Well, as coarse as his management style is/was, a key ingredient in its success may have been in the fact that he's a really smart guy who wants to be convinced of why your ideas are right, and while he's a tough customer, he can be convinced.
Now, there are a lot of boneheads on Planet Earth. Everybody has worked under a PHB who you have to practically subvert in order to keep your company afloat. But far more insidious are smart people who don't know how to argue or debate - or, if they do, replace actual discussion with fallacy. They use tactics such as circular arguments, attrition, argument from authority, ad-hominem attacks and stonewalling to prevent any actual reason from taking place. And usually, they're the most powerful person in the room, so your only option is to say, "Actually, sir, you haven't responded to any point I've made, and I think some outside factor is influencing your decision." Yippee.
That's funny, cause I taped some lectures at a major research institution back in '04 where an evolutionary biologist cited the link between skin color and latitude. So apparently not all evolutionary biologists subscribe to this belief.
Too little sun exposure causes a Vitamin D deficiency. When women have Vitamin D deficiencies, they become less fertile. And interestingly, if I recall correctly, too much sun exposure interferes with women's antral follicle development - the ones in the ovaries, not on the skin. Therefore, there is the potential for selective pressure to be both not too dark and not too light.
Is natural selection - note that I said Natural Selection, not evolution - fast enough to cause the suppression of darker-skinned people at the poles and lighter-skinned people at the equator? Well, if I started off with a population where everyone's blood type was either AB, A, or B, and I sterilized all of the people with B alleles, the population would soon be all type A. No other factor has as direct an impact on a population's genes than fertility, by definition. Forget skin cancer. Skin cancer won't prevent most people from having children. Having no viable eggs will.
So nobody's saying those strange cosmic rays created the variation we see in people's skin tones. But it's daft to push aside the direct impact that skin color and latitude have on fertility, and the large body of circumstantial evidence we have in the form of human geography.
There's that quote by Miyomoto: "A delayed game is eventually good; a bad game is bad forever." Some companies, I think, started to realize: "Hey, with patching capability on most consoles and PCs, we can release a game bad and make it good eventually!" The trouble is this never works the way they want it to. If the game is buggy when you ship it, people will always remember it as a buggy mess, and if it's bad, people will not give it a second chance.
Then there's another category of games: self-consciously shitty exploitation games. A lot of EA's brands fall into this category, for instance. They develop because the marketers say that there is no way Madden 08 cannot make a profit, and they ship because anyone muscleheaded enough to buy it will buy it bugs and all.
F-Zero AI cars also teleport directly behind you at fairly regular intervals. Just play the 1vs1AI mode (whatever it's called) and watch the enemy's blip on the map.
Agreed. God, I do hate how people carry on about how horrible America is, and how we live in a repressive consumerist culture that devalues love and community; how we, in effect, create mass murderers by ingendering in people a desire for Tickle-Me-Elmos, Starbucks coffee and IKEA furniture that just can't be satisfied.
Firstly, if you don't want to live in a repressive consumerist culture, I guarantee you there are thousands upon thousands who feel exactly the same way right here in America who would love to have one more hippie or punk friend. Go be a mountain man. You can even grow some bud and sell it for what little goods you need. Or, just live a simple lifestyle right here in the mainstream. All it takes is saying, "Huh, maybe I should get a library card instead of buying books, not watch so much television, get my furniture at garage sales, and not try to keep up with the fashion rat race." Join the Quakers, who are not only dedicated to simple living, but get conscientious objector status.
Furthermore, I don't think any of them have even the vaguest idea of the rampant, sudden, and often totally inexplicable violence which occurs in places that aren't America. Sure, we're a far cry from Japan, but anyone who thinks there is something about the nation which is fundamentally alienating and necessarily produces killers needs to read up on African history.
