That happens because we drive cars. Cars are very stupid, expensive and dangerous solutions to the simple problem of moving people around. They've killed and crippled more people than wars. That's because moving tanks at high speeds on flat open strips results in accidents. That will not change. Want safety? Build trains. Get rid of the cars.
Planes have slammed people into the ceilings. Planes have crashed themselves. Self-driving cars, v.1, crash more often and cause more injuries per crash. Computers are toasters. They are not intelligent. Computers can't deal with chaotic situations. "Life finds a way" is another way of stating it; it is impossible to build an AI that does what humans can do. Driving isn't a video game. You can't program for chaotic systems. If you can, go get your Nobel.
Skills don't matter when the car yanks the wheel away from your hands. That's what self-driving means. Do you all REALLY WANT an app to drive your cars? Don't lie to yourselves.
Well done. I think Ian Malcolm, the chaos theoretician in Jurassic Park gave the best (in the novel) explanation as to why we can't outsmart the universe. Mathematically, chaos wins. Life/Chaos beats the best-laid plans of mice and men. Humans are best at all-purpose threat response in unusual situations. The sheer audacity of the belief that we can build a billion two-ton computers and let them loose is staggering.
I stand watching a computer-dispatched elevator sit on a floor, opening and closing its doors, and no one can make it stop. They have to call Otis every time. And it happens a lot. That's a damned simple sensor and interface, and it fails. No one pays much attention because there are five other elevators. If the elevators were doing seventy among hundreds of other elevators, it would be more tragic.
A car would consist of two or more networks, dozens of sensors, hundreds of millions of lines of code that absolutely must work, and would work best if all the other cars were running the same code and are integrated into a worldwide network. This assumes the sensors don't fail eventually, or that the owner doesn't, and this might shock some Americans, trade in their car every two years, but instead keep their cars for a decade or more. They do that because new cars last that long, easily. A robot car would fail in hundreds of ways in that ten years, because of normal failure of all that incredibly delicate self-driving equipment. I guess everyone HAS to buy new every few years, as the manufacturers really, really would like it if they do, so I assume code updates won't be all that forthcoming on older models. Bricked or new, your choice. Cha-ching. No wonder they're so very, very happy to build robot cars. It's a license to drain all the damned wallets.
And of course, we can't ignore that car AIs with outside network connectivity are, by definition, remote-control ready. If anyone thinks this isn't a power dream, really? Recall also that America isn't the only country in the world. Remote monitoring and override of cars will be used by secret police and evil bastards in nearly every nation on the planet to nail journalists and malcontents. Damn, this is gonna be a well-behaved world when they are done.
The main reason you can put them out of power is that you use paper and pencil voting. If you convert to e-voting, your ability to annoy business interests by voting them out of power will be, um, problematic. As they kinda own those systems.
A corporation, being a government-granted license to avoid personal responsibility for one's actions, is not free to do whatever it wants for some self-defined goal of endless profit. That notion started around 1970. A corp is not a castle, and its true purpose is determined by the society that granted it its privileges. That has been understood for centuries, until, as I said, around 1970.
Surveillance, that thing I've been screaming about for years - it's gonna become impossible to communicate about such things undetected. And believe me, it will be criminal and they will start using the new super-police surveillance sphere to track down people who do. Tomorrow won't be like today. They will keep growing in malice and capabilities. And they buy any law they want.
And the encrypted BIOS on PC and Mac motherboards - has that been cracked? Not really. Linux distro makers have to beg for a license to use mobos, IIANM. Encryption does work, at a certain level. And Google has been good at blocking or demoting crack pages for so many things. Try to find a bleeping free (current!) DVD ripper sometime using a search engine. Point is, they can be successful enough to keep anyone from bothering. And there are more than a few writers and activists in prison for fighting such things. Or at least sued into oblivion, Scientology-style.
Why did Mozilla implement DRM? They did because Netflix wanted it. They'll implement DRM anything - the ways they can be forced, including, I dunno, guns and prison, are legion.
And cue my toldyousos for the last fifteen years. With nothing to stop them, "property" owners will continue to lock up viewlines, pictures, sounds, and even ideas with ever more violent and drastic punishments (try to escape arrest - pretty violent). At some point, progressing ever so slowly but surely, we'll have personal video surveillance of what we see and hear, somehow, so they'll know if we're seeing something we haven't paid for. Why the hell not? Cam in the forehead, or tap the optical and auditory nerves, or perhaps just fMRI the brain in real time to see what we see. Or just use ubiquitous area monitoring, and just run timelines on people to see if they're acted criminally in looking at a picture or listening to a song.
