I think it's fairly mundane issues that contribute here. Relatives of mine have worked for both Fox and CNN on their national broadcasts-fairly big time as it goes. Sticking to principle is fine, but there folks aren't independently wealthy and like their jobs. It's unreasonable to assume they would sacrifice careers to stickle for principle-after all they don't get to decide what airs anyway. Even the most amazing reporting goes unnoticed if it doesn't air. Besides, plenty of people are genuinely more interested in seeing nipples instead of quality reporting on Darfur.
Profit centered corporate ownership of the media does more to stifle reporting than the individual reporter.
Yup...lost me there too. The whole thing stinks of conspiracy theorists. Hasn't ANYONE heard of Occams razor?
The main difficulty of the digital age seems to me to be determining the validity of the huge number of sources of information.
At least with congress it's easy-just follow the votes and you can tell who is paying the bills. When it comes to crackpot, truthy conspiracy theorists you just need to take a deep breath, hold it and let it out slowly.
Mind you, I'm not saying everything in the article is entirely bullshit, just that it's pretty obvious they have an axe to grind. You have to have some substance in order to slip in the red herrings.
When you look at the major media outlets you do need to take into account that big corporations own them, but that doesn't mean that martians control the world.
Sure! What I mean is that they RE-routed the air traffic over my house. It used to go over the river, supposedly for safety reasons. I guess we are statistically safe enough-the FAA certainly wasn't interested in getting feedback on the issue.
Dell sold PC's through Staples back in the mid 90's. I still have a Dell 486 gathering dust in my basement-got it at Staples (at a massive discount as I worked there at the time). AFAIK dealing with the backwash of returned & unsold products killed the deal. Dunno if they learned anything from the experience; selling through Staples took control of the customer's experience away from Dell.
"There are lies, damned lies and then there are statistics". Extra points if you can place the quote.
The term "significance" is the weasle word here. If you are stuck on a hot airplane and have a choice for waiting 91 minutes or 100 minutes, the difference just isn't significant...to the poor fool stuck on the plane. (unless you ask him at 90 minutes which he would prefer.)
Incidentally, this same program is being rammed down our throats where I live-they didn't even ask us because it's so significant! They tell us that by routing low flying airplanes over my house, they will reduce delays by a whole 3%! When I lie awake at 3:00 am, listening to large, low-flying jet aircraft as they roar directly over my house at full throttle, I will take comfort in that fact. After all, it's significant!
It's ridiculous that these attitudes still persist. Every time I hear the claim that AIDS is the patient's fault I want to smack someone. There are at least a dozen ways people could contract the disease innocently and unknowingly. Sure, some people take risks and pay the price, but for instance in Africa the infection rates are so high because of ignorance about the disease, not because they are all moral failures.
Merck does have a right to recoup their development costs-after all they have to save up for the next round of drug liability lawsuits like the vioxx fiasco.
Still, they ought to play smarter and drop costs when countries try to negotiate price-the tactic of countries taking a compulsory license is a big weapon against which they have no counter. They could sell AIDS and malaria drugs cheap and look like angels whilst continuing to price gouge for boner pills. Problem solved!
This is the kind of ill-informed dreck I've come to expect from hyper-liberal euro-trash. You write off the political oppression in China as "to be expected", yet you expect nothing but perfection from the US.
I strongly suggest you study cold war history very closely, then thank us for providing 50 years of security while you ran your little popgun armies in circles and built welfare states.
If you really believe the US Gov't is no better than China's you ought to lay off the hashish.
Of COURSE it's our own fault-our country is run by greedy idiots who are in the pockets of giant corporations. Additionally, the safeguards built into the US constitution have all been cleverly circumvented by corporate control of the media and the political parties. It amazes me when anything positive gets accomplished since our legislative process consists of doublespeak, red herrings and pandering to the money. But it's still done by process, not by edict.
The Chinese don't have to worry about elections, free press, rule of law, environmental impact, etc.. All they have to do is keep pumping out the goods with the largest, cheapest workforce in the world and clamp the lid on when the citizenry complains. They cheat like hell, too. Their currency doesn't float, they steal the designs for anything and everything and pump out cheap copies in quantity. At least when the Japanese set out to kill US manufacturing they played by the rules.
This has nothing to do with being a pawn and everything to do with your cherished (and apparently much exercised) right to whine and cry about everything. Perhaps if you throw a tantrum you'll get your way.
