Microsoft seeks patent for office ’spy’ software
(From: The Times 1/16/2008)
Microsoft is developing Big Brother-style software capable of remotely monitoring a worker’s productivity, physical wellbeing and competence. The Times has seen a patent application filed by the company for a computer system that links workers to their computers via wireless sensors that measure their metabolism.
The system would allow managers to monitor employees’ performance by measuring their heart rate, body temperature, movement, facial expression and blood pressure. Unions said they fear that employees could be dismissed on the basis of a computer’s assessment of their physiological state.Microsoft submitted a patent application in the US for a “unique monitoring system” that could link workers to their computers. Wireless sensors could read “heart rate, galvanic skin response, EMG, brain signals, respiration rate, body temperature, movement facial movements, facial expressions and blood pressure”, the application states.
The system could also “automatically detect frustration or stress in the user” and “offer and provide assistance accordingly”. Physical changes to an employee would be matched to an individual psychological profile based on a worker’s weight, age and health. If the system picked up an increase in heart rate or facial expressions suggestive of stress or frustration, it would tell management that he needed help.
Peter Skyte, a national officer for the union Unite, said: “This system takes the idea of monitoring people at work to a new level with a new level of invasiveness but in a very old-fashioned way because it monitors what is going in rather than the results.” The Information Commissioner’s Office said: “Imposing this level of intrusion on employees could only be justified in exceptional circumstances.”
The US Patent Office confirmed last night that the application was published last month, 18 months after being filed. Patent lawyers said that it could be granted within a year.
Watch out BIG BROTHER is watching you/ monitoring you and if they don’t like what they see they may just FIRE YOU!
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“Race Baiting”
But clearly audible: “These are race-based questions,” shouts a male voice in the audience at the Cashman Center in Las Vegas.
He spoke after Tim Russert opened with several attempts to re-engage Clinton and Obama on the racially-charged feuding that consumed much of the last week. He drew some remorse from each, but a steadfast refusal to rejoin the combat.
But on the heckler’s central point: Agree? Disagree?
UPDATE: I’d initially heard “race-baiting.” Here’s the video from Breitbart TV, source of the quote above.
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FDA Says Cloned Animals Safe for Food
WASHINGTON (AP) - Just over a decade after scientists cloned the first animal, the last major barrier to selling meat and milk from clones has fallen: The U.S. government declared this food safe Tuesday. Now, will people buy it?
But it will be hard to tell which foods do contain ingredients originating from cloned animals. The Food and Drug Administration ruled that labels won’t have to reveal whether the food comes from cloned cows, pigs or goats, or the clones’ offspring, because those ingredients are no different than meat or milk from livestock bred the old-fashioned way.
“We found nothing in the food that could potentially be hazardous. The food in every respect is indistinguishable from food from any other animal,” FDA food safety chief Dr. Stephen Sundlof said. “It is beyond our imagination to even find a theory that would cause the food to be unsafe.”
Still, FDA isn’t surprised by the outcry since it pored over 30,500 comments from the public - many of them negative - before issuing Tuesday’s ruling. A September 2006 poll by the Pew Initiative on Food and Biotechnology found that 64 percent of Americans were uncomfortable with animal cloning. And when FDA convened its own focus groups, it found a third of consumers would never eat food from cloned animals, while another third weren’t worried and the rest fell somewhere in the middle.
–My take: Well now, I trust the FDA as much as I do Satan. This is the organization that approves drugs (by the way) that have been shown to kill young woman, but the FDA says they are safe.
Or they approve drugs to be used and later turn around (after enough people have been maimed or killed) and take them off the market.
