@M_Smart007 wrote:@Anonymous, I always did like a good game of Chess,
I beat the principal of my school in a Chess tournament when I was in the 3rd grade. (He was no beginner)
My Mother enrolled Me in a weekly adult Chess tournament. I played people that killed me so to speak.
I think that is what made Me so good at the Game.
Sorry for the OT.
I always found this fascinating: http://boylston-chess-club.blogspot.com/2016/04/but-its-over-at-au-bon-pain-boys-of.html
For years many great, and sometimes very famous, chess players would sit and play for hours on the large patio of a coffee shop just across the street from Harvard. The link has pictures of some and what it looked like. Note the chess tables with chairs made of concrete.
I never learned the game but found it fascinating to watch and try and figure it out without any introduction.
The line in the signature came from an 80s movie, Wargames, about a kid that almost starts WW3 by reactivating a dormant program running on a military computer. This is the computer's response at the end of the movie, after it stopped running a global thermonuclear war simulation:
Dang that's invasive, and potentially privacy invading (taking a webcam picture every 10 minutes?!). I don't appreciate being micromanaged, give me a deadline and I will have it done. With software like that I would just print all my work and go back to doing everything on paper, I can't work with people constantly looking over my shoulder. There's plenty of other ways to measure productivity, like actually looking at the work accomplished. If you don't trust me to do the work they can hire someone else.
How on earth did they figure that was a good idea 
@amck12 wrote:How on earth did they figure that was a good idea
It's all part of this 'collect everything we can' big data culture. The number of permutations in the data used to be large enough that only people with mainframes could do it. These days anyone can buy enough cloud compute infrastructure to try their hand at it.
Everyone thinks they'll find some holy grail by collecting as much personal information as possible. A large part of it comes from smartphone apps, where companies large and small beg us to install them for some sort of convenience that gives them access to data they can resell to some analytics market.
Just look at who else thinks this is A Good Thing™:
"But Weir claims to also be in in late-stage talks with Delta Airlines and CVS Health, a US health-care and pharmacy chain ranked #5 on the Fortune 500 list. Neither company would comment on if or when they were preparing to deploy the system."
I am not 100% coherent right now but every company has the capability for surveillience of one form or another whether they are quite aware of that or not is a different issue. Yesterday I sadly did my disservice to humanity in napkin sketching the solution for someone who didn't quite get it.
Job #2 VP calls a meeting and asks how we can not only track who is in an office but where they are because we are trying to reopen our offices while maintaining social distancing... he's aware that there are some capabilities around using WAPs to track people by BLE, but didn't fully realize that the ones we are installing already have that feature or the implications of such.
"Oh huh, well it's going to be a challenge to get at the data."
Not really, their website has libraries for Python, node, and three other languages here, pretty sure we can leverage one easily enough.
"Hmm, we will have to analyze the data though."
Yo jefe, did you forget that's what this company does, provide analytics solutions to other companies? Pretty sure we have people who can do that.
There was what I have heard termed as a pregnant pause there of both the VP and my boss as they put it together.
"This isn't something we are doing today, just something if necessary."
Right. Betcha within 3 months we are doing it, hell it might even be 3 weeks and this place is not a dynamic company.
Sorry I wasn't at my best this week and what started as an innocent question and response probably just sent another billion dollar company down the road to tracking their employees in more resolution when it comes to analyzing them.
@Anonymous wrote:
@M_Smart007 wrote:@Anonymous, I always did like a good game of Chess,
I beat the principal of my school in a Chess tournament when I was in the 3rd grade. (He was no beginner)
My Mother enrolled Me in a weekly adult Chess tournament. I played people that killed me so to speak.
I think that is what made Me so good at the Game.
Sorry for the OT.
I always found this fascinating: http://boylston-chess-club.blogspot.com/2016/04/but-its-over-at-au-bon-pain-boys-of.html
For years many great, and sometimes very famous, chess players would sit and play for hours on the large patio of a coffee shop just across the street from Harvard. The link has pictures of some and what it looked like. Note the chess tables with chairs made of concrete.
I never learned the game but found it fascinating to watch and try and figure it out without any introduction.
The line in the signature came from an 80s movie, Wargames, about a kid that almost starts WW3 by reactivating a dormant program running on a military computer. This is the computer's response at the end of the movie, after it stopped running a global thermonuclear war simulation:
@Anonymous wrote:
@M_Smart007 wrote:@Anonymous, I always did like a good game of Chess,
I beat the principal of my school in a Chess tournament when I was in the 3rd grade. (He was no beginner)
My Mother enrolled Me in a weekly adult Chess tournament. I played people that killed me so to speak.
I think that is what made Me so good at the Game.
Sorry for the OT.
I always found this fascinating: http://boylston-chess-club.blogspot.com/2016/04/but-its-over-at-au-bon-pain-boys-of.html
For years many great, and sometimes very famous, chess players would sit and play for hours on the large patio of a coffee shop just across the street from Harvard. The link has pictures of some and what it looked like. Note the chess tables with chairs made of concrete.
I never learned the game but found it fascinating to watch and try and figure it out without any introduction.
The line in the signature came from an 80s movie, Wargames, about a kid that almost starts WW3 by reactivating a dormant program running on a military computer. This is the computer's response at the end of the movie, after it stopped running a global thermonuclear war simulation:
Love that movie! The big war board was awesome once it got rolling ... 
@Anonymous wrote:I can definitely see some good in this, as well as the bad just like anything else in life. The good, would be that maybe those "deadbeats' can finally get what they deserve. No matter where I've worked there has alwasy been those that do very little and go unnoticed while you're doing most of the work. I never understood how managment couldn't see this, and it's only gotten worse in today's society with everyone being on their phone all day.
Obviously then you have the privacy issues, but then again you're in their employ and thus give up a certain amount of that. What Companies today do not have surveillance? And it all boils to down to increasing productivity while lowering costs, having an algorithm decide everything is where we're heading. So it's only natural to see it replace the Human factor in every facet of industry. At some point we'll have these AI overlords scrutinizing everything we do, and opting to replace us all with robots. lol
They get away with it because it's not easy to fire someone anymore. Companies have to worry about lawsuits from wrongful termination claims. Even in at-will states, companies have to make sure they build a history on the individual which is why it seems all they do is document, document, document. Without it there could be claims of discrimination and retaliation.
