The Film "The Net". SouthPark's Wacky Molestation Adventure...
etc. etc. etc.
The problem of course is the assumption of guilt, which is a complete reverse of normal American law (Innocent until Proven Guilty). I recall my Dad (Professor at a major University) got hit with a few 'sexual harassment' complaints. Fortunately he had good notes. In both cases the young lady had actually offered sexual favors in exchange for grades, and he turned them down. And they then claimed it was his idea. Meetings with the Dean, hassle, etc... He and my Mom laughed about it.
I can recall a quickly hushed up proposal by Lawrence Livermore to link all the http://www.video.dot.ca.gov/ CALTRANS cameras to a software system that would effectively allow CHP to track every single car on all of California's freeways, simultaneously. You don't need "GPS" if you actually know where all of your cameras are located on the WGS earth model. Plate recognition, parallax, framerate... all data points that will give you plate number, time, direction, speed. Everything you need to know to automatically hand out tickets to everyone in California.
Yo- Arnie ! Want to solve your budget crisis ? If you ticketed every single driver for a $200 fine once a week, that would be some serious bucks.
If your employer reimburses you for safety glasses or steel toed shoes, they don't get access to everything you do while wearing them, do they ? Of course not.
Take it as a reimbursement, and do NOT let them even THINK that they 'own' the hardware. Note that they will need to include the $$ as part of your compensation (and you're probably gonna pay tax on it).
As far as the intellectual property issue if you 'invent something' while using the equipment, it's always a hard job proving that in a court of law. Even people who sign those 'all your brain are belong to us' agreements (sign or yer fired !) get out of them all the time. They keys usually are that the wonderful concept you developed has nothing to do with the core business of your employer.
I'd feel safe doing it this way. BUT! I'm neither a lawyer nor a tax consultant, nor do I play either role on TV. So YMMV.
Seriously. Growing up in the US suburbs, the concept of 'bartering' is foreign, and considered impolite at best, and offensive at worst, to the point where you will be banned from a shop for it. Fast forward a decade after my D&D experience and I found myself alone for half a year in a middle eastern country. And shopping in the bazaar for supplies. Almost immediately the bartering skillset I had learned playing D&D for the better part of five years raced to the forefront. While spells and armor were not available (but automatic weapons were) , I still made out just fine, and never had to roll the D20 I kept in my pocket. Yes, I still have that talisman some 30 years later, it's a useful decision making tool.
My thoughts exactly. The concept of a 'frankenfish' which deliberately accelerates evolution for shortsighted purposes is a baaaad idea with a bad end for all of us.
NOT an urban legend. Happened to me with a 550 card program at Mizzou in 1975. I was running through the halls to go get it punched on the auto-collator (I think that's what it was called- a machine that punched the extra columns on the right (73 through 80) in sequence so you could resort the cards. And I tripped, and the cards went flying.
Fortunately I had a printout because I'd just run the program, so I just went back and keypunched the whole damn thing. And left the cards in the hall. I was a faster typist than a sorter.
Bingo. While the technorati here at/. may look down their noses at it, there are a gazillion of us corporate types using Citrix (or, as we like to call it, Sh*trix), which is empirically a terminal application. So think of a terminal on the iPhone that lets you get into your entire corporate application empire.
MAJOR Business killer application. Instantly, the iPhone can become the defacto business palmtop environment. Sure, businesses will need to scale applications dependent on 1024x768 or higher screen sizes, or get used to virtual screens (imagine a virtual screen using the tilt sensors for screen panning ? Cool !).
I prefer Heinlein's Law: "Stupidity is often punishable by death. Sentecse is carried out immediately. There is no appeal."
That said- teach "Errors Course". Engineers of my generation heard a lot about errors, disasters, etc. caused by bad process, math, theory, materials. Who can forget the cheesy 8mm film of the Tacoma Narrows bridge failing ? Who can forget the Challenger exploding on takeoff, and the Columbia breaking up on re-entry ? And who isn't fascinated with the classic case of the "Unsinkable Titanic" sinking. On it's maiden voyage ?
Learning from mistakes is, as others have noted, often the best teacher.
Not this collection of morons again. They wandered about the high energy physics landscape nattering on about 'black hole signatures' after the Brookhaven collider made what *appears* to be quark gluon plasma. As I understand it, there is a fellow who is just bad at math and wants to keep his grant money coming.
Fortunately, court documents have probably not spelled the word properly. You see, for the US Government, "Nukular" is the legal spelling of the word. And the documents will be tossed out.
Well, back in the 1960's and 70's we called it a mainframe computer. Lots of corporations use "Citrix" which empirically provides a virtual machine for a common, locked to the teeth desktop user. Or some sort of terminal server.
I so agree. The #1 switch fetishist switch should be the classic knife switch. These blokes must be children to have never seen one of those. (I'm pretty sure they were outlawed by any country with a functional set of safety regulations at some point in the 1950's).
I would also posit that the #2 choice would be the two station keyswitch (Launch the missiles) sort of steup.
I don't know where you got your science education, but a project like SETI is made up of lots of Engineering and a few bits of "Science". Most of the great unwashed do not make the distinction between a Scientist and an Engineer.
While SETI is based on a single bright hypothesis (We Are Not Alone), the execution of the project is based on lots of bits of science knowledge executed as Engineering, and bits of tests (How can another civilization communicate with us ? Gravitation waves ? Radio ? How does the galaxy affect propagation of these ? What's between us and them ? How will it affect receiption ? etc..)
It's the synthesis of knowledge and research that makes the project possible. Will you argue that radiotelescope astronomy is somehow 'not science' or 'a waste' ? Because that's the main parent of SETI technology. I would be surprised if the radiotelescope people and the SETI people don't talk all the time, and learn from each other.
Besides, the budget for SETI is so pitifully minimal as to be laughable. As one poster noted, we have 'minimal science dollars'. This is true.
Consider this. Actual dollars spent on "asteroid watch" are significantly less than the budget to produce the Hollywood film "Armageddon". So if we get the big smack upside the head from space, we can all die knowing we were entertained, but not protected.
Oh, you were looking for a display, and maybe a mouse and overlapping WIndows ? Sorry, hadn't been invented yet. We did build a color map display and rotate it, though. This was the Biomedical Image Analysis Lab. Very cool stuff for 1975. Imaging and display ran on a PDP-11...mmm. back in the day. had to boot that sucker by loading in the punch tape boot code sequence in octal, then load paper tape, THEN we could actually load the programs from Mag tape. you guys and your newfangled hard drives don't know how easy you've got it !
(mumbling about steam powered computers and young whipper-snappers..)
Yes it could. It's not the rendering math, or the 3d basic algorithms that have experienced advances (although they have). It's the resolution of the sensors. Our brain scan was a cube approx 1024x1024x1024. That was a boatload of data for the 70's.
The ones discussed are ginormous data sets.
How about over THREE Decades. As a high school student (in the 70's), I worked on software to merge CAT scans and thermal scans of the brain during an NSF summer program at Mizzou. Fortran IV, big honkin IBM 360 mainframe, etc. The first run with a full data load took the entire University mainframe down (hey, I was only 15 and didn't understand JCL, shoot me). We were trying to auto-diagnose tumors.
The basic engineering has been refined, but the science is still the same.
I worked for a company that delivered a 3.5M BEAM DIRECTOR to AFWL in the 90's. Notice the caps. So why is this a surprise to anyone ? The program was DESIGNED to **CLASSIFIED **** in the **CLASSIFIED*** stage of flight. Of course it has other uses. Beam source was a GPFEL.
However, trust me on this, it's too damn big to attach to a shark's head. Even a whale shark. A space based shark, maybe, but you'll have a tough time getting something the size of a small skyscraper into orbit. Not to mention the nuke plant to power it.
Well, yes, sure, but how can one get through the metal bulkheads with an electromagnetic signal ? Unless your aircraft is made from some type of material that will allow e and b fields to buzz right through it (and if so, perhaps we can sell that material to various Stealth programs, no ?), you're going to have to cut holes for waveguides instead of cable ways.
The major savings in transmitted power in an aerospace environment would be in weight of wiring. If your transmitter / receiver assembly and waveguide pipes weigh less than the equivalent direct copper power busses, then it's all worth while.
Of course, the most likely savings these days has to do with signal / information cables. Replacing complex multi-wire signal cables with digital network / fiber optic busses is your best chance to cut weight.
Other interesting features of a waveform power transmission solution would need to include power interruption devices, load sensing devices, and the like. If this takes off, I would find some millimeter wave radar companies that want to get in on the 'ground' floor.
I've taken a long posting that I wrote on my blog and dropped it into the site. And I am Inauthentic. Now I understand the "Bladerunner Moment" comment in the article. I shall begin to surround myself with oddly colored polaroids and snapshots of theoretically implanted ancestors.
