I know I'm late to the discussion, but I thought I'd throw this in for thought.

As long as we're not talking about censorship, I really think this .xxx thing could work. Think about it: somebody looking for porn (he knows what he wants) will look in the .xxx part of the internet, while anybody else will avoid the .xxx. As long as nobody is evesdropping (blackmail, anyone?) or censoring by domain name, the porno website owners have no reason to use anything other than the .xxx domain. As a porn site operator, why would you go out of your way to try and reach people you know don't want what you're selling when you already have a niche market singled out for you?

Yes, I realize Goatse and the like will continue exist, but that's an obvious exception for obvious reasons.

And now they have your Slashdot UID. If they didn't have your name before, they probably have it now...

Avira saw part of a program (called "Avira") that bombards the user with pop-ups, scaring them, and asking for money every year. It acted accordingly. The only shocking thing here is that it actually worked.

Nah, it just can't stop touching itself.

Think bigger -- Fox News, being so radically right wing as it is, represents a huge threat to public workers, safety nets, and generally anything that doesn't immediately benefit the elite class. Even if this ends up hurting News Corp's viewer base (the delusional), it will mean less of this blockading politics in the name of tax cuts for wealthy, less wars of conquest, and less of this anti-union vendetta being pushed on public employees. If they're as leftist as you say, then their workers would probably also like it if the propaganda machine were to die down.

Enough of us here complain about News Corp, Murdoch, Fox, etc. that it's probably relevant enough for our purposes. If this goes anywhere, it's really big news and it does matter. Besides, it's not like this was news-for-nerds(TM) either.

let me get this straight - now the government is actually paying people whose job description is to sit around on Facebook all day? And we're still trying to cut programs that benefit society...

It sounds like this is detecting signs of people's behavior changing as they sidestep their inhibitory mechanisms, or in basic terms that they're nervous doing something they know is wrong and the system is detecting their nervousness. Any ideas on how will this pre-screening work on sociopaths, who don't feel any remorse or commitment to societal morals or societal norms? Someone who doesn't experience the human inhibitory reflex? Someone with an anxiety disorder, or otherwise has a (non-criminal) reason to be nervous?

The Citizens United decision will be overturned? No? Didn't think so. Free speech is a corporation's right, but only a privilege for citizens. I always wondered why Oprah got sued for talking about beef, so I guess this explains a few things...

First off, as the original article said, and I restated, this is not constant. It's a clip-on that the children wear while outside and under supervision of day care staff. I suppose if the parents become enthralled with the idea and decided to take the GPS devices home for their own 24/7 user it might be, but as of yet there is no indication that has happened. As for the conditioning, that's debatable. Some types of Orwellian or authoritarian oversight will condition children to accept it as a normal part of society, much like Libyans accept oppression as normal. However, this seems rather benign so I think even if the children know what it is it probably won't brainwash them all that badly. Now airport security at the entrances to their schools...

FTA:

I am the last person to defend GPS technology, or any of this other Orwellian bullshit that seems to be the norm, but this is a non-story loaded with buzzwords that the submitter knew would immediately rile us up (it was enough to get me to RTFA, at least...). The technology is being used to supplement the daycare staff's supervision, and alert them early on when a child takes off. This clip-on is not going to prevent the child from intentionally running off, and an abductor will just remove it (if he's not an idiot as some are). However, if the child wanders off -- which believe me it happens all the time -- they can find him/her more quickly and not risk another child getting lost in the time spend looking for the first one.

Looking after maybe 1 or 2 children and this is going to happen sometimes. Looking after several dozen and this kind of solution seems practical. It's not like they're implanting something in the children to monitor their every move at home or initiate them into our totalitarian surveillance state of fear or what have you. Yes it has controversies (what is the GPS company going to do with the data? how hard would it be for some predator to intercept the data stream?), but not on the scale that the submitter has everyone worried about. Congratulations, you all have been trolled.

You mean like those riots we did right after Osama bin Laden died?

TFA says it's LoJack. You may not have known, but LoJack is embedded in the BIOS so the backdoor program (which is whitelisted by most AVs) gets silently restored each time Windows is re-installed. Unless the buyer is installing Linux, it doesn't matter how many times you reinstall the OS because the loJack will re-install from the motherboard each time.

I'll bet Richard Stallman would have something to say about this...