Edited by author 01-19-2007 03:30 AM
did'nt know that jo and jade are mean man!do not insult another person's culture when you are so ignorant more like dumb!can't even tell the diff between a paki and an indian.

I've only now come across your 12/23 post on the UK government establishing traffic monitoring of all cars, and blaming the need to do this on the July terrorist attacks, which were carried out on public transport.

Therefore you might like to know that I was told in August at the Birmingham inter-city coach station that the left-luggage office had been closed. Reason? The July terrorist attacks. Which, needless to say, were conducted by people who kept their luggage with them.

Edited by author 02-15-2006 10:03 AM
So that's why I think this form of government is outmoded. Everytime they break wind they get their butts sued off. What's the point? Better to have separate more specific organizations that are more in touch with the people that preform public functions.

The Wack-Pack
By William Rivers Pitt
Tuesday 14 February 2006

"... Attorney General Alberto Gonzales..., testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee regarding warrantless wiretapping of American citizens authorized by Mr. Bush, said, 'President Washington, President Lincoln, President Wilson, President Roosevelt have all authorized electronic surveillance on a far broader scale.'"

"Really. George Washington authorized electronic surveillance on a far broader scale than what the National Security Agency is capable of today. How did he do this in an age when the whale-oil lamp was the height of technology? Did he use the old two-cans-and-some-string wiretap trick? Perhaps he was able to bug the Hessians using Ben Franklin's kite and key...."

As discused on slashdot today:

"... 'Government surveillance has intensified ... particularly in Europe."

Posted by Zonk on Thursday February 09, @11:39AM
from the if-there-is-that-much-we-should-probably-rethink-this dept.

 Carl Bialik from the WSJ writes "The number of telephone wiretaps from 2000 to 2004 authorized by state and federal judges increased by 44%, the Wall Street Journal reports, in part because of a rise in terrorism investigations after 9/11, and because the Patriot Act extended surveillance to Internet providers. All the surveillance activity can put a strain on carriers. 'Smaller telecom companies in particular have sought help from outsiders in order to comply with the court-ordered subpoenas, touching off a scramble among third parties to meet the demand for assistance', the WSJ reports, adding, 'Government surveillance has intensified even more heavily overseas, particularly in Europe. Some countries, such as Italy, as well as government and law-enforcement agencies, are able to remotely monitor communications traffic without having to go through the individual service providers. To make it easier for authorities to monitor traffic, some also require registering with identification before buying telephone calling cards or using cybercafes.'"

I know Amazon does it but it's different when it's only one website and not the whole web.

Edited by author 02-07-2006 01:01 PM
Really sorry about that.

He isn’t above the law if he is doing all of that!

Also you said you write fiction, What is your author name so I can see?

Back to biometrics: I am completely against it as it sounds like something from the book of Revelation. ‘Because We Can Syndrome’ again. Think! But gov doesn’t think, they just do, because they have power. I just like how they announce this stuff without first stating how it is exactly to be used and then we vote on it, but like I said, before with government we elect politicians to ‘represent’ us. There is no fullproof system (only measures) and I don't feel like personally becomming a punching bag for criminals.

Way to invasive. Like if they can come up with something to stop someone from cutting off a body part of mine to steal eggs then I'm in but I don't think so.
So this could be the single most invasive technology ever devised and therefore should be relegated to something more private like maybe entering into the bathroom in your home and that's about it.
FIGHT IT!

Also Google is offering the 'personal search history service.'
OK, fine I opt out, but who would opt in unless you’re a nun? I certainly don’t want a store manager spying on me as I browse his aisles I think I, at least, have that much privacy. If it is a large transaction that's fine for them to keep a receipt. I just don’t see it. Your giving someone your life history for Convenance. All your loves, desires, anger hatred...It’s arrogance.
In my apartment, I rent it but the landlord doesn't shine a camera on me and then promise not to show it to anybody else. There is a personal agreement that I will not be bothered while inside the apartment and everyone does that unless they are living with someone else, but even then, and do you trust a large cold cooperation to manage your life?
People should live for themselves instead of being pampered. Society needs to suck in some fresh air and live life.

Forgot to say: I was going to give the car to my son in a few hours.

My son was going to turn 17 in less than 12 hours. I'd had the Camry totally repainted metallic flake green; it looked better than new. I parked on California Boulevard, where it runs through the Caltech campus, and ran in to the Math department for a while. When I got back, I found the car totalled, rear-ended at maybe 50 or 60 mph, accordoned, windshields shattered. Took almost 3 days to get the poilice report. 81-year-old had blasted through stop signs, red lights, done major damage to 3 cars, mine the worst. Had hypoglycemic shock, caused (he admitted) because he took the medication without an accompanying meal. Eyewitness followed him as he made an illegal U-turn, ran some more red lights and stop signs. She stayed until the Pasadena Police Department arrived.

They asked about the accident. "What accident?" he asked. "I don't remember any acident." Cops pointed out the 1-inch gash on his forehead, 1/2 inch on a cheek, the split lip, all bleeding profusely. "Did I hit a pole?" he asked.

On the 5th trip to the police station, I brought my wife, as she technically owns the car, to demand they press criminal charges (hit-and-run). They refused. I investigated. Turns out he's the City Manager and also the City Attorney of a nearby city. And I thought nobody was above the law. Guess Bush-ism is catching. And I guess that I wasn't paranoid enough.