If you still don't understand, try going to China and publicly complain about the government or try to vote for the leadership. Sometimes it really is that simple.
The US borrows money to finance the bloated government budget. For every dollar we borrow, we have to pay back the interest with tax dollars. The government can barely pay the interest as it is.
Taxes rise and the value of the dollar falls. The US can't repudiate debt like a small 3rd world country-we're too big. We are on the hook and will never get off. The US standard of living will continue to erode as the gap between rich and poor increases. This might stop when the value of US labor drops and the value of chinese labor rises to the point where costs equalize, but we are screwed any way you look at it.
China has the US by the short hairs, but they can't pull very hard....yet. Until the value of the US market is below a critical percentage of China's overall exports, they will wait. After that point, it will be a good idea to start learning to speak Chinese.
China is to nations what Microsoft is to corporations, except far worse since they don't have to worry about legal issues beyond giving them lip service. They also have nukes and lots of tanks.
The saddest fact is that we can only blame ourselves. Congress continues to float bonds to finance our addiction to deficit spending. China buys them up secure in the knowledge that there is no political will in the US to actually balance a budget. Not only do we get completely outclassed in trade, they also are our banker-to whom we owe big time.
The upshot is we buy things we can't afford from China, paid for with money we borrowed from China.
"Series of tubes" isn't the worst way to describe it. My impression was that he was speaking somewhat off-the-cuff and was trying to make a specific point-the tubes can get "clogged".
He was a layman speaking to laymen-what do you expect? I don't know of any politicians with prior IT experience-they use a different side of the brain.
I knew a dude who had guns and once took a 9mm automatic out to show to his friends. Another guy asked to handle it and immediately pointed it at the owners head and pulled the trigger. When the [very scared] owner asked him how he knew it wasn't loaded the guy just shrugged.
The basic problem is that people aren't always rational or logical at critical moments.
I'm a parent, too. Regardless of his upbringing, I think we can safely assume that he was fucking nuts, as in there was something biologically wrong with his brain. It's a damn shame and frankly I feel kind of sorry for the guy-he was obviously miserable in his short life. If he was carrying around some sort of brain lesion or malformation, how much blame can you really assign to him?
When are these guys going to adopt a really cool logo, like a cross with bent arms or a bundle of sticks wrapped around an axe?
Once these tactics are accepted and legalized, eventually governments should begin experimenting with the use of webcams and computer microphones to monitor people for other illegal behaviors.
Don't forget the oodles of dirt cheap labor. They have literally hundreds of millions of people who think getting paid a few dollars a day for factory labor is fantastic-and for them it IS fantastic when compared to raising chickens and rice on a farm in the middle of nowhere. I think the only real reason India lags behind china is BECAUSE they have democratic institutions.
I am tired of hearing about body counts. Anyone bother to read history? More Americans were killed in 3 DAYS at the battle of Gettysburg than in the entire Iraq "war" and that was with muzzle-loading muskets, not automatic weapons. It doesn't make the deaths any more palatable but it's true.
The point of the thread ought to be this; neither of the two major political parties in the US represent the interests of average people. The republicans have oil and big business, the democrats have the entertainment and the lawyers.
The problems go far deeper than the current issues because the media are controlled by large corporate interests and the two major parties have a stranglehold on power.
The worst part is that everyone has such a short memory that we are incapable of doing anything about it.
Yup, the simplest, fastest and most reliable method of backing up data is a portable USB drive. Dunno about the cost but if they aren't cheaper now they will be soon. The author of the article shills for DVD+R quite effectively but how long will it be the standard? What's new? Blu ray?
HDDs keep getting cheaper in terms of dollars per byte stored. They are also getting faster, smaller and more reliable. Why bother with anything else?
Where does the tax money to pay for it all come from? The thing I love about liberals, especially Euro-liberals, is that they think you can vote utopia into existence. The Euros are particularly annoying since they got a half century of free security (courtesy of the good old US of A) and thus had the luxury of spending their defense budgets on social programs.
Goverment does indeed exist to protect commerce-you can't buy yourself a nifty new crown if there aren't any peasants to rape.
I'm sorry but I just don't believe in the inherent goodness of people or governments. Not to say they are inherently BAD either, just that blind faith in anything is extremely dangerous. Governments are made of PEOPLE and generally people are flawed, short-sighted and self-interested.
