The purpose of avionics is to get a plane from one point to another without incident.
The purpose of automated stock trading software is to make as much money as possible while screwing the other guy if you get the opportunity.
You'll never make automated stock software 'safe'. Its purpose is inherently risky and combative. You're not up against the laws of physics and the occasional thunderstorm; you're up against other people who have similar software and an urge to hurt you. This is Wall Street PvP (that's Prick-versus-Prick). It's unsafe by its nature.
You cannot make competitions entirely 'safe'. What you can do is pen them in so that they do not hurt bystanders. Just like putting crash walls around a NASCAR track, we need to put up regulations around Wall Street so their blood combat does not spill out and harm the larger economy. Re-implementing Glass-Steagall is the least that we can do to keep Wall Street's fiery crashes from hurting the common people. There are probably more reforms we could make to wall them off properly.
Blindsight isn't *that* hopeless -- the human race at least survives, albeit as chattel.
But Peter Watts' Rifter trilogy is the bleakest thing I've ever read. The slow but inexorable annihilation of Earth's entire ecosystem by humans screwing each other over in every way possible is written brilliantly.
I'm reminded of this April Fool's article in Locus Magazine:
Acclaimed science fiction writers Paolo Bacigalupi and Peter Watts today announced that they are working on a new shared universe anthology.
“Peter and I got talking about how much we loved shared-world anthologies, like Thieves World or Wild Cards,” said Bacigalupi, “but were put off by the unreasonable optimism of their settings. We think science fiction is ready for a pessimistic future of bleak, uncompromising wretchedness." (...) “We expect suicides,” said Watts. “And maybe a Nebula.”
Bacigalupi added that they had rejected a Barry Malzberg story written for the anthology for being “too optimistic.”
So apparently the authors with the most 'depressing' street cred in the business are Watts, Bacigalupi, and Malzberg.
This is not about using social media. It's about using the spying ability of smartphone apps to pad his fundraising mailing lists. Everyone who downloads that app will be giving their phone number and twitter name to the campaign. It could also grab their email address, and all the info on everyone in their contact list.
This is an extremely smart, out-of-the-box way of using social media as a stepping stone to outrageously unethical campaign advertising. It's a shining, heartfelt example of amoral power, a pristine jewel of fucking the public when they're not looking. I'm not surprised the Romney campaign came up with it.
The problem with making comic book stories on television is that you don't have the budget. Special effects cost money, and any truly 'super' hero is going to need special effects to wow the audience.
Without the multi-million dollar budget you get in movies, there are few superhero stories you can make well. Maybe something with minor SFX like Arrow (the Green Arrow TV show coming out in the fall), but nothing with real powers and real sensawunder. At best you'll just make lame soap operas like Smallville that occasionally hint at super powers being used in the background.
I was an army medic, and can tell you right off the bat this idea is bullshit it several different directions. First, no army ever could or would fight this way. The notion of the egalitarian army with no leadership is not really different from a mob.
Maybe it's mis-titled. The title shouldn't have anything to do with armies. A better title might be 'The Directed Mob'. *That* concept intrigues and frightens me more than the ridiculous NMA.
Or to put it another way, if I may quote the Church of the Sub-Genius:
"There are three kinds of people -- I call them Larrys, Curlys, and Moes. The Larrys don't even know that there are three types; if they're told, it's an abstraction, because they cannot imagine anything beyond Larry-ness. The Curlys know about it, and recognize the pecking order, but find ways of living with it cheerfully...for they are the imaginative, creative ones. The Moes not only know about it, but exploit and perpetuate it.
The naive, pleasant believers of all kinds are Larrys -- ineffectual, well-meaning do-gooders destined always to be victims, often without once guessing their status. Like sheep, they don't want to hear the unpleasant legends about "the slaughterhouse"; they/trust/ the strange two-legged beings who feed them. The artists, unsung scientific geniuses, political writers, and earnest disciples of the stranger cults are Curlys -- engaging, original, accident-prone but full of life, intuitively aware of the Moe forces plotting against them and trying to fight back. They can never defeat the Moes, however, without BECOMING Moes, which is impossible for a true Curly.
The Moes, then, are the fanatics, the ranters, the cult gurus, the Uri Gellers AND the Debunkers; they are the Resistance Leaders and the Ruling Class Bankers. They hate each other, but only because they want to control ALL the Larrys and Curlys themselves....Larrys and Curlys die in wars started by rival Moes -- the Larrys willingly, the Curlys with great regret."
