Sandy hit at high tide and a full moon the gravity of the moon raised the water a few feet which is why the storm surge caused all the flooding
we had a more powerful storm hit NYC the year before and it did a lot less damage because it didn't hit at high tide. very minor flooding.
for another hurricane to do as much damage as Sandy, it has to hit the around the 22nd of the month and make landfall close to 8pm
Which sounds like as good a time and date to make landfall.
Where I grew up they'd describe a severe flood as happening once, every 70 years. I'm not 70 years old and another one has already happened.
I used to commute through a riverside neighborhood where the late-September Spring High Tide combined with the end-of-summer monsoon and the river would flow up through the storm drains and into the streets. Businesses would sandbag their front doors. Several years back, they finally decided to put in pumps to handle the annual event.
Never underestimate the power of multiple weather systems ganging up on you.
I thought it was normal for construction workers to take dumps all over the property and unfinished buildings?
I understand that when the David Lynch version of "Dune" was filmed in Mexico, they had to sweep cigarette butts, food wrappers, and other such detritus out of the dunes to get that "deep desert" look.
Nope. Not gonna last. How do you tax kindness? If I let my hairdresser use my car for her groceries in exchange for a haircut, no money changes hands and no taxes are paid.
That's not gonna last long.
There's a word for when two parties exchange goods or services without money changing hands. The word is "barter".
Bear in mind that the US press prints only the most extreme incidents. Most police officers in the US never fire their weapons in the line of duty for their entire careers.
Armed raids by tax collectors, I can believe. If someone refuses to pay taxes long enough, it's reasonable to arrest him. If that individual is also known to be stockpiling arms, as happens in the US from time to time, then I can see how an armed raid is justifiable. That doesn't mean it's routine procedure. I think the point of TFA is that we don't want armed raids to *become* routine procedure.
Most don't. But just my one local metropolis has more weapon-firing incidents in any given year than some countries, even though each and every one requires the officer to be placed on leave and investigated.
I've seen the local police training academy, and yes, they are trained military-style. Even have their own marching songs.
I can't recall any misapplied invasions in force lately, but it can be a perilous (read fatal) thing to be schizophrenic in public around here.
All of the UK's current nuclear reactors use seawater for cooling. Many coal-fired power stations (but not all of them) are also on the coast or estuaries and similarly use seawater for their cooling loops.
Corrosion is not a problem, just use marine-rated stainless steel pumps and piping for the loops and carry out preventative maintenance every now and then. Odd problems with seawater cooling do occur, such as a plague of jellyfish which threatened to block the seawater intakes at a Scottish reactor site and they were shut down for a time as a precaution.
I have noticed that direct cooling (seawater/riverwater/lakewater) is popular in Europe. It fell out of favor in the US a while ago because the permitting was too troublesome. I haven't heard of a direct cooling water plant in the US built in the last 20 years. The US uses mostly air cooling or cooling towers. Air cooling is ideal environmentally, but is not nearly as efficient- thermodynamially it is worse and dozens of fans cost more to operate compared to pumps. Cooling towers are nearly as good as direct cooling and can be made to be relatively water-efficient.
It is a complete mystery to me why direct cooling is still used in environmentally-liberal Europe but is practically outlawed in the global-warming-denying USA.
Direct cooling is apparently popular in Florida - Manatees famously like to hang around power plants in cold weather.
Network or most serial PHY interfaces (e.g. Ethernet, Firewire, USB, I2C) are always specified with bit as the base units as the PHY level only worry the raw '0' or '1' and not payloads..
That's because the actual bitstream isn't really in data bytes. There can be all sorts of odd control bits and groups thereof tacked on. If you want an old-time horse-and-buggy example. remember that ASCII was originally a 7-bit code. The 8th bit was for use by hardware as a parity bit. And TTY devices often also had start and stop bits. Sometimes even 2 stop bits. So a "byte" over a modem could potentially be 11 bits long, and that's before the modem itself contributed anything.