The lesson to be learned from the original article is that if you give anyone just a little bit of power they will begin abusing it. End of story.
Agree. The root of it is good design. Menus have a place, analog controls have a place. I would freak without a dedicated volume knob and fan speed control as well as temp control.
I still have a good old analog graphic equalizer for my stereo. It's WAY easier to push a bunch of sliders than to navigate a menu. That being said, I dont need one in my car-a few presets with a custom selection lurking behind a menu is ok, provided the interface is intuitive.
One of my pet peeves is bad interface design, be it analog or digital. Often it seems as if the engineers are trying to squeeze the maximum number of features out of a very limited chip rather than optimize fewer features.
The US government/constitution had two things going for it that are now in the toilet. The first was an independent press to expose wrongdoing. Since giant corporations control the media what we get as "news" is now heavily filtered. The second is the ability to vote out bad leaders. Since the political process is controlled by political parties that are two sides of the same coin, funded by the aforementioned giant corporations, we don't really get a choice as to who we elect or what the so-called "issues" are. Pretty much the same thing is happening in europe.
Bottom line: as the western governments squabble over which corporation gets to screw the most people, the chinese are slowly and carefully assuming real power in the world.
I said "environmental lobby" not scientists. By this I meant anyone out there making noise about environmental issues. I have no idea what the scientific community (as distinct from the rest of the noisemakers) really thought about "global cooling" in the '70's.
Again, in case you missed it, my point is that the overall focus (by whomever) on catastrophic climate change detracts attention from other serious and urgent problems.
We can argue all you want about exactly who said exactly what exactly when but that isn't the issue-but the original post was about the effect of hyperbole on acceptance of scientific ideas.
Additionally, people often seem confused about the fact that correlation does not imply causality.
This is relevant in evaluating where our research dollars and efforts are best spent. At best, the climate data shows correlation-not to say this isn't important or worth researching. I'd like to see a return to fixing stuff where causality has been proven and accepted by the scientific community.
I was going to make a vaguely sarcastic comment about your "putting on shorts" for global warming, and then you played the booby-trapped card.
This always comes up; the global cooling theories during the 1970s were *nowhere* near as widely-accepted and publicised in the scientific community/press. Even the popular press, who were responsible for promoting these theories didn't carry anywhere near as much on "global cooling" than they do now on warming. See this and this. And people were considering global warming even back then. The point is, instead of focusing on global catastrophies we have plenty of smaller but equally important things that are being ignored. More sigificantly, the science is rock solid. I'm not even trying to imply global warming will not occur - if you didn't see the humor in the "shorts" comment I can't help you.
Besides, the degree of acceptance of a given idea doesn't necessarily reflect it's truth.
The sad fact is that even if the globe isn't warming, even if CO2 emissions don't really matter worth a damn, even if we are experiencing a perfectly normal change in climate, all the global warming dispute does is detract from the really important problems associated with pollution.
Remember Love Canal? Superfund cleanup sites? If the globe warms I can put on shorts, a t-shirt and some sunblock but it's a bit harder to cure cancers, heavy metal poisonings, etc..
The environmental lobby should focus on something other than global warming regardless. 30 years ago they were saying pollution would block the sun and cause another ice age. How is climatological speculation necessary when we have so many other problems proven to be caused by pollution?
My kids were all *born* at the hospital mentioned in the article, giving me the requisite "it could have been me" perspective. (kudos to the philly cops for getting this nutcase)
The issue isn't "Cameras are good vs. cameras are bad" but "How much camera use is acceptable?"
Keep in mind that the majority of the cameras involved were private security cameras to which the police/government do NOT have easy access = not really scary.
In a recent trip to the UK, I was a bit surprised at the prevalance of government owned and controlled cameras-cameras that police/gov't CAN access easily = more scary. At least a representative democracy with a free press can pass laws limiting the use of the cameras, although the mere existence of the cameras creates a situation inviting abuse regardless of existing legislation.
Scarier yet = I recently bought some stuff online, giving my personal information to persons unknown.
Scariest = malware able to access a pc webcam and microphone. Who controls the malware? Why?
