same end result but with the addition of thousands of dollars of student debt.
Except a) that does squat for the labor market here, reinforcing the point that we don't have enough jobs to go around and b) Foxconn is employing the same tech efficiencies and robotics to reduce their own labor as well, which means fewer global jobs.
Actually that kind of emphasizes the point. Where you had Kodak, Polaroid, etc, actively employing hundreds of thousands, those same people are not necessary to manufacture a multi-tasking smart phone, and nothing else has developed to utilize those idle workers in the meantime.
It's easy to ignore the issue and shout "LUDDITES!" but sometimes you have to look at a problem actively rather than wait for it to self correct, as the self correction can be messier than the fix. An uncontrolled, unregulated, unchecked market does NOT lift all boats as a matter of course.
Part of the issue is that there are not 'more' jobs being made to replace the ones that disappear now, as the general trend is for fewer employees at all levels of industry. Consider the VCR. Back in the day there were 20 brands, each making their own hardware. Now (if VCRs were still being made) it would be 20 brands that exist only as shell companies, each just repackaging the same hardware from 2-3 Chinese companies.
Face it, when they told us we were entering a service economy everybody expected to be software consultants, nobody believed there would only be McDonald's or WalMart.
Slashdot Mirror
A member of Congress or the Senate on a day to day basis will deal with 100x the sensitive material you will. Furthermore there's the question of who gets access to the records & can they abuse it to blackmail govt. officials or otherwise effect policy decisions.
So yes you are not a special snowflake.
a) It's also smaller, so easier for an employee to put in their pocket and walk away with.
b) There is absolutely nothing wrong with a text based OS. As for it being proprietary, well so is iOS outside of a few BSD bits. The point is that it is a small dedicated device and you don't have to worry about some bored clerk cracking it to put his Facebook app on the thing or browse porn on it's built in browser.
c) Lots of handheld scanners used to use Palm devices and I'm sure they'll use Androids too. The lightness factor only matters in if you expected them to be at a station or carting the thing around the store.
You act as though the regulations came out of a vacuum. AT&T lobbyists created those regulations and their pet congressmen & senators enacted them. Because the regulations limit who can compete against AT&T.
If corporations had no influence on government, THEN you could cry about government intervention. Every person with a functioning brain, however, knows that corporations are deeply mired in our politics and they heavily influence what regulations will effect them.
This is why free market utopianism is such a crock. Business do not want to compete with each other and will use every ounce of their power & every legal trick they can create to prevent an upstart from disrupting their markets.
Ironically the only way to have a free market is if the government forces them to.
Now you're just being stupid. When we replaced farm work with industry, we were creating manufacturing jobs. Millions of them. This is the exact friggin' opposite of that. We are shrinking and offshoring those well paid manual labor jobs. They're not coming back, at least not in the form of employment for people. I'm sure we could rebuild with robots and use 1/100th the employee labor we used to use for the same tasks.
Also, in that time having a college degree, ANY college degree was a guarantee of a good career. Now? Now it might get you a job as checkout person at McDonald's.
The situations are not interchangeable.
Having an interest in technology does not mean you have to blind yourself to the pitfalls of technology. I love my cell phone, but I acknowledge that it was assembled through labor practices I would deem inhuman for laughable wages with unregulated toxic waste disposal. Technology is not a panacea.
Let's suppose 20-30% of Americans are employed as engineers, doctors, lawyers, CEO's. The non-trade jobs. What happens when we roboticize the other 70-80%'s jobs? Will ALL of them train to become robot repair techs? Doubtful. So where will they work? How will the economy keep moving? These are questions that NEED to be asked and answered instead of living in fantasy tech land.
I remember when the 'job creators' were busy creating jobs in China and shutting factories here. Every pundit was on and on about how we'd all be consultants and living in a service economy. Well now those people get mocked for not getting a STEM degree while they work in McDonald's or Wal-Mart next to all the other poors. Not everyone gets to live in Galt's Gulch buddy.
"Industrial robots have proven useful in reducing EMPLOYEES in large factories, with major enterprises enlisting their services to LAYOFF EMPLOYEES. The Factory-in-a-Day project, which kicked off in October, aims to also make robotic technology beneficial to small and medium enterprises (SMEs), by LAYING OFF EMPLOYEES within 24 hours."
Not one of those companies gives a damn about your privacy. They all collect and data-mine more information about you than the NSA does, it's why the NSA tapped them to begin with. They are only doing this to a) prevent or at least minimize foreign countries using the privacy scandal to fund competition against them; b) prevent or at least minimize foreign countries from penalizing them legally; and c) for the slight bit of positive marketing with people who believe they care.
You complain about "piecemeal laws" then argue that we should have a bunch of local laws instead of one unifying national one. Then you want a new government body to go around inspecting everyone and making different regulations for different people.. Have you read the definition of piecemeal?
Or paying taxes so a rural inbred farmer can stay afloat against market forces, join the Tea Party and bitch about teh gubment!
However, if I talk to someone and ask them for something and they consensually provide it, then the government has no right to influence that situation unless its willing to breach individual rights.
