If you can do that, then you could do the same thing with a mobile passport, in a future where everyone knows how to consume them. Assuming a proper implementation of a mobile passport, it would contain all the same data as your paper passport and would be digitally-signed by the issuer to prove authenticity and origin. Both paper and mobile passports should perfectly usable offline... though both could be checked online. I suppose the odds of a mobile passport being checked online might be higher, and a paper passport might be more durable if you need it to last a long time, though expiration would be a problem in both cases.

In reality, if you found yourself in this sort of situation your best best would be to sneak into Canada or Mexico and ask for asylum. If things were to get as bad as rsilvergun assumes, it would be granted.

The mobile driving license standard does not require you to hand your phone over, and indeed it wouldn't help the cop if you did because he'd have to hand it right back so you could unlock before it would send any data. It delivers the data to the copy wirelessly, via NFC, BLE or Wifi, depending on the context. What's on the screen (either a QR code or nothing) does not identify you or prove your driving privileges, so it's useless to the cop, intentionally so.

I was involved in the development and standardization of the mobile driving license standard and in the process spent some time talking to cops from a few jurisdictions. Interestingly to me, the response from the cops was universal: They would strongly object to anything that would require them to touch your phone. Of course, I was talking to the higher-ups and their concern was the liability that would be incurred if a lot of their officers broke peoples' thousand-dollar phones. Individual cops might have different perspectives, but their commanders thought it was way too risky.

As for passports, IMO any useful mobile passport should work the same: No handing over of the device, indeed the protocol should ensure that the device must be in the user's hand to present the passport.

Someday we'll probably get an international standard for mobile passports, but it's not happening any time soon.

Until recently I worked for Google, on Android, and participated in the International Standards Organization (ISO) committee that would be tasked with defining the technical standard for mobile passports. To be clear, the ISO committee can't actually issue such a standard, passports are standardized through ICAO. But the relevant ICAO committee delegates the technical work to an ISO committee.

The current situation in those committees is that the companies who make passport booklets and passport acceptance infrastructure are successfully fending off attempts to define a standard to enable mobile passports. They have gotten a new standard (called the "Digital Travel Credential - Physical Component", DTC-PC) approved that allegedly facilitates mobile devices with passports but isn't actually usable. Apple has refused to implement it and Google isn't making any moves to support it (though someone could write an Android app that does; all of the necessary APIs are available).

One of the main sticking points is that the ICAO committee is currently specifying that any digital travel credential should not support data minimization, meaning the ability to present just a subset of the data. More precisely, they specify that data minimization is a non-goal, but since a protocol that supports retrieving and authenticating a subset of the data without leaking any of the un-presented data is always going to be a lot more complex than a protocol that sends the entire data set in a single signed blob, any technical proposal that supports data minimization will be shot down as needlessly complex.

The ICAO's position on data minimization is that the only use of travel credentials is presentation at border checkpoints, and at border checkpoints you always have to present all of the data, so data minimization support is unnecessary. The counterargument from many people is that passports are used in many contexts other than border checkpoints, and many of those other contexts don't need and therefore shouldn't get all of the data in the passport. Since both Google and Apple insist on data minimization as an essential feature, there's not much movement happening.

My guess is that it will take 2-3 years to break the current logjam on even beginning work on a real, usable standard, then another few years to define it and put it into effect, then a few years more for most border checkpoints to accept it, and perhaps a few years beyond that for people to become sufficiently confident in their mobile devices' reliability that they will travel without a paper passport booklet. So... 20 years or so.

The work with the TSA is on derived credentials that are based on your passport (and securely authenticated), using a protocol derived from the ISO 18013-5 mobile driving license standard. It does support data minimization and looks a lot like what an eventual passport protocol should look like (IMNSHO -- note that I designed big chunks of the 18013-5 standard), but will not be accepted at any border checkpoints.

A paper passport doesn't increase your odds of getting out. All passports are verified electronically by the airlines and TSA. If there's a flag on your passport it doesn't matter whether it's in your phone wallet or in your hand.

It also ignores that moving pictures are not the same as still pictures. When images are moving, you don't see each frame as clearly, so you can get away with lower resolution, and with a moving image, you can actually perceive far more resolution than the actual pixel resolution of each individual image, because things in the real world don't line up perfectly with grid lines on consecutive frames.

So with moving images, you would expect to perceive higher resolution above a certain point as a reduction in eyestrain and other physiological effects, rather than directly as conscious perception.

Sort of. System updates originate from Google but flow through the OEM, which is contractually obligated to validate them and then push them out. Apps and some system services (Play services, a collection of security-related system components, etc.) are updated directly by Google.

The expectation for Android Automotive is that systems will have a 15-20 year support lifespan. I think there are even contractual obligations mandating the lower end of that range. So I don't think you keep your vehicles long enough for it to be an issue.