I never realized how much the Church of the Sub-Genius shares with Nietzche. Thanks, that's an insight that will leave me shaking in bed with nightmares someday.:)
4X games are generally Turn-Based Strategy (TBS). The Real-Time Strategy (RTS) genre is very different. I prefer TBS games but they're hard to find nowadays. Ever since Age of Empires and the Warcraft series popularized RTSes, developers just haven't been making TBSes, which is a shame.
A friend of mine used 'ghod' instead of 'God' back in the early 1990s on Usenet. I think he was trying to avoid outright blasphemy. I liked the concept and took to it.
But I don't think that this will cause new ways to blow things up - you may need something bigger than the CERN accelerator to make things happen.
Actually...one of the exciting findings is that the Higgs boson's mass is lower than expected. So low that the standard model predicts that the vacuum should be unstable. That means any space with no particles in it should be boiling away, with the zero point energy converting into real energy. Since we probably would have noticed if the universe had spontaneously disintegrated, that suggests something needs to be fixed in the standard model.
If fixing the standard model leads to a way for us to utilize the zero point energy, this discovery might just lead to a new way to blow things up. And if -- ghod forbid -- we discover a way to make the vacuum unstable, then we might learn how to make one really big boom. Just one, because it will consume the entire universe, but that one will be REALLY BIG.
But what amazes me is that this has always been possible and always will be. If there is sound coming out of your speakers, there is a way to record it.
I guess the auto-ripper website makes it so easy as to make Google nervous. But when they manage to stamp out all of those websites, they'll next have to come for the thousands of different audio software that record whatever your computer is playing. Then they'll have to go for the manufacturers of headphone plugs, because if nothing else you can always wire your headphone outlet to your speaker input. Then they'll have to go after handheld audio recorders...
It's just silly. Anything put on Youtube can and will be endlessly copied. For Google to act otherwise is...I dunno, maybe 'security through assuming people are stupid'.
The Higgs particle is just the particle manifestation of the Higgs gauge field. Think of it as a huge block of jello through which all massive objects move. 125 GeV is the energy required to scoop out a bit of that jello and isolate it.
Then what would you prefer that animators use instead of Flash for their web animations?
I'd like a good answer to this also.
Right now there are three main applications designed for HTML5 animation (as opposed to HTML5 apps): Adobe Edge, Sencha Animator, and Tumult Hype. I know nothing about any of them. Some quick googling suggests that they're all new and still unproven, in various stages of polish and completeness.
The problem, I feel, is that Flash is being ostracized from the net too quickly, before mature tools to replace it are ready. I'm sure there will be a program that will allow hobbyists, amateurs, and professionals alike to create animations in the new standard of HTML5. But the software isn't quite mature yet. Certainly not as polished and feature-packed as Flash.
I just hope HTML5 lasts. If we go through a purge like this every few years, animation on the web may never fully recover.
If you're that poor, Obamacare isn't taxing you. If the cheapest insurance in your region costs more than 8% of your income then you get assistance with Obamacare.
Now, maybe you make a little more than that and you still don't have insurance. Then as somebody whose insurance premiums have been covering your costs every time you go to the emergency room, fuck you right back. You need insurance, and you're an idiot if you think otherwise.
Look, I'm being silly here and I didn't mean to insult anyone. But it's hard not to look down on people who have the money to buy insurance yet insist on riding the medical system for free. It's very easy to think of those people as selfish and evil, but as someone with faith in humanity I prefer to believe they're just idiots. Either way, I'm totally okay with taxing them.
Congress has always had the ability to tax just about any activity. The only restriction is that the tax must be fairly applied -- they can't, say, tax everyone in Alabama named Joe Scithers. That might pull out just a single person, and it's arbitrarily limited to a region. But Congress could, for example, tax everyone in the country named Joe, if they wished.
There has been talk that if Republicans get back into office they could institute a $100,000 tax on all abortion procedures. It wouldn't outlaw the practice, but it would be almost as good.
There's nothing new about Congress's ability to do this. The fact that they don't institute such taxes goes to prove that either they really hate implementing new taxes of any kind, or (less likely) that they are, despite other evidence, benevolent leaders who really do want to make the country better.
So apparently Obamacare is a tax. The right wingers are already starting to make hay of that. But I think they're missing something.
