I've been an engineer for 35+ years, and managing and hiring engineers for about half that time. Your opinion on the drug testing being silly is fine, but I guarantee that many people disagree, and would prefer not working next to someone who's using.
If you suspect your employee is using anything on the job and it is hurting his performance or causing disruption, that is fireable. Performance firing is slower I admit, but if he's outright being disruptive, you can fire him on the spot. Based on what I've seen and heard, most of my peers are using some form of what they perceive to be performance enhancing amphetamines, usually legally prescribed but not always. I choose not to, but I don't care, they do what they do and I can't differentiate eccentric personalities from drug abuse in this case, so whatever.
My current employer literally told me "Whatever drug you were using in the interview, keep using it", so there's that.
As far as lying on the application, that's flat out fire able.
Only if I get caught, and my previous employer has no incentive to tell you the truth. And if you read carefully, I said defensible but misleading. Employers always, always use every sort of equivocation, prevarication and dissimulation available when discussing the job, when managing employees on the job, and when representing themselves. I am not sure why I wouldn't do that as well. I do not strictly lie, but I have every incentive to create my own reality and sell it to you. I do that on many things, not just salary. It is literally the most important part of any job to leave the boss feeling like a better job was done than actually was.
My salary history is none of your business. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
So, now the interviews will get longer, and more in depth, and you could argue that they should have been that way before
Right now they are 8 hour interviews. You want to make it a week? Do you honestly think this will help you evaluate my on the job behavior?
The interview bullshit is about one thing: justifying offshoring. In every case it has not been about my work ethic, my attitudes, my ability to live up to expectations or even my verbal agreement to meet those expectations.
What it has been is an 8 hour long final exam on selected topics in electrical & computer engineering, computer science and occasionally math. On a few occasions the questions I'm asked have borne some form of semblance to the job I accepted, but usually it's just people in a pissing contest. The reason this is allowed to go on is so that you as an employer can justify not hiring some fraction of us, and allow H1Bs or offshored labor to replace us. You can run up to your favorite politician and say "We just can't hire enough engineers". Then the H1B notice appears in our employee kitchen (as required by law) that says so and so is being brought in for his technical expertise at some pay rate that is usually a fraction of what I really, truly make.
I would argue when you are hiring engineers in high cost regions, you are getting the cream of the crop intellectually. When they let you down, it has nothing to do with technical skills, it's because of work ethic and missed expectations. And from my experience, employers are quick to correct this, particularly employers who are paying top dollar. It's the ones that are trying to pay the absolute minimum that sometimes have to retain losers longer than they'd like. As it should be.
So in general what I'm saying here is that you are doing the maximum possible to underpay everyone you hire. We are doing the maximum possible to make sure you pay as much as possible. At the end of the day you will offer as much as you want to pay, and I will take it or leave it. And if you feel like I'm overpayed, you will toss me on my ass...assuming you think you can get someone better for what you want to pay. This sounds like the sort of business practices we've all come to accept.
Now that you mention it, I do remember such questions from a couple of lifetimes ago when I was applying for unskilled jobs. That was so long ago that I forgot. Those questions stopped when I started in engineering, though.
I've worked as an engineer for 20 years in the very best companies out there. All of them asked that. Some require a drug test, others don't. It's silly, I am not going to be operating a bus, I'm going to be driving a keyboard and mouse, maybe an oscilloscope if I get suckered into lab work. All ask for your previous salary on the job application.
These days I leave it blank, but often HR will ask directly. I give them a number that is defensible but misleading, and what I want them to beat to work there. So far nobody has ever called me on it.
They should not ask though. First, it is usually considered confidential information from current employers. Second, the should be paying me what they think I'm worth, not based on what the other guy thought I was worth, or via some fixing scheme where everyone agrees this is what we pay engineers, and when they get pissed we give them a few % more.
... intelligent people at any location you live in who can socialize with you
If there were a better reason not to join, I can't think of it. Smart people are just fine to socialize with, as long as they aren't being expected to be smart. Shine a spotlight on their mensa card, and suddenly a wild jackass appears.
As an engineer, I am not aware of very many patents, and I intentionally keep my blinders on. However every once in a while a patent comes by that looks like "I patented downloading a file, anyone who downloads files owes me royalties". Often they get to us deliberately to ensure that we are crossing in to willful violation. And yup, I do willfully violate that kind of bullshit patent. Any reasonable person would.
