I have to agree with this. Living in Raleigh, NC, a fairly large but new city, I simply don't see hardly ANY factories ANYWHERE. As far as the eye can see, everything is suburbs and retail (grocery stores and Home Depots on every block). We seem to be a completely consumption-based economy. There some high-tech (i.e. IBM, who's quickly offshoring jobs to China) and some bio-pharmaceutical. But I don't see much work for the 'average joe' that you used to have in this country when industry was king.
It's downright scary thinking what might happen if World War 3 were to ever break out. The only reason we won WWII was because our factories produced weapons faster than the Axis countries (who's factories were being bombed). Virtually ALL of our industry was used for the war effort in order to accomplish this. But we'd never be able to win a conventional drawn-out war anymore. We simply don't have the industry anymore. And who does? China. And who's side are they likely to be on in WW3? Not ours. So it's virtually guaranteed that WW3 is going to be nuclear, since that's the only way we'd 'win' the war.
This is somewhat off-topic, but I've always assumed that hearing aids would lead to further hearing loss. After all, aren't you just amplifying sound and blasting it into your ear, which is what caused the hearing loss in the first place?
The rumors flying around (which have been the only way to know about upcoming RA's, and which have been quite accurate) are that an executive decision has been made to reduce the U.S. workforce to 70,000.
Unfortunately, this number also includes new low-paying jobs, like the call-center jobs in Dubuque, Iowa.
I just had to pay $1300 in out-of-pocket expenses for my daughter to get a single stitch (emergency room visit because it was after hours). And the doctor was on the fence as to whether nor not she needed one. Had I known it was going to cost me $1300, I would have used a band-aid.
There is a HUGE disconnect between medical services and pricing. How many of us ask doctors about how much something is going to cost? How many doctors tell us this information up-front?
That's why I think there should be a law that hospitals/doctors MUST present you with a bill BEFORE they do anything (except in the case of an emergency). i.e. they're not allowed to charge you for anything unless you've signed the bill for it first.
That's exactly true. People in the U.S. dislike unions because they've been brainwashed into believing statements like "Unions protect the employees against any kind of common sense options".
I'm glad SOMEONE has finally point out what some of these inefficiencies are. I (like many others here) consider myself a fiscal conservative. But it bugs the heck out of me that Republicans are always complaining about government inefficiency, but they never provide any evidence to back it up, or propose anything to improve the inefficiencies (except cutting taxes...whatever THAT's supposed to do). Republicans don't WANT to solve inefficiencies in government for fear of losing a useful campaign issue. Everything is "pork"....unless it's money being spent in their district, then it's vital for helping their economy. And that makes them all the more hypocritical in my eyes. Unfortunately, the Democrats aren't doing anything about it either, but at least they're not hypocrites.
I would LOVE it if Obama started an Efficiency-in-Government initiative, but he hasn't lived up to the hype. And of course the Republicans/Fox News would somehow manage to spin it as being socialist/communist anyway.
IBM layoffs and coporate espionage
on
There Is No Cyberwar
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
IBM has recently started directly laying off American developers and replacing them with Chinese developers working in the "CDL labs". They're doing this for code designed to run on System z mainframes, such as Rational HATS (half the team just moved to China in the past couple of weeks). The main reason why companies use System z at all is because it's supposed to be ultra-secure, and therefore it is used for the most sensitive of processes (like banks, etc...). How unrealistic would it be for a Chinese developer (either willingly, or coerced by the Chinese government) to plant security holes in IBM mainframe products? They did it with Google...isn't it logical that they'd also be trying to target IBM?
It scares the heck out of me thinking how many Fortune 500 companies that use System z for their ultra-secure mainframes might be getting exposed to Chinese corporate espionage.
Hrm....except the GDP DIDN'T drop by 29%. It was estimated to have dropped between 2.4% and 6.9%.
And I don't know what you mean by saying the current recession would have been over with within a year. The recession started in December of 2007. Obama did not take office until January 2009, and didn't really start 'rescuing stuff' until a couple of months later. That's over a year right there where in what can only be described as the "hands off" policy of the Bush Administration (admit it...he was pretty inept by the end of his term and wasn't doing anything). So the "hands off" policy you describe utterly failed to stop the current recession even though it had over a year to "work".
And if GM had not been rescued? Not just GM, but also a majority of parts suppliers would have simply gone out of business. Sure...the automobile industry would have survived, but would it have been reborn in the U.S., or in China?
