Markee, your fears are justified. I once worked at a company that used flextime combined with competitive performance reviews; e.g. your performance was determined relative to your peers, so everybody knew they were in direct competition. In addition, they always set extremely ambitious deadlines. The end result was that work hours automatically shot up to the maximum level the human body could withstand -- without management ever having to say, "you must work x hours per week" or anything like that. People came in early, stayed late, worked every weekend, slept in the office, ate breakfast, lunch, and dinner at work, and pulled all-nighters. People were unhappy but the system absolutely worked. The employees were unbelievably motivated (at least until they burn out and get fired) and the company was extremely successful.
I had dreams like that when I worked at Microsoft.
One day I dreamt that there was a function call in Win32 called "ParentsBeliefs".
nResuult = ParentsBeliefs(HWND hWnd, BELIEF_INFO **ppBeliefs, LONG *nBeliefs)
Parameters:
hWnd -- [in] handle to the window whose parent's beliefs you want to know
ppBeliefs -- [out] pointer to an array of pointers to beliefs.
nBeliefs -- [out] the number of beliefs returned.
return value -- indictaes SUCCESS (==0) if the function worked or the error code if the function did not succeed.
Remarks: Call ParentsBeliefs when you want to find out the beliefs of a window's parents. The function returns an array of beliefs.
Then I dreamed that, for NT5.0, there would be a new "ParentsOpinions" API so that ISV's would have access to more information about windows' parents. The significance, of course, is the effect that parents's beliefs and opinions have on the growth and development of a window, so it is important to be able to query and find out what they are.
This dream is somehow playing on the idea that a (human) child is strongly influenced by the beliefs of the parents, and fully understanding the kid involves understanding the parent. Perhaps the same is true of windows, even though they have only one parent.
A month later, I dreamt that there was a directory in the NT source tree that was created by Jesus. Only it wasn't made just now, it was created in the beginning, when the whole universe was created. Like Jesus knew there would be an NT and created this subdirectory. Only somebody had discovered the "Jesus" subdirectory and renamed it "Belshazzar". And Jesus wrote the original interface definition (IDL) file, describing the interface between men and women. And the actual implementation, that is, male and female genitalia, are generated by the Microsoft IDL compiler (MIDL), of course.
What's bizarre about this dream is that I had no conscious recollection who Belshazzar was. I had to ask around, and eventually a friend of mine got the answer from the "Christians At Microsoft" mailing list.
Belshazzar (flourished 550-539 BC), in the Old Testament, Babylonian prince mentioned in Daniel 5 as the last Chaldean king of Babylon. He was slain when Babylon was captured by the Medes and the Persians. Although no ancient historian mentions his name as one of the successors of the second Chaldean king, Nebuchadnezzar II, the Babylonian cuneiform inscriptions gave the name Belsaruzar as that of the son of Nabonidus, the last king of Babylon. A later inscription suggested that Belshazzar was associated with his father on the throne. See Daniel 5.
It's always interesting to see people's predictions. Shortly before new years, I made my own. One of my predictions was that computer intelligence would exceed human intelligence. What really made me think of this was Bruce's discussion of how super-analyzed the stock market would be. Right now computers only present data (faster and better) to humans to be interpreted, and do some limited trading based on simple rules... what will happen when they are smarter than humans at buying securities? When any joe can buy the latest Stock Market Analyzer 5000 from GetRichUsingAMachineThatIsSmarterThanYouAre.com, and get 1200% annual return on your investment without having to spend one minute doing market research? (At least until everyone buys one).
Other predictions I made:
The Age Of Nanotech -- an explosion in nanotech development.
Engineered Humans -- engineering human DNA will create humans with magical abilities.
Population Crunch -- you may disagree with me on this one. I don't fall into the "technology will save us" crowd on population growth. (But it's an interesting topic for debate).
I agree with people who say that Bruce's future sounds a bit much like today. When you look at machine intelligence, nanotech, bio engineering, and population effects together, there can be no question that the future will be very different from the past or the present.
Ok let me get my shameless plug out of the way: I'm trying to get the word out on some secure chat software I wrote. See http://www.spod-ware.com/.
Astute/. readers have read all this already. Although Katz focuses mainly on the marketing/ commercial aspects, Bruce Schneier, the cryptography expert already cover this in his answers to Ask/.:
One hundred years ago, everyone could have personal privacy. You and a friend could walk into an empty field, look around to see that no one else was nearby, and have a level of privacy that has forever been lost to today's technology. The framers of the Constitution never explicitly put a right to privacy into the document; it never occurred to them that it could be withheld. The ability to have a private conversation, like the ability to keep your thoughts in your head and the ability to fall to the ground when pushed, was a natural consequence of the world. When the Supreme Court found a right to privacy in the Constitution, it's because the language of the Constitution assumed its existence.
