In the year 2019 the modern desktop PC still has the ability to read (and in many cases, write) CDs, DVDs, Blu-Ray, 3.5" floppies (USB floppy drive), and almost any format of USB mass storage device made in the last 20+ years. Apart from magnetic tape (which I've already identified the solution for that problem), I fail to see how "most" digital media is lost to you.
You are partially right, many popular formats still can be read. Although reading some of the more exotic formats can be harder. The main problem is proper storage of the magnetic or optical media. Time isn't very kind to floppy disks, tapes and cd-roms. Even when having a matching drive, many media weren't readable any more.
As to access to online stuff, the sites often disappear, you lose the account credentials, etc. That's as good as lost.
Get used to what exactly? Painful levels of procrastination?
You're exactly right. This data wasn't critical to me, but from time to time I had the urge to check back on them. When I found a box of old photographs when my grand-mother died, it was easy retrieve the data. Some pictures were faded and for some negatives a scanner helped, but I got many interesting insights into the early days of my grandparent's and parent's youths. Seems my grandmother was quite a naughty girl back in the days.
Same with her collection of letters and journals. It was a bit harder to read - she wrote in Kurrent the way she learned in school instead of the more common latin style of handwriting today,
Now what can my children or grandchildren do with what they find in my boxes when they clean out the house? Spend $500 on my early collection of porn and mp3? Find out that most content on VHS-cassettes became mostly snow-storms? This is what's being lost. Not the super-high-importance stuff, the common things.
You might be one of the very conscientious people who move all their stuff from server to server. I'm the more average procrastinator. You'll won't probably lose that much, although if your grandchildren don't happen to have the passwords to your properly secured storage, they won't be any wiser than mine with boxes of old stuff.
It happened before and it'll happen again. Although all the companies talk a good game about how safe their storage is, in reality archiving your old stuff is really hard.
* I still have a box full of 5"1/4 floppy disk, some hard sectored. * I have more than a few boxes of cds, many of them so badly aged that I can't read them any more. * I have a few account son platforms where I'm not even sure they still exist. Some were secure picture storage. * I have a few boxes of old photographs * I have a few boxes of super 8 films * I even have a box of VHS cassettes with stuff I care about. * No vinyl disk left, I sold those. In retrospective, probably a bad idea. Some of the songs on those seem to be lost. * A cupboard full of paper with stuff from school and university.
Of all those things, I guess the box of photographs and the super 8 films have the best chance of surviving me and of interest to my future grand-children. Most digital media is already lost today to me. For the rest, I just hope there's no fire and no flood.
On a larger scale, enormous amounts of knowledge and art has been lost due to fires and wars affecting libraries and museums. Last famous occurrence was probably all the stuff destroyed wilfully in Cambodia and in Iraq.
So MySpace losing a few boxs of memories of people who mostly can't even remember they had it is sad, but nothing tragic or surprising.
What a great occasion to don a red Make America Great Cap and some Oakley mirror shades. To complement the outfit perhaps some face mask against the smog / dusty air.
Good luck with face recognitions, Mr. Robot.
NB: Guy Fawkes masks or Halloween masks of current and past presidents aren't such a good idea, they good give the security the idea you're up to no good. One needs to do this in the proper style.
If Amazon, Spotify etc will succeed, it'll wont have to increase the payouts either. -> Win and they can tell the artist Apple was on their side. Perhaps even increase the payout by a few small percent to become to more attractive to artists again.
If the lawsuit fails, Amazon, Spotify etc will be the bad bullies with egg on their faces. -> Win for Apple again. No legal cost and they have positioned themselves at the side of the artists.
Whatever happens, Apple doesn't lose by letting others take the fall or doing the work.
Keep in mind we're talking about a project that's roughly the same length as Paris to Liechtenstein. It's not a trivial undertaking.
Indeed. Paris - Zürich is about only 100km short of going to Liechtenstein, but you can board a TGV for this trip today. The main reason it stops at Zürich is that nobody cares to go to Liechtenstein.
As the next poster mentioned, Paris - Marseille is fully operative. Same with München - Hamburg or Paris - Berlin. Those are all high-speed trains covering a comparable distance. And they were build through densely populated areas by countries where the opposition can't simply be thrown into jail.