Finally, do NOT sympathize with the killers. None of this, "Well, I used to be like that, but then the nurturing community of/. saved me." No. You're not like them because they decided to go on a killing spree and you didn't. They could've decided to NOT go out and end a bunch of human lives, but instead, they decided that a mass murder/suicide was a good choice. We are affected by our environment, but we are not automatons. You always have a choice, whether you know it or not.
I agree. Bush Sr. was probably the least interventionist president we've had in twenty years, and when he did, he did it mostly right (except for violating Islamic holy sites). Clinton engaged in a lot of reckless and ultimately pointless bombing of sovereign states. Ronald Reagan... well, don't get me started with that guy.
While I think I was feeling anti-George*Bush* when I posted that, I deliberately kept it to just observation. Hell, maybe if the current Bush had served as head of the CIA, he (and the weasels who control him) wouldn't have destroyed everything the Republicans have been building since the 1980's and turned world opinion rabidly against the United States.
OP's discussion did not say anything about where the material and power comes from.
Basically, the world of the Diamond Age was intensely stratified because those at the top had a stranglehold on resources, just like they do today. Sure, a lot of the people seen in the book make their living by selling nanoscale designs and software, but as seen in the very first pages of the book, the Victorians control the Feed, which provides everyone with both the matter and energy necessary to live. It's like the power company, if the power company also provided you with food and material goods, and if it were a global hegemony ruled by stockholders so rich and static they adopted feudal titles.
Part of the book's overall thrust was about Seed technology, which China (which looks much like China following the Opium wars of the 1800's) really wants and those who currently control the economy want to stamp out. With Seed technology, you just plant this little thing in the ground, and it siphons off minerals from the bedrock and trash, elements from the air and earth, and uses the energy of the sun and ambient heat or even small-scale fusion to produce a car, which sprouts a dozen other Seeds so your neighbors can plant their own cars.
I think people still want to use Windows, on the whole, but they don't want to use spyware and adware, and they don't want to use McAffee or Symantec because in many cases these products hit your performance just as badly. When you start saying, "Hey, you wouldn't have to worry about all this if you switched to Ubuntu or Mac OS X," they say, "But what about my programs?" and you respond, "Do you seriously use that much besides IE, AIM, and Outlook Express?" you get some converts pretty easily.
True, many of Windows' security problems are directly attributable to the fact that it is the biggest target, but network worms don't propagate when you have no open ports. You shouldn't be putting yourself at risk of being pwned just by plugging an ethernet cable into a brand new box. That epoch of Windows security history did a lot to tarnish MS's image. And now, hell, even I say the best way to keep a windows box secure is to 1) Install Firefox, 2) Install Thunderbird, 3) Install nothing else, and 4) Never let a child or a fool near it unsupervised. No wonder up-and-coming developers who don't have an established brand image are fleeing the windows platform. Their very audience is terrified of them.
I'm not sure that you could prove this in court, but it's my totally unfounded opinion that no upright human being could look at such a craigslist ad and not think, "Huh, that sounds too good to be true." The people who did not come to the house were the ones who either decided they didn't want to, or, worse, decided that it must be a prank or scam. The ones who came were engaged in an act of self-deception, because they stood to benefit from it, they weren't the ones being screwed, and they had a half-assed excuse as to why they did it.
Either that, or they're stupid as a bored. Come on. You have to be pretty fucking naive to believe that you can get anything for free. So it isn't "Cleatus sold me his old car. Oh, it wasn't his car? He swore it was," it's, "I had a strong suspicion that something funny was going on, but I did something I suspected was wrong anyway because I stood to benefit from it."
This isn't really a legal rant, it's a social one. But fortunately there is such a thing as social justice, and you can, and should, ostracize your 'friends' when they do something which is morally repugnant and shady. After all, the next one to get fucked over could be you.
