As intrusive as the Google Glass has proven to be, it will only be worse when observation recording tech is more difficult to detect.

I disagree. The exact opposite: when people stop noticing, they will stop caring. It won't be perceived as intrusive anymore, and people will be less annoyed by it.

It's the conspicuousness of the camera in Google Glass, the constant reminder that you might be recorded, that makes most people feel creeped out. For the previous decade leading up to that product, nobody cared about small+cheap camera tech itself. And people walk/drive by fixed-position cameras all the time, and don't give a fuck there either. Peoples's behavior shows that "intrusiveness" happens when a cameras looks like a camera, and I suspect it also has something to do with being face-level, literally "in your face" and you're making eye contact with it, unlike the case with less conspicuous cameras. It was never about privacy; it's some aspect of self-consciousness kind of related to privacy, but a different thing.

You might say "maybe you, but I sure care. Hell yes it's about privacy." Of course you say that. I'm talking about how people behave and the emotions they display. Not their innermost secret thoughts that they are always terrified to express in voting booths or policy decisions, yet are happy to speak of on the Internet.

You know, the Internet, where they don't have a camera in their face making them all self-conscious! The Internet, where instead of a terrifying 1x1 pixel image that makes you think "WTF is that? That's weird! Are you watching me?" you now instead see a bunch of "like buttons" which are obviously for liking things, not getting your browser to send a request to an unrelated tracking server.

In addition, there's a certain inevitability about it all. The cameras have been there a long time, there are more today, and there will be even more tomorrow. You can't do anything about it, except stay at home. So you'll either accept or you'll go insane and get selected out. You'll handle it. (Contrast that to Google Glass, the one small camera out of the hundreds out there, that you actually recognize and is also rare enough that there's little social cost to shunning. With GG you can refuse to accept and also stay within social norms, so GG is different.)

the Constitution is a blacklist of things government is not allowed to do, not a whitelist of things Citizens ARE allowed to do.

I get your sentiment, and support it, but I must quibble on a minor point: The main body of the Constitution is a whitelist of duties the government is charged with, and the means for doing so. The first ten amendments, The Bill of Rights, is a blacklist of things the government is forbidden from doing without a constitutional amendment. The 9th and 10th amendments specify that the Bill of Rights, being a blacklist, is not to be interpreted as a whitelist of citizen rights.

The only defense is to give them just barely enough resources to do their job, ... It's all about taxes ... there are but a handful of congresscritters who actually are for less government spending,

Are you unhappy with taxes or with budget allocation? The first and third part above are about budget allocation, which, unfortunately, has very little to do with taxation. The middle part is about taxes, which, unfortunately, have very little to do with budget allocation.

I favor reducing spending and increasing taxes. That is because I am a fiscal conservative and we are currently running a wildly excessive deficit. I believe in running a balanced budget except during exceptional economic downturns, in which a short-term deficit is fiscally prudent for the long-term outcome, and in times of plenty, when a short term surplus prepares our larder for the next downturn.

Conflating reductions in spending with reductions in taxation is a premeditated psychological manipulation tactic. There are bad people out there who want to maximize their personal short-term outcome by cranking up the deficit and damn the consequences to the economy. Those people are not helpful to America. Do not fall victim to the false equivalence of taxation and spending.

You just outed our spies in your network and you expect us to sign a no-spy list? Come again when we have undermined your security enough that you're as safe as the other countries we pretty much already own.

In other words, we'll only not spy on you if you hand over what we want willingly.

Bitcoin's primary purpose is to traffic/launder money and goods.

Objection. Will stipulate that its primary purpose is to traffic. But I call mega-bullshit on its primary or even secondary purpose being to launder, though there might be a way one could use Bitcoin for that.

Or Ubuntu and other popular distro to do something like this:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/148440

Then it's normal for people to have encrypted stuff on their drives that they can't decrypt. And thus a "reasonable man" could not be expected to be able to decrypt such stuff even if he cooperated fully. They could be using full disk crypto with an encrypted container file that they can't decrypt. They can decrypt the first but not the second (or maybe they can - it becomes harder to tell :) ).

But once a popular OS has stuff like this by default, it's much easier for the defence to argue that you can't do it.

Of course in this case - the guy has been supplying wrong passwords, so unless you can show it was out of desperation and/or due to duress, he'd still be in trouble.

Sometimes people take turns driving the same car - maybe even on the same day as part of the same journey (road trip).