Or did you mean that on your side of the Atlantic only trivial undertakings have a chance of success?
Adblockers can be annoying for Spotify and its ilk and therefore they don't like them. When a company stoops so low to ban them, it just means their business model failed or they're doomed for another reason.
It's like a shop with a rule to shoot shoplifters on sight.
A total over-reaction which in the end won't help Spotify except help them to annoy customers and drive them away.
Going by Mr. Musk's other fancy projects like the Hyperloop and his tunnels or even the flame thrower, the outlook for a stainless steel rocket is very dim.
Most of the time, Mr. Musk's cunning plans overlook some aspect and in the end they either fall very short on the original expectation or don't work at all. And if they work, liek the tunnels, they end up being about the same as those made by others.
In engineering there are very few overlooked secrets to revolutionise things like Mr. Musk always twitters. Fortunately most engineers aren't the fumbling dolts he thinks they are.
Probably this is just another case of dangerous half-knowledge - as usual.
Even if he was a lazy clerk doing nothing but his hobby in the office, this would quite challenging.
The most logical explanation would be either that this is a group of people or that he uploaded a big bunch of articles from other sources. Both scenarios aren't bad, it just deflates the sensationalism of the news-story.
In general, children pay a reduced tariff so it affects the bottom line less. Even more so, when there are already subsidised, so the difference between subsidising all children isn't that big. It also reduces the hassles with distributing reduced price cards.
Another annoying thing are children under 15 riding alone and getting caught free-riding. You can easily fine adults, but with children things are more complicated. This problem is also gone when they don't need to pay.
Same for Vienna. There pre-school children are always free and all school-children (up to 15, also later if you still go to school) get al free transportation card.
This isn't new and a really, really good thing. Good for Paris to catch up.
Many comments didn't seem to pick up why Zurich is refusing:
Zurich asserts the attack was done by some foreign government in a hostile or warlike manner, which is excluded from coverage. The prime suspect in this case would be Russia.
It's very common to exclude damages from war in insurance contracts. With foreign nations doing state sanctioned or organised hacking, this becomes very favourable for Zurich. They basically say, we cover only damage from script kiddies, not from foreign secret services waging a cyberwar against the USA.
Whether Mondelez' are incapable buffoons or they left their doors open with a writte invitiation to plunder them isn't really what this is all about.
I think it's about time we let some hot chics sit on the board; I prefer red-heads though, so the screening process is more complicated as a result.
Sorry, you lose and instead of crusty old farts you'll now have to deal with more dried-up prunes and obnoxious landwhales too. The exception is of course when the CEO decides to put his girlfriend on the board as CWO (Chief Women Officer) or whatever to put her upkeep on the company bill.
Back a long time ago, my economics professor started his economics 101 for engineers with following statement:
Engineers are the camels salemen ride one.
This is still true today.
As to liberal arts and humanities being necessary to create better products, that might be true, if those branches would offer any systematic or useful approaches to apply them. Those sitting around and just discussing which reality is more worthy are just a wast of time.
In the past, people with little useful skills were swineherds and goose girls. However, the need for those occupations are gone, so today those same people are multi media marketing consultants and agile project controllers.
Mr. Kurzweil is right, that useful jobs get automated so that people will mess up less and pointless make believe jobs are created instead to occupy the masses.
This from a agile multimedia marketing project controller who wishes to do do something rewarding like herding swines instead.
Actually, rising sea levels are no conspiracy but a fact. Given that the current sea levels are quite low over history of earth and that we're still coming out of an ice-age, rising sea levels are to expected. For one if it gets warmer, water expands and then all the ice melting in Antarctica, Greenland, Alaska (but not in the Arctic, because that ice already floats) need to go somewhere.
Can we do anything about it? Not really, except moving further inland or building dykes like the Dutch do. Is that a reason to create panic just to make money with the fear of yet another apocalypse? I find that disgusting.
It must be slow season for another End of the World scenario. As if the raise of about 3.5" between 1980 and today made us to swim to school in scuba gear.
And just for fun, look at the End of the World scenarios from the 70ies, 80ies and 90ies, prediction how bad it'll be by 2020. None of them happened, they all got it wrong. Makes one wonder about the current crop of apocalypses.