The lawyers have to earn their keep and deal with that. We can't have the state of all technology and progress get tied up in courts because of trolls. I'm with your original post, line em up against the wall, use incendiary rounds.
Honestly I think I know a number of men who would pay to be filmed in some staged sex act. All it takes is one. And of course he's going to put it online.
Wht about a small box, on which is printed the house number?
Except that it's illegal for anyone but USPS to use that particular box. Also not all of them are locked (or large enough) for packages. In the relatively new neighborhood I live in, all of those boxes are together down the street, and there are a few package boxes large enough for many things (if they weren't massively overpacked, as many are). But only USPS can use them.
At my house I have often considered just a large metal box, with cameras. The trouble is a keying system, and how to get drivers to use it. I would not let anyone into my house, but I would give them a box that they can put stuff in, and have cameras over/in the box to at least see who is using it and photograph what was placed in and taken out.
It's not capitalism if there are only monopolies. Capitalism requires a large number of competitors with approximately equal footing. What we have here is both high-anticompetitive to the core (i've yet to work at a company that didn't do everything it legally could to subdue competitors, and in one case illegally did, rather than actually compete).
Monopolies aren't good for anyone, period. It's short term thinking at its finest.
As I am not a shareholder, I could not care less about that. If your point is that pragmatically financially successful things will keep getting made until they aren't financially successful enough to warrant more investment bucks, you'll get no debate from me, that's fact.
This is all how we run a franchise into the ground. Very similar to how wall street runs corporations into the ground. Unimaginative, but very practical. The next most unimaginative but practical thing is to try to revive a franchise that was previously run into the ground by holding onto the IP for years and then reboot it when you think the moment is ripe. Somewhat higher risk, but people can bound it with some accuracy and make a successful pitch. Still stupid, still unimaginative, but some money can be made. Great for them.
They really ought to have sold off the Star Trek TV rights, it's not in their wheelhouse.
Your criticism of CBS may be correct, I don't really have a basis to evaluate it. But I would argue we do not live in a time when the masses will tolerate an idealistic utopian future, the philosophical dilemmas inherent in bringing it about and real people trying to be better than we expect.
We live in a time when pragmatists and self-centered behavior is idolized, when war and violence are seen as ideal tools for solving difficult social problems, and when letting people die because they're not us is ok as long as we don't say it out loud. People acting on idealism are viewed as ridiculous and naive and with utmost contempt. That's not compatible with any of the Star Trek series I've liked.
I guess I don't think we're living in a time when Star Trek could be successful, even if it were holding itself to its ideals. They really should just sell the IP and the new owners should sit on it for a little while, while we wallow in our self-imposed cess pit for a decade or two. After a few decades we're going to realize that pragmatism may not be that great after all.
I thought that the majority of Slashdot users decided that they weren't going to watch this show when they made it exclusive to CBS's new streaming service?
We probably aren't. 100% of my knowledge of this show comes from Slashdot. I'm not stupid enough to pay money for a service that still shoves ads down my throat, particularly for just one show. I'm not interested enough to yoink it. So I live vicariously through marketing astroturf fluff.
I don't want it to manage the turbolifts or even whatever they use for toilets. If the best the federation has is Windows, I'm joining up with the Romulans.
It's almost as if there's some money being paid to write slam articles about certain companies who are either disruptive or successful, who are not also paying those same sources to write glowing fluff pieces. If we called it protection money...it would sound like the mafia. So let's call it marketing money. These companies don't need to pay the marketing money because their products sell themselves, so instead we write trash pieces.
Tesla makes excellent cars. All the rest of this is just stupid. If you paid your money for a pre-order, you probably knew that delivery was TBD if you were paying any attention at all.
Why pay all that money for a Honda when a Hyundai gets you there just the same? Why does BMW exist as a company? Lamborghini, right out. Nissan Leaf is fine if you care uniquely about electric, we do not need Tesla. Speaking for myself, I'd take the Tesla any day of the week, even though it is 2x or more the price.
Trying to bin complex devices by marketing feature lists just doesn't work when you go through those feature lists line by line and examine implementation and how well it suits your purposes and desires. How well those things were implemented really matters a lot and determines how much we're willing to pay.
Or maybe you have never written any piece of code that actually had to solve a real problem and was not just simple business-logic.