NEW Mexico. Apparently though this is a common mistake even for Americans. A friend of mine from NM and I went to a restaurant while attending a conference in San Diego. We were talking with the waitress and she asks where we're from. He says New Mexico and she replies, "Wow, you speak really good English!" !@$*
I'd apologize for overlooking the "New". But if I was the US Government, I'd overlook the "New" and not apologize.
That seems like something that is insanely overlooked. It is basically a free ride right into a target area. I guess they don't expect someone's bag bombs to have enough yield for big damage. A well-funded terror cell could make that happen I'm sure.
Stuff like that has been discussed many times. Terrorists are as much into "theatre" as the TSA. They only score points when they bring down a plane. So they ignore the easier and more obvious targets.
At least until they don't. After all, until 9/11, the safest way to survive a hijack attempt was to let the hijackers do what they wanted.
"Persons of Interest" are people connected with the inquiry at hand. They aren't trying to find who is popular on the cocktail circuit.
The "inquiry at hand" is no longer just the inquiry at hand, which is what the ruckus is all about.
They would be trying to find terrorists talking to their leadership hierarchy, as well as suppliers and active supporters. They aren't trying to find who is popular on the cocktail circuit.
Over the course of time, the two have been known to coincide. When the Inquiry at Hand shifts, the cocktail circuit is just one more collection of data to feed into the hopper.
Of your friends, and your friends of friends, do you have at least one that lives in each of China, India, Sub-Saharan Africa and South America? I would guess that most people reading this in North America or Europe do not. Do you realistically think that you have a 'third hop' who lives in each of these places? Even if you do, that means that everyone in China (4.5x population of the US), India (4x), Sub-Saharan Africa (2.5x) or South America (1x) is separated from that person by only 3 more hops, including people (in some regions of any of these) who might have lived in the same rural location all their lives.
In general terms, that is true, but what the NSA is after is Persons of Interest. Persons of Interest aren't peasants down on the farm in China, they're "interesting persons", which is to say that they are people who move around a lot and meet a lot of other interesting persons. There's only 1 hop between me and Jimmy Carter, who can be in turn linked to all other recent presidents and other present or former senior government officials, who have between them personally met more than a few terrorist/Freedom Fighter leaders. I also have only 1 or 2 hops between me and Arnold Scharzenegger, who has many of the same connections.
Once your "person of interest" list reaches 320 million people or so, it ceases to have any meaning.
You're confusing data entry with uniform resource identifiers. Ligatures exist in English as well, but we don't use them in domain names. Nor do we use control characters (backspace, for example, which only worked on devices that could overprint).
What you do within a website is between you and the site provider. I'm only concerned with the general navigation of the Internet.
That's rather Amero-centric of you. Would you go to an Arabic language website? If so, you probably have a way to type Arabic characters. Would you go to a Japanese language website? If so, you probably have a way to type Japanese characters. These characters have been allowed in certain parts of the URL for a long time, but never the TLD. What, largely, has changed?
This is a step towards more globalization, which is a good thing for everyone except the people who are on top but unable to take full advantage of being on top (the American middle and lower classes).
No, actually, it's not Amero-centric. It's historo-centric. Just like lawyers are hung up on Latin. What concerns me isn't the language - since to computers all languages are equally gibberish, it's the complexity of the support mechanism. ASCII/EBCDIC were the character sets used to set up the Internet, and support for them (ASCII, at least) is pretty well universal.
Once you're AT a website, I would certainly hope that their data entry facilities are supporting their target audiences, whatever they are in whatever languages/character sets make the users happy. But getting there shouldn't be balkanized. What we have now is a lowest common denominator. What we risk achieving is a World-Wide Web that's so nationalistic that no one will make the effort required to leave home.
You jest, but there's a darker side to being "full international".
I have a keyboard setup that allows me to easily enter virtually any character used in any latin-based alphabet, although the Slashdot editor would promptly sit on them (Hey, I want my "thorn" back!).
