Why would I want to subject myself to the living hell of being upper management? The only advantage I can see is that I'll be taking the place of one less idiot, and quite frankly I'm already sick of doing their jobs for them.
Instead, I'm going to see if this brain of mine can construct and realise a job with high pay, minimal hours, and no interaction with stupid people. I think that'd be a much better use of IQ points than simply being able to do Robbie the Retard's job three times more efficiently.
I had a full-time offer from a mob I'm contracting for. I looked it over and said I wouldn't accept it as it stood, but if they were prepared to accept a couple of changes...
My manager^3 said my proposed changes sounded OK. I rewrote large chunks of the contract as per what I'd stated and sent it back to him to approve.
Funnily enough, I haven't heard anything since. Possibly someone still thinks that if they hold out long enough, I'll see the light and accept an 8% pay cut, appropriation of all my IP, and mandatory unlimited unpaid overtime.
In the meantime, I'm getting paid by the hour and already have other offers on the table.
It can change in an instant if an exec-level manager is replaced. Usually for the worse.
I worked helpdesk in a government department for seven years. Apart from having to fend off offers of management positions (filled in for the occasionally, almost puked from boredom), it was very nearly nirvana, at least for the first five years or so. Then management got switched around and it went to hell in a handbasket. When I left, I was the longest-serving techie they had. And damn if those first couple of years weren't good.
Now I work for a global computer company. I can't complain about the money. But I was hired as a general project bod, and so far all I do for eight hours a day is data entry and shuffling stacks of forms into alphabetical order. The management is hapless, the prospects are hopeless, and the entire site needs to be nuked from orbit. I'm outta here as soon as I can be.
Where I *want* to be is not 'working' at all, having used my analysis knowledge to provide me with a nice little self-perpetuating money tree. With all the time in the world, I can then start turning my energies to stuff *I* think is cool, even if it's not generating a paycheck.
So you have a Judas goat machine which sits around simulating a beige box from the local department store with default settings, surfing the web semirandomly and full of spyware and trojans. It's got folders full of vanilla porn and randomly downloaded crap everywhere.
Your *actual* machine sits in a custom safe buried under the house, stores all its data in RAM or random-password-encrypted partitions on your neighbours' open networks, and is laced with thermite.
If the Judas machine is removed from the house or the case cracked in a normal way, the thermite in the real machine (as well as the transmitter/sensor in the Judas machine) goes bang.
If you really feel you must be able to recover your data at a later time, have the passwords for the partitions stored in an encrypted file somewhere on the internet - one for which you do know the password.
What forensics finds: A machine which looks like any other consumer machine - full of crap downloads and vanilla porn. No obvious functioning wireless comms capacity.
If they discover the neighbours' networks and poke around in there, they might find the encrypted blocks. But there's no way to prove who put them there, where they came from, or what their purpose is. The neighbours will claim ignorance. Your own PC didn't have any wireless devices.
If they've been monitoring wireless transmissions in the area for a while, they might be able to say that something in your house (or nearby) was communicating wirelessly. However, it and the remains of the real PC are now so much charred ash, even if the basement is dug up. Not to mention that there was never any incriminating data stored on that PC at any point anyway.
Of course, there are more ways to wreck you than through purely technical evidence - being dragged through the courts and media, for starters - but that's a discussion outside the scope of antiforensics.
As an Australian, I can honestly say that I do not want the current mess of political office holders reducing _my_ convenience just because bloody Bush has pissed off three-quarters of the planet.
Personally, I'd tell him that he could fly in economy class like everyone else - with plenty of attention from the rubber-gloved airport 'security' he's responsible for encouraging - and catch a bloody taxi. And none of those jumped-up American security guards allowed in, either. He can take his chances.
Point. You'd be better off trying to get science teachers to run Elementeo competitions over the school year, and have inter-class tournaments (all ages, it's one of the few activities in which older and younger kids can face off as equals).
Heck, sell it to a trading card company and see if you can get a half-hour Saturday morning kids' cartoon out of it. Follow it up with expansion packs / sequels which deal with more advanced concepts and/or 'rare' elements. The collect-em-all poster would be based on the periodic table.
"Elementeo The Movie: Rise of the TransUranics"
instead of thinking we could access the net of minds.
I asked the net of minds how to achieve ultimate human transcendence. They said "OMGWTFBBQ!" and "kekekekeke!"