And if AIG had not been rescued? Well...that was pretty much a financial Armageddon scenario. Think our problems with strained credit supplies is bad now? What would it have been like if credit simply disappeared because most financial institutions went under. What would have happened once the large banks had depleted the FDIC, and bank deposits would have no longer been insured anymore (unless of course the government were to 'intervene' and back the FDIC?). Sure...the global economy would have survived, but where would the U.S. economy rank in the world in relation to China? Admit it....China has the economic advantage since they don't have the 'burden' of labor and environmental laws....you know...the kinds of laws that prevent our country from becoming the polluted, hellish, slave-driven place that China is?
I'm sorry, but even as a life-long Libertarian, I cannot believe that the best policy was to let the economy do it's thing. Will these interventionist policies reduce the rate of growth in the coming years? You bet! But the alternative would have been extremely ugly. The "natural state" of unregulated economies is an endless cycle of dizzying expansions and terrifying collapses. You need regulation and interventionism to level out both the lows and the highs.
...
The other thing to be avoided is lengthy legalese or copyright information spread all over code. If this is necessary, at all, it should fit on one line and if necessary reference a COPYRIGHT or LEGAL file...
You know....for many of us developers, this legalese is dictated by company lawyers. We can't simply "avoid" putting this legalese in our code.
You do realize that the phrase "climate change" was invented by the Republican pollster Frank Luntz when he discovered that focus groups found the phrase "global warming" too scary, right?
I just happened to stick in the scientific community since "climate change" is in fact a more-accurate description. But it wasn't the "liberals" or the "liberal media" that invented this phrase.
Seriously? As others have already mentioned, the private sector has only one interest...maximizing profit. You only have to go as far as looking at your local cable company to see "private sector efficiency" in action.
If the DOT were run by a private company, all roads would be tolled....heavily. You would have to pay lots of extra fees like "exit ramp usage fees". If you wanted to go to another state, you'd have to purchase a "subscription" to use those roads. You'd only be allowed to drive certain kinds of cars on those roads....those from car companies that have made cross-licensing agreements with the road companies (and those cars would cost quite a bit more then too). Safety concerns would take a back seat to profits (i.e. unsafe conditions would only be fixed if the costs of lawsuits outweigh the costs of repairs). And you can totally forget about aesthetics....cheap and ugly is what all your roads would look like. etc....etc...
So sure, from a pure efficiency standpoint, the private sector can do things more effectively and efficiently than government. But in the end, consumers still end up paying more from services provided by the private sector. The only time this isn't true is when prices are strictly controlled by government (e.g. here in North Carolina, electric rate hikes must be approved by the state). But then that's considered governmental interference in the marketplace, right?
The libertarian side of me says that maybe providing broadband to all isn't necessarily a good thing. Likewise, maybe providing electricity to all back in 1900 wasn't necessarily good either. In the end, we didn't just provide poor people in the country with power. Instead, we provided an incentive for people to move out into the country, leading to sprawl, demand for more roads, foreign dependence on oil, etc... From a pure efficiency point-of-view, living in the city is much more efficient than living in the country. So providing all these services to the country leads to a very inefficient system. One of the reasons why infrastructure in cities is falling apart is because we use all of our resources building infrastructure out to every rural corner of the country, when really we should be concentrating on putting our resources where it affects the most people...in the cities.
Well...I was going to say that this cost might be irrelevant. If the school was in a northern climate that was using electricity to heat the building, then that money would have ended up going to the heating bill instead.
Then I read it was in Arizona. Oops... double whammy if you include the added cooling costs.
I'm no climatologist (and I assume you are not either), so I cannot say with authority whether or not global warming exists. I see lots of evidence on both sides of the issue. But even the right-wing Thomas Donohue, head of the fricken U.S. CHAMBER OF COMMERCE admits that global warming is real. And if there were any reliable evidence whatsoever to disprove AGW, then he would be the one person who would be all over it. But he's not. He admits it's real (although he fights tooth-and-nail about what we should be doing about it). Him admitting that AGW is real is about equivalent to Al Gore admitting that it's not.
And besides, like it or not, peak oil is a real problem. The U.S. hit peak oil back in the 1970's, and production has been decreasing ever since (despite the fact that far more exploratory wells have been drilled in this country than anywhere else on the planet), making us more and more reliant on foreign sources of oil. Not many people remember, but Texas used to be the Saudi Arabia of oil production...but not any more.