Slashdot Mirror
/agree
I think it's fairly mundane issues that contribute here. Relatives of mine have worked for both Fox and CNN on their national broadcasts-fairly big time as it goes. Sticking to principle is fine, but there folks aren't independently wealthy and like their jobs. It's unreasonable to assume they would sacrifice careers to stickle for principle-after all they don't get to decide what airs anyway. Even the most amazing reporting goes unnoticed if it doesn't air. Besides, plenty of people are genuinely more interested in seeing nipples instead of quality reporting on Darfur.
Profit centered corporate ownership of the media does more to stifle reporting than the individual reporter.
Yup...lost me there too. The whole thing stinks of conspiracy theorists. Hasn't ANYONE heard of Occams razor?
The main difficulty of the digital age seems to me to be determining the validity of the huge number of sources of information.
At least with congress it's easy-just follow the votes and you can tell who is paying the bills. When it comes to crackpot, truthy conspiracy theorists you just need to take a deep breath, hold it and let it out slowly.
Mind you, I'm not saying everything in the article is entirely bullshit, just that it's pretty obvious they have an axe to grind. You have to have some substance in order to slip in the red herrings.
When you look at the major media outlets you do need to take into account that big corporations own them, but that doesn't mean that martians control the world.
Sure! What I mean is that they RE-routed the air traffic over my house. It used to go over the river, supposedly for safety reasons. I guess we are statistically safe enough-the FAA certainly wasn't interested in getting feedback on the issue.
Dell sold PC's through Staples back in the mid 90's. I still have a Dell 486 gathering dust in my basement-got it at Staples (at a massive discount as I worked there at the time). AFAIK dealing with the backwash of returned & unsold products killed the deal. Dunno if they learned anything from the experience; selling through Staples took control of the customer's experience away from Dell.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out.
"There are lies, damned lies and then there are statistics". Extra points if you can place the quote.
The term "significance" is the weasle word here. If you are stuck on a hot airplane and have a choice for waiting 91 minutes or 100 minutes, the difference just isn't significant...to the poor fool stuck on the plane. (unless you ask him at 90 minutes which he would prefer.)
Incidentally, this same program is being rammed down our throats where I live-they didn't even ask us because it's so significant! They tell us that by routing low flying airplanes over my house, they will reduce delays by a whole 3%! When I lie awake at 3:00 am, listening to large, low-flying jet aircraft as they roar directly over my house at full throttle, I will take comfort in that fact. After all, it's significant!
Piston engines are obsolete anyway.
Say hello to your new rotary engine overlord.
http://www.starrotor.com/Engine.htm
It's ridiculous that these attitudes still persist. Every time I hear the claim that AIDS is the patient's fault I want to smack someone. There are at least a dozen ways people could contract the disease innocently and unknowingly. Sure, some people take risks and pay the price, but for instance in Africa the infection rates are so high because of ignorance about the disease, not because they are all moral failures.
Merck does have a right to recoup their development costs-after all they have to save up for the next round of drug liability lawsuits like the vioxx fiasco.
Still, they ought to play smarter and drop costs when countries try to negotiate price-the tactic of countries taking a compulsory license is a big weapon against which they have no counter. They could sell AIDS and malaria drugs cheap and look like angels whilst continuing to price gouge for boner pills. Problem solved!
This is the kind of ill-informed dreck I've come to expect from hyper-liberal euro-trash. You write off the political oppression in China as "to be expected", yet you expect nothing but perfection from the US.
I strongly suggest you study cold war history very closely, then thank us for providing 50 years of security while you ran your little popgun armies in circles and built welfare states.
If you really believe the US Gov't is no better than China's you ought to lay off the hashish.
Of COURSE it's our own fault-our country is run by greedy idiots who are in the pockets of giant corporations. Additionally, the safeguards built into the US constitution have all been cleverly circumvented by corporate control of the media and the political parties. It amazes me when anything positive gets accomplished since our legislative process consists of doublespeak, red herrings and pandering to the money. But it's still done by process, not by edict.
The Chinese don't have to worry about elections, free press, rule of law, environmental impact, etc.. All they have to do is keep pumping out the goods with the largest, cheapest workforce in the world and clamp the lid on when the citizenry complains. They cheat like hell, too. Their currency doesn't float, they steal the designs for anything and everything and pump out cheap copies in quantity. At least when the Japanese set out to kill US manufacturing they played by the rules.
This has nothing to do with being a pawn and everything to do with your cherished (and apparently much exercised) right to whine and cry about everything. Perhaps if you throw a tantrum you'll get your way.