It depends. Can I download a boxed set of a TV series - with the box? Can I download the included booklet with genuine cast-member signature, the small pewter figurine, the keychain, the miniature replica of one of the characters' more notable accessories? Or, if I'm enough of a fan, the action figures, the A2 posters, the show-themed general merch?
Not to mention that anything with a fanbase STILL has a huge first-broadcast audience, because they want to see it NOW instead of in three hours when the ad-free torrent goes up on the net.
I'm surprised that official show and movie websites don't actually offer downloadable versions (low-rez) along with the hi-rez DVD sets etc. The low-resolution versions would flood the usual download methods, discouraging all but the most persistent searchers, and why d/l something from an unknown source when you can get it from a reputable one? In the meantime, by the time people have gotten to the download page, they've already been subjected to the rest of the web page with its promotions, on-sells, and other links designed to appeal to the wallets of people likely to download that particular content.
Want to hook a friend on a TV series? It used to be that you'd have to argue them into watching the show (and perhaps rescheduling or missing something), or inviting them over, or lending them your tape or DVD and hoping they watched it. With official download links, just send them the link in email. Pow, it's just become easier for fans to make more fans, a certain percentage of which will be profitable from the perspective of the media makers. Personally, if I had a product to sell, I'd like 100% market penetration with 1% buying five bucks of stuff off me, as opposed to 0.0001% penetration and everyone buying a hundred bucks' worth.
I'm still surprised at how few businesses take advantage of the conventions that fans arrange. Appearances by individuals (cast, crew, producers, effects people) aside, wouldn't it logically be the perfect place to set up a stall selling every damn bit of official merchandise there is, at a slight discount? Heck, even if there's not room to sell everything (or if something runs out), at least have a catalogue and let people put in orders for same-week delivery.
Make the robot react in a non-pained way.
Wouldn't the soldiers feel better about a robot which went out into the minefield, got five out of six legs blown off, then pulled itself back to safety with the last one, muttering imprecations and flashing a light saying "PC LOAD LEGS"?
Or how about one which sang mine-exploding ditties while it stomped up and down? Or one that detected explosions and responded with fightin'-type words?
Funny thing about working in IT - you learn to spot repeating patterns in data, and match them up to certain results.
I got bored one week, and wondered if, amongst the chaotic mess that is the global investment industry, there were any really freakin' obvious patterns that fell out if you filtered the data a little bit. I'm not talking about subtle seventeeth-order pertubations, I'm talking about patterns which would mudwrestle Godzilla in the ruins of Tokyo for the title of "Most Unsubtle".
Yep, there were.
One year later, I'm still working in IT because I'm not stupid enough to throw a career away on a whim. But I've also made (after tax) an additional five times my annual net salary, for about two days' work. Retirement is most definitely on the cards, and it ain't gonna include punching a clock or chasing up a client ever again.
Who'd've thought the best place to apply IT skills would be in a completely different industry?
Alternative option: Outthink the business people. Write up how much time, money, convenience and hassle you _saved_ each time the Windows machines faceplant and yours don't. Convert it all to dollar figures by using efficiencies of interrupted vs uninterrupted staff and their combined salary rates converted to dollars per minute.
Include secondary items such as the time spent reporting, diagnosing and repairing the errors, the time and money spent on software and hardware upgrades, the time it took for everyone to get back on track and the long-term effects that the crash would have not only on the productivity of the directly affected users, but all the people who interacted with them and were inconvenienced as a result.
Once that figure has been arrived at, put next to it the cost in sysadmin-hours and dollar equivalent of the time and effort it took for you and your team throughout the past days, months etc in order to tweak the systems to the point where they simply did not crash. Make the numbers fairly large.
Then, next to the second sets of figures, include the phrase "Already paid as part of standard contract."
Then update the figures each month or so, along with year-to-date totals, and email them to the boss and a level or so up the food chain. Make sure the CIO or equivalent gets a copy.
That way, they have something on hand which they can point to which says WHAT you do, WHERE your salaries are going, and most importantly, WHY you're being paid and HOW MUCH you're returning to the company as a result.
Better still, if you or anyone on your bit of the food chain gets called into a meeting to justify your existence, you can bring a copy of the most recent report instead of spending ten minutes trying to explain why firing all the sysadmins would be a Bad Move to people who use laptops as status symbols and cat warmers.
Yes, I believe in being pre-emptive.
With 500+ users, even five different standard builds can be a pain in the ass. All it needs is for one software rollout to not work on one of the variations, and that's 100 phone calls.