We SHOULD be taxing the heck out of the stuff and making alternate energy more competitive simply to become less reliant on foreign oil. And I'm sorry, but the constant "drill-baby-drill" calls from the conservatives is just plain short-sighted. There's simply not that much oil out there, and we'll need those reserves of oil 20-50 years in the future when we've completely depleted our oil reserves on land. And we have lots of coal, but coal has it's own issues (mountain top removal, acid rain, mercury emissions, etc...).
So I have no problem whatsoever with taxing carbon emissions. Even if AGW is all bunk, it's still the right thing to do from a sustainability perspective.
It may be crap, but that doesn't imply that it's not going to succeed. As the ex-Lotus employee can probably attest, software development in IBM rarely involves making products faster or more stable. It's all about features, and making sure that your product has more feature-list checkboxes checked than the other guys. "Starts in under 127 seconds" is not a sell-able feature. The only thing the PHBs buying this stuff see is that iNotes has 100 features, and product X only has 75.
The only time performance or stability is really ever considered is when customers start complaining that they're going to drop the IBM product. And by then, the product is so bloated that improving performance to any significant degree is virtually impossible.
It is tidally locked according to the article linked in the article: "Because the planet is so close to the star, it is gravitationally locked to it in the same way the Moon is locked to Earth. One side of the planet always faces its star, just as one side of the Moon always faces Earth. "
BTW....this is related to the process that is thought to occur on most tidally-locked rocky planets. They likely do not have atmospheres, since it entirely sublimates on to the cold side of the planet. When the atmosphere freezes out on the cold side, it reduces the atmospheric pressure on the cold side, which causes the atmosphere on the hot side to flow to the cold side, repeating the process until the entire atmosphere is gone.
But in this particular case, the 'atmosphere' is getting continuously replaced through evaporation of the planet itself.
This process is also one of the reasons why planets around red dwarf stars may be unlikely, since the planet has to be close to the star to receive enough energy from it, but being that close to the star increases the likely-hood of it becoming tidally locked with the star.
No, because it's still a closed system. The solid contents of the planet are continually moving towards the sun (the freshly-deposited rock is always pushing the older rock towards the hot side via gravity) But the overall center of gravity of the planet never changes position relative to the star since the momentum of the solid part of the planet is counteracted by the momentum of the atmosphere moving in the opposite direction. So the planet itself always stays the same distance away from the star.
The other interesting question might be what sort of shape might a planet take on when it's continuously evaporating on one side and sublimating on the other. Maybe the planet takes on an egg shape if the sublimation only occurs at the coldest point on the planet. Or maybe bowl-shaped if the sublimation occurs as soon as the evaporated rock reaches the shadow side of the planet.
What I find interesting about this planet is that it's tidally locked with it's star, so one side is over 4000F, while the other is -370F. That could imply that the surface continuously evaporates on the hot side and condenses out of the atmosphere on the cold side. So the planet is essentially a conveyor belt always in the process of being destroyed and created. The contents of the entire planet could have gone through this process many times already.
AT&T has offered MMS support for a while (at least I've been being billed for it....20 MMS messages for $2.99/mo, then $0.25 each additional message). Would the MMS support for iPhones require this additional 'feature' be added to your plan? And if so, who's going to pay $0.25 for each message (I assume the first 20 would go rather quickly)? That seems like it would prevent many people from actually using the feature.
Uh huh.....you don't have a kid do you? The same logic could be applied to parents who lock away chemicals behind child-proof cabinets. How else are they going to learn not to drink Drano unless they do it and end up in the Emergency Room?
Sorry...but learning not to run off comes with age. 2 and 3 year old's simply cannot comprehend that they're not supposed to run off, and they usually cannot be taught so at that age.
Oh for fsk sake....you OBVIOUSLY do not have a 3 year old who has a tendency to run away from you in stores, and occasionally likes to play 'hiding' games. Several times, I've looked away for no more than 5 seconds and have had my daughter disappear on me. It's the scariest thing that can happen to you. And thinking to yourself "she PROBABLY wasn't just snatched by some pervert" isn't much comfort.
That doesn't mean I'm going to be tagging her at 17 years of age. But IMHO, something like this would be a useful tool for toddlers and small children. There's a difference between trusting her and trusting the world.
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I fail to see how Democrats and Republicans differ on the matter. Both support large government at the expense of your rights.