Technology has demolished that worldview. Powerful directional microphones can pick up conversations hundreds of yards away. Pinhole cameras -- now being sold over the Internet -- can hide in the smallest cracks; satellite cameras can read the time on your watch from orbit. And the Defense Department is prototyping micro-air vehicles, the size of small birds or butterflies, that can scout out enemy snipers, locate hostages in occupied buildings, or spy on just about anybody.
In the aftermath of the terrorist takeover of the Japanese embassy in Peru, news reports described audio bugs being hidden in shirt buttons that allowed police to pinpoint everyone's location. Van Eck devices can read what's on your computer monitor from halfway down the street. (I heard that the CIA demonstrated this for Scott McNealy at Sun; they captured his password from a van in the company's parking lot.) Lasers bounced off windows can reveal the Doppler effect of compression and rarefaction of air by soundwaves, and eavesdrop on conversations happening on the other side. If an attacker can plug into your power line, it can read it from even further away. Purchase anything lately? Unless you use cash, what, where, and when is recorded in a database. And in many stores, a security camera has recorded your presence while the helpful sales clerk captures your name and personal information.
The ability to trail someone remotely has existed for a while, but it is only used in exceptional circumstances. In 1993, Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar was found partly by tracking him through his cellular phone usage. Timothy McVeigh's truck was found because the FBI collected the tapes from every surveillance camera in the city, correlated them by time (presumably the explosion acted as a great synch pulse), and looked for it. During Desert Storm the U.S. dropped thousands of miniature robots -- millimeters in diameter -- on Iraq that looked for signs of biological warfare.
The technology to automatically search for drug negotiations in random telephone conversations, for suspicious behavior in satellite images, or for faces on a "wanted list" of criminals in on-street cameras isn't here yet, but it's just a matter of time. Face-recognition software can pick individual faces out of a crowd. Voice recognition will soon be able to scan millions of telephone calls, listening for a particular person; it can already scan for suspicious words or phrases. Moore's Law, which says the industry can double the computing power of a microchip every 18 months, affects surveillance computing just as it does everything else: the next generation will be smaller, faster, and a lot cheaper. As soon as the recognition technologies can find the people, the computers will be able to do the searching automatically.
At the same time, the fear of crime is facilitating a great deal of surveillance, not all of it instigated by the police. Some U.S. airports automatically record the license plates of anyone coming onto airport property, even if it is just to pick up someone. Some cities are installing directional microphones to pinpoint gunfire; others are setting video cameras on lampposts to deter crime. It's getting difficult to walk into a store without being videotaped. Timothy McVeigh couldn't drive a truck through downtown Oklahoma City without it showing up on an in-store surveillance camera, and these cameras were positioned to protect the store, not to track goings-on outside the windows.
The U.S. is initiating a program called "computer-assisted passenger screening," or CAPS. The idea is to match commercial air travelers against profiles of evildoers, using such items as the traveler's address, credit card number, destination, whether or not he is traveling alone, whether the ticket was paid in cash, when the ticket was purchased, whether it was one-way or round trip, and about three dozen other factors that are being kept secret. Needless to say, groups like the ACLU have objected to stopping and searching people based on stereotypes. Not to mention that the data is saved, just in case the government needs to peek into people's pasts. No warrant required, of course.
More is coming. Out of concern for public safety, the FCC has ruled that by 2001, cellular and PCS companies must be able to locate users who dial 911 to within a radius of 125 meters. Consumers will foot this bill through a user tax, and you can be sure that wireless operators will introduce a plethora of other services based on this technology. The companies are probably going to use the cellular technology to locate people, although if they can wait a couple of technological generations they can drop miniature GPS receivers in the phones and do even better. One way or another, people will end up carrying technology that allows them to be digitally tailed. And currently, no warrant is required.
The surveillance infrastructure is being installed in our country under the guise of "customer service." Some hotels track guest preferences in international databases, so that customers will feel at home even if it is their first stay in a particular city. Caterpillar Corporation is installing diagnostic chips into all new farm machinery. These chips alert the local dealer, via satellite, when a part is failing. The dealer can then drive to the farm with a replacement, often before the machine has even broken down. This is great; I'll bet farmers really like the prompt service and the reduction in downtime. But the same technology can be used for other, less benign, purposes.
Automobile surveillance is almost automatic. Rental cars, equipped with GPS navigational systems, can keep a complete record of exactly where that car has been. Mercedes Benz is planning on embedding a Web server into its cars, so that technicians can spot service problems remotely. At least two companies plan on marketing a smart car locator that uses a GPS receiver and a cellular phone to alert the authorities to your whereabouts in case of an emergency. It only takes a slight modification to allow the locator to work automatically when queried by the police. Lojack, the device that can track your car if it has been stolen, can also be used for surveillance. Will net-connected smart cars give police the ability to track everybody in the country simultaneously? Already systems like Lojack do this, as do car phones.
