covering the week's top tech stories
with a slight linux bias if you enjoy
your weekly tech news with a slight
linux bias become part of our fleet
choose your rank at patreon.com category
five
let's get into it scientists have
created a plane that flies
without fuel that's coming up but first
as the covid19 pandemic blurs the lines
between home life and job life for many
the eu is fighting for homeworkers to
have the right to disconnect
lawmakers have passed a non-binding
resolution arguing that homeworkers
have the right to be unreachable by work
the european parliament employment
committee voted 31-6 with 18 abstentions
in favor of allowing people to take time
off and urge the european commission to
create
rules that catch up with the new reality
of work
alex aguias saliba who spearheaded the
resolution
says the pressure to always be reachable
always available is mounting
resulting in unpaid overtime and burnout
many of us can relate how about you has
the need to work from home caused the
line between work and private life to
become hazy
comment below and let us know lawmakers
in favor of the new resolution say
workers should be allowed to be offline
without suffering employer retribution
as a result
the right to to disconnect in the eu
must now be approved
by the full chamber before it can be
submitted to the commission
and state government for a vote no sorry
i'm just taking a call from work
no you're not all right you need to be
able to turn off i need to be able to
disconnect
yes i'm busy doing my own thing
i i love this story and i like that uh
in
in the eu they're kind of taking that
approach to
protect the workers because it's been a
problem now
for quite some time even before covid
with the rise of
you know e-commerce and internet
connectivity where people are not being
able to turn off
like i remember when i you know started
you know my former job in 2007
i think something like that and i had
the blackberry
yep and that was always with me yeah
like i'd be laying in bed
and 11 30 i'd get an email that comes in
it's like
oh yes you know and i never turned off
and it became such an addiction almost
not that i wanted to work but it was
like my mind was always going is there
an email waiting for me is there
something there yeah
i love that they've taken this approach
isn't it interesting though jeff that by
responding to those pings you're
actually training your
co-workers and your employers that
you're always available
yes and and it's a hard thing it's like
where is that line and
you know we're we're probably speaking
to a lot of i.t managers and and folks
that work in the it department and
and realistically i mean servers go down
regardless of whether it's past 5 p.m or
not
that's right and guess what we're the
folks that have to run into the
to the office and take care of things i
mean how many times have i spent a
saturday
fixing up a server or doing something to
do with work because something's down
and it's got to be attended to it's like
you can it's not a nine to five job
that's right and a lot of things these
days are not nine to five jobs and
you're lucky if you have something that
you can actually shut down
and say call it quits at five o'clock in
the afternoon yeah
but realistically and especially in
today's you know
kind of covid 19 landscape where
hey people are working from home and
when
the computer when the email comes in or
when the ping comes in on zoom
you've got to be there yep and you feel
like you've got to be there and and
maybe that's part of it too is
maybe employers have to say okay so
staff
here's our policy we understand that
you've got a life as well
we just expect you to put in a good
honest hard-working day
and and then deal with the stuff that
you need to deal with at home but it's
hard
i've been self-employed i've worked at
home yeah oh for sure and i mean like
in you know my former career as a labor
contract negotiator
it used to be the thing was you know
you've got your hours work and then
there's on call
and then yeah like all the time on call
that's a burn yeah like
you're answering the phone no matter
what well yeah and so
those kind of things almost have been
lost because it's like oh you're not
really
on the clock but you're just always
available yeah
and so you know it becomes that fine
line between
going too far and you know dare i say
abusing the employee's time
versus being able to have maximum
productivity and exposure to address
issues as they happen
and so it i mean with online work and
whatnot it has
changed the landscape of like you said a
typical nine to five
and most jobs that have gone online are
no longer nine to fives
yeah they're kind of you know your your
typical full-time work
but around the clock yeah i envy um
self-employed individuals who know to
call it quits at five
yeah after five it's like all right kids
let's have fun
yeah it's it's time to to hang out with
mom or dad
and uh you know that's that's a hard
thing to accomplish
when you are like only a phone call away
that's right and it's almost like you
know
your phone is in your pocket now and
you're you're stuck with it ringing if
uh
so it's like have a separate phone yeah
what's your answer i mean
we're all in this together what is your
solution to this
particular issue it may be a law that
has to come down from the government or
it may be something that you've
established within your own
within your own infrastructure of your
company we'd love to hear about it
comment below
here's becca a plane that flies without
propellers or
jets and uses no fuel sounds like
something from star trek
but apparently it's a thing the secret
is to use ion thrusters
which also sound like something from
sci-fi next up
molecular teleportation
the team responsible is from the
massachusetts institute of technology
they say the electro-aerodynamic-powered
plane uses a propulsion system to fly
which could lead to new aircraft that
are quieter and mechanically simpler
than what we have today what's more they
don't produce any fossil fuel emissions