In summary, the internet is good for most art forms and reinvigorating it.
Sure, the big companies making their profit from having a choke-hold on the distribution of art are suffering, but they had it coming. They were complacent and exploiting customers and artists alike.
Also with the internet a floodgate has been opened and works of all quality - mostly total junk - has inundated the world. Curating the work isn't yet where it needs to be to filter out all the crap, but there are definitively improvements made in that area.
Hand in hand with the previous points it becomes for artists more difficult to earn a living with traditional methods and they need to find alternatives. But it always was hard for artists to make a living, so that's just the next iteration of an very old story.
From what I see, traditional art has seen a resurgence because of the internet, but making ends meet as an artist is still tough.
The article assumes for some strange reason, that those countries use coins. Well hello to the reality, many countries have paper money only and no coins, or after inflation the coins are so worthless, that they're good as collectors items only. Problem solved and other half-baked college theses can be safe stored in the depths of some library to be forgotten for the next millennia.
In the same CNC business, it wasn't uncommon for small shops to by the small model and then accidentally swap the ROM or change the model encoding. Also remember how consumers dealt with feature-crippled mobile phones. Some models were rooted even before they properly hit the shelves. Not to forget the fate of all kind of copy protection and dongles for popular software, from Windows to Photoshop, from DVDs to Ebooks. It can be summed up by one word: Broken.
The same will happen here, only that BMW and other manufacturers have a lot less resources available to stay ahead of the evil crackers, hackers modders. Those cars will be rooted pretty quickly and for good.
Fleets will pay for the features, but I'm certain the chip-tuning shops of today will expand to feature unlocking at discount prices. Bring on that cunning plan and lets hack a little!
Ok, jobs in manufacturing have been greatly reduced over the past century and the individual productivity sky-rocketed. The consequence was consumer goods became dirt cheap and few people work at producing them - at least in the western world.
Now things start the same with knowledge jobs and some services. With a diagnostic tricorder, automatic blood analyser and self-service MRI, the doctors and many specialists at the labs will have a good part of their work disappear or be replaced by a friendly unskilled worker telling you where to place your hand and hand you the print-out. Another set of jobs on the way out are train-drivers, truckers, taxi-drivers and pilots, they have a big chance of being replaced by computers in the near future.
What will be the consequence? Will the world end? Will the mschines rise and Skynet take over?
One of the first consequences will be, that the value of the service rendered will be greatly devaluated. In the end, we humans pay manly for three things: The value of the raw materials, the necessary investments for the production site and the time spent by a human to create the product. If the latter two drop significantly, the second because the productivity of the machines go up and the third because of automation, then simple we won't be willing to pay as much for the product and spend out money elsewhere. This elsewhere is where the jobs for humans will be.
For one, personal comfort services are very often hard to automate. Hairdressers and make-up stylists will be be hard to replace by computers. As another consequence, the organisations will fill with pointless jobs which keep each other busy. We see that today with all the consultants, controllers, marketing departments, safety and security people, quality assurance, project managers, application owners and so on. Those are nearly totally unproductive or, the few that are good at their job, cost only a little less than what their work saves. This is the negative aspect, but the same also exists in positive. Skilled people are able to spend more time doing things not possible before. Today, many illnesses have been identified that before didn't have a name because people died of other things first. And for many of those illnesses, cures have been developed.
In the end, humans will go on pushing the envelope, being that with discovering new cures to make life longer and better or be that by spending more effort on hairdos and the next fashion in legging-design. Automated tasks will just become a commodity, no matter how complicated it is. If you don't believe me, just look at that mobile phone of yours and look around how many designer cases are floating around. People are willing to spend 25% of the value of the phone on a piece of printed plastic with some designer-scribbles on it.
What a catastrophe, Youtube and DailyMotion are supposed to pay a tax of 1% or so on the business involved in France! I'm certain, this 1% of their revenue will make the difference between going bankrupt or being the pride of capitalistic success.