Sounds like an 'open source' tool but did it protect the user's and creator's rights? interesting another good book to check.

I have been studying Heim’s multidimensional (Quantum) theory lately as it has been one of the more recent topics for FTL (faster then light travel). A lattice(grid)like Metron 6-dimensions for a ‘Unified Field Theory’. Now this makes the masses more correct then ever but still not perfect. The reason this theory is so exciting is that it doesn’t chase other goals, I think in Quantum Mechanics or String theory, of trying to use infinite numbers and settles on a round number for extreme accuracy yet not perfection.

I think if FTL was possible it doesn’t necessarily mean we could do the God trot like viewing everything and everyone instantly.
The reason I think making stuff ‘free to all’ ,if they want it, is good is that it would firstly allow for a allot of possibilities by combining our wills together to do this safely. A standards approach would be turning the lights off without trying to close the curtain.
So turning the lights off/on is great. Choice.
Also, I don’t think we will very much be like God completely and achieve complete omniscience with ourselves because I believe that we are innately required to combine forces with other beings to achieve that type of power and not every being in the universe can all think the same way all the time, although some of the time to achieve great things. So that type of God power can be present but only with true freedom or love I guess. So it’s kind of like we have the ‘hive mind’ approach to survive but it’s messy besides.
I think freedom comes with responsibility.

No, I really was talking about the Baxter / Clarke book. Having now been enlighted by wikipedia (hadn't been aware of the Bob Shaw story, "slow glass" etc - shame on me), I suppose that Baxter & Clarke were giving Bob Shaw a nod. I don't know how similar the two stories are.

In B&C's story I liked what they did with the inevitable changes to peoples' attitudes to privacy - no point in shutting the curtains any more, but turning the lights off should work...

Are you sure you're not confusing that with the Bob Shaw novel/fix-up of that name (based around the Hugo and Nebula shortlisted story "The Light of Other Days")?

Bit late to chip in, but people might be interested in "The Light of Other Days" by Stephen Baxter / Arthur C Clarke. As far as I remember, it posits a device (some sort of wormhole jobby) which in its final iteration allows the user to observe any point in space, at any point in time. Because the technology becomes cheaply available, anyone can check out any event, any person, etc. As I recall they did an interesting job of working out the implications of this.
Like The Demolished Man, I guess (haven't read it), except the tools for privacy invasion / truth determination (depending on your point of view!) are freely available to all. Fun story.

Roads? in the future there are no roads.

Ah don't trust the government signs ;) Actually the recent book Market Forces by Richard K Morgan probably is good for this talk as it displays highway GPS car battles. Not sure about pedestrians though. I haven't read this but I am just reading only recent stuff lately and probably not as well read as allot of people here yet : )
There are just too many people in small areas, too much managed housing and managed people for that matter, but if you go out to the country still too random with all of the vehicle gadgets. I wouldn't even race there. Of course they have tracks now but such a pervasive society. Which is great I always dreamed of it but...

"...Bush has admitted that he gave orders that allowed the NSA to eavesdrop on a small number of Americans without the usual requisite warrants."

The government has always done this but the privacy barrier decreases exponentially with technol-o-gy. I was reading something interesting in the book Spin State where like AI was replacing government somehow : ()
It's like a guy using a cell phone (or thinking a thought soon, I will check out The Demolished Man) just to make a simple call but then he finds himself wrapped up in an international conspiracy just for the fact that he is connected to this powerful ALL Net. The one fact. Cool book title 'The Fact.' But, does information really identify total reality, not always because reality is cross dimensional and morphs. The information age moves aside for the multidimensional participation or spiritual age.
We have the ability to have info but were just not organizing it properly.

It always amazed me that car drivers would suddenly fling open a car door into the face of a cyclist, or signal (in UK: indicate) a right turn and then immediately make a left-turn to collide with a cyclist. I speak from scarring experiences. Good to understand traffic; useful to develop defensive skills consistent with paranoia that there are car drivers TRYING to kill cyclists. And, speaking of appropriate paranoia in Bigbrotherstan:

Tice Admits Being a New York Times Source

"If you picked the word 'jihad' out of a conversation," Tice said, "the technology exists that you focus in on that conversation, and you pull it out of the system for processing."

According to Tice, intelligence analysts use the information to develop graphs that resemble spiderwebs linking one suspect's phone number to hundreds or even thousands more. [JVP: social network theory]

President Bush has admitted that he gave orders that allowed the NSA to eavesdrop on a small number of Americans without the usual requisite warrants.

But Tice disagrees. He says the number of Americans subject to eavesdropping by the NSA could be in the millions if the full range of secret NSA programs is used.

"That would mean for most Americans that if they conducted, or you know, placed an overseas communication, more than likely they were sucked into that vacuum," Tice said.

[out the airlock and iinto the vacuum with them all; let God sort them out]

I think there's something to be said for requiring cyclists to take a traffic safety test (basically to ensure they understand the Highway Code) before being allowed on the roads ... and for requiring would-be drivers to spend at least 12 months on a bicycle (or a low-power moped) before letting them behind the wheel of a car for the first time. Might be a bit more civility all round, if everyone had to walk a mile in the other guy's shoes.

