I accept your point that it is impressive that such a mountain of suck runs so effectively on MySQL. However it is still a mountain of suck. Or to put it another way, I don't think computers were invented so some mini bill gates can try to cajole me into "poking" my friends for the purposes of selling advertising.

This all seems pretty simple. You record every access, all accesses will be audited at a later stage by an oversight committee. 99% of cases are automatically handled (e.g. doctor accessing records for his patient day after admission) but cases which are not clear are reviewed. Any employee who accesses records has to explain his rationale for doing so. If the rationale doesn't hold up, they are disciplined / sacked. A warning explaining this comes up when you try to access records. I would imagine the guarantee of losing your job would curtail the curiosity of most nosy employees, and while the sacking might be post-hoc, their apprehension will be before the fact.

These are the guys that brought you the credit crunch. Nice to see nothing has changed.

I agree. The party line seems to be "Things like Wikileaks are good, because they deny privacy to other people. Things like car number plate recognition are bad, because they deny privacy to us." I personally hope that personal privacy is eroded at the expense of public information. I'm here to learn, not to cheat, and I'm not afraid of anyone.

It's a religious movement - after Marxism was totally discredited, these guys have got to believe that someone is out to get them. Monsanto, Nike, GAP, Starbucks. I waded through some anti-globalisation literature, there's a whole post-modern framework ("counter-narrative") behind some of these guys. Total bullshit of course, but new religions usually are. Their form of the armageddon is that man's sinful ways (capitalism, scientific advance, industry, the evil pursuit of money) will lead to an ecological catastrophe. They don't provide any solutions, because that's not their job.

Penrose's entire argument (in "The Emperor's New Mind") for why consciousness was quantum mechanical was that a computer could not be concious, because it could not answer the question "how do you feel?" - to which I respond "can I have my money back". Scientists like Penrose, Hawking and Dawkins should be locked up for their own good when they start mumbling about philosophy and God. They would be very quick to point fingers if the Dalai Lama or Amartya Sen started making statements about microbiology or quantum gravity based on their philosophical skill.

I think we are supposed to go "back to nature" - like the end of Battlestar Galactica, we give up our technology. After 95% of the population have starved to death, we could have a perfectly sustainable life "in harmony" with nature - i.e. up until the point something less conflicted evolves to kill us all. I think the enviro-crowd's anti-industrial ideas come from people like Rousseau and Marx, and just like Rousseau and Marx, they are totally reliant on the culture they criticize.

So to summarise your argument: the police force is corrupt, therefore anything that gives the police force information is bad, because they misuse whatever power they have. These people are armed with guns, they have great power to tamper with the criminal system, but you are particularly worried that they might be able to track a car that goes into a "gay district". Why don't you follow your argument to the logical conclusion, and dissolve the police force? We could all police ourselves, with our .44s.

Why should anyone be alarmed about Fukushima? Let's do some risk analysis. What do you think the severity of the problem is? I assume we can limit this to how many people do you think are going to die. What do you think the probability is? For me, I estimate the probability of more than 100 people dying is less than 1 in a million, even granted the one in a thousand events that overtook the reactor have happened. If the public reaction is reasonable, then it should be a reasonable reaction to these figures - which are something like the number of people that die on the roads in a day. If you are factoring an unreasonable public reaction into your analysis (i.e. germans banning all nuclear power), then we might as well stop arguing - they could ban nuclear power for any reason (and effectively, they already have banned nuclear power - there are very few new nuclear plants in the US or Europe, due to irrational public fear). We slashdotters understand rationality, and nuclear power, and pity the poor idiots who are trapped by their ignorance into a carbon burning future.

This argument doesn't work. If people gave press to preventable death, they would highlight obesity, gun ownership and safe driving. The reason people are scared of nuclear power is because they do not understand the issue. The reason people live in hurricane afflicted areas is probably because they do not think it will happen to them. If the same number of people died from artificial nuclear radiation in Florida as die from hurricanes, can you imagine the hysteria?

Well, lucky for you that the legal system requires your guilt to be proven beyond reasonable doubt. If you told someone you were going down that road, by your logic, you would be arrested. So effectively what you are saying is, the police are going to fit someone up for this crime. If they have more information, it is more likely to be me. I don't see how you can deduce that - and since in your world, law enforcement is random anyway, what does it even matter - it's not fair either with or without the cameras. I think the real point of this argument is this gives information and power to the state, and the police, something which slashdotters are against, since they have an instinctive distrust of authority. Slashdotters might be against authority, but that doesn't mean authority is wrong.

Sorry mate, but you sound insane. You're busy analysing the wording in a quote that has been paraphrased by the journalist. Would you care to analyse the line "Mr. Edwards’s head had been wrapped in plastic, and his throat appeared to have been slashed." Is that the kind of civil liberty you are so keen to protect?

If you don't like it, why? I like my life, where people who commit crimes are actually tracked down by the state and held. You might not believe it, but the police can actually gain access to your house if they can show evidence that you committed a crime. If you say something to your neighbour about how your wife won't be coming back again, ever, he can be sure of that, they can actually use his testimony in court - almost like they have recording devices everywhere. Police can ask you hard questions, try to trip you up, even lie to you to make you incriminate yourself. If any of these methods were invented today, would you allow them? Tech is cool and all, but somehow I don't think automatic reg plate recognition would have made things a great deal easier for Adolf.