Seriously, to corporations like Google or Amazon, taxes and tariffs are just regular business to be dealt with as appropriate, just like road traffic is to be dealt with when driving around the city. It really doesn't matter whether its called VAT or some other name or if the money is used as bribes for corrupt politicos - sorry lobbying money - to avoid costly laws. It's never a matter of freedom or or up about fairness. In the end only one thing count and that's how much money is left after all expenses are paid.
Work the system and treat the boss just like you would handle a system bug or limitation.
Step 1: Get it into your official procedure, to do some kind of acceptance test or quality checks for software delivered by 3rd parties. This can often be done innocently and disguised as a formality.
Step 2: Improve the acceptance test procedure so that the pieces of garbage with security holes will fail Here, make sure the improved tests become official and rubber stamped.
Step 3: When at delivery the tests fail, raise a critical ticket with the delivering company. This works best if you managed in step 2 to make the test part of the acceptance. Now people will start to feel the pain, because a failed acceptance and a piece of software marked as "Not Ready for Deployment" will have commercial impacts. People will curse and try to force it through.
Step 4: While the shit is flying your way, make sure you stay reasonable, helpful and stick very closely to the official company procedures. Get acquainted with the QC department and ISO-whatever proceedings. Don't be controversial, never bad-mouth anyone. At the same time, document your cases, print out the mails where people attach your message to their replies.
Step 5: The software will be rolled out no matter what you said, but now you have a proper documentation of how your boss and the marketing department bend and break the holy official rules nobody want to keep.
Step 6: Various outcomes a: People in marketing hate your guts now and avoid you as much as they can because you're branded as difficult. Problem solved for you. b: They want you to do it again next month. Some chances are that the delivering organisation learned that releases are smoother if the software doesn't fail the test devised by that crazy lunatic in software engineering (this means you). A slow increase of security will ensure.
Step 7: Somewhere down the road there's a big chance the company will get into troubles because of their faulty software. Make sure, the people investigating that get access to your documentation.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm a bit disappointed. I was hoping it moves at relativistic speeds. Unfortunately 0.37% of c isn't even getting close.
Thanks for the hint, I'll try that.
Most digital media is already lost today to me.
In the year 2019 the modern desktop PC still has the ability to read (and in many cases, write) CDs, DVDs, Blu-Ray, 3.5" floppies (USB floppy drive), and almost any format of USB mass storage device made in the last 20+ years. Apart from magnetic tape (which I've already identified the solution for that problem), I fail to see how "most" digital media is lost to you.
You are partially right, many popular formats still can be read. Although reading some of the more exotic formats can be harder. The main problem is proper storage of the magnetic or optical media. Time isn't very kind to floppy disks, tapes and cd-roms. Even when having a matching drive, many media weren't readable any more.
As to access to online stuff, the sites often disappear, you lose the account credentials, etc. That's as good as lost.
Get used to what exactly? Painful levels of procrastination?
You're exactly right. This data wasn't critical to me, but from time to time I had the urge to check back on them. When I found a box of old photographs when my grand-mother died, it was easy retrieve the data. Some pictures were faded and for some negatives a scanner helped, but I got many interesting insights into the early days of my grandparent's and parent's youths. Seems my grandmother was quite a naughty girl back in the days.
Same with her collection of letters and journals. It was a bit harder to read - she wrote in Kurrent the way she learned in school instead of the more common latin style of handwriting today,
Now what can my children or grandchildren do with what they find in my boxes when they clean out the house? Spend $500 on my early collection of porn and mp3? Find out that most content on VHS-cassettes became mostly snow-storms? This is what's being lost. Not the super-high-importance stuff, the common things.
You might be one of the very conscientious people who move all their stuff from server to server. I'm the more average procrastinator. You'll won't probably lose that much, although if your grandchildren don't happen to have the passwords to your properly secured storage, they won't be any wiser than mine with boxes of old stuff.
It happened before and it'll happen again. Although all the companies talk a good game about how safe their storage is, in reality archiving your old stuff is really hard.
* I still have a box full of 5"1/4 floppy disk, some hard sectored.
* I have more than a few boxes of cds, many of them so badly aged that I can't read them any more.
* I have a few account son platforms where I'm not even sure they still exist. Some were secure picture storage.
* I have a few boxes of old photographs
* I have a few boxes of super 8 films
* I even have a box of VHS cassettes with stuff I care about.
