Fox News never showed the 60,000+ Iraqis we incinerated, shot, and crushed to death. Nor the burnt and mangled children and adults who survived our attacks. Or the prison camps, mostly holding people who we felt like might be a problem - and who are probably still in the camps. If you wanted to cover such things, you could go to hell, as far as the military was concerned. People died finding truth while Fox's old draft avoiding men and MILFy women pseudonewspeople in tight skirts sat in air-conditioned studios and made. Shit. Up.

And in another decade, that system is overwhelmed, and in two more decades, useless. Population growth problems expand geometrically, not linearly. Too many people in too little space trying to do things as their great-great-great-grandparents did on the open prairies and mountainsides. No matter what is done, in one or two generations it is overcome again. You have to shoot where the bird is gonna be, not where it is - solutions that solve your generation's problem will be a disaster to a future generations who are much more numerous, not to mention their proclivities to consume more each year.

Can't overpopulate and not expect consequences. The complications arrive on a hockey-stick curve, as geometric growth is *not* linear. The complexity of the structure to support that population builds slowly, then accelerates rapidly - and finally cannot be sustained. And as taxes don't expand geometrically, the lines cross and infrastructure failure commences. And that already happened; we can't - or won't- raise enough money to fix the aggregate and growing backlog of repair of structures our grandparents started. And perhaps shouldn't - open roads and suburbs made sense when there were a hundred million people. A half-billion people will grind the flow to a halt - and their very presence makes it nearly impossible to expand existing roads or train lines. We could: 1) keep pretending 1950 will last forever, and fail. 2) increase taxes and become ferocious about emminent domain and build the train lines we need whereever they need to be. 3) learn to tunnel cheaply and extensively and build out underground 4) fly 5) control population growth and the hell that comes with it when it achieves orbital velocity, as it is now - accept a slow rollback period while supporting a gigantic population of aging people for a few decades, then a stable, smaller population could be sustained at the level of expenditure we care to support (expenditure not being just money - we expend wildlife and ecologies to expand our numbers).

America declared overpopulation a solved problem - because it can't do math. Nothing can grow forever in a closed system.

Careful. He'll "shuuussshhhh" you, (adults are speaking). Or is that just female reporters?

And gets you a pile of dead people and mutated viruses back on the march. Viruses don't care about market forces.

Astounding - every post labelling Christie as an idiot has been modded down to zero and below.

He IS a total fucking idiot.

And Republicans are now out of mod points.

Never disappoints, this moron. He'll go to the wall for the stoopid. Envy, greed, arrogance, vengeance, ignorance, and a willingness to pander for fools.
Happy measles epidemics, everyone.

Someone will always be smarter than you, no matter how many layers of security you pile on. Don't let your car be opened remotely. I guess we'll all have to learn the hard way not to give up control of our own property for a handful of glittery dust.

I started out admiring disruptive tech. As the years rolled on, I noted that computation and networking were no longer under our control; we've no choice in how we are connected, nor to which computers we use, for instance in cases such as these. The motivation for change is to make more money, first, and next to improve surveillance and control. Convenience is just a by-broduct.
I see no reason to not-use a key to open my door. At least the thief has to be physically present to break into a mechanical locked door. Networked computers will never be secure, not when backdoors are mandated by manufacturers and cops of all sorts. And those backdoors will be in the hands of crooks in months if not hours. Hell, the crooks are finding the backdoors the cops-of-all-sorts then use themselves.
Waiting on my Elio. eliomotors.com Back to the future. K.I.S.S.
And hey, it's possible to build a mechanically locked door no AAA locksmith can open. It's just that we WANT to be able to break into our own cars, if necessary. The key words being "we" and "our own".

Who asked for this?
The industry eagerness to bug and track everything is universal. Why? The first answer is always: money. The second, and most accurately stated: power. Knowing where everyone is, and what they are doing, is power. But that power is not for schmucks.
Pity we didn't have this universal eagerness to limit population growth, or control suburban land conversion, or to colonize free space with habitats. But power over others? No fucking limits.
Power, by the way, means Occupies are impossible to pull off. Protests. Contrary political movements, ultimately. Other words, any challenge to seated power is gonna be nearly impossible.
Hell, in England, they're already starting dossiers on kintergarteners. Just monitor what they read and do all their lives, and soon there won't be a population that even thinks of rebellion of any sort. Or could talk about it without systems monitoring and integrating the information for future suppression. And yes, I'm aware that that sounds "paranoid". But once again, I'm not predicting, I'm telling you what's already happened.
To take this back to the point of the article, there is no WAY that this eagerly sought supersaturated net of bugs - and that's what they are - will not be used for surveillance and control. I really don't need to know what is in my refrigerator that much.

Due process is meaningless as far as limiting behavior. It sorta means "customary" or "expected". Secret charges and secret courts and secret prisons have been permanently established in this country following due process. Process just rubber-stamps whatever the madhouse wants to do. The real dichotomy is what is illegal versus what is immoral or just plain wrong. Rules are morally neutral.