I'm not really sure how to describe this in economics terms, but I think, perhaps, that the GP's simile is more aptly applied to the fact that the some business leaders of the past two and a half decades have been performing activities which provide a quarterly cost savings at the expense of future revenues. In an extreme example, you could get great quarterly earnings by just firing everyone in your company and collecting on existing contracts, and then your company would promptly implode. It's difficult for me to see the net benefit there.
And just to riff off of the general subject, I think it's absurd to demand that students' papers be put in some company's database. Colleges and corporations alike have not hereto proven the most responsible or effective guardians of people's valuable personal information. These policies also take a stance which tacitly assumes that students are cheaters. And just like any good witch hunt, if you have a problem with it, people start wondering what you have to hide.
I notice this all the time. Where I live, which isn't affluent but has a lot of trendy young people, there are tons of small shops. There's several small commercial districts within walking distance, and the only chain stores that can get a foothold are the coffee shop and huge grocery stores. Go 15 minutes in any direction, though - towards the upper-middle class planned communities and tract housing, rural areas, or the light-urban lower-middle class - and you're back in McWorld.
I agree that I would rather work in a company where no persuasion had to occur - where the self-evident value of the goods and services we sold was enough to establish a consumer base and a revenue stream. However, if you're pioneering anything, you're going to need to do some persuading, trust me.
Back around when the dot com bubble burst, nobody knew what SSL VPN was. There was no market. Then, a few companies figured out that it would be valuable for Sammy in Sales to be able to access internal company documents from outside the company without having to know how to SSH in and using only a web browser. But these companies had to go out to big companies and try, laboriously, to install in people the knowledge that this would be valuable.
Now, today, most people in the IT/Security space could give you a minute-long yarn on why SSL VPN gateways are cool, from sales to execs to engineers. But back then, the idea didn't exist in the industry gestalt. Talk to a technical person, and they'd scoff and say that SSH was the best way to go and any dummy could set it up. And then you talk to a non-technical sales/marketing person, and of course that's hard because any time you try to teach a non-technical person a new technical concept it's like trying to teach a chimpanzee how to use a telephone. And in most cases, it's a chimp who's in a hurry, too.
There are very few people who will just grok a new idea if you pitch it to them and are open-minded enough to see why it could be valuable. And of course you want to find these people, because to them, the value of your technology IS self-evident. But to get to these people, you have to go through dozens or hundreds of technocrats and bureaucrats - and it's fortunate in the end that you did, because eventually, these people will start babbling in greater and greater numbers, and eventually the business will come to you and people will know what you do. But like I said, it takes time and work.
"We require our employees to work 8 hours a day, five days a week."
"Okay, that's what I work. 8x5. Standard job."
"Well, yes, but that's the requirement. I guess you could say that's the bare minimum. Do you really want to be just doing the bare minimum?"
"I don't think I understand you. I'm doing 100% of what you require of me."
"Well, yes, and 100% is very good. But Joe is giving 150%. In fact, almost everybody in the office is giving 150%. Carl's doing 200%! Wow, what a great guy! Do you want to be the guy who's just giving 100%?"
"But that doesn't make sense. 100% is the target. Depending on how you look at it, it's the most I can give. If you're saying that 150% is 100%, then I'm giving 66%, and you're saying the default work week is 11 or 12 hours a day, six days a week."
"Oh, but we're not asking you to give more than 100%! It's your choice. We here at Acme are committed to a strong work-life balance. But do you really want to be the guy who's coming in last? It might not bode well for promotions, and if we have to downsize, it'll be the people who are just putting in maximum effort who go first, rather than those who are putting in superlative effort!"
Really, people who put in more than a default work week are hurting their fellow workers and catering to management's unrealistic expectations of workers who are effectively paid less than the minimum wage after you factor in their 120-hour work weeks. And when it comes time to promote, hire and fire, do you really think that the management droids are going to look at the fact that I am consistently more alert and efficient than my counterpart who works twice as many hours as I do, or are they going to, like the fictional manager above, just look at the number of hours worked and assume that the traitor works twice as hard as I do?