... But I can't see any of our local political parties adopting that as a policy. Altogether too much of a vote-loser, especially among the neds with souped-up hatchbacks who most need it.

My apologies for my recent post Charles, it was unfair and out of order. My only excuse was that I had a run in with a car driver who seemed to think that cyclists shouldn't exist just before checking your blog (no excuse at all, I know).

Just finished Accelerando - superb!
All the best for the New Year!
Fergie in slightly damp Killin, Scotland

Just wait till some hacker gets access to the BASILISK routines in the cameras. Then all bloody hell will break loose.

I have read THE DEMOLISHED MAN -- and love it -- and it does have some relevance to the kind of future I worry we're heading for.

And yet -- the "peepers"(telepaths) in the story are essentially a benevolent cabal, a sort of wise secret tribunal. That part is the hardest to believe: that telepaths would really be so much wiser than regular people. In the real world, how much TRUST do we put in those who survey us?

(I don't hear many Americans tell me how wise and good the NSA is... mostly they take the precise opposite, paranoid view that the secret "peepers" are sinister.)

"Torture in particular, but also unlimited forms of surveillance and any other acts which invest individuals secretly with something like the powers of gods, invariably lead to humanity's darkest side. The permission to commit such acts, once released into the world, mutates and spreads like wildfire from top to bottom in any command structure and across all boundaries."
The Unrestrained President
by Tom Engelhardt
TomDispatch.com
Wednesday 4 January 2006
"Hacking Matter" and the Clan Corporate walking between worlds are godlike powers, too, but the authors know that they are fictions. Bush/Blar/Putin are unfortunately not writing fiction, but experimenting on the body politic, without anaesthesia.

Psych0Cyclist: huh?

Since when do you conclude that my having misgivings about being tracked everywhere I go in public means that I hate cyclists?

I'm not terribly happy about an emerging situation in which our movements are being monitored, our email and phone calls are being tapped, and our privacy eroded. This is entirely orthogonal to the pros and cons of different forms of transport.

JvP came up with the right Franklin quote, otherwise I'd have had to trot it out myself. Bluntly: if you think those roadside cameras are there to protect you, you need to think again.

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

- Benjamin Franklin

Oh no, another whinging car driver!

I'll be selling the Stross books I bought on Amazon now I've read what a complete idiot Stross is.
I suppose the driver who nearly killed me in a hit and run accident a couple of years ago was perfectly in his rights because cyclists don't pay road tax! The fact that a camera in the street would have caught him is irrelevant to you I suppose.

You are pathetic.

As to A. R. Yngve's attempt to imagine a world where one can't get away with anything, consider Alfred Bester's The Demolished Man (1953). Bester sidesteps techno-extrapolation to focus on Crime and Punishment, the social and ethical issues, in a future where a handful of people ("peepers") have developed telepathy. This alters business, government, and specifically law enforcement. No one has gotten away with premeditated murder in over 70 years.

We follow Lincoln Polwell, Prefect of the Psychotic Division, and peeper, arriving at a celebrity's home, investigating the murder (wealthy businessman Craye D'Courtney) and a missing person. Prime suspect is D'Courtney's #1 competitor, Ben Reich. There is a freudian slip, illegal peeping, and layers of paranoid maneuvering. The issue is, precisely, how human nature escapes the most stringent cages of a world where privacy seems destroyed. Under USSR anti-privacy, samizdat and science fiction (Strugatsy brothers) flourished. In a sense, the Dickian-Orwellian world under co-emperors Tweedle-Bush and Tweedle-Blair is bringing us a more Hard SF version of Bester's vision. Charles Stross will show us that in my favorite city East of the Atlantic: Edinburgh. I can hardly wait!

Cool perspective. It’s privacy within that type of closed system so it presents a mirage. And a new fun keyword to work with 'mirage.'
Problem is we have expanded beyond our boundaries and paparazzi don’t just include U.S.ers or locals anymore. It’s a macro-global(beyond the planet) space economy today.

Privacy is not dead. Antiprivacy entities are endemic. De facto, there is a hierarchy of privacy. The more money or power you have, the more you can retain some privacy, and fight the antiprivacy processes. Some balance is maintained by the fact that the more money or power you have, the more likely you are to be a "public figure" targeted by antiprivacy. Each year I read with great interest the Forbes list of the richest people. I always wonder: how rich do you have to be to stay off the list?

In the USA along, the 24th annual edition of The Forbes 400, the collective net worth of the nation's wealthiest climbed $125 billion, to $1.13 trillion. All but 26 people on that roster are billionaires. Are all billionaires known? How about in Russia? Moscow leads the world's cities in the number of "cash millionaires."

This clash between celebrity, corporate power, and secrecy is, itself, no secret. For example:

Rich, Famous Push for Secrecy in Divorce
Martin Kasindorf, USA TODAY

"LOS ANGELES (Dec. 9) — There's a clash going on in the nation's divorce courts that is separate from the eternal war between spouses. The rich and famous who seek a divorce, such as film stars Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston and billionaire investor Ron Burkle, are making it hard for the public to see court records of their high-profile breakups. Some of these VIPs contend in legal pleadings that they risk identity theft if personal information gets out. Another push for secrecy is coming from corporations that want to guard confidential company information when executives divorce...."