The Democrats are slightly less hypocritical about it.
I have to agree with this. Living in Raleigh, NC, a fairly large but new city, I simply don't see hardly ANY factories ANYWHERE. As far as the eye can see, everything is suburbs and retail (grocery stores and Home Depots on every block). We seem to be a completely consumption-based economy. There some high-tech (i.e. IBM, who's quickly offshoring jobs to China) and some bio-pharmaceutical. But I don't see much work for the 'average joe' that you used to have in this country when industry was king.
It's downright scary thinking what might happen if World War 3 were to ever break out. The only reason we won WWII was because our factories produced weapons faster than the Axis countries (who's factories were being bombed). Virtually ALL of our industry was used for the war effort in order to accomplish this. But we'd never be able to win a conventional drawn-out war anymore. We simply don't have the industry anymore. And who does? China. And who's side are they likely to be on in WW3? Not ours. So it's virtually guaranteed that WW3 is going to be nuclear, since that's the only way we'd 'win' the war.
This is somewhat off-topic, but I've always assumed that hearing aids would lead to further hearing loss. After all, aren't you just amplifying sound and blasting it into your ear, which is what caused the hearing loss in the first place?
Does anyone know this is the case?
The rumors flying around (which have been the only way to know about upcoming RA's, and which have been quite accurate) are that an executive decision has been made to reduce the U.S. workforce to 70,000.
Unfortunately, this number also includes new low-paying jobs, like the call-center jobs in Dubuque, Iowa.
excellent programmers steal excellent code."!
Where the heck does excellent code come from then?
I just had to pay $1300 in out-of-pocket expenses for my daughter to get a single stitch (emergency room visit because it was after hours). And the doctor was on the fence as to whether nor not she needed one. Had I known it was going to cost me $1300, I would have used a band-aid.
There is a HUGE disconnect between medical services and pricing. How many of us ask doctors about how much something is going to cost? How many doctors tell us this information up-front?
That's why I think there should be a law that hospitals/doctors MUST present you with a bill BEFORE they do anything (except in the case of an emergency). i.e. they're not allowed to charge you for anything unless you've signed the bill for it first.
That's exactly true. People in the U.S. dislike unions because they've been brainwashed into believing statements like "Unions protect the employees against any kind of common sense options".
I'm glad SOMEONE has finally point out what some of these inefficiencies are. I (like many others here) consider myself a fiscal conservative. But it bugs the heck out of me that Republicans are always complaining about government inefficiency, but they never provide any evidence to back it up, or propose anything to improve the inefficiencies (except cutting taxes...whatever THAT's supposed to do). Republicans don't WANT to solve inefficiencies in government for fear of losing a useful campaign issue. Everything is "pork"....unless it's money being spent in their district, then it's vital for helping their economy. And that makes them all the more hypocritical in my eyes. Unfortunately, the Democrats aren't doing anything about it either, but at least they're not hypocrites.
I would LOVE it if Obama started an Efficiency-in-Government initiative, but he hasn't lived up to the hype. And of course the Republicans/Fox News would somehow manage to spin it as being socialist/communist anyway.
IBM has recently started directly laying off American developers and replacing them with Chinese developers working in the "CDL labs". They're doing this for code designed to run on System z mainframes, such as Rational HATS (half the team just moved to China in the past couple of weeks). The main reason why companies use System z at all is because it's supposed to be ultra-secure, and therefore it is used for the most sensitive of processes (like banks, etc...). How unrealistic would it be for a Chinese developer (either willingly, or coerced by the Chinese government) to plant security holes in IBM mainframe products? They did it with Google...isn't it logical that they'd also be trying to target IBM? It scares the heck out of me thinking how many Fortune 500 companies that use System z for their ultra-secure mainframes might be getting exposed to Chinese corporate espionage.
Hrm....except the GDP DIDN'T drop by 29%. It was estimated to have dropped between 2.4% and 6.9%.
And I don't know what you mean by saying the current recession would have been over with within a year. The recession started in December of 2007. Obama did not take office until January 2009, and didn't really start 'rescuing stuff' until a couple of months later. That's over a year right there where in what can only be described as the "hands off" policy of the Bush Administration (admit it...he was pretty inept by the end of his term and wasn't doing anything). So the "hands off" policy you describe utterly failed to stop the current recession even though it had over a year to "work".