It's actually a form of communism in which the "government" is supplanted by a partnership between the government and the small number of large companies that run everything. I don't know what you'd call it, but if you ask me, it's not good.
As a correlary, as distasteful as I find Michael Savage, one of his longstanding claims is that fascism and communism are effectively the same thing. The only meaningful economic difference between, say, Germany and Russia, is that the "reactionary" movement of the Hitler entailed tight state control of existing industry and a vast military-industrial complex, whereas the "revolutionary" movement of Stalin meant tight state control of industry which did not exist in the modern sense before Stalin's 5-year plans and a vast military-industrial complex. Fascism also entailed the destruction of trade unions and rise to great power of various business leaders, whereas Stalinism, by contrast, was wholly opposed to spontaneous organization of workers, because the party leaders, who lived an incredibly opulent lifestyle, had the workers' best interests in mind anyway.
So, effectively, I don't think it matters what you call it. It just means that they win by maintaining their monopoly as if it's their god-given right, and we lose doubly because we can't do anything to change it and because its inefficiency fails to satisfy the desires of society.
These policies are meant to push knuckleheads with parents who will berate them into doing homework into the college system by making grades a function not of actual information retention, but rather their parent's ability to berate them into doing homework. I know there are different kinds of intelligence, and that test are not always the best yardstick for information retention, but 80% of the time you can substitute "bad test taker" for "of average or below-average intelligence." Then, they take a standardized test for which excellence is to correlate primarily to income, get into a top-rated college, realize that their mommy can't write their essays for them anymore, and slack off.
My fiancee went to a great school in a rich neighborhood. When she started out, they had a GATE (Gifted And Talented Education) system, which she was a part of. The PTA dismantled this system, because they (rich people) could not accept that their children were less smart than others. That's what homework is: a tool, used by average people with money and time to bitch to get their kids into college, because if it was tests alone, mostly smart people would get into top-rated schools. Most of the time, they even prevent smart children who understand the subject from doing the work in class during lecture, thereby making their grades an almost perfect measurement of their parent's willingness to destroy their childhood.
I believe Neal Stephenson's "The Diamond Age" had a guy whose vision had been hacked by nanorobots to deliver a small add banner at the periphery of his vision.
I think, given the choice, wireless is OK for this stage. Wireless invaders will only attack if they're within signal range and they have the motivation. Microorganisms will invade regardless. Any type of surgery or major laceration puts you at risk for infection, and if you have wires running into your head then you have a canal for germs to get to your central nervous system, where you have very little in the way of an immune system. Plus, you have to take sponge baths all the time.
The ultimate implementation for a bionic eye wouldn't require any wireless, because it would be self-contained in your head. But going whole hog like that when we're still working on transmitting information directly to the brain is overly-ambitious. I imagine once that technology reaches maturity you'll start to see people moving towards a self-contained 'eye'.
While I appreciate your plea for the safety of children and appeal to the terrorism boogeyman, both of which are highly effective ways to turn a discussion into an argument and villify your opponent, the type of RFID chip used by this company (almost certainly a one meter-range passive one, as opposed to a battery-powered active chip) would not have been helpful in saving people from terrorists or child molesters. When people talk about being "tracked" by RFID tags, they don't mean that Jack Bauer will have some unobtanium-powered device with which he pinpoints your exact location, but rather that, in a hypothetical world where you need RFID tags to make purchases and enter establishments, the FBI will be able to say, "Oh look, he went to Macy's at 12:00." That is, unless terrorists are stupid enough to take their victims to McDonald's (some child abductors probably ARE stupid enough, now that I think about it).
Slashdot Mirror
Well, as coarse as his management style is/was, a key ingredient in its success may have been in the fact that he's a really smart guy who wants to be convinced of why your ideas are right, and while he's a tough customer, he can be convinced.