I think there is a point of balance in culture and physical reality. It seems like your referring to a fascist 'closed' 'Blade Runner' system (or even a very open communist system where there is no privacy or ownership at all) where the emphasis is placed on only a few people with special privileges to rat out someone for not following their dictum. Usually this is referred to as legalisms where a legal law is the last reference before judgment instead of intention which is usually a factor based on several things and is more based on social mores then on one static law although we need laws as a point of reference. Like there are certain laws of physics but we can change nature only to an extent though.
I agree that I used to go out to an open road or field and get away from the law and just have fun without worry of the government but today you can’t race your car; you are constantly being monitored. Also corporations seem to be everywhere building crap and allot of them are not from here in the midwest what they called in-sourcing which is probably a good thing but where is the management of it since the gov seems to have its head up its ass.
Anyone can make a law up and if that person has sufficient power in society their law has the most traction so then it's like power goes before merit or reality and disrupts the social balance. Whoever has the most money or position wins even though that money or power might have been gained falsely. In a disrupted system like this you don't see the meat on the table.

So, today there is this huge push or movement for more open methods and standards open software, open government, etc. It seems like open source methods are really taking over especially last year so I see us going uphill form here. Check out EFF’s website to calm some of the fears. It really helps. They seem pretty realistic. www.eff.com. http://www.eff.org/bloggers/join/
I like the blogger’s rights because it allows freedom to post in a comfortable environment where a government or corporation would make unrealistic demands I think. They have already fired people from their jobs for posting bad things about their company like I think with Google and I think my brother was afraid to post some things with his job.

I've been thinking of writing a novel, about a near future where ubiquitous surveillance makes it IMPOSSIBLE to get away with anything -- not just simple crime, but even saying something insulting. People will quietly go mad from not being allowed to lose their temper without being fined or ratted out.

Now, I think mobile-phone cameras are major part of the surveillance problem. They make each and everyone of us a little Big Brother.

So how are we going to live in a society where you can't get away with anything? (Think of the film DEMOLITION MAN, where you're fined for swearing.) I honestly can't see how.
Humans are imperfect, and we hate to feel trapped... if crimes and misdemeanors are impossible to hide, the temptation to try and outsmart the system will become a mass neurosis.

Solutions, please. Now.

Dave O'Neill:

Wow, allot of Stross' fans are getting around: Everyone's moving from one place to another.
Sure we invent it and test it here and then it ends up East shortly, especially today with China and India gone Industrial. They abuse it even more and then hopefully groups like Kyoto or whatever odd open group starts up maybe to fix it and pull more power away from the governments in the aftermath.
Ah, the world is to singular now for a 'safe' zone unless of course you can go to a very remote area but maybe that's what people want to get away from, the rat race, but I will stay in my neighborhood that I grew up and have real friends in and prefer not to move out to some half-baked mini-city because of some rich alien assholes.
Anyway as they go more industrial allot of stuff seems to be being started there like DNA and Holographic Data storage. Also in the East you have raging birdflue and major poisen leaks with coverup governments. Sounds like here doesn't it; like people taking too many anti-biotics creating super diseases leaking from hospitals.

Europe and the East launch their own Tracking satelite to compete with America's GPS owned by the U.S. military. Currently GPS is used by everyone:
http://news.scotsman.com/scitech.cfm?id=2468912005
and don't forget the holographic data storage, with a side of bio-tracking of course.

The price of gigapixel focal plane array cameras will fall fast. They've already gotten so much cheaper from the original space-based intel that Hollywood specialty shops (for shooting title sequences, for instance) have them. Number plates (what the USA calls license plates) become cheap enough to optically capture on the fly pretty soon, and RFID brings that date sooner yet.

Note that honeybees can recognize individual human faces with up to 90% accuracy. Honeybees evolved to recognize complicated flowers quite well; in a sense, human faces are in an odd corner of flower space. So biomorphic cheap AI face recognition is coming too, after admittedly poor beta tests so far.

I'm not sure that the systemt they are launching will have anything like the resolution needed to do number plates - I suspect it'll be Makes and estimates from that.

However, various motorways next year are getting active number plate reading "safety" cameras which will read number plates and average speeds over huge distances. The M4 between J14 and J17 kicks off soon. Glad I'm moving away from the west country.

Edited by author 12-27-2005 08:46 AM
Sorry, I posted this twice. I just wanted to vent this out.

Cover your soup. Don't expect gov to tell you if it falls in though. And what if someone else takes control of it by a virus? All in the name of Liberty?

U.S. Seeks Nano Spy Planes:

http://www.redherring.com/Article.aspx?a=1...eks+Nano+Spy+Planes

It's not that I'm against protection but I have to have some control of the service.

Isaac Asimov on Star Wars:
http://www.sfwriter.com/asimov2.htm

I think we had reasonable control of Kingships in the past but today with so much power it has to be much more open. My philosophy is we have evolved from the Democracy to the Union to the Special Interest Group to Non-Profit .orgs.

It just seems like a disconnect lately where people just build homes and do things with no-one’s consent. Blade Runner was made to help us avoid these things not to want to live them. The more absolute control everyone wants the more of a segmented society we have.

