Secondly, anything that is sold should be marked as such in the store's database. Somebody walking into the store with tagged clothing should not be fingered for shop lifting, since the item shoudl have been marked as sold.
WRONG. It's not economically feasible to keep an opt-out database. The other poster already pointed out how stupid it sounds to have the hundreds of wallmart stores cross reference and link up their opt-op database for eternity.
I have a question here: why wouldn't a store just keep a history of the items it recieved, and match that to the items it sold? It would then be able to tell that the clothes someone is wearing when they walk in the store had been part of the store's inventory and whether or not it was bought here without a link to every other store. I don't think that it would be economically feasible to keep a global sync'ed database of all items, but it may be possible to keep a database of items that are suspected to be stolen (or other reasons).
Just for fun, let me respond to your accusations one by one:
* How much influence do you think any company has on DARPA directly? Somebody else indicated that they thought MS could buy off DARPA with free software/money. Hmmm... Lets think again. DARPA's goals are to advance technology in specific areas. They receive funding through DoD and Congress, not from any corporation. I believe a companies influence is limited to what they can convince key Congressmen of to redirect the type of technology (and software copyrights) that DARPA funds. Of course this ignores more direct, underhanded efforts a company might take to influence officials.
* I have a speculation of my own: the parent poster has never read what the real goals of TIA are. There seems to be an assumption that "total nformation awareness" means that the government wants to monitor all information all the time, including every single keystroke and mouse click on your computer. This is not what the specific project that is funded by DARPA (named TIA) is about. It is more about dredging through exisiting databases to notice suspicious patterns that may indicate terrorist activity. Whether or not some members of government would like the ability to comb through all possible information about people at any time is another question.
* In general I don't see DARPA being too concerned about techology leaking to other countries. Otherwise they would not fund large public universities (where a large percentage of faculty and grad students are not US citizens).
* The final point is too vague to be meaningful. While I am sure it plays well to the anti-establishment crowd, it doesn't contribute to intelligent conversation.
Slashdot Mirror
I have a question here: why wouldn't a store just keep a history of the items it recieved, and match that to the items it sold? It would then be able to tell that the clothes someone is wearing when they walk in the store had been part of the store's inventory and whether or not it was bought here without a link to every other store. I don't think that it would be economically feasible to keep a global sync'ed database of all items, but it may be possible to keep a database of items that are suspected to be stolen (or other reasons).
Keeping such a database clean may be difficult
Just for fun, let me respond to your accusations one by one:
* How much influence do you think any company has on DARPA directly? Somebody else indicated that they thought MS could buy off DARPA with free software/money. Hmmm... Lets think again. DARPA's goals are to advance technology in specific areas. They receive funding through DoD and Congress, not from any corporation. I believe a companies influence is limited to what they can convince key Congressmen of to redirect the type of technology (and software copyrights) that DARPA funds. Of course this ignores more direct, underhanded efforts a company might take to influence officials.
* I have a speculation of my own: the parent poster has never read what the real goals of TIA are. There seems to be an assumption that "total nformation awareness" means that the government wants to monitor all information all the time, including every single keystroke and mouse click on your computer. This is not what the specific project that is funded by DARPA (named TIA) is about. It is more about dredging through exisiting databases to notice suspicious patterns that may indicate terrorist activity. Whether or not some members of government would like the ability to comb through all possible information about people at any time is another question.
* In general I don't see DARPA being too concerned about techology leaking to other countries. Otherwise they would not fund large public universities (where a large percentage of faculty and grad students are not US citizens).
* The final point is too vague to be meaningful. While I am sure it plays well to the anti-establishment crowd, it doesn't contribute to intelligent conversation.