Not always easy to remember who was driving at the time in question especially if they only send the stuff months later.

It's the wrong approach if you just want a prosthetic memory to help people remember stuff.

To have a prosthetic memory what you need is a computer that can remember stuff - video, audio, photos, text etc. Preferably wearable. Then what you need is to attach a device to appropriate parts of your brain that reads thought patterns that are distinctive depending on what you are thinking (elephants, purple etc). The device does NOT have to decipher or understand what you are thinking. All it needs to do is associate the stuff to be stored/recalled or even _commands_ with the thought pattern(s) you choose for it. I call these thought macros. See also: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3478821&cid=42956909

So you capture a video/audio/picture then you assign it a thought, or "current state" of mind. If you even have difficulty rethinking[1] a thought pattern, you could search by context and time (what I stored some time ago while at home).

There may need to be training phases like in speech recognition, and it's likely to work better with some people than others.

[1] The approach the military is taking would still have problems if people can't even remember that they are supposed to remember something- so whichever approach you'd need the ability to set up "prompts" based on time and context (and brain patterns).

I believe our technology is very very far from the state where you can drop in a memory device with memories already preloaded in, and which people can use to "remember that they are to remember something" (and even if we did, it would be scary and I won't want to have it).

Because there's evidence that memories are stored differently on different people's brains - some people have a halle berry neuron: http://www.caltech.edu/content/single-cell-recognition-halle-berry-brain-cell
http://phys.org/news4703.html
Seems to me to be a bit like a Bingo hall where a neuron yells bingo when it recognizes what the "announcer reads out". And the thing is those neurons aren't in the same place for everyone, they might not even be present for everyone, and one neuron might yell bingo for slightly different things (in one person they might have a neuron that goes bingo for Jennifer Aniston when it sees Jennifer Aniston + Brad Pitt, in another person it might not go bingo for the couple).

Which is also why I think that it's delusional for people to believe we'd soon be able to transfer our minds to other machines. You can transfer something, but it'll be far from everything.

What I want is a wearable computer that belongs to me. Not a device that I basically rent and that works for its maker more than me.

In other words, it's not bloody likely that I'll ever get one. Unless parts get cheap enough that building your own becomes an option.

I'm not sure what ignorance you're talking about here. How are people going to be unaware that they've had a chip implanted under their skin that stops them from getting pregnant?

But again, functionally, the birth control application isn't much different from a Depo-Provera shot or an IUD. The differences are A) it lasts somewhat longer, and B) you can turn it off without removing it.

We don't need to fantasize about what hypothetical dystopias might do -- we have an existing one to look at. In China, there are existing technologies that already do what you're talking about. They are backed up by fines and other punishments. Outside of China, trying to force surgery on an entire population is a risky move that could easily provoke a popular uprising. China spent decades under a Stalinist dictatorship before enacting the One Child Policy, and as such they are a pretty extreme case.

Do you know how hormonal contraception normally works? It doesn't take effect right away. You'd something high-dosage like a morning after pill or shot. Subcutaneous chips are designed to release low dosages over long periods of time.

Also, why would someone who's okay with institutionalized rape be worried about their victims getting pregnant?

I don't understand why you're more worried weird hypothetical dystopias than the kinds of evil that are already happening.

Sorry, perhaps I was unclear. I was responding specifically to your statement about family planning, not to the device described in the article. As for the device, it seems to be targeted at areas where people don't have good access to medicine (probably Sub-Saharan Africa), and things like regular birth control prescriptions or Depo-Provera shots aren't practical.

One could conceivably use this for forced birth control, but I don't see how it improves on forced sterilization or IUD insertion. Forced birth control is used to stop women from ever having children again, not to control fertility timing. Even in China they seem to rely more on fines and forced abortions than contraceptives. Also, lowering birth rates tends to make people wealthier and give them more free time, so if you want to keep your population poor and uneducated, forced birth control seems like a bad idea. And of course, outside of China and (apparently) Uzbekistan, it's forced pregnancy that's the problem, not forced birth control. I'd be more worried about this tech being used for psychiatric medications than birth control.

How does the Tor Project get safe harbor? They're not an ISP.

In that case, it gets thrown out one step sooner, since they're even less involved than an ISP would be.

having a generation of students that don't know how to use pointers seems, rather scary to me.

We've managed to get along with the first one, so another one won't be much worse.