The nice thing is that we've finally settled the argument if machines can be made to drink beer and like it !
Fribble. Sure, the US sells "demilitarized scrap". In the US. To US citizens. Now ask who can buy Russian, Chinese, etc. weapons in the open global weapons market.
Yep- damn near anyone with the bucks and baksheesh to bribe the local governments who are responsible for 'controlling the sales of weapons'.
And I'm not talking about 'demilitarized scrap', but full-up functional weapons.
And so NOW how do you feel about our ability to calculate probability ?
"NASA Scientists reveal same computer used for ill-fated Mars Orbiter now used to compute asteroid orbits. Announces probability of collision with Earth to be 'like, maybe, we dunno. Kilometers, miles, who the hell understands all this metric crap anyway ? Please just increase our budget and we'll stop trying to scare you !"
The integration of Apple's suite of software with.Mac is nice. It would have also netted Microsoft another DOJ lawsuit if M$ had done it with MSN back in the day. Apple can only get away with it because their market share is not as extreme as M$'s.
Oh, and.Mac is NOT A PORTAL ! Sheesh.
All that said, I would LOVE to see them go back to a free or 'cheap' version of.Mac that is crippled in capacity so that I can use a minimal set of utilities and such- backup, iSync, etc. No.mac mail or other bandwidth sucking and disk drive crunchin stuff needed, just enable your darn iWhatever applications ! I miss my.mac, but I could not justify the expense. I pay enough for ISP access, and I get all the tools for free as in beer via other providers (yahoo, google, etc.)
If Apple wants to provide a free service that is crippled, and happily shows Apple adverts all the time, that would be fine with me. Then I'd buy up if I needed the extra space.
RFID has its uses. RFID has a major defect in an operationally chaotic installation. The defect ? Ya gotta route the chip-carrying widgets past RFID readers. RFID is Passive technology. It isn't capable of saying "Here I am! Come get me !" without prompting. It requires a handshake and proximity.
RFID is applicable tech for tracking of mid to low value items. For high value items (like shipments of missles and nukes, for example), an active monitor is required. That's why you see active monitors on a lot of trucks nowadays- GPS receiver and cell phone or packet radio communicating location periodically.
Cost, bandwidth, and computing power are not a significant issue with a periodic query/call approach. Set the units to randomly compute their location and connect / communicate / disconnect, and you've got enough bandwidth for a cloud of thousands of the little buggers.
As far as cost is concerned, well, if your materials have enough value, you can justify a $100 tracker. Just like RFID, the initial cost of tech was high, and once you got volume, savings would accrue. From a component perspective, you could get out the door for the cost of a pretty nominal cell phone.
Oh, and Mr. tinfoil ? Sheesh, man, amp up the Lithium. You've obviously gone off your meds. You're like those suburban mom eco-nazis who yammer on about pollution and eating meat while driving their SUV's and wearing leather coats. I bet you LIKE the evil corporate UPS's tracking tools when you bought your comp from another evil corporation. Dude, you're just helping oppress your fellow carbon based lifeforms by using those tools of corporations, right ? Isn't that what you're saying ? Do us all a favor, be true to your philosophy. Stop using anything that comes from a corporation. We'll enjoy the silence on this end...
Most useful in doors- factories, etc.
on
Wireless Positioning
·
· Score: 4, Informative
C'mon- take off the tinfoil hats already. This tech is already active in some places, primarily as a tracking tool for indoor industry. Here's an example:
Your company makes big widgets that get pushed around your factory floor on carts. You want your people to have the flexibility to push the carts where they need to go, but at the end of every shift carts are 'lost', the second shift guy has to go looking around for the half-assembled widget with the missing frannistan.
You can make everyone log their widget work into widget wherezit workstations, but the workers wont want to waste valuable beer time for that. So the widget wherezit workstation logging project fails.
So instead you put a wifi device on each cart. It reads where it is based on the location of access point antennas you've put up in your rafters. It then uses these AP's to periodically tell a server where it is. End results ? You know where your widgets are hiding all the time. Without anyone having to do anything.
I wish/. readers wouldn't be so anxious to find the 'evil government / corporate / wal-mart' "Threat" before they see the real world solution to real world problems.
Besides, the aliens who overthrew the gummint in the 50's already put chips in all your fool heads anyway...
Slashdot Mirror
The Film "The Net".