* No vinyl disk left, I sold those. In retrospective, probably a bad idea. Some of the songs on those seem to be lost.
* A cupboard full of paper with stuff from school and university.
Of all those things, I guess the box of photographs and the super 8 films have the best chance of surviving me and of interest to my future grand-children. Most digital media is already lost today to me. For the rest, I just hope there's no fire and no flood.
On a larger scale, enormous amounts of knowledge and art has been lost due to fires and wars affecting libraries and museums. Last famous occurrence was probably all the stuff destroyed wilfully in Cambodia and in Iraq.
So MySpace losing a few boxs of memories of people who mostly can't even remember they had it is sad, but nothing tragic or surprising.
Get used it it.
What a great occasion to don a red Make America Great Cap and some Oakley mirror shades. To complement the outfit perhaps some face mask against the smog / dusty air.
Good luck with face recognitions, Mr. Robot.
NB: Guy Fawkes masks or Halloween masks of current and past presidents aren't such a good idea, they good give the security the idea you're up to no good. One needs to do this in the proper style.
If Amazon, Spotify etc will succeed, it'll wont have to increase the payouts either. -> Win and they can tell the artist Apple was on their side. Perhaps even increase the payout by a few small percent to become to more attractive to artists again.
If the lawsuit fails, Amazon, Spotify etc will be the bad bullies with egg on their faces. -> Win for Apple again. No legal cost and they have positioned themselves at the side of the artists.
Whatever happens, Apple doesn't lose by letting others take the fall or doing the work.
Clever.
Keep in mind we're talking about a project that's roughly the same length as Paris to Liechtenstein. It's not a trivial undertaking.
Indeed. Paris - Zürich is about only 100km short of going to Liechtenstein, but you can board a TGV for this trip today. The main reason it stops at Zürich is that nobody cares to go to Liechtenstein.
As the next poster mentioned, Paris - Marseille is fully operative. Same with München - Hamburg or Paris - Berlin. Those are all high-speed trains covering a comparable distance. And they were build through densely populated areas by countries where the opposition can't simply be thrown into jail.
Or did you mean that on your side of the Atlantic only trivial undertakings have a chance of success?
Adblockers can be annoying for Spotify and its ilk and therefore they don't like them. When a company stoops so low to ban them, it just means their business model failed or they're doomed for another reason.
It's like a shop with a rule to shoot shoplifters on sight.
A total over-reaction which in the end won't help Spotify except help them to annoy customers and drive them away.
Going by Mr. Musk's other fancy projects like the Hyperloop and his tunnels or even the flame thrower, the outlook for a stainless steel rocket is very dim.
Most of the time, Mr. Musk's cunning plans overlook some aspect and in the end they either fall very short on the original expectation or don't work at all. And if they work, liek the tunnels, they end up being about the same as those made by others.
In engineering there are very few overlooked secrets to revolutionise things like Mr. Musk always twitters. Fortunately most engineers aren't the fumbling dolts he thinks they are.
Probably this is just another case of dangerous half-knowledge - as usual.
Even if he was a lazy clerk doing nothing but his hobby in the office, this would quite challenging.
The most logical explanation would be either that this is a group of people or that he uploaded a big bunch of articles from other sources. Both scenarios aren't bad, it just deflates the sensationalism of the news-story.
They might get to the point some day.
In general, children pay a reduced tariff so it affects the bottom line less. Even more so, when there are already subsidised, so the difference between subsidising all children isn't that big. It also reduces the hassles with distributing reduced price cards.
Another annoying thing are children under 15 riding alone and getting caught free-riding. You can easily fine adults, but with children things are more complicated. This problem is also gone when they don't need to pay.
Same for Vienna. There pre-school children are always free and all school-children (up to 15, also later if you still go to school) get al free transportation card.
This isn't new and a really, really good thing. Good for Paris to catch up.
Many comments didn't seem to pick up why Zurich is refusing:
Zurich asserts the attack was done by some foreign government in a hostile or warlike manner, which is excluded from coverage.
The prime suspect in this case would be Russia.