The people in this country cannot be trusted. The police are just an expression of the common culture. Given a choice, people prefer fascism, under whatever name you like. What was it Terry Pratchett said through the Patricican... what people want, what they really want, is that tomorrow be pretty much like today. They want stability and a perception of safety. To that end, they know no limits in restricting the efforts of their neighbors to not-be-like-every-else. From surveillance, to secret police and secret arrests, they support conformity and the Others getting their heads kicked in by the guards. The police are civilians, and they have no special belief system not held by the people they sometimes admit they work for... our culture likes authoritarian thugs (for use against troublemakers), so our police likes being authoritarian thugs when necessary.

In a video game they can. In the real world, they will fail to do so; Google and others are simply positing that the robot can drive better. It can on a test track. In the real world, no.

Again, I love this posting from 2010: (Great thread on this very subject, probably influenced me.) Better informed posters than I.

http://it.slashdot.org/story/1...
This post http://it.slashdot.org/comment...

"we already fixed it. its called 'trains'. (Score:5, Insightful)
by decora(1710862) on Tuesday December 20, 2011 @12:54AM (#38430976) Journal
the idea that a bunch of automatically piloted vehicles is somehow a better solution to city transport than mass-transit, it boggles my mind.
real people do not have money to maintain their cars properly. things are going to break. there are not going to be 'system administrators' to fix all the glitches that come up when cars start breaking down after a few years.
there will be problems. do i know which problems? no, but i know the main problem.
arrogance amongst revolutionaries. it is historically a pattern of the human species. declaring that nothing could go wrong is usually a precursor to a lot of things going wrong. not because the situation was unpredictable, but because human beings in an arrogant mindset tend to make a lot of mistakes, be reckless, and try to cover their asses when things go wrong.
but successful engineering is the anti-thesis of arrogance. nobody worth his salt is going to say 'what could go wrong'? they are going to have a list of 500 things that could go wrong, and all the ways they have tried to counter-act those wrong things happening."
Well said. Proof will be in the testing... on real roads with real cars. Oy.

http://it.slashdot.org/comment... Great thread on this subject. Here's a good post by a better writer than I:

"we already fixed it. its called 'trains'. (Score:5, Insightful)
by decora(1710862) on Tuesday December 20, 2011 @12:54AM (#38430976) Journal

the idea that a bunch of automatically piloted vehicles is somehow a better solution to city transport than mass-transit, it boggles my mind.

real people do not have money to maintain their cars properly. things are going to break. there are not going to be 'system administrators' to fix all the glitches that come up when cars start breaking down after a few years.

there will be problems. do i know which problems? no, but i know the main problem.

arrogance amongst revolutionaries. it is historically a pattern of the human species. declaring that nothing could go wrong is usually a precursor to a lot of things going wrong. not because the situation was unpredictable, but because human beings in an arrogant mindset tend to make a lot of mistakes, be reckless, and try to cover their asses when things go wrong.

but successful engineering is the anti-thesis of arrogance. nobody worth his salt is going to say 'what could go wrong'? they are going to have a list of 500 things that could go wrong, and all the ways they have tried to counter-act those wrong things happening."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...

Medical[edit]
  A bug in the code controlling the Therac-25 radiation therapy machine was directly responsible for at least five patient deaths in the 1980s when it administered excessive quantities of X-rays.[13][14][15]
  A Medtronic heart device was found vulnerable to remote attacks in March 2008.[16]

Funny: I remember this story. The USS Yorktown BSODed at sea when it let Window NT helm the ship.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U...
Smart ship testbed[edit]

From 1996 Yorktown was used as the testbed for the Navy's Smart Ship program. The ship was equipped with a network of 27 dual 200 MHz Pentium Pro-based machines running Windows NT 4.0 communicating over fiber-optic cable with a Pentium Pro-based server. This network was responsible for running the integrated control center on the bridge, monitoring condition assessment, damage control, machinery control and fuel control, monitoring the engines and navigating the ship. This system was predicted to save $2.8 million per year by reducing the ship's complement by 10%.

On 21 September 1997, while on maneuvers off the coast of Cape Charles, Virginia, a crew member entered a zero into a database field causing an attempted division by zero in the ship's Remote Data Base Manager, resulting in a buffer overflow which brought down all the machines on the network, causing the ship's propulsion system to fail.[6]

Anthony DiGiorgio, a civilian contractor with a 26-year history of working on Navy control systems, reported in 1998 that Yorktown had to be towed back to Norfolk Naval Station. Ron Redman, a deputy technical director with the Aegis Program Executive Office, backed up this claim, suggesting that such system failures had required Yorktown to be towed back to port several times.[7]

In 3 August 1998 issue of Government Computer News, a retraction by DiGiorgio was published. He claims the reporter altered his statements, and insists that he did not claim the Yorktown was towed into Norfolk. GCN stands by its story.[8]

Atlantic Fleet officials also denied the towing, reporting that Yorktown was "dead in the water" for just 2 hours and 45 minutes.[7] Captain Richard Rushton, commanding officer of Yorktown at the time of the incident, also denied that the ship had to be towed back to port, stating that the ship returned under its own power.[9]

Atlantic Fleet officials acknowledged that the Yorktown experienced what they termed "an engineering local area network casualty".[7] "We are putting equipment in the engine room that we cannot maintain and, when it fails, results in a critical failure," DiGiorgio said.[7]