alright to be fair we're not carrying
passengers anytime soon
the aircraft has a wingspan of just five
meters and weighs around two and a half
kilograms
but it works having taken two years to
create the plane works by removing
electrons from nitrogen molecules in the
air
which produces ions these are
accelerated toward the back of the plane
creating an ionic wind
which gives the plane thrust to move
through the air
wouldn't it be incredible to have an rc
version of this tech
think about a quadcopter and how quickly
its battery depletes
now put an fpv camera on one of those
ion-powered planes and rip through the
air at high speeds for hours
while that raises some frightening
militaristic possibilities
from a hobbyist perspective it sounds
incredible
what would you do with a small plane
that could fly without fuel
post your comment below while quite
inefficient at low speed indoor test
flights the group said that as the speed
increases
so does the efficiency in theory when
moving at 670 miles per hour
the plane could be 50 percent efficient
it's still only a prototype but
scientists believe that the future
possibilities are
very promising i think this is so neat
that we now have now granted it's a
small version
but you have itty-bitty is this an
airplane for amp
exactly but you have this propulsion
system
that doesn't require fuel that has its
own ability to
convert within the air and keep going i
mean
in theory if you can hook this sucker up
to say
solar panels you could have non-stop
flight non-stop theoretically unreal
like that's wild becca makes some really
interesting points about
like quadcopter flight and yeah i love
flying my quadcopters but
she's right the battery is like in some
of them it's like 15 minutes flight time
and so you buy extra batteries so that
you can swap them in the field and you
get you know 45 minutes flight time but
you're still
dealing with the fact that the battery
doesn't last very long
if you ever shoot any video in the air
it's the same kind of thing like you get
up there you take some video and then
you gotta land and take it and change
the battery
yep well here's an opportunity something
that can actually
uh power itself essentially yeah but
will it ever
see passenger flight that's
the thing like so it's more like it's
gonna be tough
yeah it's gonna be more i think um you
know smaller payload
payloads and this is where you know i
think in terms of a camera
or you know being able to to shoot video
but they're
they're flying like an airplane so yeah
it's going to be moving pretty quickly
so what about now we've had um henry
bailey brown on the show to talk about
how he uses his quadcopters to shoot
3d imagery
so that he can then convert that into
unreal engine
and even 3d print buildings and things
like that
but looking at topography and using a
technology like this
to keep constant tabs on changing
landscapes
or on like the we think about like bing
maps or google earth and
the way that they're able to recreate
our planet
in basically what to us seems like real
time like sci-fi
but being able to have something in the
air that can just fly around the globe
all the time taking this imagery and
shooting it back to their servers and
making it like
virtually you know much more real time
than the satellite imagery that they
have now that's four years old
yeah right so could those be things but
you know what what
what kind of things spring to mind for
you and of course you know in the back
of my mind there is that nagging
i fear that the military would get a
hold of this kind of technology
guaranteed they're already using it i
know and so this is probably from a
military contract
yeah this is probably going through your
head and and
so there that is very ominous and it's
because this is a really really cool
technology but like so many cool
technologies
it could be used for good and it could
be used for we'll we'll say
evil yep um but you know what could we
do with this that is good
that's what i'd love to know and that's
where my head went
like the what actually caught my
attention the most in this story was the
fact that it was indoor flight
like initially i was like oh they're
flying it outside but when they're like
oh our tests indoors i'm going hold on
this is indoors
okay so could you theoretically
take this shrink it down i mean who
knows what the components
are you're picturing a fly no no not
that small
but like how neat would it be if they
could take this propulsion system to the
point where it's
um you know for lack of a better word
levitation
where you can have a stable object it
has to be moving though
well it has to right now but if you
because it's taking the ions from the
air and converting them for that
propulsion system
so i don't know what you know the air
flow is out behind or anything like that
but
could it you know i'm i'm thinking could
it be converted to things in your home
where it's like
you don't have to worry about ladders
anymore because you can have
you know scaffolding or something some
sort of painting unit that goes up for
you
but i'm just thinking the internal home
use i'm like this could
change the way we build homes so that
you don't have
people falling off how does he come up
with this stuff what are your ideas
he wants to build homes and get rid of
ladders this thing is like
five meters wide and it can only attack
and you could just convert it that could
be any living space jeff
anybody living space see i'm not
confined
to the initial thoughts yeah all right
so when it can carry
a human jeff wants it to lift him up
onto his roof so that he can put up the
christmas lights a little easier
little perfect been up for three years
give us your ideas comment below don't
miss the other stories we're following
this week
first there will not be a centos linux 9
plus
debian officially supports the pine book
pro
subscribe to our youtube channel to make
sure you catch the full stories
from the category 5 dot tv newsroom i'm
becca ferguson
thanks for watching
[Music]
[Applause]
[Music]
do
[Music]