If you still don't understand, try going to China and publicly complain about the government or try to vote for the leadership. Sometimes it really is that simple.
The US borrows money to finance the bloated government budget. For every dollar we borrow, we have to pay back the interest with tax dollars. The government can barely pay the interest as it is.
Taxes rise and the value of the dollar falls. The US can't repudiate debt like a small 3rd world country-we're too big. We are on the hook and will never get off. The US standard of living will continue to erode as the gap between rich and poor increases. This might stop when the value of US labor drops and the value of chinese labor rises to the point where costs equalize, but we are screwed any way you look at it.
Um, Mr Combat Vet? If you are going to refer to someone as "clueless" please be at least marginally coherent.
China has the US by the short hairs, but they can't pull very hard....yet. Until the value of the US market is below a critical percentage of China's overall exports, they will wait. After that point, it will be a good idea to start learning to speak Chinese.
China is to nations what Microsoft is to corporations, except far worse since they don't have to worry about legal issues beyond giving them lip service. They also have nukes and lots of tanks.
The saddest fact is that we can only blame ourselves. Congress continues to float bonds to finance our addiction to deficit spending. China buys them up secure in the knowledge that there is no political will in the US to actually balance a budget. Not only do we get completely outclassed in trade, they also are our banker-to whom we owe big time.
The upshot is we buy things we can't afford from China, paid for with money we borrowed from China.
How do you greet an overlord in Chinese?
"Series of tubes" isn't the worst way to describe it. My impression was that he was speaking somewhat off-the-cuff and was trying to make a specific point-the tubes can get "clogged".
He was a layman speaking to laymen-what do you expect? I don't know of any politicians with prior IT experience-they use a different side of the brain.
I knew a dude who had guns and once took a 9mm automatic out to show to his friends. Another guy asked to handle it and immediately pointed it at the owners head and pulled the trigger. When the [very scared] owner asked him how he knew it wasn't loaded the guy just shrugged.
The basic problem is that people aren't always rational or logical at critical moments.
I'm a parent, too. Regardless of his upbringing, I think we can safely assume that he was fucking nuts, as in there was something biologically wrong with his brain. It's a damn shame and frankly I feel kind of sorry for the guy-he was obviously miserable in his short life. If he was carrying around some sort of brain lesion or malformation, how much blame can you really assign to him?
When are these guys going to adopt a really cool logo, like a cross with bent arms or a bundle of sticks wrapped around an axe?
Once these tactics are accepted and legalized, eventually governments should begin experimenting with the use of webcams and computer microphones to monitor people for other illegal behaviors.
Don't forget the oodles of dirt cheap labor. They have literally hundreds of millions of people who think getting paid a few dollars a day for factory labor is fantastic-and for them it IS fantastic when compared to raising chickens and rice on a farm in the middle of nowhere. I think the only real reason India lags behind china is BECAUSE they have democratic institutions.
I am tired of hearing about body counts. Anyone bother to read history? More Americans were killed in 3 DAYS at the battle of Gettysburg than in the entire Iraq "war" and that was with muzzle-loading muskets, not automatic weapons. It doesn't make the deaths any more palatable but it's true.
The point of the thread ought to be this; neither of the two major political parties in the US represent the interests of average people. The republicans have oil and big business, the democrats have the entertainment and the lawyers.
The problems go far deeper than the current issues because the media are controlled by large corporate interests and the two major parties have a stranglehold on power.
The worst part is that everyone has such a short memory that we are incapable of doing anything about it.
Yup, the simplest, fastest and most reliable method of backing up data is a portable USB drive. Dunno about the cost but if they aren't cheaper now they will be soon. The author of the article shills for DVD+R quite effectively but how long will it be the standard? What's new? Blu ray?
HDDs keep getting cheaper in terms of dollars per byte stored. They are also getting faster, smaller and more reliable. Why bother with anything else?
Where does the tax money to pay for it all come from? The thing I love about liberals, especially Euro-liberals, is that they think you can vote utopia into existence. The Euros are particularly annoying since they got a half century of free security (courtesy of the good old US of A) and thus had the luxury of spending their defense budgets on social programs.
Goverment does indeed exist to protect commerce-you can't buy yourself a nifty new crown if there aren't any peasants to rape.
I'm sorry but I just don't believe in the inherent goodness of people or governments. Not to say they are inherently BAD either, just that blind faith in anything is extremely dangerous. Governments are made of PEOPLE and generally people are flawed, short-sighted and self-interested.