And if GM had not been rescued? Not just GM, but also a majority of parts suppliers would have simply gone out of business. Sure...the automobile industry would have survived, but would it have been reborn in the U.S., or in China?
And if AIG had not been rescued? Well...that was pretty much a financial Armageddon scenario. Think our problems with strained credit supplies is bad now? What would it have been like if credit simply disappeared because most financial institutions went under. What would have happened once the large banks had depleted the FDIC, and bank deposits would have no longer been insured anymore (unless of course the government were to 'intervene' and back the FDIC?). Sure...the global economy would have survived, but where would the U.S. economy rank in the world in relation to China? Admit it....China has the economic advantage since they don't have the 'burden' of labor and environmental laws....you know...the kinds of laws that prevent our country from becoming the polluted, hellish, slave-driven place that China is?
I'm sorry, but even as a life-long Libertarian, I cannot believe that the best policy was to let the economy do it's thing. Will these interventionist policies reduce the rate of growth in the coming years? You bet! But the alternative would have been extremely ugly. The "natural state" of unregulated economies is an endless cycle of dizzying expansions and terrifying collapses. You need regulation and interventionism to level out both the lows and the highs.
... The other thing to be avoided is lengthy legalese or copyright information spread all over code. If this is necessary, at all, it should fit on one line and if necessary reference a COPYRIGHT or LEGAL file ...
You know....for many of us developers, this legalese is dictated by company lawyers. We can't simply "avoid" putting this legalese in our code.
You do realize that the phrase "climate change" was invented by the Republican pollster Frank Luntz when he discovered that focus groups found the phrase "global warming" too scary, right? I just happened to stick in the scientific community since "climate change" is in fact a more-accurate description. But it wasn't the "liberals" or the "liberal media" that invented this phrase.
Seriously? As others have already mentioned, the private sector has only one interest...maximizing profit. You only have to go as far as looking at your local cable company to see "private sector efficiency" in action.
If the DOT were run by a private company, all roads would be tolled....heavily. You would have to pay lots of extra fees like "exit ramp usage fees". If you wanted to go to another state, you'd have to purchase a "subscription" to use those roads. You'd only be allowed to drive certain kinds of cars on those roads....those from car companies that have made cross-licensing agreements with the road companies (and those cars would cost quite a bit more then too). Safety concerns would take a back seat to profits (i.e. unsafe conditions would only be fixed if the costs of lawsuits outweigh the costs of repairs). And you can totally forget about aesthetics....cheap and ugly is what all your roads would look like. etc....etc...
So sure, from a pure efficiency standpoint, the private sector can do things more effectively and efficiently than government. But in the end, consumers still end up paying more from services provided by the private sector. The only time this isn't true is when prices are strictly controlled by government (e.g. here in North Carolina, electric rate hikes must be approved by the state). But then that's considered governmental interference in the marketplace, right?
The libertarian side of me says that maybe providing broadband to all isn't necessarily a good thing. Likewise, maybe providing electricity to all back in 1900 wasn't necessarily good either. In the end, we didn't just provide poor people in the country with power. Instead, we provided an incentive for people to move out into the country, leading to sprawl, demand for more roads, foreign dependence on oil, etc... From a pure efficiency point-of-view, living in the city is much more efficient than living in the country. So providing all these services to the country leads to a very inefficient system. One of the reasons why infrastructure in cities is falling apart is because we use all of our resources building infrastructure out to every rural corner of the country, when really we should be concentrating on putting our resources where it affects the most people...in the cities.
Well...I was going to say that this cost might be irrelevant. If the school was in a northern climate that was using electricity to heat the building, then that money would have ended up going to the heating bill instead.
Then I read it was in Arizona. Oops... double whammy if you include the added cooling costs.
I'm no climatologist (and I assume you are not either), so I cannot say with authority whether or not global warming exists. I see lots of evidence on both sides of the issue. But even the right-wing Thomas Donohue, head of the fricken U.S. CHAMBER OF COMMERCE admits that global warming is real. And if there were any reliable evidence whatsoever to disprove AGW, then he would be the one person who would be all over it. But he's not. He admits it's real (although he fights tooth-and-nail about what we should be doing about it). Him admitting that AGW is real is about equivalent to Al Gore admitting that it's not.
And besides, like it or not, peak oil is a real problem. The U.S. hit peak oil back in the 1970's, and production has been decreasing ever since (despite the fact that far more exploratory wells have been drilled in this country than anywhere else on the planet), making us more and more reliant on foreign sources of oil. Not many people remember, but Texas used to be the Saudi Arabia of oil production...but not any more.