Without a whole lot of trouble, I can bump the tally up to include Arabic/Persian, and I have ways to branch out from there. However, the more extensive the character set is, the more problems come with it. Arabic is right-to-left, not left-to-right. It also has a whole raft of ligatures and looks really ugly if you don't use them. Chinese/Japanese "character sets" contain thousands of elements.
Putting together routing and filtering rules for a variety of systems while supporting all those possibilities is a nightmare, and that's just the tip of the iceberg.
The "murican" character set may be parochialistic, but it's about as simple as Latin goes. No funny dots or accent marks, no hooks at the bottoms of letters. No alternate codings that can confuse both memorization and collating sequences.
I strongly support the ability to render content to the full extend that localization allows. But I'd really be a lot happier keeping the basic routing and identifying components limited to something manageable.
While I'm not wild about being tracked, I simply don't feel that I have an assumption of privacy while driving around on a public road.
And, unless they're different than Florida with its OnePass toll system, a lot of Californians are already driving around with machine-readable IDs attached to their automobiles.
I don't expect privacy these days. I just want the people who collect the data to use it responsibly. Preferably, that means not at all. Unless I rob a bank, anyway.
That ended when politicians recognized that building a giant nanny state would require more and more federal control, and about half the US demographic agrees that's the goal of federal government.
Duckspeak Fail.
A "Nanny State" is one that limits your freedom "for your own good". A Police State is one that limits your freedom for its own good.
Yes, I know that we're supposed to be submitting to this whole deal "because it keeps us safe from the big bad evil terrorists".
But consider who one of the the biggest proponents of Prism is: Dick Cheney. If he's your ideal of a Nanny, you're kinkier than most of us, I think.
Mod parent up. We need more brave politicians to finally speak their minds about this instead of fearing the surveillance machine.
Bear in mind, Carter was a one term president, widely despised by Republicans and effectively abandoned by his own party -- unable to get many of his programs through a congress controlled by the Democratic Party (which at the time still contained a lot of southern social conservatives.)
He has worn the mantle of elder statesman and sage well since his time in office. Quite possibly one of the best educated and most greatly concerned for the american people of US presidents of the past century.
Carter always was concerned. Not only for the American people, but for people everywhere. His "Sunday School" image wasn't just a posture.
That, in a way was his downfall. Both Carter and Ford were pretty decent guys. About the only election where I thought it was a choice between who to vote for rather than whom to vote against. But they were both pretty ineffective overall. Carter did his part in reducing tensions between Israel and the Arabs (especially Egypt), and both Carter and Ford quietly kept the Evil Empire of the USSR at bay as it slowly ground itself to powder before finally collapsing at Reagan's feet.
But evidently nice guys finish last. Reagan didn't give a shit about other countries feelings, and, ironically, they respected him more for it. Bush I wasn't the disaster I'd feared, although he didn't actually do much better than Carter or Ford. Clinton was a sleazebag, but presided over one of the most peaceful and prosperous eras in US history. Then there was Dubya, who had been muttering about attacking Iraq almost from the moment he took office. Iraq was going to get slapped down anyway, since while they might have lacked usable WMDs, they had been getting more and more obnoxious in their probes against the no-fly zones even before Clinton departed. If we'd just waited another year or so, we could have gone in with the world at our backs instead of the world backing off. Which brings us to Obama, who was supposed to undo the excesses of Bush II, but has been looking more and more like Bush II revarnished.
In the mean time, while presidents came and went, the security paranoia infrastructure did not. J. Edgar Hoover was a nasty piece of work, although his spiritual predecessors were no angels. Who exactly inherited his excesses isn't totally clear to me, although the name "William Casey" seems to ring some bells. And the faceless beetle-like men developed Echelon, Prism and other programs of lesser fame. The lines between internal investigations (FBI) and external ones (CIA) blurred. They don't use the name "Total Information Awareness" any more, but that is the obvious goal.