I've seen mostly-successful implementation of limited superuser rights for developers. Generally it's "Put it in writing that you want your workstation unlocked and we'll do it. But if *anything at all* breaks, our total liability is limited to reimaging the disk and/or repairing the hardware. If you screw with the hardware, we're not liable for *anything* until you reassemble the original pieces. And we'll be watching your network port like a hawk - first sign of trouble and you're in your own private cyberspace."
Some developers backed down, some stepped up to the plate. Each to their own strengths. And for the most part, it worked, bar the occasional call for a nuke and pave. A couple of devs ran one vanilla machine on the production network and one godbox on the dev grid. Some dualbooted. Others came up with other variations. As long as nothing hosed the regular users, we didn't care _what_ freaky abominations they'd downloaded.
This is why I've always wanted (but never got around to putting together) a comprehensive db or reference of organisational policies. Not server logins, or patch levels, or exactly what flavor of cable the dinosaurs in the back room need, but management policies.
To whit -
1) The actual policy,
2) Who created it and when,
3) Who has the authority to change it, and
4) Their email addresses and phone numbers.
That way, any time someone's bugged about a policy I didn't come up with, I can say "The person who can change it is X, here's their email address, until they say anything then Y's policy is the one we're using." Hey, depending on the amount of personnel and time I have, I might even say "Write it up, email/fax it to me, and I'll see it gets to the right exec." Good customer relations and all that.
It'd be interesting to see a history of devices incorporated into prosthetics by hacker-minded home users.
Personally, I'd like the hardware components of a cellphone, a universal remote, a small display screen, and maybe the ability for the arm to lengthen so I could reach behind furniture or pick stuff up off the floor without bending. And maybe a USB slot I could stick a flavor-of-the-month wireless NIC on.
Software-wise, the best generalist app would be an ability to drop into a "virtual mode" where arm movements and feedback acted as the I/O to a series of configurable virtual haptic environments. The wearer would be able to 'feel' around a set of controls appropriate to the selected application or mode, and use them to control various aspects of the arm's hardware - setting the time on the internal clock, switching GPS tracking on or off, loading pre-set browser bookmarks onto the small screen (RSS mode?), typing a phone number or text message, running preloaded applications or shell scripts, you name it.
One interesting app, when coupled with a microphone and voice recognition, might be to output various kinds of sign language. I don't know how good it would be without a camera and sign-reading software to interpret complex replies, though.
Hmm, come to think of it, throw in a camera, laser pointer, LED torch... and a mechanical-recharge handle.
If a country is attacked the people are going to side with their government regardless of what it is like.
Interesting theory. Personally, I'd be standing on the beaches with a big sign saying "This way to the politicians."
Unless it was the Americans, of course. Then I'd just leave a sign saying "OIL ->" and go hide out of the way of friendly fire.
Well, there's a number of possibilities.
1) The retirement age is extended to 120.
2) Lots of over-70 people start up their own businesses hiring people over 70. Eventually, traditional businesses start hiring away some of the whitehairs, and the businesses mix.
3) Given the sheer number of new inventions and activities being invented every day, if you can't think of something interesting to see, do or try you're probably better off dead anyway.
4) As an interesting side effect, with more people in the world, investment return rates and inflation would probably rise as demand for scarce resources increases.
"I remember when you could buy that for only HALF that price!"
"That was last week, Grampa."
fish and amphibian eyes are much more complicated than ours. For example, the turtle likely sees in at least seven channels of vision, perceiving a world we could never hope to imagine
Can we put THAT on a helmet? It'd be turtle-y brilliant!
The key metric here is "loss in quality". There are always going to be cheaper people - heck, go recruit the wino in the alley out back - but quality is a strange beast to measure.
If you're cheapening your customer service, how are your customers going to react?
If you're cheapening your in-house troubleshooting/repair systems, how much time, money and patience are your own people going to lose?
If you're cheapening your systems knowledge and documentation, what will be lost when it needs to be decyphered in the future?
And yes, I am using that verb deliberately. There are certain tasks which can be effectively outsourced. Unfortunately, there are a heck of a lot more which can't be without suffering extensive side-effects.
I think the main problem is that it will only present and flag items which are already tagged by the simplest, reaction-level mental processes. There won't be any discrimination, because that's done at the higher levels. A soldier wearing this system will be just as likely to shoot tumbleweeds, shadows, cats, and friendlies breaking concealment as they will a designated enemy.
If I had opponents using this system, I'd rig up a bunch of rags in human form to leap up and go "Booga booga booga!" when half the squad had passed it. Why use my own ammo when my enemy's is so plentiful?