Think of the world Stallman posited over 12 years ago in that Day in the Life of Schoolkids essay, and how he was mocked to think that such surveillance of what kids read and paid for would happen. And it did. Not 'cause we're geniuses do we see this, it is just that you graph the equation of greed and power and the answer is always obvious. They'll keep whittling at a free world slowly, in seven year pulses, because that is how long it takes for a new generation to be born and acclimate to fresh insanity. There is *nothing* that humans will not accept, if they're exposed slowly enough and/or young enough. And it will never end. They'll extend copyright forever. Why not? Who will stop them in, what, 170 years when we're a ghost of a memory and this argument is long lost. This is a forever police state.
Voting systems, cars, refrigerators, whatever - if you take a simple task like regulating a fuel mixture, or counting votes, and rather than use a simple methodology or circuit to accomplish the task at hand and instead use a re-programmable Turing machine, you introduce the certainty that the owner of the device - who is not the same as the person who bought the device! - will change the code at will to do whatever makes the owner a profit. Change the code in the engine, beat emissions tests. Change a few votes, keep a reconstruction of a country to your advantage going. Put an AI in charge of driving a car, and police or dictators will use that AI to control people they don't like. There is no judicial solution for this, as you cannot jail a corporation. The solution is to de-complexify the systems, reintroduce simplest-possible solutions that do not use Turing devices to accomplish tasks. Fuel mixing do not require AI and a telematics system networked to the internet. Though it is inevitable that a generation born to complex IT solutions be blind to the downsides of those solutions. Rule of thumb: if you can't control what it is doing, don't trust it.
We're not "Ubering" because we're more mobile. We're becoming more mobile because companies are being Ubered. This is not an effect, this is a cause. Companies are Ubering because that way they can eliminate pensions, benefits, salaries, wages, and even the employees - Uber, for the uber example, plans on replacing all those "contractors" with robot cars. That means: all taxi drivers, gone. All Uber drivers, gone. Net result: the "inevitable" funneling of all profits to the owners and to Wall Street. The cost of public assistance to the newly destitute will, of course, be borne by taxpayers and the rest of society. Loss of retail revenue, loss of homes to bankers as mortgage holders default in poverty, decline of some neighborhoods that once housed the poor and lower middle class, with an increased crime rate which, of course, will be blamed on the lack of morals and gumption of the poor. So, more prisons, more pauper's graves, more of the usual invisible disaster that hyper-capitalism is greedily enabling.
Let's not even talk about what is going to happen to the tens of millions of truck drivers.
There is no way our security forces will let this be anything but mandatory. Manual-control vehicles will be phased out, and eventually will be criminal to drive without some sort of cop-controlled shutoff, at least. Hell, the financing companies alone love external control. They use it to disable cars which have buyers late on their car payments. They can get rid of repo men if the cars drive themselves back to the dealer.
It would have to be a mechanical kill switch for the power bus that services all the automated systems, including the robot on your brakes, accelerator, and steering, or it is just a cute story you tell yourself so you feel better. And no cute integrated batteries that can wake up if a cop wants to override. A computerized switch is a joke.
Any code and procedure can and will be dumped when convenient. Rules can't fix this. Don't accept controlled cars. Don't accept self-driving cars. Don't accept cars controlled by Turing machines which by definition are reprogrammable. Accept only rack-and-pinion steering, hydraulically controlled brakes modulated by your foot, and an accelerator that doesn't ignore your commands when it feels like it. Like e-voting: there is NO correct solution. Any effort is useless to control a computer when hostile outside forces have access. A computer is hackable, and you don't let it control a two-ton tank with you inside.
"I don't think there will be much argument about this, particularly in Amercia, where the deaths per capita inlicted by 'law enforcement', are similar to the murder rates in more civilised countries."
Well said. And rightwingers only have so many mod points, so let me give ya a hand here.
Never saw the movie. That writer was a clear thinker, wasn't he?
I'm not worried about car jackers, who are about as frequent as lighting strikes. Worried about our invisible political lords and masters. Imagine a Dick Cheney with this power. Oh god. Assange's car would have driven into a, let us say, a concrete wall at high speed. Snowden's taxi would roll over a railing and down into a gorge. Hell, why be obvious: just drive a random passing car on the street into a political opponent as they cross at a red light. Ooopsie! What a shame, must have been programmer error.
