Archive for the 'Outsourced' Category
U.S. Outsources Its Africa Spying
June 15th, 2012Via: Danger Room: Africa is important enough to the United States to spy on. Just not with official U.S. military personnel. The military’s Africa Command is outsourcing dramatic amounts of surveillance missions. And if something should go wrong, the contractors are on their own.
Indians in Gated Communities Meet Their Neighbors Online
June 12th, 2012So it goes… Via: Washington Post: Sumit Jain has fond memories of his childhood in a small town where everybody knew everybody. But as a young man, he moved to a big city for work and began living in an apartment building. Jain said he soon missed feeling connected to a community. That sense of […]
Google Fellow Wants to Offer Online Graduate Degrees for $100
June 7th, 2012In ten or twenty years, I wouldn’t be surprised to see the majority of paid work in companies, that is, work that isn’t done by machines, being done by these “certificate” holders. They’ll live in ever expanding slums, autonomously policed by RoboCops and drones. They’ll have fast Internet and there will be Superbowl commercials about […]
Western Banks Reaping Billions from Colombian Cocaine Trade
June 6th, 2012Via: Guardian: The vast profits made from drug production and trafficking are overwhelmingly reaped in rich “consuming” countries – principally across Europe and in the US – rather than war-torn “producing” nations such as Colombia and Mexico, new research has revealed. And its authors claim that financial regulators in the west are reluctant to go […]
SpaceX Flight Opens Door for U.S. Military Payloads
June 6th, 2012Via: Reuters: Space Exploration Technologies’ unmanned Dragon capsule arrived in Los Angeles on Tuesday following a test flight for NASA that could open the door to a long-desired and more elusive customer – the U.S. military. The cargo capsule blasted off May on 22 from Cape Canaveral Air Force Base in Florida and three days […]
And Now… Unsourcing
June 6th, 201275.2 million people are on Facebook, pretending to grow vegetables and raise animals in their browser windows? … Has it really come to this? Getting ribbons for bragging rights in Facebook games? —The Future Where Soda Cans Have Screens Via: The Economist: Some of the biggest brands in software, consumer electronics and telecoms have now […]
Japan: Millions of Tons of Radioactive Rubble
June 5th, 2012Via: The Atlantic: Disposing the more than 20 million tons of rubble caused by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami is proving to be a difficult problem for Japan, not least because much of the rubble has been irradiated by the Fukushima nuclear disaster. The government’s plan — to destroy 4 million tons of potentially […]
And Now… Software Will Allow a Single Professor to Deliver, ‘Meaningful Education to Hundreds of Thousands of Students at Once’
May 23rd, 2012In ten or twenty years, I wouldn’t be surprised to see the majority of paid work in companies, that is, work that isn’t done by machines, being done by these “certificate” holders. They’ll live in ever expanding slums, autonomously policed by RoboCops and drones. They’ll have fast Internet and there will be Superbowl commercials about […]
Robert Reich to New College Graduates: ‘You’re F*cked’
May 20th, 2012I’ve excerpted what I think are the key sentences. Via: Robert Reich: So much of what was once considered “knowledge work” – the kind that college graduates specialize in – can now be done more cheaply by software. Or by workers with college degrees in India or East Asia, linked up by Internet. Related: The […]
KBR on Shortlist to Run UK Police Services
May 3rd, 2012Via: Guardian: A US Pentagon contractor that was involved in building Guantánamo Bay is on a shortlist of seven private consortiums bidding for a £1.5bn contract to run key policing services in the West Midlands and Surrey. The Texas-based, Kellogg Brown & Root, which was sold off by the controversial Halliburton corporation in 2007, is […]