These all relate to a form of nosing or snooping:
I am really frustrated at all the overconstruction and bloated industry that people don't even need in the last 10 years:
-The small little hippy shop down the corner turns into half the mall because they have Internet access.
-The UPS(Parcel service) franchises.
-Wal Mart.
- 5 mini-malls in a row.
- A cheap house next to an expensive house each with the same size lots.
 called McMansions. The expensive house is usually allot taller, so a form of Boss Snooping exists. ‘Looking down On You’ syndrome.
- Work@Home syndrome.
- War@Home syndrome.
- Indoor fumes(Air Purifiers)
- Non-parties or Anti-Parties
- Too many similar services across the street frm each other in a suburban or rural areas
- Building buildings on top of buildings. 3d cities would be OK but only with spacing.
- A fitness center built on top of a nature path.
- Enron.
- A concert auditorium named Enron.
- A government named Enron.
- To many dam forms of money. I spend more time finding ways to pay bills rather then actually paying them, even with helps like Online Banking.
- Paying money with money sometimes more then 3 times.
- Too many ways to get threatened by creditors like a harmless old lady.
- Landlines
- ‘Spy’ equipment (Will I ever get a real fork of Jennifer Anniston like in Charlie’s books?)
- Expensive porn
- Money being used where people should just do it for free like New Orleans.
- The influx of flat screens everywhere(unnatural light).
- Cyber Punk enthusiasts wanting to irradiate their body with electronic devices and hard drugs. :) Hey dude, you got a gadget in there or you just happy to see me.
- Mainstream hard drugs(Diet Pills etc.)
- Funny Government syndrome
- Closed source gadgetry for ‘hobbiests.’
- Illegal governments
- Illegalisms, Illegalists, Illigitamists
- Mainstream child prostitution (Usually something is prostituted if it doesn’t work that well anymore. (Does this signify that raising kids is a thing of the past because of cloning etc.?)
- Oxymoron syndrome
- ‘Gay’ events
- Only 1 or 2 blatantly obvious minor features missing in opensource software that would take like a day to put in.
- People calling virtual reality or sims ‘gaming.’ :)
- Recycling a product only to find that you can’t recycle the recyclers.
- Linearity syndrome
- General redundancy and waste.
- The Eternal Life conspiracy

Edited by author 12-27-2005 06:25 AM
A small victory over little brother.
Mapping sites like local.google.com are now restricting their Satellite Zoom on Maps to a few hundred feet higher it seems.

I like this, regardless of it not being on video I don't like snoops peeping over my backyard fence at my layout. It could also entice criminals. I am talking about satellite mapping like a picture and not regular street maps.

OTOH, without all those cameras, how are you going to find any petrified cows? (add hot grits to taste)

Seriously though, I find the idea of the idea of the American Police State(tm) gaining a foothold in Europe by way of the UK fairly scary. I'll decide when and where I want to be monitored, all right?

Still, I'm going to London just 'because I can'. In my mind, Red Ken presides over an enclave of enlightenment just as Munich is a fairly left-wing city in the overwhelmingly rural, conservative and Christian Bavaria. Feel free to dispossess me of this notion, but after the 6th of Jan if you please :-)

Edited by author 12-25-2005 11:05 AM
Voyeurism. Rob Halford from the band Judas Priest formed a band in the late 90s called Voyeurs which I thought was very applicable for the 10th dimension generation.
A little positive news? The French government has voted to take a hands off approach to P2P file sharing asking only for a one time fee to the government similar to their television program. Not sure how their 'television' is defined though. That's a novel idea.
Stateside we don't get taxed by the government on the Internet probably because of ICANN, so they say, yet we can't wathc certain media without the 'proper' player. So supposedly if everyone gets the Internet and uses that for media then we can escape the government right?
Now they want to tax the Internet, this is the same for eco-cars as well because of not getting enough tax money from Oil, I think.
So really there is no escape from The Hand unless we use services that are not completely contracted by the government at all like Free Software or Media or just services that don't reqire large sociatal costs such as Hydrogen power and recyclable materials instaed of plastic. Might be able to use nano-bots to decompose the plastic though.

If they aren’t contracted and taxed by the government they don’t feel they own a piece of it and can’t monitor it.
No, I don’t trust the government here. I don’t trust closed source governments.
Maybe if the roads were owned by a non-profit group Gov wouldn’t interfere. I think a group of companies could come together and purchase the roads and form an open standards body. The government mainly owns the roads here. Everything else is sort of in between so that would be a good start and then public land. I would love to tee the fuight.
I think if more non-govs owned land we could cut down the cost of exes housing and live in a less congested environment. openland.org and openroads.org

Also I am upset about the the new ‘because we can’ generation also. Bring back the Dodo? The idea is as stupid as the bird. Why? Bring back the Mammoth? These animals were at the end of their evolutionary tree. Too big and furry. Maybe a dragon would be cool but like I read in some recent fantasy novels they would have to be stored Indoors. Maybe if we selected a natural habitat; but do we have room for this type of circus and for what purpose other then it’s cool? Save it for cyberspace unless it's a real help of course.

Another evolutionary oddity. The fullscale robot. Are they to replace us? When was I informed of this? If they are running closed source hardware/software they apparently have already won out since they'll know what we are but we sure as hell won't know what they are.
The year is 2010, the .NET framework has been consolidated into the .GOV framework and now is simply referred too as the Frame-Work. There are no more programmers anymore because it has been decided that control and structure is most important then simple ‘coding.’ People are not allowed to choose to live outside the Frame-Work because it has been defined by the Frame-Work that this is not a choice in the online FrameWorkpedia hosted by acadamia.