"There's just a fundamental question of whether we're going to live in a society where these dragnet surveillance systems become routine," said Catherine Crump
The answer is yes, we will, because not enough people care. Just as many people in the USA are in favor of these programs to "keep us safe from the omg terrorists!" as oppose them, according to many polls.
Hell the media hasn't even been talking about the issues, they've been playing up the celeb angle.
Our society is trending towards a total surveillance state, and people don't care enough to do anything about it. They'll keep voting for the same two parties.
We aren't merely surveilled, however, we're self-surveilling. In addition to government cameras everywhere, people put up webcams, buy into Google Street View, post their entire lives on Facebook, etc., etc., etc.
This isn't entirely a bad thing. Not all of the Boston Bombing images came from government cameras, for example. Enough people get enough benefit from "Fishbowl Society" that I don't think it likely that we'll get that genie back in the bottle.
But if we can't turn back to more private times, we need to at least establish some acceptable rules for what we have. Asymmetric intelligence (a la NSA) is a threat to liberty. Basic human dignity requires that we be circumspect about what we share. And general data, such as traffic cams and telephone records should have very strict rules about both access and retention. You shouldn't be able to simply march in, wave a flag with an eagle on it saying "National Security" and be able to plunder at will.
'An indistinct image emerges of doublers' Orwellian information-controlled civilization that is almost self-regulating, with a special kind of system of government—one that officially does not exist and is thus impossible to destroy. The society is controlled through a fictitious advanced branch of information science Lem dubs procrustics, based on the control and stratification of information flows within the society. It is used for molding groups within a society and ultimately a society as a whole to behave as designed by secret hidden rulers. One example described in the novel is the above mentioned settlement, kind of a "concentration camp" without any guards, designed so that the prisoners stay inside apparently of their own "free" will.'
Please, note this was written in 1959.
Stanislaw Lem wrote a number of things about surveillance states where things had gone on so long that they'd developed a bizarre life of their own. Not surprising, since he lived in a Soviet "Republic". One of my favorites is in the Cyberiad, where robots had taken over a planet and were constantly on the watch for "muclid spies" (i.e.:
I would not include "The Demolished Man" on the list of surveillance-predictive stories, however. In that excellent novel, the Espers were not only tightly controlled, but tightly self-controlling. In fact, one of the key factors in the story was that Lincoln was forbidden from actually prying uninvited into the minds of the people he wanted to interrogate. Despite being an Esper, he had to do most of his detective work the old fashioned way. Pretty much the diametrical opposite of the NSA approach.
If the headline is about sci-fi predictions of the Orwellian state, why not just fill in the rest? The Orwellian state seems inevitable. Step 2,people get off the planet. Step 3, the realize they want to be free and the government comes down on them. That's it. That's the future.
The future is a boot stamping on a human face, forever.
(Sorry, couldn't resist).
Actually, having re-read 1984 recently, I noticed that Smith's interrogator/torturer/reprogrammer (whose name escapes me) mentioned that the Party was evolving. Which leads to interesting speculations. We have seen in recent history that rarely does an oppressive regime last 3 generations. The founders are ideologically committed to atrocities, but successive generations aren't so heavily invested and tend to want to be seen as "better" than their predecessors. "Better" doesn't always mean fairies and flowers; China's "better" is still authoritarian, just with a looser leash. And new oppressive regimes pop up as fast as old ones fade. But at least there's some hope.
Slashdot Mirror
Sandy hit at high tide and a full moon
the gravity of the moon raised the water a few feet which is why the storm surge caused all the flooding
we had a more powerful storm hit NYC the year before and it did a lot less damage because it didn't hit at high tide. very minor flooding.
for another hurricane to do as much damage as Sandy, it has to hit the around the 22nd of the month and make landfall close to 8pm
Which sounds like as good a time and date to make landfall.
Where I grew up they'd describe a severe flood as happening once, every 70 years. I'm not 70 years old and another one has already happened.