The only people being taxed under Obamacare are those with enough money to buy insurance but who choose not to do so. We have a term for people like that -- idiots. It's an idiot tax. Obama is taxing idiocy.
I'm okay with that. Tax the idiots, the morons, and the short-sighted braindead rubes all you like, Mr. Obama. I will never pay that tax, because I am not an idiot and I intend to always have healthcare of some sort. It's about time we assigned a penalty in this country for being unable to put two and two together to make four.
I am now eagerly awaiting the new taxes for taking up two parking slots with one car, and for buying ice cream, lard, and diet coke in the same shopping basket. If we can find out who pisses all over public restroom stalls, let's tax them too.
My friends and I would have marathon games of Gauntlet, seeing how far we could play on just one quarter. My record was seven hours, using the Warrior. I think Gauntlet was the last great arcade game to allow near-infinite play time for people who had mastered of the game.
Krugman is making a very salient point: The cost of borrowing money is cheaper now than it ever has been or likely will ever be again. If we don't borrow it now, when?
Borrow money now to fix the economy and infrastructure, and when we're back on our feet then we pay it back. You don't repay debts when you're broke and out of a job; you first get an income and a stable roof over your head, then you worry about paying your debtors. It's a pretty simple concept.
I have to wonder what is going to be next?... Dark and gritty My Little Pony where Nightmare Moon stomps Twilight Sparkle to death?
Poor waif, you have no idea what kind of fanfics are out there, do you? Take a look at Fallout: Equestria sometime. It doesn't get any darker or grittier than post-apocalyptic ponies. (It's also possibly the best fanfic ever, from any fandom, if you can handle the darkness.)
The simple fact is that the major consumers of games and fiction these days are adults, not teens or children. The most valuable demographic is 18-35 now, not the 10-17 that it used to be. So companies are going to produce some content geared for an adult audience, and if they can bring in the kids also then so much the better. If England or Japan were economic powerhouses then there'd be more porn games, because violence is abhorred there but sex is okay. However, America is where the money is, and in America sex is forbidden but brutal violence is okay. So the developers are creating violent content in hopes it will hit the 18-35s and pull in some of the 10-17s also.
TL;DR -- Dark and gritty is the lowest common denominator in America. Get used to it.
You're very astute. Gravity obeys an inverse-square law, which obviously comes from a pyramid of elves pulling in an expanding series of parallel teams.
This is also why we'll never see a naked singularity, because Mrs. Claus never allows her elves to go out without their suits of invisibility.
My point is that the exploration of Earth was made by heroes willing to risk their lives and often without any hope of returning. My point is in the first people who sailed from Indonesia to Peru, or who crossed the Aleutian land bridge, or who struck out into the wilderness of northern Europe after being driven from Rome. Exploration and colonization is risky. We should be willing to take those risks if we want the rewards.
That's my point -- that human space travel is expensive only because we're thinking inside the box that says we have to return people safely. Start thinking outside that box and the universe looks like a mountain ready and waiting to be climbed.
In fact, even in the absolute worst case scenario, namely total melting of all ice caps over a few centuries (and that's how long it's going to take no matter what), how do you imagine that would end civilization?
That's easy. When the Indonesian islands start going underwater, they invade mainland Asia looking for a dry place to live. Eventually Indonesia and China start a nuclear shooting war. Boom, nuclear armageddon. Bonus points for not even getting the US or Russia involved.
You must not have lived in the '80s, son. It's easy to come up with any world-ending scenario once you realize that human beings are stupid and they wave nuclear weapons like penis analogues.
True story: I knew a guy who was married to his horse. Not legally, of course, but there was a ceremony and everything. He had a twelve-foot-high privacy fence around his backyard so that nobody would complain about his and his bride's consummations. Which, in Missouri in the 1980s, were perfectly legal.
Except they lived near an Air Force base...and every so often a helicopter would fly low overhead, then stop right over his property. The pilot would watch for a while before flying off. There was nothing my friend could do about it (and nothing the Air Force could do to stop him, short of a missile strike), so he resigned himself to giving a free show two or three times a week.
Curiosity is in our species' nature. If our government is given the ability to invade our privacy then they will use it, if only out of curiosity.
Slashdot Mirror
The purpose of avionics is to get a plane from one point to another without incident.
The purpose of automated stock trading software is to make as much money as possible while screwing the other guy if you get the opportunity.