Isaac Asimov didn’t like robots to be around in his Foundation books at least as I think he snapped them out of evolution somewhere down the line for safety(trust) concerns. At the time of his writing in the 50s he didn’t perceive the nano-technology mankind would have to monitor them for safety but he might have been a little pessimistic, which is understandable considering the post industrial nightmare after WW2, as he had the unpredictable ‘Mule’ which I think represented a closed source ‘black box’ system but didn’t perceive free standards or maybe he did because they seemed to win out in the 4th book I think. Read: Encyclopedia Galactica(Wikipedia). He seemed naturally mistrusting of the government which is understandable from a guy emigrating from the U.S.S.R. and entering the Cold War in the United States. He was against the Star Wars program.
I was against the Illigeal Immigration policies that fueled the unrealistic crimewave that nearly destroyed me and my family.

Also, I feel W.H.O. has done allot and is doing much more about the flu outbreak then any government or U.N. ever could.

Jonathan VP, that digital TV story sounds a lot like what is planned here, but with a headlong rush.

The UK possibly jumped in a little too early; the technology has improved to cope better with transmitters using the same frequency, so using bandwidth more efficiently. And, when the proposals for a switchover were first made, some crazy fees had been paid for bandwidth rights at other frequencies. But there's been no hard date set.

Havinbg said that, digital coverage in the less populated regions is still erratic. Current planning is to switch the BBC2 analogue frequencies to digital TV, which will boost the available power enormously.

Another factor is that cable TV has been competing with direct satellite broadcasts, while subscription digital terrestrial crashed and burned. So now you can buy a decoder box, plug it into the TV with a SCART lead, and get a lot of subscription-free TV.

Technically, I'd say digital TV can beat analogue, except in the very best conditions. But that's watching PAL analogue pictures, and using a SCART connection which feeds an RGB signal set to the TV, rather than RF or composite video. And SCART will also give you auto-switching between 4:3 and 16:9 picture formats.

It doesn't hurt that the BBC is heavily committed to digital broadcasting, and the system carries a good range of audio only channels (though some people will complain about the low bit-rates being used for audio). And there are the CBeebies and CBBC channels for the rugrats, which are almost reason enough on their own.

In short, in the UK a digital TV decoder can make a huge difference: it's worth getting. But the US approach, both to digital conversion and to TV content in general, comes across as crudely exploitative. You can have subscription channels on digital TV, and I don't expect to see the number of free-to-view channels in the US to more than triple, as they have here.

Back when the 407 toll highway opened here in Ontario, it was pointed out that the same computers that issued toll bills based on plate camera recorded or transponders could issue speeding tickets if a driver's average speed exceeded the speed limit. The private company that runs the highway apparently nixed the idea on the grounds that it would be bad for business.

Yes, the ACLU is chartered to protect the Bill of Rights. That doesn't mean they actually do protect the Bill of Rights in toto. They don't spend any time protecting the Second Amendment, for instance. And in the Kelo v. New London decision, an outrage against the Fifth Amendment, the national ACLU didn't do anything either.

But it must be said for the ACLU, they were so "very active and vocal" about possible abuses of the Patriot Act that no actual abuses seem to have occurred. Good for them! Now I must go and join a protest against hurricanes, lest my city fall victim to one next summer.

I've already come across a stretch of motorway that used average speed readings for speeding penalties (or at least they said that they did). Presumably they timed you entering and leaving the section and worked out the speed.

It was a section of the M1 with roadworks, so I was happy to see people slowing down more than usual.

Michael Brazier: My read on the ACLU's current primary mission is that it is gay rights, as gays represent the last major minority (oxymoron?) whose rights are routinely denied.

Re civil liberties: the ACLU is chartered to protect the Bill of Rights -- period. They have been very active and vocal in their opposition to the Patriot Act. I routinely read about supreme court rulings where the defendants were represented by the ACLU, haven't seen this from EFF -- not that they are not also worth supporting.

Re removal of all traces of Christianity: as a flaming atheist, I wholeheartedly support all efforts to keep any of my tax dollars from being spent on any subsidization of religion, however minor.

Chris Heinz: these days the ACLU's primary mission appears to be the removal of all traces of Christianity from public places and political debate in the USA. Threats to civil liberties are a low priority, better handled by other groups. For instance, the Electronic Frontier Foundation would take a hand in resisting anything similar to the "panopticon" project in Britian; civil rights issues raised by new technology are exactly their concern.

To oversimplify, the Anglo-American governments under co-emperors BushBlair have been repurposing the informational aspects of "public" space for a combination of allegedly antiterrorist and admittedly profitable purposes.

Example 1: U.S. Federal authorities have decreed that 17 February 2009 shall be the last date of conventional television. After that, all analog TV broadcasts end, and the glorious all-digital TV era dawns. 2 coupons, $40 each, go to household without digital TV, for purchase of converters. Well, okay, House and Senate preliminary approval. The former analog TV frequencies get auctioned off for an estimated $10 to $30 billion $US to the U.S. Treasury, so that cool new wifi video and stuff can be done optimally by the invisible hand.

