The issue isn't what the teachers are doing with the data. That's a grease stain from the real horror here.

The issue is, as we go forward, ebook readers will be pretty much the only way kids read library books and any other words, for that matter. When the libraries slowly shut down the paper stacks, we will be looking at a system that as a matter of course tracks every word that a human child, or adult, later, will input into their skulls.

This means: tracking for seditious or suspicious writings. Personality analysis, broken down by year, type, and growth of particular concentration of interest. I'm not saying they will be correct analyses - but they don't have to be, as credit scores and polygraph use attests.

Our society shows, doubtlessly, that such metrics will be undertaken for "security" reasons. Mostly, really, it will be done "because power". Power is all the reason they will ever need. The ability to track not only location, associations, but the very thoughts you, as a kid and beyond, are reading and processing to make you, you.

Billions of paper books will still exist, of course, and smart people will read those to keep their reading habits off the radar, but for the most part, people will accept the monitoring. Watch what you say, watch what you do, and of course watch what you read. And you have nothing to worry about, naturally, if you don't read the wrong things, we will say.

This is hell.

I should have wrote, "determined to end all life on Earth, if that's what it took, to insure Karl Marx would never win."

Patton wanted to immediately invade the Soviet Union at the end of WWII. A hell of a lot of Congresscritters and other commieharks wanted to take them out before they could spread into our world, and sleep with our women, I suppose. These characters built up the nuke force, on rockets, long before the Soviets got started building theirs. They lied to us and themselves about the power and intent of the Russians, and made the issue of who was right into a argument that would end the world.

The sole idea was to nuke the Soviets - let's not kid ourselves - if they showed signs of winning the war for the finances of the world. The Soviets never intended to blow up the world to win - but we would have done it in a heartbeat, "for freedom". Most people alive today have no inkling how fucking crazy America was about communism back then. They would have burned life out forever to save the capitalist system. The least politically sophisticated people on the planet have held the kill switch for generations - and they still don't get that they almost wiped out life forever. And it ain't over - we still are sitting on the "kill 'em for God" switches. Hell, we're rebuilding the nuke arsenal. Power, ours, that's what it always was about, and we are still willing to kill everything to win. Not that we would do it on a whim - but we reserve the right to do so.

The ocean is big, and pirates are very small. Hard to spot. Sort of like muggers; not many, but they pop up anywhere. Also, Somali businessmen are financing theses operations for profit - ransom is lucrative. This isn't about kids on a boat. This is big business (while it lasts).

Easier to deliver a bomb on a U-Haul. We need to let the Sixties go. Da Missiles aren't the big threat every was told to fear, never were. Bombs are small. You can put them anywhere. Don't need Rocket Boy to deliver them.

The world didn't die by fire because the world isn't suicidal. And frankly, only the US was determined to end all life on Earth, to insure Karl Marx would never win. Death before decapitalization, I guess.

Government spending is bad, unless of course you are mounting infrared lasers on Navy ships to shoot down Zeroes. Banzai!

Austerity my tired buttocks. They just don't like that, what was it, 48%. Spending is good when you fund jobs programs that make layzers.

Next up: lasers on planes, which will make targeted assassinations done so much more quietly.

But they kinda do make such jokes. They don't do it when you're around. If you managed to overhear it, you'd be amused and shocked, "uncomfortable", I guess.

I think, extrapolating from Richards' definition of racism, which is that only the historically powerful can be racist (white can be, black cannot be), then she doesn't believe, generally, that women can be sexist. So she can make socks-down-the-pants jokes, and have no moral qualms about making you uncomfortable. By definition, she can pretty much say what she likes; you, as a man, cannot.

I think that we've come a LONG way from, say, the atmosphere of the fifties, when men were pigs and proud of it. Consideration is now part of our modern complete breakfast.

But. At some point, being "uncomfortable" become a passive-aggressive way of acquiring iron-fisted power over others. In this case, she misheard and over-reacted to others making much the same kind of joke she herself has tweeted. If she has tweeted such, she has spoken such, so she is no stranger to silly off-color humor. So the issue, again, is who has the power here - she does.

Another issue is the atmosphere of watch what you say, watch what you do which is, frankly, VERY uncomfortable to live with. It casts a pall, not because you can't make dongle jokes, but because, today the dongle joke, tomorrow the fill-in-whatever-someone-wants-censored. The function, once written, can be supplied any argument. Power over speech, over action, should be limited, not open-ended. She ended, or tried to end, the jobs, perhaps the careers, of two men. And she managed one. And unintentionally ended her own job. Why - perhaps because she misapplied her power in the workplace.