You'll never make automated stock software 'safe'. Its purpose is inherently risky and combative. You're not up against the laws of physics and the occasional thunderstorm; you're up against other people who have similar software and an urge to hurt you. This is Wall Street PvP (that's Prick-versus-Prick). It's unsafe by its nature.
You cannot make competitions entirely 'safe'. What you can do is pen them in so that they do not hurt bystanders. Just like putting crash walls around a NASCAR track, we need to put up regulations around Wall Street so their blood combat does not spill out and harm the larger economy. Re-implementing Glass-Steagall is the least that we can do to keep Wall Street's fiery crashes from hurting the common people. There are probably more reforms we could make to wall them off properly.
Blindsight isn't *that* hopeless -- the human race at least survives, albeit as chattel.
But Peter Watts' Rifter trilogy is the bleakest thing I've ever read. The slow but inexorable annihilation of Earth's entire ecosystem by humans screwing each other over in every way possible is written brilliantly.
I'm reminded of this April Fool's article in Locus Magazine:
Acclaimed science fiction writers Paolo Bacigalupi and Peter Watts today announced that they are working on a new shared universe anthology.
“Peter and I got talking about how much we loved shared-world anthologies, like Thieves World or Wild Cards,” said Bacigalupi, “but were put off by the unreasonable optimism of their settings. We think science fiction is ready for a pessimistic future of bleak, uncompromising wretchedness."
(...)
“We expect suicides,” said Watts. “And maybe a Nebula.”
Bacigalupi added that they had rejected a Barry Malzberg story written for the anthology for being “too optimistic.”
So apparently the authors with the most 'depressing' street cred in the business are Watts, Bacigalupi, and Malzberg.
This is not about using social media. It's about using the spying ability of smartphone apps to pad his fundraising mailing lists. Everyone who downloads that app will be giving their phone number and twitter name to the campaign. It could also grab their email address, and all the info on everyone in their contact list.
This is an extremely smart, out-of-the-box way of using social media as a stepping stone to outrageously unethical campaign advertising. It's a shining, heartfelt example of amoral power, a pristine jewel of fucking the public when they're not looking. I'm not surprised the Romney campaign came up with it.
The problem with making comic book stories on television is that you don't have the budget. Special effects cost money, and any truly 'super' hero is going to need special effects to wow the audience.
Without the multi-million dollar budget you get in movies, there are few superhero stories you can make well. Maybe something with minor SFX like Arrow (the Green Arrow TV show coming out in the fall), but nothing with real powers and real sensawunder. At best you'll just make lame soap operas like Smallville that occasionally hint at super powers being used in the background.
I was an army medic, and can tell you right off the bat this idea is bullshit it several different directions. First, no army ever could or would fight this way. The notion of the egalitarian army with no leadership is not really different from a mob.
Maybe it's mis-titled. The title shouldn't have anything to do with armies. A better title might be 'The Directed Mob'. *That* concept intrigues and frightens me more than the ridiculous NMA.
Or to put it another way, if I may quote the Church of the Sub-Genius:
"There are three kinds of people -- I call them Larrys, Curlys, and Moes. The Larrys don't even know that there are three types; if they're told, it's an abstraction, because they cannot imagine anything beyond Larry-ness. The Curlys know about it, and recognize the pecking order, but find ways of living with it cheerfully...for they are the imaginative, creative ones. The Moes not only know about it, but exploit and perpetuate it.
The naive, pleasant believers of all kinds are Larrys -- ineffectual, well-meaning do-gooders destined always to be victims, often without once guessing their status. Like sheep, they don't want to hear the unpleasant legends about "the slaughterhouse"; they /trust/ the strange two-legged beings who feed them. The artists, unsung scientific geniuses, political writers, and earnest disciples of the stranger cults are Curlys -- engaging, original, accident-prone but full of life, intuitively aware of the Moe forces plotting against them and trying to fight back. They can never defeat the Moes, however, without BECOMING Moes, which is impossible for a true Curly.
The Moes, then, are the fanatics, the ranters, the cult gurus, the Uri Gellers AND the Debunkers; they are the Resistance Leaders and the Ruling Class Bankers. They hate each other, but only because they want to control ALL the Larrys and Curlys themselves....Larrys and Curlys die in wars started by
rival Moes -- the Larrys willingly, the Curlys with great regret."