Example 2: Garbage, placed on the street, properly bagged/binned for pickup, no longer has any legal presumption of privacy. "Garbologists" dig through Bob Dylan's trash. Analysis of your supermarket purhcases, correlated with your garbage, allows automated estimate that your diet is bad, so we'll automatically increase your health insurance charges. Dumpster divers recover corporate publications in hardcopy. Sale of cheap shredders skyrockets (I was given one by a wife and son optimistically eying my several hundred thousand pages of paper as notes for stories, novels, screenplays, and science papers in progress).

Example 3: Multiple video, RFID, non-publicized automobile "black box" inferring location by integrating velocity and turns; and other channels proliferate for tracking cars on streets and roads (when will they forbid sales of cars sans GPS trackers?), people on public streets, automated interpolation of peoples' social network by who goes into whose home when, or correlated going into restaurant or public meeting place. People start buying homes with tunnels networking, invisible to eyes in the sky. Next generation, nanospiders infiltrate all tunnels.

Example 4: Okay, for national security, since the laws of nature abruptly changed on 9/11, spy on US citizens without even retroactive warrants. Testmarket the notion of logging all phonecalls and emails to build said social network. Use that to filter enemies of the state. Sell arrest of same as per Ray Bradbury's bigscreen TV shows (he invented reality TV a step beyond Eric Blair's Big Brother infrastructure).

Paranoid? Naaaah. I'm enjoying the improved chocolate ration subsidized by sale of what was once considered private property.

Edited by author 12-24-2005 02:38 AM
About six weeks ago, I was spotted parking in a supermarket carpark in Barking, staying over the posted timelimit. The Car Park Management company contacted DVLA with the number, got my address, and sent me the bill.

Except, the vehicle was a combine harvester, which I'd sold two years ago and was, I'm told, exported to Cyprus. I doubt you could even get it down the streets in Barking.

And why, if DVLA still had me on record as the keeper, had they never sent me the Tax/SORN notification?

Nobody seemed to be interested in following up the possibility of a false numberplate, and, interestingly, when the Police access the database they get a different result: "No Trace". I get a feeling that the ACPO and the politicians don't realise how unreliable the DVLA database is.

At least the parking company backed down.

Now, imagine the screaming when the fake numberplates and the blatant database errors start triggering summonses against law-abiding drivers.

Anyone get the feeling that Tony Blair has drifted into the Thatcherite way of thinking, too accustomed to power to use it wisely after winning three elections?

Edited by author 12-23-2005 08:01 PM
I hope that any Americans participating in this discussion are card-carrying ACLU members. The ACLU is the only organization with any clout who would routinely oppose this kind of stuff. Plus, an ACLU membership card in your wallet is a great prop -- guaranteed to set off any conservative you might want to tweak.

Re education, my 4 children all went to an excellent new high school of ~2000 students that opened in 1990. They filmed the administrators the 1st day and showed it on local cable. I was very surprised to find that their primary concern was security -- who is watching the students when and where?

Re the traffic cameras, Charlie has already been on this, yes? The stone cows story?

Re Big Brother, for the last few years since webcams, Wired et all have been more talking about Little Brother, i.e., bored netizens monitoring everything. Given the recent growth of distributed web intelligence systems such as tagging and wikipedia, this may be the more interesting thread ...

Given that you were complaining about the impracticalities of using GPS (satellites can't see you / you can hack or tamper with the GPS "black box") when the issue of road taxing came up, I don't really see what's wrong with tracking number plate movement. It's already an offence to display incorrect number plates so for once, the Blair government doesn't have to invent a random new law just to show they're tough on crime, the technology has already been tested on Londoners, this means we'll actually get more data about where people drive to and from than the annoyingly unsubtle "this road here looks pretty packed", and it makes road pricing pretty easy without requiring tolls that take up loads of space and add unwelcome bottlenecks.

Yeah, the terrorism thing is a just the random buzzwords people have to mention these days - so what? It's still a decent idea. Plus, it makes it easier to solve car theft (which I believe is currently pretty much insolvable - needle in a haystack territory). Unless the joyriders then torch the car, of course, but you never going to get it back anyway. It should at least find stolen cars whose number plates haven't been replaced too well, which is a start.

There are car rental companies that have "black boxes" in their cars that keep track of how fast you go, where you go, etc. If they wanted to, governments could mandate that sort of system be added to all new cars...

Frankly, acb, it sounds like you need to cut down on the Situationist pamphlets and get out more. I like the image of cameras that punish, though: makes me think of big comedy mallets on robot arms.

More substantially, isn't the intenet as a whole a perfect illustration of the ways people communicate without "natural" interaction?

On a practical level, I'm conflicted on cameras in schools - on the one hand one of the things that saved my sanity in my own school days was the willingness of teachers to ignore the fact that I wasn't paying attention as long as I didn't actively disrupt the class. Cameras could make that a lot harder. On the other hand, the habit of not paying attention didn't actually do much for my academic career and, as with the police, it's useful to have a nominally-objective record when a dispute comes down to the teacher's word against the pupil's.

Kids are kept under camera surveillance for most of the day. When they first arrive at school, they naturally interact, touching their fellow pupils. The cameras see this; punishment is swift and decisive. After a few such instances, pupils are conditioned to associate touching with dire transgressions, retreat to within their own personal space and consider intrusions an invasion. This reduces their tendency to spontaneously communicate, making them easier to control. When they carry this on to adult life, they have social needs which they cannot meet, which provides an opportunity to sell them consumer products, promising fulfilment.