Now, there are a lot of boneheads on Planet Earth. Everybody has worked under a PHB who you have to practically subvert in order to keep your company afloat. But far more insidious are smart people who don't know how to argue or debate - or, if they do, replace actual discussion with fallacy. They use tactics such as circular arguments, attrition, argument from authority, ad-hominem attacks and stonewalling to prevent any actual reason from taking place. And usually, they're the most powerful person in the room, so your only option is to say, "Actually, sir, you haven't responded to any point I've made, and I think some outside factor is influencing your decision." Yippee.
Yep, it's all about the Sidekicks. That's what my deaf friend uses.
Well, that hardly matters. In a few years, AT&T will be the only telecom company in the US: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-200478575 9717366066
That's funny, cause I taped some lectures at a major research institution back in '04 where an evolutionary biologist cited the link between skin color and latitude. So apparently not all evolutionary biologists subscribe to this belief.
Too little sun exposure causes a Vitamin D deficiency. When women have Vitamin D deficiencies, they become less fertile. And interestingly, if I recall correctly, too much sun exposure interferes with women's antral follicle development - the ones in the ovaries, not on the skin. Therefore, there is the potential for selective pressure to be both not too dark and not too light.
Is natural selection - note that I said Natural Selection, not evolution - fast enough to cause the suppression of darker-skinned people at the poles and lighter-skinned people at the equator? Well, if I started off with a population where everyone's blood type was either AB, A, or B, and I sterilized all of the people with B alleles, the population would soon be all type A. No other factor has as direct an impact on a population's genes than fertility, by definition. Forget skin cancer. Skin cancer won't prevent most people from having children. Having no viable eggs will.
So nobody's saying those strange cosmic rays created the variation we see in people's skin tones. But it's daft to push aside the direct impact that skin color and latitude have on fertility, and the large body of circumstantial evidence we have in the form of human geography.
There's that quote by Miyomoto: "A delayed game is eventually good; a bad game is bad forever." Some companies, I think, started to realize: "Hey, with patching capability on most consoles and PCs, we can release a game bad and make it good eventually!" The trouble is this never works the way they want it to. If the game is buggy when you ship it, people will always remember it as a buggy mess, and if it's bad, people will not give it a second chance.
Then there's another category of games: self-consciously shitty exploitation games. A lot of EA's brands fall into this category, for instance. They develop because the marketers say that there is no way Madden 08 cannot make a profit, and they ship because anyone muscleheaded enough to buy it will buy it bugs and all.
Screw amputation, I want to go Zaphod Beeblebrox.
F-Zero AI cars also teleport directly behind you at fairly regular intervals. Just play the 1vs1AI mode (whatever it's called) and watch the enemy's blip on the map.
Agreed. God, I do hate how people carry on about how horrible America is, and how we live in a repressive consumerist culture that devalues love and community; how we, in effect, create mass murderers by ingendering in people a desire for Tickle-Me-Elmos, Starbucks coffee and IKEA furniture that just can't be satisfied.
Firstly, if you don't want to live in a repressive consumerist culture, I guarantee you there are thousands upon thousands who feel exactly the same way right here in America who would love to have one more hippie or punk friend. Go be a mountain man. You can even grow some bud and sell it for what little goods you need. Or, just live a simple lifestyle right here in the mainstream. All it takes is saying, "Huh, maybe I should get a library card instead of buying books, not watch so much television, get my furniture at garage sales, and not try to keep up with the fashion rat race." Join the Quakers, who are not only dedicated to simple living, but get conscientious objector status.
Furthermore, I don't think any of them have even the vaguest idea of the rampant, sudden, and often totally inexplicable violence which occurs in places that aren't America. Sure, we're a far cry from Japan, but anyone who thinks there is something about the nation which is fundamentally alienating and necessarily produces killers needs to read up on African history.