I have! Code is not hard. Thinking like a compiler is not hard. Maybe for people who write these articles, but not for those of us who do this work.
Thinking of algorithms that solve problems with practical memory and compute limitations...that's hard. Putting them in code? Not that hard, usually. But then the algorithms rarely live in a vacuum, and the information they rely on needs to be acquired from some black box library or some proprietary and ever changing database...and that gets hard too in a different way.
I have no love for either politicians or bosses, but is this really their problem? I suppose if you have a job where you have to work for 16 hours a day, your employer is definitely taking away your sleep time. I don't think that describes too many people.
I think most of our sleep is being lost from OUR choices. We stay up late binging on netflix, or playing games, or otherwise entertaining ourselves. We pack our day with work, kids stuff, entertainment, commute, etc. We kind of bring on a very busy, very hectic schedule and sleep is just sort of sandwiched in there.
One can argue that a 40 hour work-week is no longer really that important, but I have no reason to believe that even if we went to a 20 hour workweek we would sleep even 5 minutes more. We'd just find more stuff to pack in there. In contrast I probably could say "I'm too sleepy, I'm going to show up for work in a few hours" and my boss wouldn't give a crap as long as I got my work done. It'd come off as all kinds of horrible, but I have some karma to burn. The problem is that it wouldn't fix anything. I'd sleep in, go to work, do my job, then come home and do the same bad thing that cost me sleep previously, only later, to later hours...
The article mentions I think only one point where work schedules are directly responsible: night shift workers with disrupted circadian rhythms. There is evidence that we are more ready to sleep at certain times of the day. That might push some groups to later hours than others. But that's not likely to solve the real problem.
Their model is like this: News reporters work for free to create news stories. Then Red Hat delivers the newspapers to customers and charges for delivery.
The reporters work for free, but the editors, typesetters/web-publishers, press operators and delivery workers do not. Basically the parts of the job that aren't any fun.
's like a law firm where the janitors and legal assistants get paid, but the lawyers don't.
Lawyers hate themselves and their jobs, for the most part. They wouldn't be the kind of low-life scum they are but for the money. Not to mention actual costs lawyers have to do their jobs from legal fees to research to insurance. They will be paid or they will not do their job.
Not true for open-source developers which often do what they do simply because they can, or moon light under some pseudonym to avoid clauses in their employment agreements. It's FUN to develop and design. It's really not fun to turn the crank that makes those designs actually work for real people, to wake up in the morning and look through your issue tracker and fix your shit, etc. This is pretty much the same reason that "linux on the desktop" is always in the near future but only arrives in the present when some company (like Canonical) tries to make it happen. Once developers get the UI *they* want, they're done and walk away. It takes a lot of work to turn that UI into something that works for a larger audience of people whose jobs involve different things that the developers don't see or understand. That work isn't fun, so people have to be paid or won't do it.
This may be the shape of things to come. Quite a lot of technology can be summed up as "things that are fun to do, that we'd do for free" and "things that take a lot of work, that we hate doing". The former category has, in my observation, become somewhat harder to get employed for and is often contracted out, while the latter category ends up being fully staffed and internalized. This is true for open source or not.
I'm fairly certain Apple wants people to buy the iPhone X. The reason people aren't flocking to the 8 is because Apple said "here's this thing, that's ok...but look over at THIS thing that's really awesome", so of course people are going to want the awesome.
Unfortunately we don't really want random evolution any more
Fixed that. We definitely see and acknowledge deficiencies in our genetic makeup, and we definitely want to fix those things. What we don't want is the sort of random survival of the fittest evolution that brought us to this point.
I imagine that can be optionally disabled as with touchID. I can't say for certain yet, but it would definitely be a worthy hate article if it lacked that feature.
They were quite clear that the facial recognition and underlying AI was on the device and not anywhere else, that's one of the big features. Not really sure how that got missed on. But as you point out there's some real basic meatspace work-arounds for that, so for people who are worried about it, and there are non-criminals with significant concerns, I think being able to disable it in favor of a passcode ought to be an option.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been an engineer for 35+ years, and managing and hiring engineers for about half that time. Your opinion on the drug testing being silly is fine, but I guarantee that many people disagree, and would prefer not working next to someone who's using.