Does that sound plausible?

Two big concerns:

Will the cameras show the teachers?

What happens to the recordings?

This sort of monitoring might take some of the heat off in other areas, such as alleged sexual touching. It's not hard to see why schools might like the idea.

I reccomend John Taylor Gatto's 'The Underground History of American Education': http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/index.htm

The kids'll just nick the cameras.

Having actually taught public school here in the U.S., I'd say I'd be cautiously in favor of putting video cameras in the classroom.

In classes packed with 30+ students, discipline issues often make the difference between getting anything actually *taught* and putting out fires the entire class. It's exhausting, and what eventually drove me out of teaching. I'd come home at the end of the day, realizing that I'd spent about 20% of my time actually teaching, while the rest was spent on administration and discipline.

I often invited parents to attend classes. Few ever did. But the extra pair of adult eyes always made a huge difference in discipline. How would a camera be qualitatively different from an open-door policy?

It would be invaluable to be able to meet with a parent and actually *show* them how their student is acting in class (most want to pretend that their child would never act up at all).

With little support from administration or parents, mostly the only teachers that maintain an orderly classroom are those that emulate drill sergeants. I've seen classes that are much more dehumanizing from being run in this regard than a class with a moderate teacher and a camera ever could be.

Ahem: if you EMP a gadget like an iPod to get rid of it's RFID chip, you also get rid of any other chips that are lurking in it, thereby reducing it to a piece of junk. Ditto your car's engine manasgement system or your laptop's CPU.

Also: there is no way to tell the difference (at a distance) between nuked RFID chips and no RFID chips. Is that a shoplifter, or someone who wears hand-made or second-hand clothing? You can't use absence to prove a positive. (In contrast, wearing clothing tagged with RFID chips which nobody has paid the shop for might very well be an indicator of shoplifting.)

But if you can EMP away your RFIDs, surely the guys who snatch your laptop/ipod/car can do the same?
Same goes for shoplifters, probably.
In any case, nuked RFIDs will mean "possibly stolen goods", protecting your anonymity at the cost of making you look like a thief.

On the whole, working in a bookshop, I think RFIDs would be excellent right now.

If we could use the RFID as proof of purchase, the post-christmas refund and exchange hell would reduce to a simple problem rather than a multi-layered decision filled hell.

Charlie,
It appears that the story which sparked this off was not as kosher as first thought. The Guardian has apparently published a retraction. Being a staunch Torygraph fascist I have not seen it but I'm sure someone out there can confirm if I am right.
Jim Braiden

Jim: I'm talking about public perceptions, not realities. (Let's not let little things like facts get in our way, shall we? Otherwise we can't hope to understand what the anti-hunting lobby is all about, but I digress ...)

You missed two factoids out of your analysis. One is the spurious issue of animal rights/animal cruelty -- an issue which means very different things to countryfolk and townsfolk. The other is the fact that the UK in general and England in particular doesn't run on libertarian laissez faire idealism; it runs on sanctimony and indignation, with the baying hounds of something-must-be-done following the clarion call of The Sun, with Rupert Murdoch and his pals leading the hunt.

Gaaah ...

(Did I manage to fail to make it clear that I'm a wee bit disgusted with both sides? Damn, must try harder.)

Charlie,
Hunters Hoorey Henries? I ride- don't hunt, too damned dangerous. The group I belong to includes a postman, a barman, 2 small farmers, a lorry driver and a primary school teacher. None of us could in any way be described as Hoorey Henries. My view on hunting is very simple- if it is not harming another human being or damaging the environment then it should not be banned. If you don't like it don't do it.
Jim Braiden

Edited by author 11-02-2002 05:22 AM
So the Countryside Alliance is doing the same sorts of things as the government?

I suppose it just goes to show what a corrupted political system can lead to.

Though they do have a point about some of the people who oppose hunting; there are "opponents" of the Countryside Alliance who are involved in some near-terrorist activities. I just grow wheat, but I've been at meetings of farmers where warnings have been given about letter-bomb campaigns.

I can imagine fairly innocuous scenarios in which information about some hunt saboteur is passed through the CA computers to the police. As well as all the more alarming scenarios which the details in the DPA registration would allow. I do wonder how you can tell the difference between info in transit, which might contain any number of odd little details, and keeping a file on a lot of people.

I'm just glad I haven't put my name on any of their lists. It's bad enough being an NFU member, but there it just seems to be a constant struggle against incompetent use of computers. I subbed to an email announcement list, and every so often somebody sends out info as a 500k attachment which is produced with the latest version of MS Word. The most recent was a two-page document giving a phone number and hotmail.com email address for further information.

I really ought to get around to installing Linux, instead of using MS-DOS software for email. Luckily, I missed the NFU's Bugbear infection.

 You did miss the other bit which was a poke in the eye for Mr. Blunkett (or at least his dog's eye...)

 British ISP's have sent him a BAD ACK on his idea for them to do Cheltenam's dirty work by storing all their customer traffic for six months. At least they won't do it voluntarily, which means he's got to get legislation pushed through Mr. Blair's Poodle Parlour and that is going to expose the idea to all sorts of unwanted public approbation. He would have much preferred a quiet gentleman's "voluntary" agreement. The House of Lords is going to have so much fun kicking this one around...