SouthPark's Wacky Molestation Adventure...
etc. etc. etc.
The problem of course is the assumption of guilt, which is a complete reverse of normal American law (Innocent until Proven Guilty). I recall my Dad (Professor at a major University) got hit with a few 'sexual harassment' complaints. Fortunately he had good notes. In both cases the young lady had actually offered sexual favors in exchange for grades, and he turned them down. And they then claimed it was his idea. Meetings with the Dean, hassle, etc... He and my Mom laughed about it.
I can recall a quickly hushed up proposal by Lawrence Livermore to link all the http://www.video.dot.ca.gov/ CALTRANS cameras to a software system that would effectively allow CHP to track every single car on all of California's freeways, simultaneously. You don't need "GPS" if you actually know where all of your cameras are located on the WGS earth model. Plate recognition, parallax, framerate... all data points that will give you plate number, time, direction, speed. Everything you need to know to automatically hand out tickets to everyone in California.
Yo- Arnie ! Want to solve your budget crisis ? If you ticketed every single driver for a $200 fine once a week, that would be some serious bucks.
If your employer reimburses you for safety glasses or steel toed shoes, they don't get access to everything you do while wearing them, do they ? Of course not.
Take it as a reimbursement, and do NOT let them even THINK that they 'own' the hardware. Note that they will need to include the $$ as part of your compensation (and you're probably gonna pay tax on it).
As far as the intellectual property issue if you 'invent something' while using the equipment, it's always a hard job proving that in a court of law. Even people who sign those 'all your brain are belong to us' agreements (sign or yer fired !) get out of them all the time. They keys usually are that the wonderful concept you developed has nothing to do with the core business of your employer.
I'd feel safe doing it this way. BUT! I'm neither a lawyer nor a tax consultant, nor do I play either role on TV. So YMMV.
Seriously. Growing up in the US suburbs, the concept of 'bartering' is foreign, and considered impolite at best, and offensive at worst, to the point where you will be banned from a shop for it. Fast forward a decade after my D&D experience and I found myself alone for half a year in a middle eastern country. And shopping in the bazaar for supplies. Almost immediately the bartering skillset I had learned playing D&D for the better part of five years raced to the forefront. While spells and armor were not available (but automatic weapons were) , I still made out just fine, and never had to roll the D20 I kept in my pocket. Yes, I still have that talisman some 30 years later, it's a useful decision making tool.
My thoughts exactly. The concept of a 'frankenfish' which deliberately accelerates evolution for shortsighted purposes is a baaaad idea with a bad end for all of us.
NOT an urban legend. Happened to me with a 550 card program at Mizzou in 1975. I was running through the halls to go get it punched on the auto-collator (I think that's what it was called- a machine that punched the extra columns on the right (73 through 80) in sequence so you could resort the cards. And I tripped, and the cards went flying.
Fortunately I had a printout because I'd just run the program, so I just went back and keypunched the whole damn thing. And left the cards in the hall. I was a faster typist than a sorter.
Bingo. While the technorati here at /. may look down their noses at it, there are a gazillion of us corporate types using Citrix (or, as we like to call it, Sh*trix), which is empirically a terminal application. So think of a terminal on the iPhone that lets you get into your entire corporate application empire.
MAJOR Business killer application. Instantly, the iPhone can become the defacto business palmtop environment. Sure, businesses will need to scale applications dependent on 1024x768 or higher screen sizes, or get used to virtual screens (imagine a virtual screen using the tilt sensors for screen panning ? Cool !).
Apple is gonna kill the Crackberry if this works.
Time to stop using you xBox to run your financial empire, kids. Get the grizzled old traders back and fire the children.
I prefer Heinlein's Law:
"Stupidity is often punishable by death. Sentecse is carried out immediately. There is no appeal."
That said- teach "Errors Course". Engineers of my generation heard a lot about errors, disasters, etc. caused by bad process, math, theory, materials. Who can forget the cheesy 8mm film of the Tacoma Narrows bridge failing ? Who can forget the Challenger exploding on takeoff, and the Columbia breaking up on re-entry ? And who isn't fascinated with the classic case of the "Unsinkable Titanic" sinking. On it's maiden voyage ?
Learning from mistakes is, as others have noted, often the best teacher.
Not this collection of morons again. They wandered about the high energy physics landscape nattering on about 'black hole signatures' after the Brookhaven collider made what *appears* to be quark gluon plasma. As I understand it, there is a fellow who is just bad at math and wants to keep his grant money coming.
Fortunately, court documents have probably not spelled the word properly. You see, for the US Government, "Nukular" is the legal spelling of the word. And the documents will be tossed out.
Well, back in the 1960's and 70's we called it a mainframe computer. Lots of corporations use "Citrix" which empirically provides a virtual machine for a common, locked to the teeth desktop user. Or some sort of terminal server.
I so agree. The #1 switch fetishist switch should be the classic knife switch. These blokes must be children to have never seen one of those. (I'm pretty sure they were outlawed by any country with a functional set of safety regulations at some point in the 1950's).
I would also posit that the #2 choice would be the two station keyswitch (Launch the missiles) sort of steup.
I don't know where you got your science education, but a project like SETI is made up of lots of Engineering and a few bits of "Science". Most of the great unwashed do not make the distinction between a Scientist and an Engineer.
While SETI is based on a single bright hypothesis (We Are Not Alone), the execution of the project is based on lots of bits of science knowledge executed as Engineering, and bits of tests (How can another civilization communicate with us ? Gravitation waves ? Radio ? How does the galaxy affect propagation of these ? What's between us and them ? How will it affect receiption ? etc..)
It's the synthesis of knowledge and research that makes the project possible. Will you argue that radiotelescope astronomy is somehow 'not science' or 'a waste' ? Because that's the main parent of SETI technology. I would be surprised if the radiotelescope people and the SETI people don't talk all the time, and learn from each other.
Besides, the budget for SETI is so pitifully minimal as to be laughable. As one poster noted, we have 'minimal science dollars'. This is true.
Consider this. Actual dollars spent on "asteroid watch" are significantly less than the budget to produce the Hollywood film "Armageddon". So if we get the big smack upside the head from space, we can all die knowing we were entertained, but not protected.
Oh, you were looking for a display, and maybe a mouse and overlapping WIndows ? Sorry, hadn't been invented yet. We did build a color map display and rotate it, though. This was the Biomedical Image Analysis Lab. Very cool stuff for 1975. Imaging and display ran on a PDP-11...mmm. back in the day. had to boot that sucker by loading in the punch tape boot code sequence in octal, then load paper tape, THEN we could actually load the programs from Mag tape. you guys and your newfangled hard drives don't know how easy you've got it ! (mumbling about steam powered computers and young whipper-snappers..)
Yes it could. It's not the rendering math, or the 3d basic algorithms that have experienced advances (although they have). It's the resolution of the sensors. Our brain scan was a cube approx 1024x1024x1024. That was a boatload of data for the 70's. The ones discussed are ginormous data sets.
.. a decade.
How about over THREE Decades. As a high school student (in the 70's), I worked on software to merge CAT scans and thermal scans of the brain during an NSF summer program at Mizzou. Fortran IV, big honkin IBM 360 mainframe, etc. The first run with a full data load took the entire University mainframe down (hey, I was only 15 and didn't understand JCL, shoot me). We were trying to auto-diagnose tumors.
The basic engineering has been refined, but the science is still the same.
I worked for a company that delivered a 3.5M BEAM DIRECTOR to AFWL in the 90's. Notice the caps. So why is this a surprise to anyone ? The program was DESIGNED to **CLASSIFIED **** in the **CLASSIFIED*** stage of flight. Of course it has other uses. Beam source was a GPFEL.
However, trust me on this, it's too damn big to attach to a shark's head. Even a whale shark. A space based shark, maybe, but you'll have a tough time getting something the size of a small skyscraper into orbit. Not to mention the nuke plant to power it.
Well, yes, sure, but how can one get through the metal bulkheads with an electromagnetic signal ? Unless your aircraft is made from some type of material that will allow e and b fields to buzz right through it (and if so, perhaps we can sell that material to various Stealth programs, no ?), you're going to have to cut holes for waveguides instead of cable ways.
The major savings in transmitted power in an aerospace environment would be in weight of wiring. If your transmitter / receiver assembly and waveguide pipes weigh less than the equivalent direct copper power busses, then it's all worth while.
Of course, the most likely savings these days has to do with signal / information cables. Replacing complex multi-wire signal cables with digital network / fiber optic busses is your best chance to cut weight.
Other interesting features of a waveform power transmission solution would need to include power interruption devices, load sensing devices, and the like. If this takes off, I would find some millimeter wave radar companies that want to get in on the 'ground' floor.