Right, so the liberty loving conservatives make no effort to interfere with abortion (between a woman & her doctor), homosexuality (who's business is it what two or more people do in their bedroom), drugs (it's a private transaction between you and your drug dealer!) etc etc.
One, many people will simply not follow the law and there is no means to actually enforce it. You're not going to inspect kitchens in rural house holds.
Which is exactly why there is a national ban. It's not to remove the equipment currently in place, it is to ensure that when that equipment is due to be replaced or in new construction that less polluting options are the only ones available on the market. Dumbass. I really wish you rural hick inbreds would get off of that "black helicopters coming to take mah guns and fireplace" nonsense and grow up.
The same right wing that feels fine regulating vagina's, Muslim mosques and that rampant voter fraud that nobody can find evidence of but is obviously happening or how did a black guy get to be president? That right wing?
AHAHAHAHAHAHAHA good troll, good troll sir.
People with uncompromisable principles are often an inconvenience to everyone.
..we've all suspected it was true a long time ago. Honestly I think the bigger surprise was that the surveillance wasn't worse. There have been people who've sworn for years that every time you lick a stamp the Post Office sequences your DNA....
The idea that broadcasters make their money off advertising is a bit simplistic. Advertising is just one aspect of their business. You have to include DVD sales, fees from streaming services, online sales of content, retransmission fees from cable operators, syndication fees, etc.
The industry pitches a fit every single time some new technological innovation comes around about how it will destroy them until they figure out how to monetize it. This is nothing new and I'm frankly tired of hearing these mewling quims beg for the government to guarantee their profits. The very industries where they make significant amounts of money are the same industries they had to be dragged kicking and screaming to. If it were up to the broadcasters we'd all still have B&W TV sets with rabbit ear antennas.
Hilarious that there's another thread today about how increased mechanization is destroying the job market, so let's see.. self driving cars/trucks replacing all the professional drivers, manufacturing robots taking over the factories that haven't already moved to China, car dealerships doomed so there goes the jobs AND the thousands of small businesses and their local taxes.. tell us again how this is all good and the displaced workers will all go into software consulting, robot repair and get engineering degrees and we'll all have well paying middle class lifestyles. Go on, I'm waiting.
My point using the VCR analog was to show that today, economically, there is a very small supply chain providing devices for the entire globe. Outside of mainland China nobody is building a cell phone. Apple 'plans' to assemble phones here soon but most of their plant will be highly mechanized, so they're just using the idea of "Made in America" as a prop, they will hire very few American workers.
Aside from the supply chain, the stock market does not reward companies for hiring masses of new employees. Most corporate management is outright antagonistic towards their employees and views the average worker only as a walking debit sheet, not a valuable piece of the fabric that holds the company together. Companies have never been leaner and there is absolutely no incentive for them to hire more employees. Nor are there penalties for massive layoffs, essentially flooding the job market with 'product'.
Who invents the tools? Who makes all the new tech-tech tools/gadgets? Who maintains them? Who fixes them?
An increasingly small number of highly trained people working for an increasingly small number of business, or are you going to tell me with a straight face that there are thousands and thousands of untapped engineers, software developers out there and that all of them will get meaningful, highly paid jobs? That there are millions of entrepreneurs out there that qualify for capital investment who will be plucky enough to compete against Apple and their billion dollar patent portfolios?
Everyone likes to say "Go to college for a STEM degree!!" but gloss over the fact that a lot of people are just not suited for that kind of thing in the first place, and that if everyone unemployed currently DID follow that advice, all we would get is a glutted field of engineers and lower wages, netting pretty much the same end result but with the addition of thousands of dollars of student debt.
Except a) that does squat for the labor market here, reinforcing the point that we don't have enough jobs to go around and b) Foxconn is employing the same tech efficiencies and robotics to reduce their own labor as well, which means fewer global jobs.
This is what's called opening a public dialog because there's no magic solution.
Actually that kind of emphasizes the point. Where you had Kodak, Polaroid, etc, actively employing hundreds of thousands, those same people are not necessary to manufacture a multi-tasking smart phone, and nothing else has developed to utilize those idle workers in the meantime.
It's easy to ignore the issue and shout "LUDDITES!" but sometimes you have to look at a problem actively rather than wait for it to self correct, as the self correction can be messier than the fix. An uncontrolled, unregulated, unchecked market does NOT lift all boats as a matter of course.
Part of the issue is that there are not 'more' jobs being made to replace the ones that disappear now, as the general trend is for fewer employees at all levels of industry. Consider the VCR. Back in the day there were 20 brands, each making their own hardware. Now (if VCRs were still being made) it would be 20 brands that exist only as shell companies, each just repackaging the same hardware from 2-3 Chinese companies.
Face it, when they told us we were entering a service economy everybody expected to be software consultants, nobody believed there would only be McDonald's or WalMart.
RMS is still using that Communist slave labor built laptop but refuses to touch commercial software, right? Stay classy, you bearded troll person you!
Why do you pathetic "programmers" these days still use script languages? Real men code in assembler while wearing utili-kilts, you sissies.