Slashdot Mirror
Has Orwell's '1984' Come 22 Years Later?
gabec asks: "This weekend my mother bought a grille lighter, something like this butane lighter. The self-scanner at Kroger's locked itself up and paged a clerk, who had to enter our drivers license numbers into her kiosk before we could continue. Last week my girlfriend bought four peaches. An alert came up stating that peaches were a restricted item and she had to identify herself before being able to purchase such a decidedly high quantity of the dangerous fruit. My video games spy on me, reporting the applications I run, the websites I visit, the accounts of the people I IM. My ISP is being strong-armed into a two-year archive of each action I take online under the guise of catching pedophiles, the companies I trust to free information are my enemies, the people looking out for me are being watched. As if that weren't enough, my own computer spies on me daily, my bank has been compromised, my phone is tapped--has been for years--and my phone company is A-OK with it. What's a guy that doesn't even consider himself paranoid to think of the current state of affairs?" The sad state of affairs is that Big Brother probably became a quiet part of our lives a lot earlier. The big question now is: how much worse can it get?
Am I just accustomed to old ways? Does the new generation, born with these restrictions, feel the weight of these bonds and recoil from my fears as paranoia? What can I, a person with no political interests--a person that would really rather think that the people in office are there because they're looking out for us, our rights, and our freedoms and not because their short-sightedness is creating a police state--do to stem the tide?"
"What's a guy that doesn't even consider himself paranoid to think of the current state of affairs?"
First thought...more educated and informed than the masses of sheeples?
Seriously, I think a lot of us feel the same way and see that we aren't on a slippery slope any more. We are plummeting down a sheer drop off. The way I see it the government and big business will control more and more of our every day life as we lose more and more privacy and individual choices. Some of us will get sick of it and cash out and go live off the grid in the most remote boondocks we can find and some of us will suffer in relative silence and reminisce over the "good old days" before we lost so much of our privacy and constitutional rights. Others will never notice they lost anything. Maybe there will be another American revolution some day to try and put back into place a government whose altruistic ideals can be effected indefinitely. Hell, 200+ years is pretty good when looked at in the big picture of history but eventually power and money corrupt those who should be looking out for the good of everyone. I guess this sounds kind of defeatist but take the federal minimum wage as an example. How come 30 million people have to try to live on $5.15 an hour? How are their voices not heard? How are our voices not heard?
Money talks and the politicians and big business have the money.
I reserve the right to think for myself. Others' opinions are optional. Puppy on lap = typos...not illiteracy.
maybe the peaches issue was just a data entry glitch, but the rest of the items are true. I myself am very angry at the absurdity of age/license checks for purchasing cough medicine. As if the big drug dealers will be buying 6 oz bottles of cough syrup to make the hundreds of gallons of narcotic. "But a few high school students made small amounts of drugs with this!", cry the Nanny-State bleeding hearts! "Look at me, I care about the children, so I voted for this law", says the power-grubbing dirt bag politician. For that matter, I was recently at the grocery store behind a 50 year old man who was refused the sale of a bottle of gin because he forgot his ID. This society is going to get a big punch in the reset button real soon, as the rewards of this increasing collective stupidity are reaped. For the simple truth is, the government has neither the competence nor resources to protect everyone from themselves, from each other, and from the realities of life.
Besides peaches being a source of cyanide, also note that the only source of ricin, one of the most deadly poisons known to man, is castor beans.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Let's take a way back machine a little bit. Way back before big faceless corporations, people shopped at corner stores, where the manager knew them by name, knew what their regular order was, and for the habitual customers even had the order ready before the customer came in the store. You couldn't get yourself into too much trouble because everyone in town knew you on sight and all of your local relatives. More often than not the cops knew you by name, and not because you were in trouble but because they were as much a part of the community as you were. Privacy hasn't gone anywhere. If anything the world today has given us MORE privacy than ever before. The difference is not the level of privacy but the range of interested people. Before you worried about the local cops. These days, you only wory about them because they can pass the information to the feds whom you're really worried about. Privacy really honestly does not exist, unless you act in a way to preserve it. In the old days that meant shutting your blinds and not leaving your house. Well you have to do the same thing these days, just electronicaly. Sorry, you can't have a credit card if you want privacy because it isn't your money, it's theirs, and so they have an interest in what you buy. Likewise for your internet and phone connections, use a public service, expect it to be public. The only way to have privacy is to keep to yourself. People don't keep to themselves because it's anti social and destructive. But like it or not, there really wasn't ever any such thing as privacy.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
Id for grille lighters and peaches, huh? And why didn't you just walk away loudly commenting on the store's idiotic policy?
The peaches incident was probably a register mistake. But in a number of states you need to be 18 or older to purchase a lighter by state law. I tried to purchase one once when I was 17 so I could burn the trash out back like I had done every week for nearly a decade, and I was denied. Apparently the law presumes that lighters will only be used for smoking, and couldn't be used for things like, you know, burning trash, or making smores. It's another classic example of lawmakers restricting a wide spectrum of basic freedoms to fight a single pet cause of self-endangerment.