Unless you derive great satisfaction from housework, why would you not want a robot to do it for you so you can spend your time on things you enjoy?

I think the honest answer to this is "find another career". I'm not sure software engineering is a good choice today. But, really, I'm not sure what is.

But FictionPimp and others refusing to take advantage of the tools that have become available won't stop the transition. Junior engineers are going to have to find something else, they can't rely on their older colleagues to protect their jobs.

I'm less likely to believe a lawyer working for Exxon than a homeless person on the street with a sign saying "The End Is Nigh!" At least the homeless person doesn't know that the things he is saying have no basis in reality.

Lawyers have a responsibility to represent their clients' interests no matter how bats**t they are. Their opinion is nothing more than the opinion of their corporate bill payers. And their bill payers are one of the more sociopathic corporations out there.

Exxon is a company that actively denies climate change even though their internal documents show that their scientists have been aware of the problem for decades. It's basically the cigarette industry all over again. There are literally no companies in the world that I trust less than oil companies when it comes to climate change.

No, they aren't. They are required to provide the numbers that the government demands. They're free to precede it with a wall of text that explains why they don't feel that blaming them for people choosing to burn their gasoline, rather than, for example, using it as a beverage, produces CO2 emissions all they want to. That's their choice. What they don't have the right to do is not provide the data.

Maybe you did, but I thought the poster's name was Thomas Jefferson. :-D

The fewer hours you work, the more productive you are during the hours you spend. There's a tipping point where it doesn't break even, though, and there's a point where you have so few hours that bulls**t like catching up on all the emails that people send about things you don't really need to know starts to dominate the time spent and productivity falls off a cliff again.

There are three factors that define productivity:

• Toil (T) - The time spent doing random s**t that nobody wants to do, but you have to do, but that probably doesn't contribute much to productivity. This is a constant reduction in productivity at the bottom of the graph.
• Energy level (e) - A curve that declines over time for each day and does not fully recover in subsequent days without days off.
• Error rate (E) - A curve that is inversely proportional to energy level, and becomes exponential at high levels of fatigue.

Raw output in a given time period is proportional to energy level. Useful output is raw output minus the error rate, because erroneous output has to be redone and cancels out its benefit. And the time spent is then reduced by the time spent on toil.

So the equation looks something like f(t) = (t - T) * (e - E). That's why small reductions in bulls**t make a big difference, and the sweet spot for time spent ends up being hard bounded by when the error rate exceeds the useful output, at which point productivity goes negative.

Hope that helps.

Same. But the difference between us is that I recognize that what made it worth spending that time was that it was something I chose to do because I wanted to do it, not because my boss told me to do it.

More to the point, every minute spent doing the things my bosses have ever told me to do was a minute I couldn't spend on those other things that are awesome and that I would gladly work crazy hours for.

So what happens when people's jobs try to take so many hours from them is that a tiny percentage of people for whom that's truly exactly what they want to do might love it, but the rest of the employees burn out and run away screaming, and you end up with not enough workers to get the product done.

And they burn out precisely because those bosses are putting their needs — getting what *they* think is an amazing and awesome project — over the workers' needs — having time to do all the stuff on the side that *the workers* think is amazing and awesome.

Not at all. Rapid progress requires adequate labor. It is less efficient with more people spending fewer hours, but still more efficient than if you burn out all of those people and you end up with only a few people spending a lot of hours and everybody else leaving the project and taking their institutional knowledge with them.

See that's the thing, I *do* work with fellow rock stars. Every single person I work with is a rock star at something. Some of them are also rock stars in their jobs.

I don't want anyone to ever lead me who doesn't acknowledge that their priorities aren't my priorities. Not if it's for more than a few weeks.

I'm not a 9-to-5'er. I just spend 56 hours a week sleeping, 40+ hours a week at work writing software, sixteen hours a week working on random projects, ten hours a week exercising, eight hours a week rehearsing in music ensembles, eight hours a week eating, five hours a week driving, 1 hour a week in church, a couple of hours of time waiting in between those things, various numbers of hours trying to find a girlfriend to spend the rest of my life with, and most of the rest of my time recovering from all of the above. Oh, and laundry once a month or so, performances once a month, lots of hours (bursty) doing planning for the ensemble that I actually run...

Sometimes it feels like I never stop working. But I have much broader interests than the one little thing that I do as my job to pay the bills. And I really feel sorry for people who don't. Because those folks aren't the ones who create the things that are amazing. They're the cogs, not the ones turning the gears.

No, not even then. Options in a startup that has a 2% chance of making it to IPO are worthless, as is your equity stake. Working yourself to death for a lottery ticket is stupidity.

Startup or not, hire enough people to do the job. If you're pushing people to work crazy hours, you're a moron, and your company is all but guaranteed to be in that 98%.