If you suspect your employee is using anything on the job and it is hurting his performance or causing disruption, that is fireable. Performance firing is slower I admit, but if he's outright being disruptive, you can fire him on the spot. Based on what I've seen and heard, most of my peers are using some form of what they perceive to be performance enhancing amphetamines, usually legally prescribed but not always. I choose not to, but I don't care, they do what they do and I can't differentiate eccentric personalities from drug abuse in this case, so whatever.
My current employer literally told me "Whatever drug you were using in the interview, keep using it", so there's that.
As far as lying on the application, that's flat out fire able.
Only if I get caught, and my previous employer has no incentive to tell you the truth. And if you read carefully, I said defensible but misleading. Employers always, always use every sort of equivocation, prevarication and dissimulation available when discussing the job, when managing employees on the job, and when representing themselves. I am not sure why I wouldn't do that as well. I do not strictly lie, but I have every incentive to create my own reality and sell it to you. I do that on many things, not just salary. It is literally the most important part of any job to leave the boss feeling like a better job was done than actually was.
My salary history is none of your business. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
So, now the interviews will get longer, and more in depth, and you could argue that they should have been that way before
Right now they are 8 hour interviews. You want to make it a week? Do you honestly think this will help you evaluate my on the job behavior?
The interview bullshit is about one thing: justifying offshoring. In every case it has not been about my work ethic, my attitudes, my ability to live up to expectations or even my verbal agreement to meet those expectations.
What it has been is an 8 hour long final exam on selected topics in electrical & computer engineering, computer science and occasionally math. On a few occasions the questions I'm asked have borne some form of semblance to the job I accepted, but usually it's just people in a pissing contest. The reason this is allowed to go on is so that you as an employer can justify not hiring some fraction of us, and allow H1Bs or offshored labor to replace us. You can run up to your favorite politician and say "We just can't hire enough engineers". Then the H1B notice appears in our employee kitchen (as required by law) that says so and so is being brought in for his technical expertise at some pay rate that is usually a fraction of what I really, truly make.
I would argue when you are hiring engineers in high cost regions, you are getting the cream of the crop intellectually. When they let you down, it has nothing to do with technical skills, it's because of work ethic and missed expectations. And from my experience, employers are quick to correct this, particularly employers who are paying top dollar. It's the ones that are trying to pay the absolute minimum that sometimes have to retain losers longer than they'd like. As it should be.
So in general what I'm saying here is that you are doing the maximum possible to underpay everyone you hire. We are doing the maximum possible to make sure you pay as much as possible. At the end of the day you will offer as much as you want to pay, and I will take it or leave it. And if you feel like I'm overpayed, you will toss me on my ass...assuming you think you can get someone better for what you want to pay. This sounds like the sort of business practices we've all come to accept.
You'll also end up seeing
Now that you mention it, I do remember such questions from a couple of lifetimes ago when I was applying for unskilled jobs. That was so long ago that I forgot. Those questions stopped when I started in engineering, though.
I've worked as an engineer for 20 years in the very best companies out there. All of them asked that. Some require a drug test, others don't. It's silly, I am not going to be operating a bus, I'm going to be driving a keyboard and mouse, maybe an oscilloscope if I get suckered into lab work. All ask for your previous salary on the job application.
These days I leave it blank, but often HR will ask directly. I give them a number that is defensible but misleading, and what I want them to beat to work there. So far nobody has ever called me on it.
They should not ask though. First, it is usually considered confidential information from current employers. Second, the should be paying me what they think I'm worth, not based on what the other guy thought I was worth, or via some fixing scheme where everyone agrees this is what we pay engineers, and when they get pissed we give them a few % more.
If there were a better reason not to join, I can't think of it. Smart people are just fine to socialize with, as long as they aren't being expected to be smart. Shine a spotlight on their mensa card, and suddenly a wild jackass appears.
As an engineer, I am not aware of very many patents, and I intentionally keep my blinders on. However every once in a while a patent comes by that looks like "I patented downloading a file, anyone who downloads files owes me royalties". Often they get to us deliberately to ensure that we are crossing in to willful violation. And yup, I do willfully violate that kind of bullshit patent. Any reasonable person would.
The lawyers have to earn their keep and deal with that. We can't have the state of all technology and progress get tied up in courts because of trolls. I'm with your original post, line em up against the wall, use incendiary rounds.
Honestly I think I know a number of men who would pay to be filmed in some staged sex act. All it takes is one. And of course he's going to put it online.