I used to commute through a riverside neighborhood where the late-September Spring High Tide combined with the end-of-summer monsoon and the river would flow up through the storm drains and into the streets. Businesses would sandbag their front doors. Several years back, they finally decided to put in pumps to handle the annual event.
Never underestimate the power of multiple weather systems ganging up on you.
I thought it was normal for construction workers to take dumps all over the property and unfinished buildings?
I understand that when the David Lynch version of "Dune" was filmed in Mexico, they had to sweep cigarette butts, food wrappers, and other such detritus out of the dunes to get that "deep desert" look.
Nope. Not gonna last. How do you tax kindness? If I let my hairdresser use my car for her groceries in exchange for a haircut, no money changes hands and no taxes are paid.
That's not gonna last long.
There's a word for when two parties exchange goods or services without money changing hands. The word is "barter".
There's also a tax form for it.
Bear in mind that the US press prints only the most extreme incidents. Most police officers in the US never fire their weapons in the line of duty for their entire careers.
Armed raids by tax collectors, I can believe. If someone refuses to pay taxes long enough, it's reasonable to arrest him. If that individual is also known to be stockpiling arms, as happens in the US from time to time, then I can see how an armed raid is justifiable. That doesn't mean it's routine procedure. I think the point of TFA is that we don't want armed raids to *become* routine procedure.
Most don't. But just my one local metropolis has more weapon-firing incidents in any given year than some countries, even though each and every one requires the officer to be placed on leave and investigated.
I've seen the local police training academy, and yes, they are trained military-style. Even have their own marching songs.
I can't recall any misapplied invasions in force lately, but it can be a perilous (read fatal) thing to be schizophrenic in public around here.
All of the UK's current nuclear reactors use seawater for cooling. Many coal-fired power stations (but not all of them) are also on the coast or estuaries and similarly use seawater for their cooling loops.
Corrosion is not a problem, just use marine-rated stainless steel pumps and piping for the loops and carry out preventative maintenance every now and then. Odd problems with seawater cooling do occur, such as a plague of jellyfish which threatened to block the seawater intakes at a Scottish reactor site and they were shut down for a time as a precaution.
I have noticed that direct cooling (seawater/riverwater/lakewater) is popular in Europe. It fell out of favor in the US a while ago because the permitting was too troublesome. I haven't heard of a direct cooling water plant in the US built in the last 20 years. The US uses mostly air cooling or cooling towers. Air cooling is ideal environmentally, but is not nearly as efficient- thermodynamially it is worse and dozens of fans cost more to operate compared to pumps. Cooling towers are nearly as good as direct cooling and can be made to be relatively water-efficient.
It is a complete mystery to me why direct cooling is still used in environmentally-liberal Europe but is practically outlawed in the global-warming-denying USA.
Direct cooling is apparently popular in Florida - Manatees famously like to hang around power plants in cold weather.
Network or most serial PHY interfaces (e.g. Ethernet, Firewire, USB, I2C) are always specified with bit as the base units as the PHY level only worry the raw '0' or '1' and not payloads..
That's because the actual bitstream isn't really in data bytes. There can be all sorts of odd control bits and groups thereof tacked on. If you want an old-time horse-and-buggy example. remember that ASCII was originally a 7-bit code. The 8th bit was for use by hardware as a parity bit. And TTY devices often also had start and stop bits. Sometimes even 2 stop bits. So a "byte" over a modem could potentially be 11 bits long, and that's before the modem itself contributed anything.
Does this mean that tar-based road surfaces are slowly flowing downhill?
Not so slowly, now that it's summertime.
NEW Mexico. Apparently though this is a common mistake even for Americans. A friend of mine from NM and I went to a restaurant while attending a conference in San Diego. We were talking with the waitress and she asks where we're from. He says New Mexico and she replies, "Wow, you speak really good English!" !@$*
I'd apologize for overlooking the "New". But if I was the US Government, I'd overlook the "New" and not apologize.
That seems like something that is insanely overlooked. It is basically a free ride right into a target area. I guess they don't expect someone's bag bombs to have enough yield for big damage. A well-funded terror cell could make that happen I'm sure.