Yup. Since the drug war and 9/11, the young have been raised in a police state. They know nothing else. And don't get me started on the technoeutopians... rich white kids who will never have their cars driven to a lonely spot by a cop for a little impromptu electrocution and tooth extraction. It's the troublemakers and the poor who will see the interior of a Vehicle Sequester concrete box when they annoy some Homeland Security hawk or local cop or even one of our lovely CIA bastards assigned to remove Snowdens from the world.
We're living in a giant, open air prison. I hate being right.
I've been pointing out the obvious ever since they had the brilliant idea of controlling a car by Turing machines on an internal network, hooked up to a external cell phone network. It will follow inevitably that: bad guys will take control, at the worst possible time, or police will exercise their immediately taken prerogative to stop, control, or block vehicles, or a combination of the two, as police aren't always nice, and sometimes the term "police" means "shadowy people who have lots of power and don't like you - at all."
It will be used immediately to monitor and control cars run by poor people in rich neighborhoods or towns, because of the Children, of course. And the Wikileaks supporters, and people like Assange or Snowden, or women rights supporters in Saudi Arabia wouldn't dare step into a swell new car without taking a chance that the car doors lock, the windows freeze, and their cars drive to a lovely lonely place with a waiting squad of armored men with machine guns await them for a final escort to a place where people never leave, alive or dead. Not only do your phones and TVs listen in and track you, but you can't trust your car not to take you away while you try desperately to break the windows. They'll probably just provide a escort car behind to make sure you can't jump to freedom.
Picture this, if the above scenario makes you giggle: you're driving to work, and suddenly your steering wheel stops working. The car exists the freeway, and drives to a police station, where a squad of SWAT-armored (they wear it to bust massage parlors, for satan's sake) point guns at you and tell you to exit the vehicle. Why? Who the fuck cares? You could have too many parking tickets (and they will KNOW when you park illegally). Hell, they'll just build a concrete box to slot cars into, to make it dead easy to get you out without risk to themselves. Mass removal of troublemakers made automated. Hell, just drive the cars into a jail receiving garage and starve the passengers out if they don't want to get out, why risk a cop?
I wonder how they'll support local law enforcement when cars *can't* speed? I digress. They'll invent new crimes, of course.
It will be damned impossible to annoy or challenge people with power to control your car. It'll be a rolling arrest cage. God, what good little boys and girls we shall be.
A fun note, to the person who called me out as insane when I predicted a terrorist would just nuke the car controls en masse with an EMP bomb/gun, when I used the term "carnage": when they killed the WIRED journalist's car dead on the expressway, he had a truck barreling up behind the car. If the truck had hit him, "carnage" would have been the term to describe his death. And that was a FRIENDLY demonstration of what happens when you let a computer control your brakes, controls, and accelerator.
What am I saying? Don't. Let. Computers. Control. Your. Car. EVER. Don't buy them, demand mechanical controls. Buy an Elio, when and if they come out, and make sure the Elioites don't "improve" the autocar by adding self-driving computer systems. Not that they'll have a choice, if we don't start fighting this off now.
I have no hope this stops. A generation of people who went to school with their faces on their floor while dogs sniff their crotches, and were arrested if they drew someone punching someone, aren't exactly trained to fight for their freedom. They never had freedom; how would they care?
I am surprised there is any vegetation left alive in the south considering the millions of tons of lead all the Jed Clampetts have fired into the ground the last 425+ years.
You do not own the airspace above your home. This has been long established. The Prudential Building in Chicago was literally built ABOVE the railroad's private property on a huge platform, and there wasn't a thing they could do about it (everyone hated the railroads by 1950, and even the courts are not above being petty little children).
The cops are videoing the countryside with unbelievably high megapixel cameras on aircraft - you are on Candid Camera now, and I expect someday troublemakers will get cameras on their noggins along with a tracker on their ankle. Worse is coming, as the drones will shrink and interferometric arrays of tiny gnat-like flying cameras will take to the skies. You could fry them with lasers- oh, waitaminute, they've done the groundwork and terrorized everyone about terroristic laser-flashing the skies, so that's out. Best hide inside. Oh, that's right, they can see through walls with that radio gadget...
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That happens because we drive cars. Cars are very stupid, expensive and dangerous solutions to the simple problem of moving people around. They've killed and crippled more people than wars. That's because moving tanks at high speeds on flat open strips results in accidents. That will not change. Want safety? Build trains. Get rid of the cars.
