Probably not that predictable. The atrocity at that point might be: must be implanted in your butt to work, or automatically sniffs out and takes control of your car or flying drone, etc.

"effecience was improved"

I'm sure it was.

'At least, I think those bars are showing percentages."

Can you not read the label on the y-axis? It says, "APPEARANCES ON THE WATCH LIST".

And anyway, the 3rd bar (the next one higher than Tea Party groups) is for "Acorn Successors", ACORN being the group that many Republicans blame for electing Obama in the first place. So your arguments seem to be in a shambles.

"The research could be used for health-tracking apps, baby monitors, and for the military and law enforcement."

Yeah, lead with the health-tracking and baby monitors, which actually benefits the subject, such that the subject would happily allow a monitor right next to them, and thus "through the walls" monitoring will never, ever get used.

Bury the bit about using it shoot people who break a drug law, or a resister of some foreign tyranny, in a way that they never have a chance to see it coming, which is how this will actually get used.

Ugh.

[Citation needed.]

"humans are not all good guys looking out for societies interests, but their own."

Let me flip this a bit. Most humans are empathetic and actually do look out for those in their community around them (society, if you wish to call it that). But a small number are indeed sociopaths who look out only for themselves. From a game-theory perspective, the more Utopian a society becomes (i.e., trusting of others), the more advantage and profit there is to being a scam-artist sociopath. So there is a hard-core selection for a small number of these people. In fact, it does seem likely that our institutions and governments are more often run by sociopaths than otherwise. Being willing to step on another man's neck is fairly rare but does have its rewards, unfortunately.

There's your summary, well done.

"If the educators are gathering data that showing people who failed or never took geometry end up making 50% less more than students who do pass geometry, they will more than likely look to tailor the curriculum to help students develop the skills and abilities required to pass geometry."

In schools, there are (at least) opposing camps: the educators (teachers in classrooms with students) and administrators (pointy-haired bosses). It's easy to overlook the very deep disconnect that these groups have within a school system. In the last 20-30 years, a tipping point has been crossed in which more money is spent on administration than teaching; shared governance has basically booted teachers to the curb, with the biggest decisions by admins only; most college teachers being contingent adjunct faculty (not tenured with protection from admin retaliation), etc.

Anyway, the people doing these giant database projects are generally not the educators you're looking for. They're Bill Gates, they're outside think tanks, they're private companies looking to sell a product and make a buck. In most high schools now the educators are not even in charge of the curriculum anymore, so they couldn't change it if they wanted to. I was talking to a local high school teacher who told me that he had to write down and formally file paperwork on any question or response who might deliver in the classroom; if an administrator walked in the room and heard him answering a question from a student that wasn't on the filed lesson plan, then he would receive an "unacceptable" job performance rating for that day. Stuff like that. The tighter you squeeze...

Citation needed, like this:

"Generally the combination of both the in-body citation and the bibliographic entry constitutes what is commonly thought of as a citation (whereas bibliographic entries by themselves are not)." [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citation]

You need a short on-point quote, plus the reference. Simply naming an article or book (bibliographic entry) does not count. You've still said absolutely nothing that actually relates to the gggggp post. Tends to make one think of those people who go on about quantum stuff without really knowing anything about it.

Thanks again for telling us how it can't be explained.

Another option: Lobby for regulation to make this kind of move against the communications utility illegal.

Thank you for that link to an 8,000-word article which doesn't initially seem related to your comment. Can the point be addressed in a key quote or summary paragraph?

That's always what it seems like to me, too. I haven't yet heard a coherent explanation why quantum entanglement is any different from that.

(My own metaphor involved two differently-colored hamsters in an opaque tube, yours is probably better.)

"Or is there anybody here naive enough to believe that other nations don't do this?"

I believe there's quite a few nations that don't even have the technical capacity to record and search every citizen's phone, email, video, and text communications. Of course the U.S. was first in that regard.

You always get that in the first 5 minutes of an economics course (to theoretically cover their ass), and then the rest of course is about money. They don't really have any way to verify, measure, or make predictions based on that piece of dogma.