Finally, do NOT sympathize with the killers. None of this, "Well, I used to be like that, but then the nurturing community of /. saved me." No. You're not like them because they decided to go on a killing spree and you didn't. They could've decided to NOT go out and end a bunch of human lives, but instead, they decided that a mass murder/suicide was a good choice. We are affected by our environment, but we are not automatons. You always have a choice, whether you know it or not.
Well, they're all composed of 1's and 0's, so they must be basically identical. Except for those songs that contain a 2, or a -1.
I agree. Bush Sr. was probably the least interventionist president we've had in twenty years, and when he did, he did it mostly right (except for violating Islamic holy sites). Clinton engaged in a lot of reckless and ultimately pointless bombing of sovereign states. Ronald Reagan... well, don't get me started with that guy.
While I think I was feeling anti-George*Bush* when I posted that, I deliberately kept it to just observation. Hell, maybe if the current Bush had served as head of the CIA, he (and the weasels who control him) wouldn't have destroyed everything the Republicans have been building since the 1980's and turned world opinion rabidly against the United States.
You know, Bush Sr. used to be the head of the CIA.
OP's discussion did not say anything about where the material and power comes from.
Basically, the world of the Diamond Age was intensely stratified because those at the top had a stranglehold on resources, just like they do today. Sure, a lot of the people seen in the book make their living by selling nanoscale designs and software, but as seen in the very first pages of the book, the Victorians control the Feed, which provides everyone with both the matter and energy necessary to live. It's like the power company, if the power company also provided you with food and material goods, and if it were a global hegemony ruled by stockholders so rich and static they adopted feudal titles.
Part of the book's overall thrust was about Seed technology, which China (which looks much like China following the Opium wars of the 1800's) really wants and those who currently control the economy want to stamp out. With Seed technology, you just plant this little thing in the ground, and it siphons off minerals from the bedrock and trash, elements from the air and earth, and uses the energy of the sun and ambient heat or even small-scale fusion to produce a car, which sprouts a dozen other Seeds so your neighbors can plant their own cars.
I think people still want to use Windows, on the whole, but they don't want to use spyware and adware, and they don't want to use McAffee or Symantec because in many cases these products hit your performance just as badly. When you start saying, "Hey, you wouldn't have to worry about all this if you switched to Ubuntu or Mac OS X," they say, "But what about my programs?" and you respond, "Do you seriously use that much besides IE, AIM, and Outlook Express?" you get some converts pretty easily.
True, many of Windows' security problems are directly attributable to the fact that it is the biggest target, but network worms don't propagate when you have no open ports. You shouldn't be putting yourself at risk of being pwned just by plugging an ethernet cable into a brand new box. That epoch of Windows security history did a lot to tarnish MS's image. And now, hell, even I say the best way to keep a windows box secure is to 1) Install Firefox, 2) Install Thunderbird, 3) Install nothing else, and 4) Never let a child or a fool near it unsupervised. No wonder up-and-coming developers who don't have an established brand image are fleeing the windows platform. Their very audience is terrified of them.
THERE ARE FOUR LIGHTS!
I'm not sure that you could prove this in court, but it's my totally unfounded opinion that no upright human being could look at such a craigslist ad and not think, "Huh, that sounds too good to be true." The people who did not come to the house were the ones who either decided they didn't want to, or, worse, decided that it must be a prank or scam. The ones who came were engaged in an act of self-deception, because they stood to benefit from it, they weren't the ones being screwed, and they had a half-assed excuse as to why they did it.
Either that, or they're stupid as a bored. Come on. You have to be pretty fucking naive to believe that you can get anything for free. So it isn't "Cleatus sold me his old car. Oh, it wasn't his car? He swore it was," it's, "I had a strong suspicion that something funny was going on, but I did something I suspected was wrong anyway because I stood to benefit from it."
This isn't really a legal rant, it's a social one. But fortunately there is such a thing as social justice, and you can, and should, ostracize your 'friends' when they do something which is morally repugnant and shady. After all, the next one to get fucked over could be you.