Stuff like that has been discussed many times. Terrorists are as much into "theatre" as the TSA. They only score points when they bring down a plane. So they ignore the easier and more obvious targets.
At least until they don't. After all, until 9/11, the safest way to survive a hijack attempt was to let the hijackers do what they wanted.
"Persons of Interest" are people connected with the inquiry at hand. They aren't trying to find who is popular on the cocktail circuit.
The "inquiry at hand" is no longer just the inquiry at hand, which is what the ruckus is all about.
They would be trying to find terrorists talking to their leadership hierarchy, as well as suppliers and active supporters. They aren't trying to find who is popular on the cocktail circuit.
Over the course of time, the two have been known to coincide. When the Inquiry at Hand shifts, the cocktail circuit is just one more collection of data to feed into the hopper.
I had exactly the same thought but I was gonna say something like, "Those E.T. carts are gonna have some company soon."
All the better that Microsoft has such fantastic experience with phoning home (or at least to the NSA).
NSA: "We've found a HUGE terrorist cell in Mexico!"
Of your friends, and your friends of friends, do you have at least one that lives in each of China, India, Sub-Saharan Africa and South America? I would guess that most people reading this in North America or Europe do not. Do you realistically think that you have a 'third hop' who lives in each of these places? Even if you do, that means that everyone in China (4.5x population of the US), India (4x), Sub-Saharan Africa (2.5x) or South America (1x) is separated from that person by only 3 more hops, including people (in some regions of any of these) who might have lived in the same rural location all their lives.
In general terms, that is true, but what the NSA is after is Persons of Interest. Persons of Interest aren't peasants down on the farm in China, they're "interesting persons", which is to say that they are people who move around a lot and meet a lot of other interesting persons. There's only 1 hop between me and Jimmy Carter, who can be in turn linked to all other recent presidents and other present or former senior government officials, who have between them personally met more than a few terrorist/Freedom Fighter leaders. I also have only 1 or 2 hops between me and Arnold Scharzenegger, who has many of the same connections.
Once your "person of interest" list reaches 320 million people or so, it ceases to have any meaning.
tea party? The tea party has major corporate backers.
Who could care less about the little grunts with their "Keep your Socialist hands off my Medicare" signs.
There's always more cannon fodder. No need to go out of the way to protect the minions.
You're confusing data entry with uniform resource identifiers. Ligatures exist in English as well, but we don't use them in domain names. Nor do we use control characters (backspace, for example, which only worked on devices that could overprint).
What you do within a website is between you and the site provider. I'm only concerned with the general navigation of the Internet.
That's rather Amero-centric of you. Would you go to an Arabic language website? If so, you probably have a way to type Arabic characters. Would you go to a Japanese language website? If so, you probably have a way to type Japanese characters. These characters have been allowed in certain parts of the URL for a long time, but never the TLD. What, largely, has changed?
This is a step towards more globalization, which is a good thing for everyone except the people who are on top but unable to take full advantage of being on top (the American middle and lower classes).
No, actually, it's not Amero-centric. It's historo-centric. Just like lawyers are hung up on Latin. What concerns me isn't the language - since to computers all languages are equally gibberish, it's the complexity of the support mechanism. ASCII/EBCDIC were the character sets used to set up the Internet, and support for them (ASCII, at least) is pretty well universal.
Once you're AT a website, I would certainly hope that their data entry facilities are supporting their target audiences, whatever they are in whatever languages/character sets make the users happy. But getting there shouldn't be balkanized. What we have now is a lowest common denominator. What we risk achieving is a World-Wide Web that's so nationalistic that no one will make the effort required to leave home.
Your admin blocks Infoworld articles? Thank him sometime for looking out for you.
Thanks Mordac!
As a dumb American, how am I going to type these?
You jest, but there's a darker side to being "full international".
