This article hitting the big media outlets is sort of reminiscent of the old "In Search Of" episodes I enjoyed as a kid. Heavy on questions to mesmerize you into a sort of helpless state, but low on testable science. Drones are generally controlled via 900 MHz, 2.4 and 5.8 GHz, Even if it were down in the UHF/VHF bands, these are all highly trackable frequencies + modes. Unlike HF Skywave or skip propagation, which entails refracting off the ionosphere and going potentially very long distances (hundreds or thousands of miles), the transmitter location/s of these drones are easily trackable with off-the-shelf amateur radio equipment. I know that transmitter fox hunting isn't as sexy as fuzzy mysteries, but this is one of the reasons I dislike the big media outlets. If they're so stupid on the obvious here, how wrong are they on other topics?

The "experts" have focused on squeezing blood out of a turnip or cracking the whip over the decades, but they don't know human nature nor do they show much evidence of catering to well-being (which would have a positive effect on productivity). Everyone has his own particular psychology and ecosystem. My office is like a sensory deprivation chamber -- no natural light, no noise (except the occasional cell block-like clang down the hallway when someone shuts his door. The sheer lack of stimulation in a small cube-shaped space -- as with ~200 pound mammals in old-fashioned zoos -- causes its own pacing back and forth. Evidently human experiments showed that after a certain time people actually begin to hallucinate, given lack of (diverse) sensory input. The senses (plural) evolved for millions of years to hunt for food and avoid danger. Real-time information processing, environmental interaction. Not sitting in a cell, staring at a screen.

Interesting in our modern society is that we have a plethora of terms describing short attention spans, but not nearly as many for a overly-long or poorly directed attention spans. These scenarios, which I've seen occur more frequently over the years, are llikewise responsible for loss of productivity. People focusing obsessively on minutiae, rabbit holes, constantly refactoring, not sticking to an 80/20 or 90/10 rule, etc. The modern office has no evolutionary basis in primate history.

Anyway, this guy summed it up tongue-in-cheek as ADD: Ambition Deficit Disorder: http://www.examiner.com/articl.... It turns out that there are not sufficient rewards in most large organization for hard work.

Well, at least government could more easily clamp down on white-collar crime, lending fraud, dirty CIA/drug banks, find missing e-mails, recover billions of disappeared money over the various wars that have been fought, excessive corporate influence, foreign influence, etc. Hahaha -- just kidding.

There was an episode in the second or third season in which a big-game hunter lands on the island and decides he wants to hunt humans instead. So he discretely interviews each of the castaways to determine which would present the greatest challenge for him. When he interviews the Professor (Jungian archetype for intelligence) he concludes that he'd have the professor bagged & mounted before the professor could figure out his next move. The implication here is that there's an aspect of intelligence which suggests so-called intentionality, intelligence may be directed "toward" something, some problem, function, etc. Some problems are extremely complex and need some deliberation. Others are challenging in a different way, and need a snap/real-world decisions or cunning. Could be a language limitation also. We tend to confuse cleverness, wisdom, cunning, reptilian intelligence, memory, success, business or strategic/military knowledge, and learning ability all as "intelligence". I can't think of a single test which would gauge all of that.

One of the things that stinks about Slashdot is being labeled flamebait by people who have no idea who you are, what your credentials are, etc. I REALLY do have a triple-major under my belt, work in a Big-10 research library the past decade, took a grad course on the Philosophy of Mind, and hung out for a couple years on the AI-Philosophy Yahoo group (which included Marvin Minksy at the time). If I were judged by my peers, my comment here would not have been denigrated as the flamebait ramblings of someone who didn't have reasons for his statements.

And so I reiterate my commentary -- that the liberal arts, which typically includes philosophy, instructs primarily by deconstruction, not by construction. Its "job" or M.O. is not to build things or deliver objective/provable goods (e.g. inductive proof in math/csci). Anyone who thinks he can "prove" his theory definitively in philosophy would probably fail the course as an irrational polemic, whereas proof is the bread&butter of csci/math. So I mainly see philosophy as dragging CSci down into a pit of the uncomputable in which the solution isn't the point of the exercise at all.

What problems has philosophy "solved"? Is that the point of philosophy? I don't think so.

I have a BS in CSci, a BA in the liberal arts, and have taken a few philosophy courses.

I've become much more jaded about philosophy because it began to dawn on me after taking a grad course in philosophy that engineering/IT is about SOLVING general computational problems. We're looking for relationships between numbers, values, methods of computation, etc. which have a general purpose utility. In most cases, these pipes/algorithms are designed to be somewhat blind to the content going through them. It's a quest to solve general problems.

Philosophy, on the other hand, often "forgets" that its problems are often computational/logic, perhaps even totally unrelated to the subject being treated -- rather, there is a more general and underlying logical problem that gives rise to what appears to be a problem in ethics, a paradox in something or the other. Philosophers, in my experience, can get mired in a specific subject domain, when the problem is actually a general logic issue. I could provide many examples from the philosophy of mind, but I don't want to distract from this basic distinction between what computer science/algorithmics tends to be about -- and how philosophers tend to get mired in circular/uncomputable particulars. The last problem with philosophy is that, I think, it doesn't actually WANT to solve problems -- lest it put itself and its faculty out of business as a relic of a previous age.