This just in. FB opening a huge data warehouse in a town by me. So it begins...
I always find the "I don't do anything wrong, so I don't mind it" crowd interesting. I bet the Jews used to think that way too. I mean..religious persecution never happens right? I think people are so overly comfortable these days they forget that just a few short years ago nearly everything but white people were persecuted for something for no reason except it was "wrong to not be white and/or not male".
Never be so self centered that you forget other people may not be as honest as you. This goes for the criminals and the...supposed not criminals making laws.
:thumbsup:
"I'm not doing anything wrong, so I have nothing to worry about."
What do you do then when your crime is that your grandfather was born on the "wrong" continent? Or that you're the "wrong" gender? Or that you've chosen the "wrong" religion? Or that you've simply got the "wrong" opinions?
Let's get two people, running on the same platform and running for the same ideas of governance.
One's a white Christian male.
The other's a black atheist female.
Who's got the better chance of winning election to a public office, even today?
How about the same two people 20 years ago? 50 years? 100 years?
One of the few constants during our short history on this planet has been mans inhumanity to man. Power corrupts. Why would we want to give anyone more power and control over our lives. Nobody can be trusted with that kind of power.
Also, on a strictly economic and practical level, it would be cheaper and more effective to just shove a chip up everyone's ass at birth.
This.
Just look at how our species' history is frequently divided up or defined: Conquests, wars, assassinations, genocides, and the powerful reigns of cruel dictatorships and monarchies. It's also said that we're living in the most peaceful time in recorded human history. Look at all the fighting we still have. There are still constant skirmishes and battles, and many nations which still have severe restrictions on personal freedoms.
This is what we end up calling "relatively peaceful."
You don't want to have one of those "Accident Free" posters at your workplace if you have to put the word "Hours" in front of it. I'm not sure what our planet should have as its post. "Seconds since the last killing of one human by another."
Or even look at our own system of government in the US, and the lengths that we went to to try to keep the cruelties of the past at bay. Those who wrote our Constitution evidently realized that people were very prone to be power-hungry, and harbor little or no concern for the well-being of others, so a system was made up that would try to keep those destructive tendencies in check. While this document was by no means perfect, unchanging, or even unchangeable (look at all the Amendments to it), it still does a pretty decent job, so long as it's followed.
In general, humans don't have a good track record of treating each other very nicely. Allowing, or even
requiring, the use of better and better tools with which to exercise this destructive behavior seems like a very bad idea.
I said yes, but not because I necessarily think they should be, but because they inevitably will be; ergo, the question isn't really that important. I do strongly believe that the ubiquity of surveillance like seen in Minority Report is an absolute inevitability, whether I like it or not. Increasingly there will be simply no private outside the home.
What happens then when technology makes it possible to easily look inside a home, using only ambient electromagnetic radiation? Specifically, wavelengths of EMR that pass through walls? That'd be no different than a simple surveillance camera: When you're out in public, light hits you, bounces off, and is recorded by a camera. If light happens to be passing through your walls, which a camera outside happens to pick up, wasn't that also public domain? So at that point, even remaining at home may offer little privacy.
That's a great idea, as long as you trust the entities who have control of that technology to do what is best for society. Instead, they more often than not, just want to jail and fine as many as possible to protect their budgets and jobs.
Why the heck do we have corporation run, for profit prisons?
Or speed cameras and red light cameras. Municipalities will surely say that it's for the public safety, but they seem to have a habit of putting them in when they're having budget problems.
"It's for your own protection."
I am complete fine with having security cameras all over the place to protect the population. Stiffer penalties would also help but being able to see a crime in real time or have this data is a good thing.
I don't commit crimes so I have no issue with feeling like it's an invasion of privacy as long as this is in the public where there should be no expectation of privacy anyway.
The fact that so many people caught the two bombers on film/video was extremely helpful in this case.
Around here they have cop cars with license plate readers on them that constantly scan plates as the car drives by. It's a great way to perform a lot of searches without any involvement by the officer in the car and can alert them to stolen cars, cars with owners who have warrants, etc. Great idea IMO.
Are you certain of that? Have you committed to memory every law on the books, and follow them at all times? Even those which may contradict one another?
(Given the number of laws we've got, coupled with the skill level seen in computer programming, I'm going to say that it's quite likely that there are very contradictory laws, without having specific examples. Our book of laws is like a huge computer program, written in an even more, and sometimes deliberately, convoluted way, without the benefit of a compiler program to tell us where it might be screwed up.)