I have a keyboard setup that allows me to easily enter virtually any character used in any latin-based alphabet, although the Slashdot editor would promptly sit on them (Hey, I want my "thorn" back!).
Without a whole lot of trouble, I can bump the tally up to include Arabic/Persian, and I have ways to branch out from there. However, the more extensive the character set is, the more problems come with it. Arabic is right-to-left, not left-to-right. It also has a whole raft of ligatures and looks really ugly if you don't use them. Chinese/Japanese "character sets" contain thousands of elements.
Putting together routing and filtering rules for a variety of systems while supporting all those possibilities is a nightmare, and that's just the tip of the iceberg.
The "murican" character set may be parochialistic, but it's about as simple as Latin goes. No funny dots or accent marks, no hooks at the bottoms of letters. No alternate codings that can confuse both memorization and collating sequences.
I strongly support the ability to render content to the full extend that localization allows. But I'd really be a lot happier keeping the basic routing and identifying components limited to something manageable.
While I'm not wild about being tracked, I simply don't feel that I have an assumption of privacy while driving around on a public road.
And, unless they're different than Florida with its OnePass toll system, a lot of Californians are already driving around with machine-readable IDs attached to their automobiles.
I don't expect privacy these days. I just want the people who collect the data to use it responsibly. Preferably, that means not at all. Unless I rob a bank, anyway.
That ended when politicians recognized that building a giant nanny state would require more and more federal control, and about half the US demographic agrees that's the goal of federal government.
Duckspeak Fail.
A "Nanny State" is one that limits your freedom "for your own good". A Police State is one that limits your freedom for its own good.
Yes, I know that we're supposed to be submitting to this whole deal "because it keeps us safe from the big bad evil terrorists".
But consider who one of the the biggest proponents of Prism is: Dick Cheney. If he's your ideal of a Nanny, you're kinkier than most of us, I think.
Give Snowden Obama's prize. He's not using it.
Heck, Obama got the Nobel for "not being Bush". Turns out he IS Bush. Might as well give it to someone who at least did something.
... to do what the government wants with great disrespect to freedom and liberty.
That word, like "pro-active" is grossly over-used. Try this, instead:
... to do what the government wants with great contempt for freedom and liberty.
Mod parent up.
We need more brave politicians to finally speak their minds about this instead of fearing the surveillance machine.
Bear in mind, Carter was a one term president, widely despised by Republicans and effectively abandoned by his own party -- unable to get many of his programs through a congress controlled by the Democratic Party (which at the time still contained a lot of southern social conservatives.)
He has worn the mantle of elder statesman and sage well since his time in office. Quite possibly one of the best educated and most greatly concerned for the american people of US presidents of the past century.
Carter always was concerned. Not only for the American people, but for people everywhere. His "Sunday School" image wasn't just a posture.
That, in a way was his downfall. Both Carter and Ford were pretty decent guys. About the only election where I thought it was a choice between who to vote for rather than whom to vote against. But they were both pretty ineffective overall. Carter did his part in reducing tensions between Israel and the Arabs (especially Egypt), and both Carter and Ford quietly kept the Evil Empire of the USSR at bay as it slowly ground itself to powder before finally collapsing at Reagan's feet.
But evidently nice guys finish last. Reagan didn't give a shit about other countries feelings, and, ironically, they respected him more for it. Bush I wasn't the disaster I'd feared, although he didn't actually do much better than Carter or Ford. Clinton was a sleazebag, but presided over one of the most peaceful and prosperous eras in US history. Then there was Dubya, who had been muttering about attacking Iraq almost from the moment he took office. Iraq was going to get slapped down anyway, since while they might have lacked usable WMDs, they had been getting more and more obnoxious in their probes against the no-fly zones even before Clinton departed. If we'd just waited another year or so, we could have gone in with the world at our backs instead of the world backing off. Which brings us to Obama, who was supposed to undo the excesses of Bush II, but has been looking more and more like Bush II revarnished.