I'm not really sure how to describe this in economics terms, but I think, perhaps, that the GP's simile is more aptly applied to the fact that the some business leaders of the past two and a half decades have been performing activities which provide a quarterly cost savings at the expense of future revenues. In an extreme example, you could get great quarterly earnings by just firing everyone in your company and collecting on existing contracts, and then your company would promptly implode. It's difficult for me to see the net benefit there.
Heh. I'd send them a DMCA takedown notice!
At the University of California, the same applies. A work is not the property of the University unless they sponsor, commission, or contract it: http://www.ucop.edu/ucophome/coordrev/policy/8-19- 92att.html .
And just to riff off of the general subject, I think it's absurd to demand that students' papers be put in some company's database. Colleges and corporations alike have not hereto proven the most responsible or effective guardians of people's valuable personal information. These policies also take a stance which tacitly assumes that students are cheaters. And just like any good witch hunt, if you have a problem with it, people start wondering what you have to hide.
I notice this all the time. Where I live, which isn't affluent but has a lot of trendy young people, there are tons of small shops. There's several small commercial districts within walking distance, and the only chain stores that can get a foothold are the coffee shop and huge grocery stores. Go 15 minutes in any direction, though - towards the upper-middle class planned communities and tract housing, rural areas, or the light-urban lower-middle class - and you're back in McWorld.
I agree that I would rather work in a company where no persuasion had to occur - where the self-evident value of the goods and services we sold was enough to establish a consumer base and a revenue stream. However, if you're pioneering anything, you're going to need to do some persuading, trust me.
Back around when the dot com bubble burst, nobody knew what SSL VPN was. There was no market. Then, a few companies figured out that it would be valuable for Sammy in Sales to be able to access internal company documents from outside the company without having to know how to SSH in and using only a web browser. But these companies had to go out to big companies and try, laboriously, to install in people the knowledge that this would be valuable.
Now, today, most people in the IT/Security space could give you a minute-long yarn on why SSL VPN gateways are cool, from sales to execs to engineers. But back then, the idea didn't exist in the industry gestalt. Talk to a technical person, and they'd scoff and say that SSH was the best way to go and any dummy could set it up. And then you talk to a non-technical sales/marketing person, and of course that's hard because any time you try to teach a non-technical person a new technical concept it's like trying to teach a chimpanzee how to use a telephone. And in most cases, it's a chimp who's in a hurry, too.
There are very few people who will just grok a new idea if you pitch it to them and are open-minded enough to see why it could be valuable. And of course you want to find these people, because to them, the value of your technology IS self-evident. But to get to these people, you have to go through dozens or hundreds of technocrats and bureaucrats - and it's fortunate in the end that you did, because eventually, these people will start babbling in greater and greater numbers, and eventually the business will come to you and people will know what you do. But like I said, it takes time and work.
Dude, you need to watch Office Space.
"We require our employees to work 8 hours a day, five days a week."
"Okay, that's what I work. 8x5. Standard job."
"Well, yes, but that's the requirement. I guess you could say that's the bare minimum. Do you really want to be just doing the bare minimum?"
"I don't think I understand you. I'm doing 100% of what you require of me."
"Well, yes, and 100% is very good. But Joe is giving 150%. In fact, almost everybody in the office is giving 150%. Carl's doing 200%! Wow, what a great guy! Do you want to be the guy who's just giving 100%?"
"But that doesn't make sense. 100% is the target. Depending on how you look at it, it's the most I can give. If you're saying that 150% is 100%, then I'm giving 66%, and you're saying the default work week is 11 or 12 hours a day, six days a week."
"Oh, but we're not asking you to give more than 100%! It's your choice. We here at Acme are committed to a strong work-life balance. But do you really want to be the guy who's coming in last? It might not bode well for promotions, and if we have to downsize, it'll be the people who are just putting in maximum effort who go first, rather than those who are putting in superlative effort!"
