The Future Attribute Screening Technology (FAST) project is "designed to track and monitor, among other inputs, body movements, voice pitch changes, prosody changes (alterations in the rhythm and intonation of speech), eye movements, body heat changes, and breathing patterns
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?
All you've said in the above is true. But it still conditions the children to believe that constant electronic surveillance by authority figures is normal.
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...
The system is not in anyway meant to replace teachers or aids, but to simply enhance their watchful eyes and increase safety. Although it cannot prevent a child from running off, it can provide an alert to chaperones, who are outnumbered by their students.
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.
This is probably a screw-up more than censorship. Given the popularity of Blogspot, I suspect the people who did this just simply entered in a website, got an IP address, and added an iptables rule or equivalent, without looking or realizing what they were blocking. Hell, that could even be scripted, and I could easily see an intern or low-level staff having just entered "leakymails.blogspot.com" into a script without knowing what happened behind the scenes. I know ISPs hate net neutrality, but it's really not in their best interests to completely cut off access to blogspot.com; even if they have a monopoly they're just going to get flooded with complaints, with real competitive advantage in return to justify the added cost.
Barring a simple but stupid mistake like this from someone routing traffic, IANAL but it should not be the ISP's responsibility to not only screw with people's internet access at the request of the government, but go the extra mile and cut off access to the entire service provider. If we allow that kind of action, then we'll see a whole array of other sites getting blocked at a national level. Then, in an effort to keep themselves accessible around the world, we'll see hosting providers around the world bend over backwards to censor themselves and their users just because somebody, somewhere in the world, might object to some kind of political content one of their users posted.
No, anyone who thinks this will effectively censor the websites in question has never worked as a network engineer. If they think messing with the DNS will comply with the court order, then they're probably spot on (how many judges do you know who will be able to work around that, or even know the difference?), and the nerdy people who will change their DNS settings to get around it are also probably not far from using a proxy to access the site in question, which will, incidentally, bypass this type of filter.
Given the popularity of Blogspot, I suspect the people who did this just simply entered in a website, got an IP address, and added an iptables rule or equivalent, without looking or realizing what they were blocking. Hell, that could even be scripted, and I could easily see an intern or low-level staff having just entered "leakymails.blogspot.com" into a script without knowing what happened behind the scenes. I know ISPs hate net neutrality, but it's really not in their best interests to completely cut off access to blogspot.com; even if they have a monopoly they're just going to get flooded with complaints, with real competitive advantage in return to justify the added cost.
Barring a simple but stupid mistake like this from someone routing traffic, IANAL but it should not be the ISP's responsibility to not only screw with people's internet access at the request of the government, but go the extra mile and cut off access to the entire service provider. If we allow that kind of action, then we'll see a whole array of other sites getting blocked at a national level. Then, in an effort to keep themselves accessible around the world, we'll see hosting providers around the world bend over backwards to censor themselves and their users just because somebody, somewhere in the world, might object to some kind of political content one of their users posted.
IP blocking is a blunt method of filtering content that can erase from view large swaths of innocuous sites by virtue of the fact that they are hosted on the same IP address as the site that was intended to be censored. One such example of overblocking by IP address can be found in India, where the IP blocking of a Hindu Unity website (blocked by an order from Mumbai police) resulted in the blocking of several other, unrelated sites. As Andrade points out, "There are other less restrictive technical procedures than the one used, which allow ISPs to comply with court orders fully, while affecting only the sites involved."
Would have been nice to cite the full-size image, or the article in which it appears, rather than a badly resized Google image result, but whatever. The graph you cited compares hourly wages to productivity, and I'm not sure how that relates to standard of living rather than employee productivity. Within its context the graph pretty poorly done; the axis aren't labeled ($140 per hour in 2005?), the description is vague, nothing is said about what was actually measured (or how) and I'd be willing to bet any mention of standard of living doesn't even account for inflation over the 55 years it covers.
Any serious analysis (read: not partisan) of standard of living will show that for most people in the US in the last 30 years, it's gotten better.
Now go and enlighten yourself.
Forgive me for being blunt here, but based on your original post (with a questionable source), and your relatively hostile response to criticism of said post, it looks like the only person stuck on partisan analysis here is you.
In summary, the entire linked article is just a conservative cherry-picking economic talking points to give liberals and conservatives in a scientific-looking survey, then present anybody who disagrees with his beliefs as uninformed.
"Experience has proved that some people indeed know everything." -- Russell Baker