The lesson to be learned from the original article is that if you give anyone just a little bit of power they will begin abusing it. End of story.
Agree. The root of it is good design. Menus have a place, analog controls have a place. I would freak without a dedicated volume knob and fan speed control as well as temp control.
I still have a good old analog graphic equalizer for my stereo. It's WAY easier to push a bunch of sliders than to navigate a menu. That being said, I dont need one in my car-a few presets with a custom selection lurking behind a menu is ok, provided the interface is intuitive.
One of my pet peeves is bad interface design, be it analog or digital. Often it seems as if the engineers are trying to squeeze the maximum number of features out of a very limited chip rather than optimize fewer features.
Hooooray! Someone gets it right for a change!
The US government/constitution had two things going for it that are now in the toilet. The first was an independent press to expose wrongdoing. Since giant corporations control the media what we get as "news" is now heavily filtered. The second is the ability to vote out bad leaders. Since the political process is controlled by political parties that are two sides of the same coin, funded by the aforementioned giant corporations, we don't really get a choice as to who we elect or what the so-called "issues" are. Pretty much the same thing is happening in europe.
Bottom line: as the western governments squabble over which corporation gets to screw the most people, the chinese are slowly and carefully assuming real power in the world.
Welcome to the dawn of the totalitarian era.
I said "environmental lobby" not scientists. By this I meant anyone out there making noise about environmental issues. I have no idea what the scientific community (as distinct from the rest of the noisemakers) really thought about "global cooling" in the '70's.
c ausation_(logical_fallacy)
Again, in case you missed it, my point is that the overall focus (by whomever) on catastrophic climate change detracts attention from other serious and urgent problems.
We can argue all you want about exactly who said exactly what exactly when but that isn't the issue-but the original post was about the effect of hyperbole on acceptance of scientific ideas.
Additionally, people often seem confused about the fact that correlation does not imply causality.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_implies_
This is relevant in evaluating where our research dollars and efforts are best spent. At best, the climate data shows correlation-not to say this isn't important or worth researching. I'd like to see a return to fixing stuff where causality has been proven and accepted by the scientific community.
I was going to make a vaguely sarcastic comment about your "putting on shorts" for global warming, and then you played the booby-trapped card.
This always comes up; the global cooling theories during the 1970s were *nowhere* near as widely-accepted and publicised in the scientific community/press. Even the popular press, who were responsible for promoting these theories didn't carry anywhere near as much on "global cooling" than they do now on warming. See this and this. And people were considering global warming even back then. The point is, instead of focusing on global catastrophies we have plenty of smaller but equally important things that are being ignored. More sigificantly, the science is rock solid. I'm not even trying to imply global warming will not occur - if you didn't see the humor in the "shorts" comment I can't help you.
Besides, the degree of acceptance of a given idea doesn't necessarily reflect it's truth.
The sad fact is that even if the globe isn't warming, even if CO2 emissions don't really matter worth a damn, even if we are experiencing a perfectly normal change in climate, all the global warming dispute does is detract from the really important problems associated with pollution.
Remember Love Canal? Superfund cleanup sites? If the globe warms I can put on shorts, a t-shirt and some sunblock but it's a bit harder to cure cancers, heavy metal poisonings, etc..
The environmental lobby should focus on something other than global warming regardless. 30 years ago they were saying pollution would block the sun and cause another ice age. How is climatological speculation necessary when we have so many other problems proven to be caused by pollution?
My kids were all *born* at the hospital mentioned in the article, giving me the requisite "it could have been me" perspective. (kudos to the philly cops for getting this nutcase)
The issue isn't "Cameras are good vs. cameras are bad" but "How much camera use is acceptable?"
Keep in mind that the majority of the cameras involved were private security cameras to which the police/government do NOT have easy access = not really scary.
In a recent trip to the UK, I was a bit surprised at the prevalance of government owned and controlled cameras-cameras that police/gov't CAN access easily = more scary. At least a representative democracy with a free press can pass laws limiting the use of the cameras, although the mere existence of the cameras creates a situation inviting abuse regardless of existing legislation.
Scarier yet = I recently bought some stuff online, giving my personal information to persons unknown.
Scariest = malware able to access a pc webcam and microphone. Who controls the malware? Why?