Planes have slammed people into the ceilings. Planes have crashed themselves. Self-driving cars, v .1, crash more often and cause more injuries per crash. Computers are toasters. They are not intelligent. Computers can't deal with chaotic situations. "Life finds a way" is another way of stating it; it is impossible to build an AI that does what humans can do. Driving isn't a video game. You can't program for chaotic systems. If you can, go get your Nobel.
Skills don't matter when the car yanks the wheel away from your hands. That's what self-driving means.
Do you all REALLY WANT an app to drive your cars? Don't lie to yourselves.
Well done.
I think Ian Malcolm, the chaos theoretician in Jurassic Park gave the best (in the novel) explanation as to why we can't outsmart the universe. Mathematically, chaos wins. Life/Chaos beats the best-laid plans of mice and men. Humans are best at all-purpose threat response in unusual situations. The sheer audacity of the belief that we can build a billion two-ton computers and let them loose is staggering.
I stand watching a computer-dispatched elevator sit on a floor, opening and closing its doors, and no one can make it stop. They have to call Otis every time. And it happens a lot. That's a damned simple sensor and interface, and it fails. No one pays much attention because there are five other elevators. If the elevators were doing seventy among hundreds of other elevators, it would be more tragic.
A car would consist of two or more networks, dozens of sensors, hundreds of millions of lines of code that absolutely must work, and would work best if all the other cars were running the same code and are integrated into a worldwide network. This assumes the sensors don't fail eventually, or that the owner doesn't, and this might shock some Americans, trade in their car every two years, but instead keep their cars for a decade or more. They do that because new cars last that long, easily. A robot car would fail in hundreds of ways in that ten years, because of normal failure of all that incredibly delicate self-driving equipment. I guess everyone HAS to buy new every few years, as the manufacturers really, really would like it if they do, so I assume code updates won't be all that forthcoming on older models. Bricked or new, your choice. Cha-ching. No wonder they're so very, very happy to build robot cars. It's a license to drain all the damned wallets.
And of course, we can't ignore that car AIs with outside network connectivity are, by definition, remote-control ready. If anyone thinks this isn't a power dream, really? Recall also that America isn't the only country in the world. Remote monitoring and override of cars will be used by secret police and evil bastards in nearly every nation on the planet to nail journalists and malcontents. Damn, this is gonna be a well-behaved world when they are done.
The main reason you can put them out of power is that you use paper and pencil voting. If you convert to e-voting, your ability to annoy business interests by voting them out of power will be, um, problematic. As they kinda own those systems.
Stick with the paper.
The entire internet once lived on analog wires.
A corporation, being a government-granted license to avoid personal responsibility for one's actions, is not free to do whatever it wants for some self-defined goal of endless profit. That notion started around 1970. A corp is not a castle, and its true purpose is determined by the society that granted it its privileges. That has been understood for centuries, until, as I said, around 1970.
They pay to change that law. Boom.
Surveillance, that thing I've been screaming about for years - it's gonna become impossible to communicate about such things undetected. And believe me, it will be criminal and they will start using the new super-police surveillance sphere to track down people who do. Tomorrow won't be like today. They will keep growing in malice and capabilities. And they buy any law they want.
And the encrypted BIOS on PC and Mac motherboards - has that been cracked? Not really. Linux distro makers have to beg for a license to use mobos, IIANM. Encryption does work, at a certain level. And Google has been good at blocking or demoting crack pages for so many things. Try to find a bleeping free (current!) DVD ripper sometime using a search engine. Point is, they can be successful enough to keep anyone from bothering. And there are more than a few writers and activists in prison for fighting such things. Or at least sued into oblivion, Scientology-style.
Why did Mozilla implement DRM? They did because Netflix wanted it. They'll implement DRM anything - the ways they can be forced, including, I dunno, guns and prison, are legion.
And cue my toldyousos for the last fifteen years. With nothing to stop them, "property" owners will continue to lock up viewlines, pictures, sounds, and even ideas with ever more violent and drastic punishments (try to escape arrest - pretty violent). At some point, progressing ever so slowly but surely, we'll have personal video surveillance of what we see and hear, somehow, so they'll know if we're seeing something we haven't paid for. Why the hell not? Cam in the forehead, or tap the optical and auditory nerves, or perhaps just fMRI the brain in real time to see what we see. Or just use ubiquitous area monitoring, and just run timelines on people to see if they're acted criminally in looking at a picture or listening to a song.