I never realized how much the Church of the Sub-Genius shares with Nietzche. Thanks, that's an insight that will leave me shaking in bed with nightmares someday. :)
4X games are generally Turn-Based Strategy (TBS). The Real-Time Strategy (RTS) genre is very different. I prefer TBS games but they're hard to find nowadays. Ever since Age of Empires and the Warcraft series popularized RTSes, developers just haven't been making TBSes, which is a shame.
A friend of mine used 'ghod' instead of 'God' back in the early 1990s on Usenet. I think he was trying to avoid outright blasphemy. I liked the concept and took to it.
But I don't think that this will cause new ways to blow things up - you may need something bigger than the CERN accelerator to make things happen.
Actually...one of the exciting findings is that the Higgs boson's mass is lower than expected. So low that the standard model predicts that the vacuum should be unstable. That means any space with no particles in it should be boiling away, with the zero point energy converting into real energy. Since we probably would have noticed if the universe had spontaneously disintegrated, that suggests something needs to be fixed in the standard model.
If fixing the standard model leads to a way for us to utilize the zero point energy, this discovery might just lead to a new way to blow things up. And if -- ghod forbid -- we discover a way to make the vacuum unstable, then we might learn how to make one really big boom. Just one, because it will consume the entire universe, but that one will be REALLY BIG.
But what amazes me is that this has always been possible and always will be. If there is sound coming out of your speakers, there is a way to record it.
I guess the auto-ripper website makes it so easy as to make Google nervous. But when they manage to stamp out all of those websites, they'll next have to come for the thousands of different audio software that record whatever your computer is playing. Then they'll have to go for the manufacturers of headphone plugs, because if nothing else you can always wire your headphone outlet to your speaker input. Then they'll have to go after handheld audio recorders...
It's just silly. Anything put on Youtube can and will be endlessly copied. For Google to act otherwise is...I dunno, maybe 'security through assuming people are stupid'.
The Higgs particle is just the particle manifestation of the Higgs gauge field. Think of it as a huge block of jello through which all massive objects move. 125 GeV is the energy required to scoop out a bit of that jello and isolate it.
Then what would you prefer that animators use instead of Flash for their web animations?
I'd like a good answer to this also.
Right now there are three main applications designed for HTML5 animation (as opposed to HTML5 apps): Adobe Edge, Sencha Animator, and Tumult Hype. I know nothing about any of them. Some quick googling suggests that they're all new and still unproven, in various stages of polish and completeness.
The problem, I feel, is that Flash is being ostracized from the net too quickly, before mature tools to replace it are ready. I'm sure there will be a program that will allow hobbyists, amateurs, and professionals alike to create animations in the new standard of HTML5. But the software isn't quite mature yet. Certainly not as polished and feature-packed as Flash.
I just hope HTML5 lasts. If we go through a purge like this every few years, animation on the web may never fully recover.
If you're that poor, Obamacare isn't taxing you. If the cheapest insurance in your region costs more than 8% of your income then you get assistance with Obamacare.
Now, maybe you make a little more than that and you still don't have insurance. Then as somebody whose insurance premiums have been covering your costs every time you go to the emergency room, fuck you right back. You need insurance, and you're an idiot if you think otherwise.
Look, I'm being silly here and I didn't mean to insult anyone. But it's hard not to look down on people who have the money to buy insurance yet insist on riding the medical system for free. It's very easy to think of those people as selfish and evil, but as someone with faith in humanity I prefer to believe they're just idiots. Either way, I'm totally okay with taxing them.
Congress has always had the ability to tax just about any activity. The only restriction is that the tax must be fairly applied -- they can't, say, tax everyone in Alabama named Joe Scithers. That might pull out just a single person, and it's arbitrarily limited to a region. But Congress could, for example, tax everyone in the country named Joe, if they wished.
There has been talk that if Republicans get back into office they could institute a $100,000 tax on all abortion procedures. It wouldn't outlaw the practice, but it would be almost as good.
There's nothing new about Congress's ability to do this. The fact that they don't institute such taxes goes to prove that either they really hate implementing new taxes of any kind, or (less likely) that they are, despite other evidence, benevolent leaders who really do want to make the country better.
So apparently Obamacare is a tax. The right wingers are already starting to make hay of that. But I think they're missing something.
The only people being taxed under Obamacare are those with enough money to buy insurance but who choose not to do so. We have a term for people like that -- idiots. It's an idiot tax. Obama is taxing idiocy.