Really, people who put in more than a default work week are hurting their fellow workers and catering to management's unrealistic expectations of workers who are effectively paid less than the minimum wage after you factor in their 120-hour work weeks. And when it comes time to promote, hire and fire, do you really think that the management droids are going to look at the fact that I am consistently more alert and efficient than my counterpart who works twice as many hours as I do, or are they going to, like the fictional manager above, just look at the number of hours worked and assume that the traitor works twice as hard as I do?
I believe I've heard that called fascism.
As a correlary, as distasteful as I find Michael Savage, one of his longstanding claims is that fascism and communism are effectively the same thing. The only meaningful economic difference between, say, Germany and Russia, is that the "reactionary" movement of the Hitler entailed tight state control of existing industry and a vast military-industrial complex, whereas the "revolutionary" movement of Stalin meant tight state control of industry which did not exist in the modern sense before Stalin's 5-year plans and a vast military-industrial complex. Fascism also entailed the destruction of trade unions and rise to great power of various business leaders, whereas Stalinism, by contrast, was wholly opposed to spontaneous organization of workers, because the party leaders, who lived an incredibly opulent lifestyle, had the workers' best interests in mind anyway.
So, effectively, I don't think it matters what you call it. It just means that they win by maintaining their monopoly as if it's their god-given right, and we lose doubly because we can't do anything to change it and because its inefficiency fails to satisfy the desires of society.
These policies are meant to push knuckleheads with parents who will berate them into doing homework into the college system by making grades a function not of actual information retention, but rather their parent's ability to berate them into doing homework. I know there are different kinds of intelligence, and that test are not always the best yardstick for information retention, but 80% of the time you can substitute "bad test taker" for "of average or below-average intelligence." Then, they take a standardized test for which excellence is to correlate primarily to income, get into a top-rated college, realize that their mommy can't write their essays for them anymore, and slack off.
My fiancee went to a great school in a rich neighborhood. When she started out, they had a GATE (Gifted And Talented Education) system, which she was a part of. The PTA dismantled this system, because they (rich people) could not accept that their children were less smart than others. That's what homework is: a tool, used by average people with money and time to bitch to get their kids into college, because if it was tests alone, mostly smart people would get into top-rated schools. Most of the time, they even prevent smart children who understand the subject from doing the work in class during lecture, thereby making their grades an almost perfect measurement of their parent's willingness to destroy their childhood.
I believe Neal Stephenson's "The Diamond Age" had a guy whose vision had been hacked by nanorobots to deliver a small add banner at the periphery of his vision.
I think, given the choice, wireless is OK for this stage. Wireless invaders will only attack if they're within signal range and they have the motivation. Microorganisms will invade regardless. Any type of surgery or major laceration puts you at risk for infection, and if you have wires running into your head then you have a canal for germs to get to your central nervous system, where you have very little in the way of an immune system. Plus, you have to take sponge baths all the time.
The ultimate implementation for a bionic eye wouldn't require any wireless, because it would be self-contained in your head. But going whole hog like that when we're still working on transmitting information directly to the brain is overly-ambitious. I imagine once that technology reaches maturity you'll start to see people moving towards a self-contained 'eye'.
While I appreciate your plea for the safety of children and appeal to the terrorism boogeyman, both of which are highly effective ways to turn a discussion into an argument and villify your opponent, the type of RFID chip used by this company (almost certainly a one meter-range passive one, as opposed to a battery-powered active chip) would not have been helpful in saving people from terrorists or child molesters. When people talk about being "tracked" by RFID tags, they don't mean that Jack Bauer will have some unobtanium-powered device with which he pinpoints your exact location, but rather that, in a hypothetical world where you need RFID tags to make purchases and enter establishments, the FBI will be able to say, "Oh look, he went to Macy's at 12:00." That is, unless terrorists are stupid enough to take their victims to McDonald's (some child abductors probably ARE stupid enough, now that I think about it).