germans love to be abused obviously.

So instead of the current mess in nuclear free Ukraine we would have the same mess only with nuclear armed Ukraine. That is indeed appealing idea.

I do not thin that legit ads are a problem but neither you nor I can distinguish legit ads from malicious ones which devise needs where there is none and doing some other stuff nobody wants except their authors or police department that now can detect that you rolled a conical object and now a sweet smelling cloud is being dispersed by air condition - augment this with automatic sentencing or even better preemptive sentencing as after all system will know you wanted to commit a terrible crime even before you do. I think there is huge potential there!

first works, the other other does not.

It is really a pleasure to watch a civic society at its best, exchanging reasonable and well thought trough arguments, going beyond the easy to spell out but not really working 'silver bullet' solutions, taking into account side effects of proposed solutions and weighing their benefits and costs independently of who was the author and doing this all with respect to other members of society. One can be surprised that such law point for any civic society (as NSA and secret courts etc really were) allows to show this great nation from its best side. Good summary and good fruitful discussion that follows are a sign that the republic and democracy are in good shape.

if you are good enough.

This said I think every prospective engineer should consider carefully the reasons to become one. It is advised to do something on top too - like applied business practice or Business Economics as they call it. Seems to be a common practice in Germany these days and I find the idea appealing. Then again I am not sure whether any engineering title will guarantee you a job in the future. I saw today the stats for education in Germany and the number of people finishing off the courses at universities has increased over the years. What has not increased is number of people going secondary paths of education and ending up in industry 'lower' positions. Gosh when I look around in my settlement - there are only few houses where owners are engineers. There is one where there is a civil servant and another one university teacher and 4 households with engineers including mine. The rest of the settlement is owned by technicians doing intelligent work for others sometimes even supervising the floor in small industrial companies. Quite frankly I find them more worthy than those engineers with a title that I have to work with but that is another story.

So if one takes property ownership as a proxy for well done career choices then being an engineer does not mean much. But hell it makes fun if you can assemble things and see them work. There is certain great positivist joy in doing that! The question is: do you need to become an engineer to do these things today? I wonder if that is really true.

Original question was about digital and analogue being put as opposites - tell me then whether doing this stuff is analogue or digital? Surely lots of silicon is being used and a little processed into an actual product. As surely as a lots of digital processing used to control completly automated factory producing those things.

The statistics I meantioned briefly before makes me also think about history. There were times where engineer was a sign of high intelligence and skill. The I got a degree..... And then all these people I work got degrees too..... Now it seems to me the value the engineers before had in society is now attributed to scientists but not even them are at the level an engineer like this was before. This guy had an impact on societies he lived in. Do YOU think that your input is anywhere around this level? Why do we talk about glory then?

I may have missed the whooooosh sound accompanying your sarcasm or you missed this report. Which one is it?

you are mistaken. You can (or at least you could) lock customer's phone in many different ways. They went away from that exactly because people want to use local sim card when they are abroad etc and because this does not provide much of an advantage besides pissing people off - if you get a sponsored mobile you are these days using flat rate tariff i.e. you pay per month etc. and calls are 'free'. As you get sponsored mobile usually if you have a contract there is no added benefit for having phone locked - money is flowing exact the same independently of the SIM card that is inside the phone.This is valid for calls and most of SMS contracts. The capped flat rates are different of course as you pay per volume if you exceed some limits but most of business models in telecom need no locking no more.

ever since operators moved away from manual call switching to SW control call setup there were no reason to charge people per call/duration/volume of traffic other than providing reasons for the customers not to overload network with pr0n. Other than that the costs of network are fixed after the network is built and roaming is configured. This is one thing. The other is that the every phone I had so far (and I had a few) had an option to give user control over the network they wanted to use. Some even had lists of operators that were preferred etc. so where is the problem?

maybe the family and friends do not know they are in hands of UK authorities - maybe they even came to those authorities in search of help to find their kin? That this is causing speculation is bad already. Latest when they are sent to prison or set free they will be able to communicate unless of course they will be executed after the sentencing: 'this court finds the defendants innocent and orders their release and for the reasons of national security orders an immediate hanging by their neck until they die'. The odd thing is, it can even be that authorities act in interest of the public as majority of servants of the state probably at least intend to do. We will not know that of course.

Of course that it is so. The question is not whether they want to abuse our rectums but what can we do about that? Considering how difficult it is to get wide enough lasting enough protests it is much more effective to hire some lobbyists - the bad thing is - we already pay those people with our tax money so we would end up paying twice and still being uncertain of the result. What a nice world we live in.

but they are trying.

Even a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

Nobody with a healthy brain can claim that currently used techniques can recognize our thoughts. They can recognize some of our feelings or rather general state of mind and we also have techniques that after some training allow some people that lost their limbs to control the devices that replaced them. These are not very accurate but getting better if one is to believe the media. We started this journey and if that is possible (why should it not be) then we will get there some day. The question is - will this be a shinny day for all of humanity or only for the chosen ones.

Quite frankly I am all for a VR simulation of lesbian act between Sandra Bullock and Jennifer Lopez changing roles on each try of course, but I know better to what this is going to be used first, once we reach any meaningful thought recognition (which is very far away yet). You see I am old enough to know a 'perfect' solution with all whistles and shinny buttons and displays even so appealing as it may be, is useless if some of its aspects are like massive red flags waving in front of me. Especially whenI think about thought police that is already very well established. If this thing is going to be reasonably effective it will be also very dangerous for what is left of our freedoms too. I am not convinced that all the shiny benefits are bigger than costs and losses endured on the way.

My thoughts too. I think it has quite good uses too - people with missing extremities can get a replacement that is controlled well by such devices. I think that Mr Hawking would appreciate development in this area very much. Judging on how many problems male-female interactions are causing I think that a bit more sophisticated device helping to distinguish between 'ooohhh no no no' meaning 'please continue' or 'f.off or I call the police'. This said I must admit that knowing that somebody can evaluate your feelings if not thoughts may be spooky and may also be not for your benefit - I am thinking here about greedy corporations, criminals - normal and those in government, spying agencies, insurance companies (which are already not insurance companies but another tax authority with some limited utility attached to it) etc.

Maybe it is good that thought reading will not be very easy - Thinking processes are probably to dispersed and variable for the machines so that they would have to train even more and individually per brain. Development in this area gives us a little time to investigate the possible consequences for our society and what we think is beneficial. I am rather pessimistic on what will happen however. The hysteric 'think abut the children' crowd combined with 'cut his arm and perforate his anus - tough on crime' crowd together with general brainlessness of common folk will lead us there without preparation but with full speed - as the members of the dominating species do.