It's very common to exclude damages from war in insurance contracts. With foreign nations doing state sanctioned or organised hacking, this becomes very favourable for Zurich. They basically say, we cover only damage from script kiddies, not from foreign secret services waging a cyberwar against the USA.
Whether Mondelez' are incapable buffoons or they left their doors open with a writte invitiation to plunder them isn't really what this is all about.
I’ve found that nothing beats good noise-cancelling headphones. Haven’t seen anything better yet.
Have you tried an office with privacy? That's even better than noise-cancelling headphones.
I guess the corporate world isn't ready for such a radical and innovative idea yet. Human horse blinders will have to do for now.
I think it's about time we let some hot chics sit on the board; I prefer red-heads though,
so the screening process is more complicated as a result.
Sorry, you lose and instead of crusty old farts you'll now have to deal with more dried-up prunes and obnoxious landwhales too. The exception is of course when the CEO decides to put his girlfriend on the board as CWO (Chief Women Officer) or whatever to put her upkeep on the company bill.
Back a long time ago, my economics professor started his economics 101 for engineers with following statement:
Engineers are the camels salemen ride one.
This is still true today.
As to liberal arts and humanities being necessary to create better products, that might be true, if those branches would offer any systematic or useful approaches to apply them. Those sitting around and just discussing which reality is more worthy are just a wast of time.
In the past, people with little useful skills were swineherds and goose girls. However, the need for those occupations are gone, so today those same people are multi media marketing consultants and agile project controllers.
Mr. Kurzweil is right, that useful jobs get automated so that people will mess up less and pointless make believe jobs are created instead to occupy the masses.
This from a agile multimedia marketing project controller who wishes to do do something rewarding like herding swines instead.
Actually, rising sea levels are no conspiracy but a fact. Given that the current sea levels are quite low over history of earth and that we're still coming out of an ice-age, rising sea levels are to expected. For one if it gets warmer, water expands and then all the ice melting in Antarctica, Greenland, Alaska (but not in the Arctic, because that ice already floats) need to go somewhere.
Can we do anything about it? Not really, except moving further inland or building dykes like the Dutch do.
Is that a reason to create panic just to make money with the fear of yet another apocalypse? I find that disgusting.
It must be slow season for another End of the World scenario. As if the raise of about 3.5" between 1980 and today made us to swim to school in scuba gear.
And just for fun, look at the End of the World scenarios from the 70ies, 80ies and 90ies, prediction how bad it'll be by 2020. None of them happened, they all got it wrong. Makes one wonder about the current crop of apocalypses.
In summary, the internet is good for most art forms and reinvigorating it.
Sure, the big companies making their profit from having a choke-hold on the distribution of art are suffering, but they had it coming. They were complacent and exploiting customers and artists alike.
Also with the internet a floodgate has been opened and works of all quality - mostly total junk - has inundated the world. Curating the work isn't yet where it needs to be to filter out all the crap, but there are definitively improvements made in that area.
Hand in hand with the previous points it becomes for artists more difficult to earn a living with traditional methods and they need to find alternatives. But it always was hard for artists to make a living, so that's just the next iteration of an very old story.
From what I see, traditional art has seen a resurgence because of the internet, but making ends meet as an artist is still tough.
The article assumes for some strange reason, that those countries use coins. Well hello to the reality, many countries have paper money only and no coins, or after inflation the coins are so worthless, that they're good as collectors items only. Problem solved and other half-baked college theses can be safe stored in the depths of some library to be forgotten for the next millennia.
In the same CNC business, it wasn't uncommon for small shops to by the small model and then accidentally swap the ROM or change the model encoding.
Also remember how consumers dealt with feature-crippled mobile phones. Some models were rooted even before they properly hit the shelves.
Not to forget the fate of all kind of copy protection and dongles for popular software, from Windows to Photoshop, from DVDs to Ebooks. It can be summed up by one word: Broken.
The same will happen here, only that BMW and other manufacturers have a lot less resources available to stay ahead of the evil crackers, hackers modders. Those cars will be rooted pretty quickly and for good.
Fleets will pay for the features, but I'm certain the chip-tuning shops of today will expand to feature unlocking at discount prices. Bring on that cunning plan and lets hack a little!
