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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...."

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.

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!

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.

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

- Benjamin Franklin

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.

"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.

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.)

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

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