...these companies keep trying to turn technology into pets...
That wouldn't bother me much, although it would be annoying. My real concern is that these companies keep trying to turn us into technology's pets.
but this makes it abundantly clear that we average cirtizens are well on our way to becoming serfs, with corporations as the feudal lords.
I'd offer Timothy my seat on the craft!!
Simply locate the antenna and unplug it so it can not transmit. Honestly, learn about stuff if you want to control it.
So what are the chances that they'll collect the data anyway, store it, and retrieve it during the next scheduled maintenance? 'Live data' is a pretty small subset of 'useful data'.
I'm willing to "go nuclear" on any corporation. My give-a-shit is broken. I will reduce them all to bankrupt rubble long before I will have a moment of pity for them...
If you really have the wherewithal to reduce corporations to 'bankrupt rubble', for Christ's sake what are you waiting for? Tell the rest of us how to do it, then get your ass in gear and start destroying! After you're done with Apple/Google/BigAuto, you might have a look at Monsanto. Then after that, there are many others whose smoking ruins I'd love to toast marshmallows over.
(5) Not everybody is more productive when working from home as there may be more distractions at home than at work. Walking the dog, doing the washing up, etc. Troubleshooting certain problems is (far) easier locally than remotely.
Too true. We can work from home occasionally, but my wife hasn't got the idea that working from home is working. It's very nice to be offered cups of tea occasionally, but being asked if you want anything every five minutes - oh and can I come to get something heavy out of the cupboard, empty the bin, see how cute our dog looks as he's gone to sleep leaning in a corner and so on
When I was working from home a lot, I was in the fortunate position of not having daily deadlines to meet. As a result, I was *more* productive at home. The scheduling freedom meant that I could take care of occasional personal stuff during the day that just couldn't get done on evenings or weekends. But because I tended to be kind of 'uptight Protestant' about my work ethic, (and because I really liked what I was doing), I more than made up for that by working early mornings and late evenings. Being at home also meant that I could take the breaks necessary to understand a problem and/or come up with solutions, without being stressed out about the watchful eyes of co-workers and management seeing me 'slack off'.
IMHO, some weekly presence in the office is required; if not for meetings, group discussions where telepresence isn't enough, etc, then for the social aspect of team building and maintenance. But in a lot of jobs, for a lot of people, two or three days a week working from home can be a win for both employer and employee.
FTA: “Now, the system can recognise patterns that are either condescending or caring sentiments and can even send a text message to the user if the system thinks the post may be arrogant”
On the one hand, maybe it's a good idea to notify users that their comments will likely be interpreted by most readers as having 'X' emotional tone. On the other hand, it may result in people habitually self-censoring to the extent that they show no warning signs before they explode, (literally or figuratively), in some destructive action or activity.
I'm also thinking that this kind of ongoing **parentalistic monitoring is the wet dream of corporate overlords and wannabe dictators the world over.
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**A word I coined, not a spelling mistake...
...now one seldom goes to the second page.
Speak for yourself. I have Google set to deliver not 10, but 100 results per page; yet I regularly get 5, 6, or more pages into the results looking for what I want - especially with all the irrelevant crap that Google insists on throwing up in the vain hope that it will be 'helpful'.
...If you entered "Paris Hilton" you got a tree with separate branches for French hotels and for sluts.
Thank you so much for that! Made my night - I'm still laughing!
How is it useful to give me thousands of results that are completely irrelevant to what I am searching for? Only give me results that contain EXACTLY the words I typed. And I shouldn't have to use quotations marks or other silly nonsense.
Amen brother!!
It would be interesting to see how much their energy usage would go down if they defaulted to basic pattern matches and only applied their 'crystal ball and tea leaves' algorithms on demand. I bet they'd chew through a lot fewer CPU cycles. But then, since Google threw 'don't be evil' under the bus they haven't exactly been all about choice and customization.
but you had to be something of a lexicographer (i.e. you effectively "think like a search engine" and do your own categorizations, rather than relying on the search engine) to get better results out of it than the average person, who is a relatively poor classifier, gets out of Google doing their classifying for them.
I don't mind that Google panders to the lowest common denominator; I just really REALLY wish they'd introduce an 'advanced' mode for people who know how to do more sophisticated searches. Especially, I want them to stop trying to give me more 'information' at any cost when I'm trying to reduce the number of hits to just the relevant ones, especially where having zero legitimate hits is a really important piece of information. And they really need to just totally fuck off with the full-of-fail, utterly inane, ESL versions of 'synonyms' that they keep contaminating their search results with. I get really tired of using allintext and double quotes, and I've noticed that the effectiveness of both of these is starting to decrease anyway.
Yeah, I might get better results if I signed in, but I'd rather walk around with stones in my shoes than do that. And I suspect I'd have to enable JS to make that work anyway; for me Google is even worse with JS enabled.
Anyone can make an omelet with eggs. The trick is to make one with none.