One might wonder why I go on about surveillance in other posts, and this is one illustration why - in a world where a camera and mic can be anywhere, you are in a prison, no matter what comfy chairs there might be there. Privacy of some sort, even if it is just for talking with someone sitting next to you, is essential for a civil society - living in fear of sudden discovery and loss of career is no way for a human to live. Humans who must live like that are pretty much prisoners.

Eh, 'nuff.

Copyright violations were made criminal felonies over a decade ago. That battle was lost when almost no one was looking.

Then EVERYthing and ANYthing you do may and perhaps almost certainly will get you into trouble. Just being in a cop's presence, and catching his eye, can destroy your life. Cameras and recordings don't help; those are evidence and will be confiscated and turned over to the police and prosecutors. Or the camera will simply be yanked and destroyed at the scene, along with the box it is connected to. If not that, then if anything in those recordings is adverse to the prosecutors' case, and if they have a vested interest in hurting you, that evidence will be destroyed or lost. I've seen it happen.

We've no chance. If you aren't powerful or rich enough to hire help, you are dog food to them. The end result is a *very* compliant citizenry. Which is apparent in every way.

A gasoline engine is horrendously inefficient. Only about 30% of the energy from burning the dead dinos is converted to motion - the rest is waste heat.

Electric motors, much more efficient. What you lose at the power plant you get back in miles per erg, polution-wise.

And if we had gone to nuclear plants or wind or solar, there'd be NO pollution from driving electric cars. We made the choice for coal, because it was easy, and because we fallaciously believe that a nuke plant disaster is worse than pounding trillions of pounds of carbon into the atmosphere. Also a little deal with free market ideological nuttery, which believes new tech should pay its own way and old tech somehow isn't massively subsidized (free land, tax gifts, wars to get the land).

Yes, he did. It was ten degrees warmer.

No. A thing happened, or it did not. Reality is not "in the middle".

A "he-said-she-said pissing contest"? If he hadn't fought back, it would now be common understanding that the Tesla was a piece of shit that died on a NYT reporter. It's STILL common understanding that somehow a Tesla failed on Top Gear. Perception is absolutely reality. He had to hit back brutally and immediately, or Tesla would have been Apteraed.

To be fair, the "NYT" didn't lie - Broder did. The NYT backed up one of their journalists. Which they should! You don't throw your soldiers out into the enemies tender mercies, just 'cause. But if Broder lied - or was confused - then he has lost their protection, one would think. Let's see how this plays out. Reportorial lying is not well received at any paper.

The "grey area" is that there are not enough decent jobs. Paging the Ayn Randites and the Free Traders: you've made a mess. No more factories, no more office jobs, outsourced, centralized, only cheap youth wanted, and low wages with no insurance. Victory.

Also, women can fail to find work because they've been convicted of, say, marijuana possession and no longer can get student loans, or get a job because they are former felons. Hell, you can't even enter Canada if you've been convicted of a pot crime. We've new corporate services that do nothing by track your criminal and financial history and provide reports to our new lords. You get a bad score, you don't exist. How many millions of people can't get a good job because of our new data lords? In the old days, you could move out of state and try to start over. No more. No where in the world to start over.

When we sold Russia out from under its citizens in the early Nineties, half the population lost their jobs and now lives in perpetual poverty. The single greatest supplier of young desperate, cheap, porn actresses in the world, all from Shock Doctrineing the Soviet Union into hell.

You want a better world? Start taxing rich people, pass laws to create jobs, and re-create the middle classes. They need jobs, good paying jobs.

The Bible Belt is the best place (worst?) to find strip clubs and brothels. Jesus wants him sum hookers, apparently.

The harder you squeeze down on human sexuality, the worse the twisted mentalities the prohibition spawns. Victorian England invented bondage and whipping because, not in spite of, its incessant antisexuality. Lock human sexuality in the dark, and watch the monsters come out.

Let's try this: stop trying to control people. Let women pose nude if they want to. Let men pay to look if they like. Let them take whatever drugs they like, as long as they don't hurt anyone else and can pay their own medical bills. Stop inventing new and more insane way reasons to break people's doors in and shoot their dogs.

To those who would make us better:

Stop trying to FIX us. Fix yourselves, you repressed little wankers... the people most consumed with porn and kiddie porn always have the biggest collections. Self-loathing weasels, trying to vent their guilty consciences on others, punishing them instead of themselves.

You can't FIX people. People are people. The scariest monsters in history are the effete sociological masters, self-styled, who set out to fix the human race.