Think of the world Stallman posited over 12 years ago in that Day in the Life of Schoolkids essay, and how he was mocked to think that such surveillance of what kids read and paid for would happen. And it did. Not 'cause we're geniuses do we see this, it is just that you graph the equation of greed and power and the answer is always obvious. They'll keep whittling at a free world slowly, in seven year pulses, because that is how long it takes for a new generation to be born and acclimate to fresh insanity. There is *nothing* that humans will not accept, if they're exposed slowly enough and/or young enough.
And it will never end. They'll extend copyright forever. Why not? Who will stop them in, what, 170 years when we're a ghost of a memory and this argument is long lost. This is a forever police state.
Henry Ford was a fascist-admiring Nazi admirer, yet somehow, no one seems to recall that come epithet time.
Voting systems, cars, refrigerators, whatever - if you take a simple task like regulating a fuel mixture, or counting votes, and rather than use a simple methodology or circuit to accomplish the task at hand and instead use a re-programmable Turing machine, you introduce the certainty that the owner of the device - who is not the same as the person who bought the device! - will change the code at will to do whatever makes the owner a profit. Change the code in the engine, beat emissions tests. Change a few votes, keep a reconstruction of a country to your advantage going. Put an AI in charge of driving a car, and police or dictators will use that AI to control people they don't like. There is no judicial solution for this, as you cannot jail a corporation. The solution is to de-complexify the systems, reintroduce simplest-possible solutions that do not use Turing devices to accomplish tasks. Fuel mixing do not require AI and a telematics system networked to the internet. Though it is inevitable that a generation born to complex IT solutions be blind to the downsides of those solutions. Rule of thumb: if you can't control what it is doing, don't trust it.
We're not "Ubering" because we're more mobile. We're becoming more mobile because companies are being Ubered. This is not an effect, this is a cause. Companies are Ubering because that way they can eliminate pensions, benefits, salaries, wages, and even the employees - Uber, for the uber example, plans on replacing all those "contractors" with robot cars. That means: all taxi drivers, gone. All Uber drivers, gone. Net result: the "inevitable" funneling of all profits to the owners and to Wall Street. The cost of public assistance to the newly destitute will, of course, be borne by taxpayers and the rest of society. Loss of retail revenue, loss of homes to bankers as mortgage holders default in poverty, decline of some neighborhoods that once housed the poor and lower middle class, with an increased crime rate which, of course, will be blamed on the lack of morals and gumption of the poor. So, more prisons, more pauper's graves, more of the usual invisible disaster that hyper-capitalism is greedily enabling.
Let's not even talk about what is going to happen to the tens of millions of truck drivers.
There is no way our security forces will let this be anything but mandatory. Manual-control vehicles will be phased out, and eventually will be criminal to drive without some sort of cop-controlled shutoff, at least. Hell, the financing companies alone love external control. They use it to disable cars which have buyers late on their car payments. They can get rid of repo men if the cars drive themselves back to the dealer.
It would have to be a mechanical kill switch for the power bus that services all the automated systems, including the robot on your brakes, accelerator, and steering, or it is just a cute story you tell yourself so you feel better. And no cute integrated batteries that can wake up if a cop wants to override. A computerized switch is a joke.
Any code and procedure can and will be dumped when convenient. Rules can't fix this. Don't accept controlled cars. Don't accept self-driving cars. Don't accept cars controlled by Turing machines which by definition are reprogrammable. Accept only rack-and-pinion steering, hydraulically controlled brakes modulated by your foot, and an accelerator that doesn't ignore your commands when it feels like it. Like e-voting: there is NO correct solution. Any effort is useless to control a computer when hostile outside forces have access. A computer is hackable, and you don't let it control a two-ton tank with you inside.
"I don't think there will be much argument about this, particularly in Amercia, where the deaths per capita inlicted by 'law enforcement', are similar to the murder rates in more civilised countries."
Well said. And rightwingers only have so many mod points, so let me give ya a hand here.
"How about the day after they get to assassinate people for any reason or no reason?"
And why was this downscored? How about that day?
Never saw the movie. That writer was a clear thinker, wasn't he?