I've taken a long posting that I wrote on my blog and dropped it into the site. And I am Inauthentic. Now I understand the "Bladerunner Moment" comment in the article. I shall begin to surround myself with oddly colored polaroids and snapshots of theoretically implanted ancestors.
The nice thing is that we've finally settled the argument if machines can be made to drink beer and like it !
Fribble. Sure, the US sells "demilitarized scrap". In the US. To US citizens. Now ask who can buy Russian, Chinese, etc. weapons in the open global weapons market.
Yep- damn near anyone with the bucks and baksheesh to bribe the local governments who are responsible for 'controlling the sales of weapons'.
And I'm not talking about 'demilitarized scrap', but full-up functional weapons.
And so NOW how do you feel about our ability to calculate probability ?
"NASA Scientists reveal same computer used for ill-fated Mars Orbiter now used to compute asteroid orbits. Announces probability of collision with Earth to be 'like, maybe, we dunno. Kilometers, miles, who the hell understands all this metric crap anyway ? Please just increase our budget and we'll stop trying to scare you !"
My GOD ! They're giving it away ! How can we control this !
The integration of Apple's suite of software with .Mac is nice. It would have also netted Microsoft another DOJ lawsuit if M$ had done it with MSN back in the day. Apple can only get away with it because their market share is not as extreme as M$'s.
.Mac is NOT A PORTAL ! Sheesh.
.Mac that is crippled in capacity so that I can use a minimal set of utilities and such- backup, iSync, etc. No .mac mail or other bandwidth sucking and disk drive crunchin stuff needed, just enable your darn iWhatever applications ! I miss my .mac, but I could not justify the expense. I pay enough for ISP access, and I get all the tools for free as in beer via other providers (yahoo, google, etc.)
Oh, and
All that said, I would LOVE to see them go back to a free or 'cheap' version of
If Apple wants to provide a free service that is crippled, and happily shows Apple adverts all the time, that would be fine with me. Then I'd buy up if I needed the extra space.
RFID has its uses. RFID has a major defect in an operationally chaotic installation. The defect ? Ya gotta route the chip-carrying widgets past RFID readers. RFID is Passive technology. It isn't capable of saying "Here I am! Come get me !" without prompting. It requires a handshake and proximity.
RFID is applicable tech for tracking of mid to low value items. For high value items (like shipments of missles and nukes, for example), an active monitor is required. That's why you see active monitors on a lot of trucks nowadays- GPS receiver and cell phone or packet radio communicating location periodically.
Cost, bandwidth, and computing power are not a significant issue with a periodic query/call approach. Set the units to randomly compute their location and connect / communicate / disconnect, and you've got enough bandwidth for a cloud of thousands of the little buggers.
As far as cost is concerned, well, if your materials have enough value, you can justify a $100 tracker. Just like RFID, the initial cost of tech was high, and once you got volume, savings would accrue. From a component perspective, you could get out the door for the cost of a pretty nominal cell phone.
Oh, and Mr. tinfoil ? Sheesh, man, amp up the Lithium. You've obviously gone off your meds. You're like those suburban mom eco-nazis who yammer on about pollution and eating meat while driving their SUV's and wearing leather coats. I bet you LIKE the evil corporate UPS's tracking tools when you bought your comp from another evil corporation. Dude, you're just helping oppress your fellow carbon based lifeforms by using those tools of corporations, right ? Isn't that what you're saying ? Do us all a favor, be true to your philosophy. Stop using anything that comes from a corporation. We'll enjoy the silence on this end...
C'mon- take off the tinfoil hats already. This tech is already active in some places, primarily as a tracking tool for indoor industry. Here's an example:
/. readers wouldn't be so anxious to find the 'evil government / corporate / wal-mart' "Threat" before they see the real world solution to real world problems.
Your company makes big widgets that get pushed around your factory floor on carts. You want your people to have the flexibility to push the carts where they need to go, but at the end of every shift carts are 'lost', the second shift guy has to go looking around for the half-assembled widget with the missing frannistan.
You can make everyone log their widget work into widget wherezit workstations, but the workers wont want to waste valuable beer time for that. So the widget wherezit workstation logging project fails.
So instead you put a wifi device on each cart. It reads where it is based on the location of access point antennas you've put up in your rafters. It then uses these AP's to periodically tell a server where it is. End results ? You know where your widgets are hiding all the time. Without anyone having to do anything.
I wish
Besides, the aliens who overthrew the gummint in the 50's already put chips in all your fool heads anyway...