Ok, jobs in manufacturing have been greatly reduced over the past century and the individual productivity sky-rocketed. The consequence was consumer goods became dirt cheap and few people work at producing them - at least in the western world.
Now things start the same with knowledge jobs and some services. With a diagnostic tricorder, automatic blood analyser and self-service MRI, the doctors and many specialists at the labs will have a good part of their work disappear or be replaced by a friendly unskilled worker telling you where to place your hand and hand you the print-out. Another set of jobs on the way out are train-drivers, truckers, taxi-drivers and pilots, they have a big chance of being replaced by computers in the near future.
What will be the consequence? Will the world end? Will the mschines rise and Skynet take over?
One of the first consequences will be, that the value of the service rendered will be greatly devaluated. In the end, we humans pay manly for three things: The value of the raw materials, the necessary investments for the production site and the time spent by a human to create the product. If the latter two drop significantly, the second because the productivity of the machines go up and the third because of automation, then simple we won't be willing to pay as much for the product and spend out money elsewhere. This elsewhere is where the jobs for humans will be.
For one, personal comfort services are very often hard to automate. Hairdressers and make-up stylists will be be hard to replace by computers. As another consequence, the organisations will fill with pointless jobs which keep each other busy. We see that today with all the consultants, controllers, marketing departments, safety and security people, quality assurance, project managers, application owners and so on. Those are nearly totally unproductive or, the few that are good at their job, cost only a little less than what their work saves. This is the negative aspect, but the same also exists in positive. Skilled people are able to spend more time doing things not possible before. Today, many illnesses have been identified that before didn't have a name because people died of other things first. And for many of those illnesses, cures have been developed.
In the end, humans will go on pushing the envelope, being that with discovering new cures to make life longer and better or be that by spending more effort on hairdos and the next fashion in legging-design. Automated tasks will just become a commodity, no matter how complicated it is. If you don't believe me, just look at that mobile phone of yours and look around how many designer cases are floating around. People are willing to spend 25% of the value of the phone on a piece of printed plastic with some designer-scribbles on it.
What a catastrophe, Youtube and DailyMotion are supposed to pay a tax of 1% or so on the business involved in France! I'm certain, this 1% of their revenue will make the difference between going bankrupt or being the pride of capitalistic success.
Seriously, to corporations like Google or Amazon, taxes and tariffs are just regular business to be dealt with as appropriate, just like road traffic is to be dealt with when driving around the city. It really doesn't matter whether its called VAT or some other name or if the money is used as bribes for corrupt politicos - sorry lobbying money - to avoid costly laws. It's never a matter of freedom or or up about fairness. In the end only one thing count and that's how much money is left after all expenses are paid.
Work the system and treat the boss just like you would handle a system bug or limitation.
Step 1: Get it into your official procedure, to do some kind of acceptance test or quality checks for software delivered by 3rd parties. This can often be done innocently and disguised as a formality.
Step 2: Improve the acceptance test procedure so that the pieces of garbage with security holes will fail Here, make sure the improved tests become official and rubber stamped.
Step 3: When at delivery the tests fail, raise a critical ticket with the delivering company. This works best if you managed in step 2 to make the test part of the acceptance. Now people will start to feel the pain, because a failed acceptance and a piece of software marked as "Not Ready for Deployment" will have commercial impacts. People will curse and try to force it through.
Step 4: While the shit is flying your way, make sure you stay reasonable, helpful and stick very closely to the official company procedures. Get acquainted with the QC department and ISO-whatever proceedings. Don't be controversial, never bad-mouth anyone. At the same time, document your cases, print out the mails where people attach your message to their replies.
Step 5: The software will be rolled out no matter what you said, but now you have a proper documentation of how your boss and the marketing department bend and break the holy official rules nobody want to keep.
Step 6: Various outcomes
a: People in marketing hate your guts now and avoid you as much as they can because you're branded as difficult. Problem solved for you.
b: They want you to do it again next month. Some chances are that the delivering organisation learned that releases are smoother if the software doesn't fail the test devised by that crazy lunatic in software engineering (this means you). A slow increase of security will ensure.
Step 7: Somewhere down the road there's a big chance the company will get into troubles because of their faulty software. Make sure, the people investigating that get access to your documentation.