Slashdot Mirror
I must have missed the second part of the article, where it explains how to build your own time machine and travel back to the 1970s.
Instead, I'm going to see if this brain of mine can construct and realise a job with high pay, minimal hours, and no interaction with stupid people. I think that'd be a much better use of IQ points than simply being able to do Robbie the Retard's job three times more efficiently.
My manager^3 said my proposed changes sounded OK. I rewrote large chunks of the contract as per what I'd stated and sent it back to him to approve.
Funnily enough, I haven't heard anything since. Possibly someone still thinks that if they hold out long enough, I'll see the light and accept an 8% pay cut, appropriation of all my IP, and mandatory unlimited unpaid overtime.
In the meantime, I'm getting paid by the hour and already have other offers on the table.
It can change in an instant if an exec-level manager is replaced. Usually for the worse. I worked helpdesk in a government department for seven years. Apart from having to fend off offers of management positions (filled in for the occasionally, almost puked from boredom), it was very nearly nirvana, at least for the first five years or so. Then management got switched around and it went to hell in a handbasket. When I left, I was the longest-serving techie they had. And damn if those first couple of years weren't good. Now I work for a global computer company. I can't complain about the money. But I was hired as a general project bod, and so far all I do for eight hours a day is data entry and shuffling stacks of forms into alphabetical order. The management is hapless, the prospects are hopeless, and the entire site needs to be nuked from orbit. I'm outta here as soon as I can be. Where I *want* to be is not 'working' at all, having used my analysis knowledge to provide me with a nice little self-perpetuating money tree. With all the time in the world, I can then start turning my energies to stuff *I* think is cool, even if it's not generating a paycheck.
So you have a Judas goat machine which sits around simulating a beige box from the local department store with default settings, surfing the web semirandomly and full of spyware and trojans. It's got folders full of vanilla porn and randomly downloaded crap everywhere. Your *actual* machine sits in a custom safe buried under the house, stores all its data in RAM or random-password-encrypted partitions on your neighbours' open networks, and is laced with thermite. If the Judas machine is removed from the house or the case cracked in a normal way, the thermite in the real machine (as well as the transmitter/sensor in the Judas machine) goes bang. If you really feel you must be able to recover your data at a later time, have the passwords for the partitions stored in an encrypted file somewhere on the internet - one for which you do know the password. What forensics finds: A machine which looks like any other consumer machine - full of crap downloads and vanilla porn. No obvious functioning wireless comms capacity. If they discover the neighbours' networks and poke around in there, they might find the encrypted blocks. But there's no way to prove who put them there, where they came from, or what their purpose is. The neighbours will claim ignorance. Your own PC didn't have any wireless devices. If they've been monitoring wireless transmissions in the area for a while, they might be able to say that something in your house (or nearby) was communicating wirelessly. However, it and the remains of the real PC are now so much charred ash, even if the basement is dug up. Not to mention that there was never any incriminating data stored on that PC at any point anyway. Of course, there are more ways to wreck you than through purely technical evidence - being dragged through the courts and media, for starters - but that's a discussion outside the scope of antiforensics.
As an Australian, I can honestly say that I do not want the current mess of political office holders reducing _my_ convenience just because bloody Bush has pissed off three-quarters of the planet. Personally, I'd tell him that he could fly in economy class like everyone else - with plenty of attention from the rubber-gloved airport 'security' he's responsible for encouraging - and catch a bloody taxi. And none of those jumped-up American security guards allowed in, either. He can take his chances.
Point. You'd be better off trying to get science teachers to run Elementeo competitions over the school year, and have inter-class tournaments (all ages, it's one of the few activities in which older and younger kids can face off as equals). Heck, sell it to a trading card company and see if you can get a half-hour Saturday morning kids' cartoon out of it. Follow it up with expansion packs / sequels which deal with more advanced concepts and/or 'rare' elements. The collect-em-all poster would be based on the periodic table. "Elementeo The Movie: Rise of the TransUranics"
instead of thinking we could access the net of minds. I asked the net of minds how to achieve ultimate human transcendence. They said "OMGWTFBBQ!" and "kekekekeke!"