The shoggoths continue their dark work, and prepare us all to enter the maw. Cthulhu awakens, and he is not best pleased.
Wht about a small box, on which is printed the house number?
Except that it's illegal for anyone but USPS to use that particular box. Also not all of them are locked (or large enough) for packages. In the relatively new neighborhood I live in, all of those boxes are together down the street, and there are a few package boxes large enough for many things (if they weren't massively overpacked, as many are). But only USPS can use them.
At my house I have often considered just a large metal box, with cameras. The trouble is a keying system, and how to get drivers to use it. I would not let anyone into my house, but I would give them a box that they can put stuff in, and have cameras over/in the box to at least see who is using it and photograph what was placed in and taken out.
So just put it down? You'd do the same for your dog if it was suffering.
It's not capitalism if there are only monopolies. Capitalism requires a large number of competitors with approximately equal footing. What we have here is both high-anticompetitive to the core (i've yet to work at a company that didn't do everything it legally could to subdue competitors, and in one case illegally did, rather than actually compete).
Monopolies aren't good for anyone, period. It's short term thinking at its finest.
I definitely trust GM to make an unbiased analysis of competitor technological capacity.
I hope he delivers himself to the moon.
Are you talking Financially?
As I am not a shareholder, I could not care less about that. If your point is that pragmatically financially successful things will keep getting made until they aren't financially successful enough to warrant more investment bucks, you'll get no debate from me, that's fact.
This is all how we run a franchise into the ground. Very similar to how wall street runs corporations into the ground. Unimaginative, but very practical. The next most unimaginative but practical thing is to try to revive a franchise that was previously run into the ground by holding onto the IP for years and then reboot it when you think the moment is ripe. Somewhat higher risk, but people can bound it with some accuracy and make a successful pitch. Still stupid, still unimaginative, but some money can be made. Great for them.
They really ought to have sold off the Star Trek TV rights, it's not in their wheelhouse.
Your criticism of CBS may be correct, I don't really have a basis to evaluate it. But I would argue we do not live in a time when the masses will tolerate an idealistic utopian future, the philosophical dilemmas inherent in bringing it about and real people trying to be better than we expect.
We live in a time when pragmatists and self-centered behavior is idolized, when war and violence are seen as ideal tools for solving difficult social problems, and when letting people die because they're not us is ok as long as we don't say it out loud. People acting on idealism are viewed as ridiculous and naive and with utmost contempt. That's not compatible with any of the Star Trek series I've liked.
I guess I don't think we're living in a time when Star Trek could be successful, even if it were holding itself to its ideals. They really should just sell the IP and the new owners should sit on it for a little while, while we wallow in our self-imposed cess pit for a decade or two. After a few decades we're going to realize that pragmatism may not be that great after all.
I thought that the majority of Slashdot users decided that they weren't going to watch this show when they made it exclusive to CBS's new streaming service?
We probably aren't. 100% of my knowledge of this show comes from Slashdot. I'm not stupid enough to pay money for a service that still shoves ads down my throat, particularly for just one show. I'm not interested enough to yoink it. So I live vicariously through marketing astroturf fluff.
I don't want it to manage the turbolifts or even whatever they use for toilets. If the best the federation has is Windows, I'm joining up with the Romulans.
It's almost as if there's some money being paid to write slam articles about certain companies who are either disruptive or successful, who are not also paying those same sources to write glowing fluff pieces. If we called it protection money...it would sound like the mafia. So let's call it marketing money. These companies don't need to pay the marketing money because their products sell themselves, so instead we write trash pieces.
Tesla makes excellent cars. All the rest of this is just stupid. If you paid your money for a pre-order, you probably knew that delivery was TBD if you were paying any attention at all.
I wish this weren't actually the case. 20 years ago it wasn't the case, not sure when everyone became old curmudgeons.
Why pay all that money for a Honda when a Hyundai gets you there just the same? Why does BMW exist as a company? Lamborghini, right out. Nissan Leaf is fine if you care uniquely about electric, we do not need Tesla. Speaking for myself, I'd take the Tesla any day of the week, even though it is 2x or more the price.
Trying to bin complex devices by marketing feature lists just doesn't work when you go through those feature lists line by line and examine implementation and how well it suits your purposes and desires. How well those things were implemented really matters a lot and determines how much we're willing to pay.