We SHOULD be taxing the heck out of the stuff and making alternate energy more competitive simply to become less reliant on foreign oil. And I'm sorry, but the constant "drill-baby-drill" calls from the conservatives is just plain short-sighted. There's simply not that much oil out there, and we'll need those reserves of oil 20-50 years in the future when we've completely depleted our oil reserves on land. And we have lots of coal, but coal has it's own issues (mountain top removal, acid rain, mercury emissions, etc...).
So I have no problem whatsoever with taxing carbon emissions. Even if AGW is all bunk, it's still the right thing to do from a sustainability perspective.
It may be crap, but that doesn't imply that it's not going to succeed. As the ex-Lotus employee can probably attest, software development in IBM rarely involves making products faster or more stable. It's all about features, and making sure that your product has more feature-list checkboxes checked than the other guys. "Starts in under 127 seconds" is not a sell-able feature. The only thing the PHBs buying this stuff see is that iNotes has 100 features, and product X only has 75. The only time performance or stability is really ever considered is when customers start complaining that they're going to drop the IBM product. And by then, the product is so bloated that improving performance to any significant degree is virtually impossible.
It is tidally locked according to the article linked in the article: "Because the planet is so close to the star, it is gravitationally locked to it in the same way the Moon is locked to Earth. One side of the planet always faces its star, just as one side of the Moon always faces Earth. "
BTW....this is related to the process that is thought to occur on most tidally-locked rocky planets. They likely do not have atmospheres, since it entirely sublimates on to the cold side of the planet. When the atmosphere freezes out on the cold side, it reduces the atmospheric pressure on the cold side, which causes the atmosphere on the hot side to flow to the cold side, repeating the process until the entire atmosphere is gone. But in this particular case, the 'atmosphere' is getting continuously replaced through evaporation of the planet itself. This process is also one of the reasons why planets around red dwarf stars may be unlikely, since the planet has to be close to the star to receive enough energy from it, but being that close to the star increases the likely-hood of it becoming tidally locked with the star.
No, because it's still a closed system. The solid contents of the planet are continually moving towards the sun (the freshly-deposited rock is always pushing the older rock towards the hot side via gravity) But the overall center of gravity of the planet never changes position relative to the star since the momentum of the solid part of the planet is counteracted by the momentum of the atmosphere moving in the opposite direction. So the planet itself always stays the same distance away from the star.
The other interesting question might be what sort of shape might a planet take on when it's continuously evaporating on one side and sublimating on the other. Maybe the planet takes on an egg shape if the sublimation only occurs at the coldest point on the planet. Or maybe bowl-shaped if the sublimation occurs as soon as the evaporated rock reaches the shadow side of the planet.
What I find interesting about this planet is that it's tidally locked with it's star, so one side is over 4000F, while the other is -370F. That could imply that the surface continuously evaporates on the hot side and condenses out of the atmosphere on the cold side. So the planet is essentially a conveyor belt always in the process of being destroyed and created. The contents of the entire planet could have gone through this process many times already.
AT&T has offered MMS support for a while (at least I've been being billed for it....20 MMS messages for $2.99/mo, then $0.25 each additional message). Would the MMS support for iPhones require this additional 'feature' be added to your plan? And if so, who's going to pay $0.25 for each message (I assume the first 20 would go rather quickly)? That seems like it would prevent many people from actually using the feature.
Uh huh.....you don't have a kid do you? The same logic could be applied to parents who lock away chemicals behind child-proof cabinets. How else are they going to learn not to drink Drano unless they do it and end up in the Emergency Room? Sorry...but learning not to run off comes with age. 2 and 3 year old's simply cannot comprehend that they're not supposed to run off, and they usually cannot be taught so at that age.
Oh for fsk sake....you OBVIOUSLY do not have a 3 year old who has a tendency to run away from you in stores, and occasionally likes to play 'hiding' games. Several times, I've looked away for no more than 5 seconds and have had my daughter disappear on me. It's the scariest thing that can happen to you. And thinking to yourself "she PROBABLY wasn't just snatched by some pervert" isn't much comfort.
That doesn't mean I'm going to be tagging her at 17 years of age. But IMHO, something like this would be a useful tool for toddlers and small children. There's a difference between trusting her and trusting the world.