It depends. Can I download a boxed set of a TV series - with the box? Can I download the included booklet with genuine cast-member signature, the small pewter figurine, the keychain, the miniature replica of one of the characters' more notable accessories? Or, if I'm enough of a fan, the action figures, the A2 posters, the show-themed general merch? Not to mention that anything with a fanbase STILL has a huge first-broadcast audience, because they want to see it NOW instead of in three hours when the ad-free torrent goes up on the net. I'm surprised that official show and movie websites don't actually offer downloadable versions (low-rez) along with the hi-rez DVD sets etc. The low-resolution versions would flood the usual download methods, discouraging all but the most persistent searchers, and why d/l something from an unknown source when you can get it from a reputable one? In the meantime, by the time people have gotten to the download page, they've already been subjected to the rest of the web page with its promotions, on-sells, and other links designed to appeal to the wallets of people likely to download that particular content. Want to hook a friend on a TV series? It used to be that you'd have to argue them into watching the show (and perhaps rescheduling or missing something), or inviting them over, or lending them your tape or DVD and hoping they watched it. With official download links, just send them the link in email. Pow, it's just become easier for fans to make more fans, a certain percentage of which will be profitable from the perspective of the media makers. Personally, if I had a product to sell, I'd like 100% market penetration with 1% buying five bucks of stuff off me, as opposed to 0.0001% penetration and everyone buying a hundred bucks' worth. I'm still surprised at how few businesses take advantage of the conventions that fans arrange. Appearances by individuals (cast, crew, producers, effects people) aside, wouldn't it logically be the perfect place to set up a stall selling every damn bit of official merchandise there is, at a slight discount? Heck, even if there's not room to sell everything (or if something runs out), at least have a catalogue and let people put in orders for same-week delivery.
Zero-day 'sploit in 0, 0, 0...
Make the robot react in a non-pained way. Wouldn't the soldiers feel better about a robot which went out into the minefield, got five out of six legs blown off, then pulled itself back to safety with the last one, muttering imprecations and flashing a light saying "PC LOAD LEGS"? Or how about one which sang mine-exploding ditties while it stomped up and down? Or one that detected explosions and responded with fightin'-type words?
Funny thing about working in IT - you learn to spot repeating patterns in data, and match them up to certain results. I got bored one week, and wondered if, amongst the chaotic mess that is the global investment industry, there were any really freakin' obvious patterns that fell out if you filtered the data a little bit. I'm not talking about subtle seventeeth-order pertubations, I'm talking about patterns which would mudwrestle Godzilla in the ruins of Tokyo for the title of "Most Unsubtle". Yep, there were. One year later, I'm still working in IT because I'm not stupid enough to throw a career away on a whim. But I've also made (after tax) an additional five times my annual net salary, for about two days' work. Retirement is most definitely on the cards, and it ain't gonna include punching a clock or chasing up a client ever again. Who'd've thought the best place to apply IT skills would be in a completely different industry?
Alternative option: Outthink the business people. Write up how much time, money, convenience and hassle you _saved_ each time the Windows machines faceplant and yours don't. Convert it all to dollar figures by using efficiencies of interrupted vs uninterrupted staff and their combined salary rates converted to dollars per minute. Include secondary items such as the time spent reporting, diagnosing and repairing the errors, the time and money spent on software and hardware upgrades, the time it took for everyone to get back on track and the long-term effects that the crash would have not only on the productivity of the directly affected users, but all the people who interacted with them and were inconvenienced as a result. Once that figure has been arrived at, put next to it the cost in sysadmin-hours and dollar equivalent of the time and effort it took for you and your team throughout the past days, months etc in order to tweak the systems to the point where they simply did not crash. Make the numbers fairly large. Then, next to the second sets of figures, include the phrase "Already paid as part of standard contract." Then update the figures each month or so, along with year-to-date totals, and email them to the boss and a level or so up the food chain. Make sure the CIO or equivalent gets a copy. That way, they have something on hand which they can point to which says WHAT you do, WHERE your salaries are going, and most importantly, WHY you're being paid and HOW MUCH you're returning to the company as a result. Better still, if you or anyone on your bit of the food chain gets called into a meeting to justify your existence, you can bring a copy of the most recent report instead of spending ten minutes trying to explain why firing all the sysadmins would be a Bad Move to people who use laptops as status symbols and cat warmers. Yes, I believe in being pre-emptive.
With 500+ users, even five different standard builds can be a pain in the ass. All it needs is for one software rollout to not work on one of the variations, and that's 100 phone calls. I've seen mostly-successful implementation of limited superuser rights for developers. Generally it's "Put it in writing that you want your workstation unlocked and we'll do it. But if *anything at all* breaks, our total liability is limited to reimaging the disk and/or repairing the hardware. If you screw with the hardware, we're not liable for *anything* until you reassemble the original pieces. And we'll be watching your network port like a hawk - first sign of trouble and you're in your own private cyberspace." Some developers backed down, some stepped up to the plate. Each to their own strengths. And for the most part, it worked, bar the occasional call for a nuke and pave. A couple of devs ran one vanilla machine on the production network and one godbox on the dev grid. Some dualbooted. Others came up with other variations. As long as nothing hosed the regular users, we didn't care _what_ freaky abominations they'd downloaded.