Or maybe you have never written any piece of code that actually had to solve a real problem and was not just simple business-logic.
I have! Code is not hard. Thinking like a compiler is not hard. Maybe for people who write these articles, but not for those of us who do this work.
Thinking of algorithms that solve problems with practical memory and compute limitations...that's hard. Putting them in code? Not that hard, usually. But then the algorithms rarely live in a vacuum, and the information they rely on needs to be acquired from some black box library or some proprietary and ever changing database...and that gets hard too in a different way.
No, there isn't. So this guy, criticizing, is making shit up in order to do it.
Nah, a lot of us drive around with the entire contents of git-hub and the linux kernel on USB keys.
I have no love for either politicians or bosses, but is this really their problem? I suppose if you have a job where you have to work for 16 hours a day, your employer is definitely taking away your sleep time. I don't think that describes too many people.
I think most of our sleep is being lost from OUR choices. We stay up late binging on netflix, or playing games, or otherwise entertaining ourselves. We pack our day with work, kids stuff, entertainment, commute, etc. We kind of bring on a very busy, very hectic schedule and sleep is just sort of sandwiched in there.
One can argue that a 40 hour work-week is no longer really that important, but I have no reason to believe that even if we went to a 20 hour workweek we would sleep even 5 minutes more. We'd just find more stuff to pack in there. In contrast I probably could say "I'm too sleepy, I'm going to show up for work in a few hours" and my boss wouldn't give a crap as long as I got my work done. It'd come off as all kinds of horrible, but I have some karma to burn. The problem is that it wouldn't fix anything. I'd sleep in, go to work, do my job, then come home and do the same bad thing that cost me sleep previously, only later, to later hours...
The article mentions I think only one point where work schedules are directly responsible: night shift workers with disrupted circadian rhythms. There is evidence that we are more ready to sleep at certain times of the day. That might push some groups to later hours than others. But that's not likely to solve the real problem.
Their model is like this: News reporters work for free to create news stories. Then Red Hat delivers the newspapers to customers and charges for delivery.
The reporters work for free, but the editors, typesetters/web-publishers, press operators and delivery workers do not. Basically the parts of the job that aren't any fun.
's like a law firm where the janitors and legal assistants get paid, but the lawyers don't.
Lawyers hate themselves and their jobs, for the most part. They wouldn't be the kind of low-life scum they are but for the money. Not to mention actual costs lawyers have to do their jobs from legal fees to research to insurance. They will be paid or they will not do their job.
Not true for open-source developers which often do what they do simply because they can, or moon light under some pseudonym to avoid clauses in their employment agreements. It's FUN to develop and design. It's really not fun to turn the crank that makes those designs actually work for real people, to wake up in the morning and look through your issue tracker and fix your shit, etc. This is pretty much the same reason that "linux on the desktop" is always in the near future but only arrives in the present when some company (like Canonical) tries to make it happen. Once developers get the UI *they* want, they're done and walk away. It takes a lot of work to turn that UI into something that works for a larger audience of people whose jobs involve different things that the developers don't see or understand. That work isn't fun, so people have to be paid or won't do it.
This may be the shape of things to come. Quite a lot of technology can be summed up as "things that are fun to do, that we'd do for free" and "things that take a lot of work, that we hate doing". The former category has, in my observation, become somewhat harder to get employed for and is often contracted out, while the latter category ends up being fully staffed and internalized. This is true for open source or not.
I'm fairly certain Apple wants people to buy the iPhone X. The reason people aren't flocking to the 8 is because Apple said "here's this thing, that's ok...but look over at THIS thing that's really awesome", so of course people are going to want the awesome.
Unfortunately we don't really want random evolution any more
Fixed that. We definitely see and acknowledge deficiencies in our genetic makeup, and we definitely want to fix those things. What we don't want is the sort of random survival of the fittest evolution that brought us to this point.
I imagine that can be optionally disabled as with touchID. I can't say for certain yet, but it would definitely be a worthy hate article if it lacked that feature.
They were quite clear that the facial recognition and underlying AI was on the device and not anywhere else, that's one of the big features. Not really sure how that got missed on. But as you point out there's some real basic meatspace work-arounds for that, so for people who are worried about it, and there are non-criminals with significant concerns, I think being able to disable it in favor of a passcode ought to be an option.