In the mean time, while presidents came and went, the security paranoia infrastructure did not. J. Edgar Hoover was a nasty piece of work, although his spiritual predecessors were no angels. Who exactly inherited his excesses isn't totally clear to me, although the name "William Casey" seems to ring some bells. And the faceless beetle-like men developed Echelon, Prism and other programs of lesser fame. The lines between internal investigations (FBI) and external ones (CIA) blurred. They don't use the name "Total Information Awareness" any more, but that is the obvious goal.
"There's just a fundamental question of whether we're going to live in a society where these dragnet surveillance systems become routine," said Catherine Crump
The answer is yes, we will, because not enough people care. Just as many people in the USA are in favor of these programs to "keep us safe from the omg terrorists!" as oppose them, according to many polls.
Hell the media hasn't even been talking about the issues, they've been playing up the celeb angle.
Our society is trending towards a total surveillance state, and people don't care enough to do anything about it. They'll keep voting for the same two parties.
We aren't merely surveilled, however, we're self-surveilling. In addition to government cameras everywhere, people put up webcams, buy into Google Street View, post their entire lives on Facebook, etc., etc., etc.
This isn't entirely a bad thing. Not all of the Boston Bombing images came from government cameras, for example. Enough people get enough benefit from "Fishbowl Society" that I don't think it likely that we'll get that genie back in the bottle.
But if we can't turn back to more private times, we need to at least establish some acceptable rules for what we have. Asymmetric intelligence (a la NSA) is a threat to liberty. Basic human dignity requires that we be circumspect about what we share. And general data, such as traffic cams and telephone records should have very strict rules about both access and retention. You shouldn't be able to simply march in, wave a flag with an eagle on it saying "National Security" and be able to plunder at will.
I have another name, Stanislaw Lem, with two his novels, Eden and, to a lesser extent, Observation on the Spot"
An extract from Eden:
'An indistinct image emerges of doublers' Orwellian information-controlled civilization that is almost self-regulating, with a special kind of system of government—one that officially does not exist and is thus impossible to destroy. The society is controlled through a fictitious advanced branch of information science Lem dubs procrustics, based on the control and stratification of information flows within the society. It is used for molding groups within a society and ultimately a society as a whole to behave as designed by secret hidden rulers. One example described in the novel is the above mentioned settlement, kind of a "concentration camp" without any guards, designed so that the prisoners stay inside apparently of their own "free" will.'
Please, note this was written in 1959.
Stanislaw Lem wrote a number of things about surveillance states where things had gone on so long that they'd developed a bizarre life of their own. Not surprising, since he lived in a Soviet "Republic". One of my favorites is in the Cyberiad, where robots had taken over a planet and were constantly on the watch for "muclid spies" (i.e.:
I would not include "The Demolished Man" on the list of surveillance-predictive stories, however. In that excellent novel, the Espers were not only tightly controlled, but tightly self-controlling. In fact, one of the key factors in the story was that Lincoln was forbidden from actually prying uninvited into the minds of the people he wanted to interrogate. Despite being an Esper, he had to do most of his detective work the old fashioned way. Pretty much the diametrical opposite of the NSA approach.
If the headline is about sci-fi predictions of the Orwellian state, why not just fill in the rest?
The Orwellian state seems inevitable.
Step 2,people get off the planet.
Step 3, the realize they want to be free and the government comes down on them.
That's it.
That's the future.
The future is a boot stamping on a human face, forever.
(Sorry, couldn't resist).
Actually, having re-read 1984 recently, I noticed that Smith's interrogator/torturer/reprogrammer (whose name escapes me) mentioned that the Party was evolving. Which leads to interesting speculations. We have seen in recent history that rarely does an oppressive regime last 3 generations. The founders are ideologically committed to atrocities, but successive generations aren't so heavily invested and tend to want to be seen as "better" than their predecessors. "Better" doesn't always mean fairies and flowers; China's "better" is still authoritarian, just with a looser leash. And new oppressive regimes pop up as fast as old ones fade. But at least there's some hope.