I'm not worried about car jackers, who are about as frequent as lighting strikes. Worried about our invisible political lords and masters. Imagine a Dick Cheney with this power. Oh god. Assange's car would have driven into a, let us say, a concrete wall at high speed. Snowden's taxi would roll over a railing and down into a gorge. Hell, why be obvious: just drive a random passing car on the street into a political opponent as they cross at a red light. Ooopsie! What a shame, must have been programmer error.
Yup. Since the drug war and 9/11, the young have been raised in a police state. They know nothing else. And don't get me started on the technoeutopians... rich white kids who will never have their cars driven to a lonely spot by a cop for a little impromptu electrocution and tooth extraction. It's the troublemakers and the poor who will see the interior of a Vehicle Sequester concrete box when they annoy some Homeland Security hawk or local cop or even one of our lovely CIA bastards assigned to remove Snowdens from the world.
We're living in a giant, open air prison. I hate being right.
I've been pointing out the obvious ever since they had the brilliant idea of controlling a car by Turing machines on an internal network, hooked up to a external cell phone network. It will follow inevitably that: bad guys will take control, at the worst possible time, or police will exercise their immediately taken prerogative to stop, control, or block vehicles, or a combination of the two, as police aren't always nice, and sometimes the term "police" means "shadowy people who have lots of power and don't like you - at all."
It will be used immediately to monitor and control cars run by poor people in rich neighborhoods or towns, because of the Children, of course. And the Wikileaks supporters, and people like Assange or Snowden, or women rights supporters in Saudi Arabia wouldn't dare step into a swell new car without taking a chance that the car doors lock, the windows freeze, and their cars drive to a lovely lonely place with a waiting squad of armored men with machine guns await them for a final escort to a place where people never leave, alive or dead. Not only do your phones and TVs listen in and track you, but you can't trust your car not to take you away while you try desperately to break the windows. They'll probably just provide a escort car behind to make sure you can't jump to freedom.
Picture this, if the above scenario makes you giggle: you're driving to work, and suddenly your steering wheel stops working. The car exists the freeway, and drives to a police station, where a squad of SWAT-armored (they wear it to bust massage parlors, for satan's sake) point guns at you and tell you to exit the vehicle. Why? Who the fuck cares? You could have too many parking tickets (and they will KNOW when you park illegally). Hell, they'll just build a concrete box to slot cars into, to make it dead easy to get you out without risk to themselves. Mass removal of troublemakers made automated. Hell, just drive the cars into a jail receiving garage and starve the passengers out if they don't want to get out, why risk a cop?
I wonder how they'll support local law enforcement when cars *can't* speed? I digress. They'll invent new crimes, of course.
It will be damned impossible to annoy or challenge people with power to control your car. It'll be a rolling arrest cage. God, what good little boys and girls we shall be.
A fun note, to the person who called me out as insane when I predicted a terrorist would just nuke the car controls en masse with an EMP bomb/gun, when I used the term "carnage": when they killed the WIRED journalist's car dead on the expressway, he had a truck barreling up behind the car. If the truck had hit him, "carnage" would have been the term to describe his death. And that was a FRIENDLY demonstration of what happens when you let a computer control your brakes, controls, and accelerator.
What am I saying? Don't. Let. Computers. Control. Your. Car. EVER. Don't buy them, demand mechanical controls. Buy an Elio, when and if they come out, and make sure the Elioites don't "improve" the autocar by adding self-driving computer systems. Not that they'll have a choice, if we don't start fighting this off now.
I have no hope this stops. A generation of people who went to school with their faces on their floor while dogs sniff their crotches, and were arrested if they drew someone punching someone, aren't exactly trained to fight for their freedom. They never had freedom; how would they care?
I am surprised there is any vegetation left alive in the south considering the millions of tons of lead all the Jed Clampetts have fired into the ground the last 425+ years.
You do not own the airspace above your home. This has been long established. The Prudential Building in Chicago was literally built ABOVE the railroad's private property on a huge platform, and there wasn't a thing they could do about it (everyone hated the railroads by 1950, and even the courts are not above being petty little children).
The cops are videoing the countryside with unbelievably high megapixel cameras on aircraft - you are on Candid Camera now, and I expect someday troublemakers will get cameras on their noggins along with a tracker on their ankle. Worse is coming, as the drones will shrink and interferometric arrays of tiny gnat-like flying cameras will take to the skies. You could fry them with lasers- oh, waitaminute, they've done the groundwork and terrorized everyone about terroristic laser-flashing the skies, so that's out. Best hide inside. Oh, that's right, they can see through walls with that radio gadget...