I'm okay with that. Tax the idiots, the morons, and the short-sighted braindead rubes all you like, Mr. Obama. I will never pay that tax, because I am not an idiot and I intend to always have healthcare of some sort. It's about time we assigned a penalty in this country for being unable to put two and two together to make four.
I am now eagerly awaiting the new taxes for taking up two parking slots with one car, and for buying ice cream, lard, and diet coke in the same shopping basket. If we can find out who pisses all over public restroom stalls, let's tax them too.
My friends and I would have marathon games of Gauntlet, seeing how far we could play on just one quarter. My record was seven hours, using the Warrior. I think Gauntlet was the last great arcade game to allow near-infinite play time for people who had mastered of the game.
Krugman is making a very salient point: The cost of borrowing money is cheaper now than it ever has been or likely will ever be again. If we don't borrow it now, when?
Borrow money now to fix the economy and infrastructure, and when we're back on our feet then we pay it back. You don't repay debts when you're broke and out of a job; you first get an income and a stable roof over your head, then you worry about paying your debtors. It's a pretty simple concept.
I have to wonder what is going to be next? ... Dark and gritty My Little Pony where Nightmare Moon stomps Twilight Sparkle to death?
Poor waif, you have no idea what kind of fanfics are out there, do you? Take a look at Fallout: Equestria sometime. It doesn't get any darker or grittier than post-apocalyptic ponies. (It's also possibly the best fanfic ever, from any fandom, if you can handle the darkness.)
The simple fact is that the major consumers of games and fiction these days are adults, not teens or children. The most valuable demographic is 18-35 now, not the 10-17 that it used to be. So companies are going to produce some content geared for an adult audience, and if they can bring in the kids also then so much the better. If England or Japan were economic powerhouses then there'd be more porn games, because violence is abhorred there but sex is okay. However, America is where the money is, and in America sex is forbidden but brutal violence is okay. So the developers are creating violent content in hopes it will hit the 18-35s and pull in some of the 10-17s also.
TL;DR -- Dark and gritty is the lowest common denominator in America. Get used to it.
Next he'll be saying, "I have altered the EULA. Pray that I do not alter it any further."
You're very astute. Gravity obeys an inverse-square law, which obviously comes from a pyramid of elves pulling in an expanding series of parallel teams.
This is also why we'll never see a naked singularity, because Mrs. Claus never allows her elves to go out without their suits of invisibility.
His only crime is being the citizen of a police state.
It can't be a crime if everyone is guilty of it.
My point is that the exploration of Earth was made by heroes willing to risk their lives and often without any hope of returning. My point is in the first people who sailed from Indonesia to Peru, or who crossed the Aleutian land bridge, or who struck out into the wilderness of northern Europe after being driven from Rome. Exploration and colonization is risky. We should be willing to take those risks if we want the rewards.
The best way to explore Mars with human beings is to make it a one-way trip. There would be plenty people willing to volunteer. It would be cheaper and reap lots of scientific rewards.
That's my point -- that human space travel is expensive only because we're thinking inside the box that says we have to return people safely. Start thinking outside that box and the universe looks like a mountain ready and waiting to be climbed.
2. We can sent two thousand robotic rovers to Mars for a year much cheaper than one man for ten minutes.
Only because we intend to bring the man back.
In fact, even in the absolute worst case scenario, namely total melting of all ice caps over a few centuries (and that's how long it's going to take no matter what), how do you imagine that would end civilization?
That's easy. When the Indonesian islands start going underwater, they invade mainland Asia looking for a dry place to live. Eventually Indonesia and China start a nuclear shooting war. Boom, nuclear armageddon. Bonus points for not even getting the US or Russia involved.
You must not have lived in the '80s, son. It's easy to come up with any world-ending scenario once you realize that human beings are stupid and they wave nuclear weapons like penis analogues.
True story: I knew a guy who was married to his horse. Not legally, of course, but there was a ceremony and everything. He had a twelve-foot-high privacy fence around his backyard so that nobody would complain about his and his bride's consummations. Which, in Missouri in the 1980s, were perfectly legal.
Except they lived near an Air Force base...and every so often a helicopter would fly low overhead, then stop right over his property. The pilot would watch for a while before flying off. There was nothing my friend could do about it (and nothing the Air Force could do to stop him, short of a missile strike), so he resigned himself to giving a free show two or three times a week.
Curiosity is in our species' nature. If our government is given the ability to invade our privacy then they will use it, if only out of curiosity.