This is why I've always wanted (but never got around to putting together) a comprehensive db or reference of organisational policies. Not server logins, or patch levels, or exactly what flavor of cable the dinosaurs in the back room need, but management policies. To whit - 1) The actual policy, 2) Who created it and when, 3) Who has the authority to change it, and 4) Their email addresses and phone numbers. That way, any time someone's bugged about a policy I didn't come up with, I can say "The person who can change it is X, here's their email address, until they say anything then Y's policy is the one we're using." Hey, depending on the amount of personnel and time I have, I might even say "Write it up, email/fax it to me, and I'll see it gets to the right exec." Good customer relations and all that.
It'd be interesting to see a history of devices incorporated into prosthetics by hacker-minded home users. Personally, I'd like the hardware components of a cellphone, a universal remote, a small display screen, and maybe the ability for the arm to lengthen so I could reach behind furniture or pick stuff up off the floor without bending. And maybe a USB slot I could stick a flavor-of-the-month wireless NIC on. Software-wise, the best generalist app would be an ability to drop into a "virtual mode" where arm movements and feedback acted as the I/O to a series of configurable virtual haptic environments. The wearer would be able to 'feel' around a set of controls appropriate to the selected application or mode, and use them to control various aspects of the arm's hardware - setting the time on the internal clock, switching GPS tracking on or off, loading pre-set browser bookmarks onto the small screen (RSS mode?), typing a phone number or text message, running preloaded applications or shell scripts, you name it. One interesting app, when coupled with a microphone and voice recognition, might be to output various kinds of sign language. I don't know how good it would be without a camera and sign-reading software to interpret complex replies, though. Hmm, come to think of it, throw in a camera, laser pointer, LED torch... and a mechanical-recharge handle.
As per his last wishes, Jack's soul was encoded with DRM. Unfortunately, he failed to realise that there is no DRM in Heaven...
Oh no, Blue Policy of Death!
If a country is attacked the people are going to side with their government regardless of what it is like. Interesting theory. Personally, I'd be standing on the beaches with a big sign saying "This way to the politicians." Unless it was the Americans, of course. Then I'd just leave a sign saying "OIL ->" and go hide out of the way of friendly fire.
Well, there's a number of possibilities. 1) The retirement age is extended to 120. 2) Lots of over-70 people start up their own businesses hiring people over 70. Eventually, traditional businesses start hiring away some of the whitehairs, and the businesses mix. 3) Given the sheer number of new inventions and activities being invented every day, if you can't think of something interesting to see, do or try you're probably better off dead anyway. 4) As an interesting side effect, with more people in the world, investment return rates and inflation would probably rise as demand for scarce resources increases. "I remember when you could buy that for only HALF that price!" "That was last week, Grampa."
fish and amphibian eyes are much more complicated than ours. For example, the turtle likely sees in at least seven channels of vision, perceiving a world we could never hope to imagine Can we put THAT on a helmet? It'd be turtle-y brilliant!
The key metric here is "loss in quality". There are always going to be cheaper people - heck, go recruit the wino in the alley out back - but quality is a strange beast to measure. If you're cheapening your customer service, how are your customers going to react? If you're cheapening your in-house troubleshooting/repair systems, how much time, money and patience are your own people going to lose? If you're cheapening your systems knowledge and documentation, what will be lost when it needs to be decyphered in the future? And yes, I am using that verb deliberately. There are certain tasks which can be effectively outsourced. Unfortunately, there are a heck of a lot more which can't be without suffering extensive side-effects.
If we really want to helps soldiers brains, Don't send their bodies off to invade other countries for no damn reason at all?
I think the main problem is that it will only present and flag items which are already tagged by the simplest, reaction-level mental processes. There won't be any discrimination, because that's done at the higher levels. A soldier wearing this system will be just as likely to shoot tumbleweeds, shadows, cats, and friendlies breaking concealment as they will a designated enemy. If I had opponents using this system, I'd rig up a bunch of rags in human form to leap up and go "Booga booga booga!" when half the squad had passed it. Why use my own ammo when my enemy's is so plentiful?