GPS is a dream technology for surveillance. One company is selling an automatic warehouse inventory system, using GPS and affixable transmitters on objects. The transmitters broadcast their location, and a central computer keeps track of where everything is. Spies have probably been able to use this kind of stuff for years, but it's now becoming a consumer item.
Individual privacy is being eroded from a variety of directions. Most of the time the erosions are small, and no one kicks up a fuss. But there is less and less privacy available, and most people are completely oblivious of it. It is very likely that we will soon be living in a world where there is no expectation of privacy, anywhere or at any time.
Computer conversations can be funny. And stupid. Check out this one, called "Conversations with Fred" http://www.sudval.org/users/spamfire/essays/fred/f red.htm
Slashdot Mirror
Markee, your fears are justified. I once worked at a company that used flextime combined with competitive performance reviews; e.g. your performance was determined relative to your peers, so everybody knew they were in direct competition. In addition, they always set extremely ambitious deadlines. The end result was that work hours automatically shot up to the maximum level the human body could withstand -- without management ever having to say, "you must work x hours per week" or anything like that. People came in early, stayed late, worked every weekend, slept in the office, ate breakfast, lunch, and dinner at work, and pulled all-nighters. People were unhappy but the system absolutely worked. The employees were unbelievably motivated (at least until they burn out and get fired) and the company was extremely successful.
One day I dreamt that there was a function call in Win32 called "ParentsBeliefs".
nResuult = ParentsBeliefs(HWND hWnd, BELIEF_INFO **ppBeliefs, LONG *nBeliefs)
Parameters:
hWnd -- [in] handle to the window whose parent's beliefs you want to know
ppBeliefs -- [out] pointer to an array of pointers to beliefs.
nBeliefs -- [out] the number of beliefs returned.
return value -- indictaes SUCCESS (==0) if the function worked or the error code if the function did not succeed.
Remarks: Call ParentsBeliefs when you want to find out the beliefs of a window's parents. The function returns an array of beliefs.
Then I dreamed that, for NT5.0, there would be a new "ParentsOpinions" API so that ISV's would have access to more information about windows' parents. The significance, of course, is the effect that parents's beliefs and opinions have on the growth and development of a window, so it is important to be able to query and find out what they are.
This dream is somehow playing on the idea that a (human) child is strongly influenced by the beliefs of the parents, and fully understanding the kid involves understanding the parent. Perhaps the same is true of windows, even though they have only one parent.
A month later, I dreamt that there was a directory in the NT source tree that was created by Jesus. Only it wasn't made just now, it was created in the beginning, when the whole universe was created. Like Jesus knew there would be an NT and created this subdirectory. Only somebody had discovered the "Jesus" subdirectory and renamed it "Belshazzar". And Jesus wrote the original interface definition (IDL) file, describing the interface between men and women. And the actual implementation, that is, male and female genitalia, are generated by the Microsoft IDL compiler (MIDL), of course.
What's bizarre about this dream is that I had no conscious recollection who Belshazzar was. I had to ask around, and eventually a friend of mine got the answer from the "Christians At Microsoft" mailing list. Belshazzar (flourished 550-539 BC), in the Old Testament, Babylonian prince mentioned in Daniel 5 as the last Chaldean king of Babylon. He was slain when Babylon was captured by the Medes and the Persians. Although no ancient historian mentions his name as one of the successors of the second Chaldean king, Nebuchadnezzar II, the Babylonian cuneiform inscriptions gave the name Belsaruzar as that of the son of Nabonidus, the last king of Babylon. A later inscription suggested that Belshazzar was associated with his father on the throne. See Daniel 5.
Other predictions I made:
- The Age Of Nanotech -- an explosion in nanotech development.
- Engineered Humans -- engineering human DNA will create humans with magical abilities.
- Population Crunch -- you may disagree with me on this one. I don't fall into the "technology will save us" crowd on population growth. (But it's an interesting topic for debate).
I explain all my predictions on my website at http://www.waynerad.com/future.I agree with people who say that Bruce's future sounds a bit much like today. When you look at machine intelligence, nanotech, bio engineering, and population effects together, there can be no question that the future will be very different from the past or the present.
Wayne
Astute /. readers have read all this already. Although Katz focuses mainly on the marketing/ commercial aspects, Bruce Schneier, the cryptography expert already cover this in his answers to Ask /.:
wayneradYes! Read "There's Plenty of Room At The Bottom", a speech by Feynman in 1959.
Computer conversations can be funny. And stupid. Check out this one, called "Conversations with Fred" http://www.sudval.org/users/spamfire/essays/fred/f red.htm