This is the same mentality as occurs in sweeping laws to fight "child pornography", and sweeping laws to fight violence in video games, and sweeping laws to protect people from the internet, or the prevention of pseudophedrine purchases for fear of meth labs getting it. If we could get people to stop asininely voting for politicians on the basis of those pet causes, then freedom would not be encroached nearly as much as it currently is.
What we are living in is a culture war between people who want personal freedom, and people who are immersed in irrational emotional fear.
It's closer than you think; many public transit systems already have the capability.
The only thing stopping them from doing it right now is allowing people to purchase with cash. Cash is a problem, because it's harder to trace cash than it is to trace credit cards.
I'll use for example the metro system near where I live, in Washington DC. It's an admittedly sophisticated system compared to a lot of other places, but it's nothing that futuristic. You can pay to use the metro (including buses) in one of two ways: you use either a credit card or cash, and you put the amount onto either a semi-reusable cardboard mag-stripe card, or a reusable RFID card. The RFID cards aren't (I don't think) stored value; they just chirp a serial number. So if you use one of those, it's fairly trivial to track you throughout the system, particularly if you load it with a credit card. Find the transaction where you added money to it, get the serial number of the card you put money on, and then follow that serial number around as you use it.
With cash the problem becomes one of identification. You can still track someone around the system using their stored-value mag-stripe card, but identifying someone as they come into the system if they pay with cash is still a significant problem. The way to get around this would be either by requiring everyone to use some non-anonymous form of payment to get in (which might mean scanning a government photo ID when paying with cash) or automated face recognition. Since most public transport is filled with cameras as is, the latter might be the way to go.
Of course none of this keeps you from buying a ticket (RFID or regular) and handing it to another person, so it wouldn't be foolproof, but I would be surprised if the police haven't used the electronic ticketing systems to figure out where suspects under pursuit enter and leave already. It's such an obvious use of the technology I can't imagine that they haven't, especially given the very high-crime areas that public-transport systems tend to run through.
Personally, I feel that it won't be very long in the future when using cash is the mark of someone suspicious. (It already is, in large quantities and in certain places -- bought an airline ticket with cash lately?) That is, anyone using cash to purchase anything from food to movie tickets will be forced through additional scrutiny, not to mention odd looks from "honest" people (using their Visa cards as God intended).
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
My view is this. If we had a perfect government with perfectly just and compassionate laws, then I would submit to total observation by the government. But we don't have a perfect government or a perfect world. Therefore, I do not want total observation.
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
This document, however, implies that the production method described in the patent results in a impure mixture of various denatured proteins.
Ahahh. You're right that studying hard/working hard should produce a nice compensation. FYI, janitors work very hard, as do flight attendants, cooks, checkout clerks, delivery folks, and machinists; just about any profession as a matter of fact. What you're describing is the market place of labor. Its always been the case that those in highest demand get paid more. That's why CEO's get $50mega bucks per year. Its not because they work any harder or have studied any harder than the construction worker (ye olde Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard in the first year). But is it fair? Of course not. Life isn't fair. Communism was a pathetic attempt at making life more fair. The minumum wage is a reasonable attempt at making life more fair.
I resent your implication that janitors have kids on welfare. Get that silver spoon and troll out of your lower class hating mouth.
Here is a reason to support making life more fair: If you don't, then poor people who have been taken advantage of will eventually stop listening to southern accent affecting Presidents and their church preachers and will burn your rich ass into a pile of ash in that brand new exurb of yours. Its happened in many many places when the wealth balance gets too whacked. That's why rich folks should support the minimum wage. Its also why they should pay more in taxes, because they benefit the most from a structured society. Its called nobility, and only snobs don't have it.
On the other hand if your going for the revolution - then by all means, get rid of all work place protections and put those 7 year old WICK program/AFDC kids to work in a debtor's prison. I'm just one of those terrible libral's who's studied history and would like our society to go on another 200 years.
yeah right...
#begin redundant Thomas Jefferson Quote
"When the Government fears the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the Government, there is tyranny"
#end Thomas Jefferson Quote
I fear the government. It is no longer ours.
OK, keep in mind that 1984 was *fiction*. It was not a prediction, prophecy, fate or destiny. If the society we live in isn't a complete duplicate of 1984, that doesn't mean that we don't have less freedom, or that the government isn't spying on us without proper oversight, or even illegally. We could come into a police state that bears little resemblance of 1984.
What you should be looking at is how actual, real dictators came to power and how real police states were formed. Yes, things are pretty good right now. No, that doesn't mean that it will stay that way, or continue to get better. Yes, we still need to work hard and remain vigilent to make sure that things continue to get better. America is not a magical place where all is good and must be that way. The same evil personality types that became dictators and created hell on earth in other countries exist here, and they are working mercilessly and without conscience to gain ever more power.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso