but what do you do here when somebody declares bankruptcy after treatment?
Don't worry; even on the remote chance that something like this is possible, it won't be a one-time treatment. It will be expensive because it requires on-going, complex procedures to fix one body system after another, systems that never had to function for more than 35-40 years in the past.
The same overtone of moral disapproval you express has greeted every major medical advance.
As it should: there have been very few medical advances that have actually increased human lifespan or health. Many medical advances feed on fear of the inevitable, have increased suffering needlessly, and are a bottomless financial pit.
And, in case you were wondering why we live longer on average, it's not due to medicine, it's almost entirely due to public health measures, a reliable food supply, and prevention.
From the point of view of biology, it is essential that the lifespan of individuals is limited: that is how species evolve and adapt. It is also an central part of our social structure. And it is how our bodies are put together: lots of parts have never needed to work more than about 35-40 years, and that's why they break down steadily after that.
Most likely, it will be far more than seven things that need to get fixed in order to extend our lifespan significantly past age 100 on average: for a lot of things in the human body, there simply are no repair mechanisms because they have never been needed before. It's good enough to put something like bones or brains together during the first few years of life and then to leave them alone, with only limited maintenance.
From an evolutionary point of view, it would be unwise to remove or disable the central mechanism by which we adapt. We probably have already adapted to the toxins and other environmental factors we live under today; if a population of 1000 year olds decided to do something stupid that ended up killing most of them, or merely had the bad luck of being particularly susceptible to some flu virus, there would be very few individuals of reproductive age to select resistant individuals from.
And from an ethical point of view, it is unclear that we have the right to prevent billions of potential human beings in future generations from coming into existence.
The traditional "three score year and ten" is a good thing to plan for: you probably won't get much more than that. Use them well.
What we need first of all is for the IRS to create an XML language and semantic model of the tax forms. That markup should specify what gets added up how, define what goes into individual fields, etc. That way, we can create open source tools that work year after year, even if the taxcode changes, not only for filing taxes, but also for analyzing and verifying tax returns, as well as analyzing the tax code and the tax forms themselves.
You'd give all your vital tax, income, and personal information to some company offering to file it for "free"?
It's not "for free", it costs money. And, yes, I trust hrblock.com (after checking the certificate) as much as I trust any tax preparation software. In fact, I trust using a web-based tax system from a Linux machine more than I trust an application-based tax system from a Windows machine (where spyware is rampant).
Besides, you're a fool if you assume that "the bad guys" can't get your tax, income, and personal information by lots of other means. You need to protect your assets so that they are safe even if people get that kind of information about you.
Not I. This is one case where I don't mind taking 30 minutes to fill out a form and physically snail mail it (certified, of course).
Consider yourself lucky if your taxes are simple enough that you can fill out a paper form in 30 minutes and do it correctly. I haven't been able to do that in years.
Several companies have web-based tax software: there is no software to install, they have all the forms, you get a PDF, and they can also submit it for you. I used one of them last year with Linux and Firefox and it worked like a charm. The refunds arrived very quickly, too.
Yes, and you need to carry that cable around, you may lose it on your trip, etc.
If you get a camera that works with AA batteries and SD (like the Ricoh R1), this means that all you ever need to carry is the camera itself: no cables, no chargers, nothing. Now, that's travel convenience.
Dreamweaver templates are a bad idea, from the dark ages of the web. If you are still generating sites by hand, you can do something fairly simple with PHP and CSS or one of the Apache modules/filters.
A better solution is to use a content management system (CMS).
Microsoft manages to deliver a beta of a 64bit version of Windows only, what, several years later than Linux. And while the 64bit Linux distributions come with most applications actually recompiled as 64bits, you will hardly get any 64bit applications for Windows.
It's just about impossible that a tecnic that makes robotic spacecraft all that much more self sufficient will be confined to just robotic space travel for long.
If you spend as much time and money on developing your systems as NASA does on theirs, you can get the same degree of autonomy and reliability.
And that degree is somewhat limited: their spacecraft crash with some frequency, and they spend a lot of time patching and bug-fixing.
People have been trying to make systems easier to manage for years. Unfortunately, it's not enough to have the desire to make systems self-managing, you also need good ideas for how to do it, and those are still lacking as much as they always have been.
Give the guy credit, though, for seeing a good opportunity. Industry will believe in this silver bullet like they have done in the ones before.
Unfortunately, the real research will still take decades to complete, and then this area will have a bad name just like most of the other overhyped technologies before it.
Care to elaborate or are you just repeating what you heard from someone, somewhere, once.
If you believe in the Bible, then it is clear that you are "just repeating what you heard from someone, somewhere, once". Because if there is anything clear about the Bible, it's that it's a pretty random collection of documents, from unknown authors, with unknown hangups and superstitions. And you are just repeating that crap.
However, when you post to Usenet you know that your potential audiance is, well, anyone. Anyone at all in the entire world. Google's archiving those postings doesn't change anything.
Google doesn't change the audience, but they change another assuption: the assumption of transience. USENET postings went away after a few weeks. That's the way USENET was designed and that's the way it was run. Google changed that after the fact.
The difference, of course, is that when talking to someone on the street you assume that your potential audiance is the few people on the street around you close enough to hear.
Well, if Google can change assumptions about distribution on USENET (namely from a the contemporaneous community of mostly students and computer scientists in the 1980's to hundreds of millions of Internet users), I don't see why Google or anybody else can't violate your assumption about who hears your conversations either.
but that is clearly an exceptional case and nobody on the street assumes that their conversations are going to be broadcast on CNN.
Nobody on USENET assume that people were going to make their conversations available for public search to hundreds of millions of random users 20 years later either. The existence of Google in 2004 is just as "exceptional" from the perspective of 1982 as the existence of networked microphones on every street corner seem to you now.
And if you think the networked microphones aren't coming, think again. There is a lot of research directed at just that: putting sensors everywhere and getting the cost and power requirements down so that that is feasible.
We are spending billions a year to examine all sorts of risks that we might face: disease, natural disasters, wars, famine, etc. Of those tens of thousands of study per year, a few pop up that warn us of potential disaster. Those are the ones we pay attention to. Then, we allocate more funding to those areas, scientists study those issues more extensively, and they reach some sort of conclusion, usually not completely unanimous but with a clear consensus among most scientists. That's the way things work. It's rational, it's sensible, and it's the best way we know how to make decisions.
The only thing that's "emotional" in this discussion is that people like you don't want to face the scientific process. You have decided for yourself that global warming is inconvenient, so you are just going to ignore it. Your is the same kind of irrational and emotional behavior that causes people to run up huge debts or gamble or take drugs: you are addicted to something, and even though it's clear it's bad for you, you just refuse to look at the facts.
As an architect
You should put a warning sign on anything you design. I wouldn't want to enter a place designed by someone who thinks one should ignore known problems and instead focus on the the things that are working well.
It might be a better use of one's time to look at the pattern of scientific herd-mentality FIRST, and then take into account individual studies second.
One can't win with people like you. When there is pretty much universal consensus among scientists about global warming (and there is) and you call it "herd mentality". If there weren't universal consensus, you'd call the results "speculative" and "unproven". It's clear again: you just don't want to face reality because it would be inconvenient for you.
I guess it's very hard to get continued funding for a study that says "Everything's fine, situation normal"
There are lots of those studies. But they don't get covered in the press because it isn't necessary to cover them in the press. We need to pay attention to potential problems. That's the way all living beings operate. Unless you are mentally unstable, you don't sit around all day thinking about the fact that your digestion is working properly or your hair is growing or your heart is beating. But when your digestion stops working properly, then you notice and pay attention.
There aren't a lot of potential problems we humans have as a species: we should be really happy. But there are some big ones. One of the big ones is global warming because it has the potential of destroying civilization and making large parts of the globe uninhabitable.
This research has some serious flaws. It is essentially based on information for a single summer,
False. The research is based centuries of climate records, millions of measurements, and extensive analysis by climatologists and statisticians. One conclusion of theis about a single summer (not "based on" a single summer, as you falsely state): it says that 2003 is an example of what we can expect.
The estimations on temperature growth are not really supported by anything - I think it was written to grab headlines.
The temperature estimates are based on decades of research and are in line with mainstream scientific consensus about climate change.
You are free to hold whatever political prejudices and superstitions you like, but as a society we have to act rationally. That's why we need to act according to scientific fact and consensus, and that is clear: global warming is occurring, it is due to human activity, and is will have severe consequences.
As in any business, it's better to just appease some of your crazy clients/customers
People whose copyright Google infringes usually don't contribute anything to Google's bottom line, so that argument doesn't work. What Google is really afraid of is the public relations fallout that a few lawsuits would have, and the precedent that might set for their search business (the Google "cache" is on pretty shaky grounds, too). That's the reason they act when you ask, not out of "politeness".
As far as a class-action, again, it'd have to be a hoarde of people with valid filings, which, quite frankly, I doubt exist, since it costs something like $25-30 for each federal filing.
Whether the copyrights are registered or not has nothing to do with whether Google is guilty of copyright infringement, only with the damages that can be recovered.
And, yes, it would be hard to recover enough damages to make a lawsuit worthwhile. That's a loophole in our copyright system: if I infringe Hollywood's copyright just once, they can ruin me with a lawsuit, but if Google infringes copyright on a massive scale, they can get away with it without fear of significant financial consequences. The fact that Google knows this tells you that the company is not the nicely-behaved underdog that some people like to think of them as.
The existence of the X-No-Archive header suggests that implicit permission is given to archive.
The X-No-Archive header was created around 1995 in response to criticism of emerging web-based USENET archives. Therefore, at best, you can only argue that such implicit permission exists after the date of its creation. But Google archives posts going back all the way to the early 1980's.
Even then, however, it is questionable whether for DejaNews to create an opt-out policy for archiving is a sufficient defense (among other things, the "X-" prefix indicates that it was not an official part of the USENET protocols in the first place).
See how far you would get if you said "Disney, unless you put a red X-No-Distribute sticker on your DVD, you grant me full rights to redistribute your DVD over the Internet".
There is nothing to "win" for individuals because Google will, "voluntarily" take down individual posts if you tell them to. So, any lawsuit an individual would bring would be short-lived because it would be nearly automatically settled.
However, people might start a class action lawsuit against Google. If Google stops being a geek darling and some ambulance chasing lawyer gets wind of this, that may yet happen.
If you don't register your copyright, all that means is that there are no additional penalties for copyright infringement. But that doesn't mean companies can blithely infringe your copyright.
Furthermore, you don't have to register before you publish: you can register whenever you like, and any copyright infringement that happens after registration is fully actionable.
I suggest you get a better lawyer because your lawyer seems to be a complete moron (more likely, however, you just invented the lawyer and you yourself are the complete moron).
I agree 100%: Google's use of USENET groups almost certainly constitutes copyright infringement. I think the only reason they haven't gotten sued is because there is little money in that (hard to prove damages).
But that doesn't make it alright. DejaNews/Google's actions were arrogant and selfish, and they have had a profound effect on USENET. Anybody who posts to USENET under their own name these days is a fool because they will have to live with whatever position they took for the rest of their life. That is very different from the information discussion forum that USENET was supposed to be.
We can question whatever we want to: this isn't the Soviet Union. You may consider it gauche to question a free-as-in-beer service, but I have to disagree there, too. Google is not a charity and their service is a business venture. There are a lot of services that are free-as-in-beer that are ultimately just loss leaders or attempts to monopolize a market. If Microsoft gives you your first copy of Windows for "free", don't you question their motives? If someone walks up to you on the street and offers you cocain for "free", don't you question their motives?
Whether something free-as-in-beer is good or desirable depends on the motivations of the people offering it and the consequences its acceptance has for you. I think the jury is still out on whether Google's free-as-in-beer services are actually a good thing or not.
Perhaps you'd like to start your own archive of the USENET message boards?
Actually, I would like Google to stop their archive because I think it sets a bad precedent.
Google's argument is that those were public electronic conversations, so there is no harm in republishing them. But think about that. The same argument applies to public conversations in real life: you don't have an expectation of privacy. So, it should be perfectly OK for Google (or anybody else) to blanket cities with microphones and cameras, use face recognition and people tracking software to identify individuals, record every interaction and conversation, and make all that data available searchable on the Internet. I don't think that's a good thing, and even if you want to argue that you like it, it definitely represents a huge change for how things operate, and that's not something a company should just be able to decide on their own.
Slashdot Mirror
but what do you do here when somebody declares bankruptcy after treatment?
Don't worry; even on the remote chance that something like this is possible, it won't be a one-time treatment. It will be expensive because it requires on-going, complex procedures to fix one body system after another, systems that never had to function for more than 35-40 years in the past.
The same overtone of moral disapproval you express has greeted every major medical advance.
As it should: there have been very few medical advances that have actually increased human lifespan or health. Many medical advances feed on fear of the inevitable, have increased suffering needlessly, and are a bottomless financial pit.
And, in case you were wondering why we live longer on average, it's not due to medicine, it's almost entirely due to public health measures, a reliable food supply, and prevention.
From the point of view of biology, it is essential that the lifespan of individuals is limited: that is how species evolve and adapt. It is also an central part of our social structure. And it is how our bodies are put together: lots of parts have never needed to work more than about 35-40 years, and that's why they break down steadily after that.
Most likely, it will be far more than seven things that need to get fixed in order to extend our lifespan significantly past age 100 on average: for a lot of things in the human body, there simply are no repair mechanisms because they have never been needed before. It's good enough to put something like bones or brains together during the first few years of life and then to leave them alone, with only limited maintenance.
From an evolutionary point of view, it would be unwise to remove or disable the central mechanism by which we adapt. We probably have already adapted to the toxins and other environmental factors we live under today; if a population of 1000 year olds decided to do something stupid that ended up killing most of them, or merely had the bad luck of being particularly susceptible to some flu virus, there would be very few individuals of reproductive age to select resistant individuals from.
And from an ethical point of view, it is unclear that we have the right to prevent billions of potential human beings in future generations from coming into existence.
The traditional "three score year and ten" is a good thing to plan for: you probably won't get much more than that. Use them well.
What we need first of all is for the IRS to create an XML language and semantic model of the tax forms. That markup should specify what gets added up how, define what goes into individual fields, etc. That way, we can create open source tools that work year after year, even if the taxcode changes, not only for filing taxes, but also for analyzing and verifying tax returns, as well as analyzing the tax code and the tax forms themselves.
You'd give all your vital tax, income, and personal information to some company offering to file it for "free"?
It's not "for free", it costs money. And, yes, I trust hrblock.com (after checking the certificate) as much as I trust any tax preparation software. In fact, I trust using a web-based tax system from a Linux machine more than I trust an application-based tax system from a Windows machine (where spyware is rampant).
Besides, you're a fool if you assume that "the bad guys" can't get your tax, income, and personal information by lots of other means. You need to protect your assets so that they are safe even if people get that kind of information about you.
Not I. This is one case where I don't mind taking 30 minutes to fill out a form and physically snail mail it (certified, of course).
Consider yourself lucky if your taxes are simple enough that you can fill out a paper form in 30 minutes and do it correctly. I haven't been able to do that in years.
Several companies have web-based tax software: there is no software to install, they have all the forms, you get a PDF, and they can also submit it for you. I used one of them last year with Linux and Firefox and it worked like a charm. The refunds arrived very quickly, too.
:-)
Installable tax software is so 20th century
Yes, and you need to carry that cable around, you may lose it on your trip, etc.
If you get a camera that works with AA batteries and SD (like the Ricoh R1), this means that all you ever need to carry is the camera itself: no cables, no chargers, nothing. Now, that's travel convenience.
Dreamweaver templates are a bad idea, from the dark ages of the web. If you are still generating sites by hand, you can do something fairly simple with PHP and CSS or one of the Apache modules/filters.
A better solution is to use a content management system (CMS).
Microsoft manages to deliver a beta of a 64bit version of Windows only, what, several years later than Linux. And while the 64bit Linux distributions come with most applications actually recompiled as 64bits, you will hardly get any 64bit applications for Windows.
It's just about impossible that a tecnic that makes robotic spacecraft all that much more self sufficient will be confined to just robotic space travel for long.
If you spend as much time and money on developing your systems as NASA does on theirs, you can get the same degree of autonomy and reliability.
And that degree is somewhat limited: their spacecraft crash with some frequency, and they spend a lot of time patching and bug-fixing.
People have been trying to make systems easier to manage for years. Unfortunately, it's not enough to have the desire to make systems self-managing, you also need good ideas for how to do it, and those are still lacking as much as they always have been.
Give the guy credit, though, for seeing a good opportunity. Industry will believe in this silver bullet like they have done in the ones before.
Unfortunately, the real research will still take decades to complete, and then this area will have a bad name just like most of the other overhyped technologies before it.
Care to elaborate or are you just repeating what you heard from someone, somewhere, once.
If you believe in the Bible, then it is clear that you are "just repeating what you heard from someone, somewhere, once". Because if there is anything clear about the Bible, it's that it's a pretty random collection of documents, from unknown authors, with unknown hangups and superstitions. And you are just repeating that crap.
$20 says he is going to chnage his mind back again some time between age 69 and 99.
To demonstrate this, please commit suicide.
Lots of people actually want to have this choice around age 70 and above. You'll probably want to have the choice as well at around that age.
Well, isn't that what you're asking everyone else to do, by wilfully forgoing life-extension technology?
I don't see "asking" as a problem. Nor do I see debating whether we want to allow this kind of medical technology at all.
The real moral dilemma to me seems to be that probably only 0.01% of the world population will be able to accomplish that.
Yes, we all should BBN IMPs in our basements, managed jointly by the CIA and DARPA. They can double as space heaters!
However, when you post to Usenet you know that your potential audiance is, well, anyone. Anyone at all in the entire world. Google's archiving those postings doesn't change anything.
Google doesn't change the audience, but they change another assuption: the assumption of transience. USENET postings went away after a few weeks. That's the way USENET was designed and that's the way it was run. Google changed that after the fact.
The difference, of course, is that when talking to someone on the street you assume that your potential audiance is the few people on the street around you close enough to hear.
Well, if Google can change assumptions about distribution on USENET (namely from a the contemporaneous community of mostly students and computer scientists in the 1980's to hundreds of millions of Internet users), I don't see why Google or anybody else can't violate your assumption about who hears your conversations either.
but that is clearly an exceptional case and nobody on the street assumes that their conversations are going to be broadcast on CNN.
Nobody on USENET assume that people were going to make their conversations available for public search to hundreds of millions of random users 20 years later either. The existence of Google in 2004 is just as "exceptional" from the perspective of 1982 as the existence of networked microphones on every street corner seem to you now.
And if you think the networked microphones aren't coming, think again. There is a lot of research directed at just that: putting sensors everywhere and getting the cost and power requirements down so that that is feasible.
You're sounding very emotional.
We are spending billions a year to examine all sorts of risks that we might face: disease, natural disasters, wars, famine, etc. Of those tens of thousands of study per year, a few pop up that warn us of potential disaster. Those are the ones we pay attention to. Then, we allocate more funding to those areas, scientists study those issues more extensively, and they reach some sort of conclusion, usually not completely unanimous but with a clear consensus among most scientists. That's the way things work. It's rational, it's sensible, and it's the best way we know how to make decisions.
The only thing that's "emotional" in this discussion is that people like you don't want to face the scientific process. You have decided for yourself that global warming is inconvenient, so you are just going to ignore it. Your is the same kind of irrational and emotional behavior that causes people to run up huge debts or gamble or take drugs: you are addicted to something, and even though it's clear it's bad for you, you just refuse to look at the facts.
As an architect
You should put a warning sign on anything you design. I wouldn't want to enter a place designed by someone who thinks one should ignore known problems and instead focus on the the things that are working well.
It might be a better use of one's time to look at the pattern of scientific herd-mentality FIRST, and then take into account individual studies second.
One can't win with people like you. When there is pretty much universal consensus among scientists about global warming (and there is) and you call it "herd mentality". If there weren't universal consensus, you'd call the results "speculative" and "unproven". It's clear again: you just don't want to face reality because it would be inconvenient for you.
I guess it's very hard to get continued funding for a study that says "Everything's fine, situation normal"
There are lots of those studies. But they don't get covered in the press because it isn't necessary to cover them in the press. We need to pay attention to potential problems. That's the way all living beings operate. Unless you are mentally unstable, you don't sit around all day thinking about the fact that your digestion is working properly or your hair is growing or your heart is beating. But when your digestion stops working properly, then you notice and pay attention.
There aren't a lot of potential problems we humans have as a species: we should be really happy. But there are some big ones. One of the big ones is global warming because it has the potential of destroying civilization and making large parts of the globe uninhabitable.
This research has some serious flaws. It is essentially based on information for a single summer,
False. The research is based centuries of climate records, millions of measurements, and extensive analysis by climatologists and statisticians. One conclusion of theis about a single summer (not "based on" a single summer, as you falsely state): it says that 2003 is an example of what we can expect.
The estimations on temperature growth are not really supported by anything - I think it was written to grab headlines.
The temperature estimates are based on decades of research and are in line with mainstream scientific consensus about climate change.
You are free to hold whatever political prejudices and superstitions you like, but as a society we have to act rationally. That's why we need to act according to scientific fact and consensus, and that is clear: global warming is occurring, it is due to human activity, and is will have severe consequences.
As in any business, it's better to just appease some of your crazy clients/customers
People whose copyright Google infringes usually don't contribute anything to Google's bottom line, so that argument doesn't work. What Google is really afraid of is the public relations fallout that a few lawsuits would have, and the precedent that might set for their search business (the Google "cache" is on pretty shaky grounds, too). That's the reason they act when you ask, not out of "politeness".
As far as a class-action, again, it'd have to be a hoarde of people with valid filings, which, quite frankly, I doubt exist, since it costs something like $25-30 for each federal filing.
Whether the copyrights are registered or not has nothing to do with whether Google is guilty of copyright infringement, only with the damages that can be recovered.
And, yes, it would be hard to recover enough damages to make a lawsuit worthwhile. That's a loophole in our copyright system: if I infringe Hollywood's copyright just once, they can ruin me with a lawsuit, but if Google infringes copyright on a massive scale, they can get away with it without fear of significant financial consequences. The fact that Google knows this tells you that the company is not the nicely-behaved underdog that some people like to think of them as.
The existence of the X-No-Archive header suggests that implicit permission is given to archive.
The X-No-Archive header was created around 1995 in response to criticism of emerging web-based USENET archives. Therefore, at best, you can only argue that such implicit permission exists after the date of its creation. But Google archives posts going back all the way to the early 1980's.
Even then, however, it is questionable whether for DejaNews to create an opt-out policy for archiving is a sufficient defense (among other things, the "X-" prefix indicates that it was not an official part of the USENET protocols in the first place).
See how far you would get if you said "Disney, unless you put a red X-No-Distribute sticker on your DVD, you grant me full rights to redistribute your DVD over the Internet".
There is nothing to "win" for individuals because Google will, "voluntarily" take down individual posts if you tell them to. So, any lawsuit an individual would bring would be short-lived because it would be nearly automatically settled.
However, people might start a class action lawsuit against Google. If Google stops being a geek darling and some ambulance chasing lawyer gets wind of this, that may yet happen.
If you don't register your copyright, all that means is that there are no additional penalties for copyright infringement. But that doesn't mean companies can blithely infringe your copyright.
Furthermore, you don't have to register before you publish: you can register whenever you like, and any copyright infringement that happens after registration is fully actionable.
I suggest you get a better lawyer because your lawyer seems to be a complete moron (more likely, however, you just invented the lawyer and you yourself are the complete moron).
I agree 100%: Google's use of USENET groups almost certainly constitutes copyright infringement. I think the only reason they haven't gotten sued is because there is little money in that (hard to prove damages).
But that doesn't make it alright. DejaNews/Google's actions were arrogant and selfish, and they have had a profound effect on USENET. Anybody who posts to USENET under their own name these days is a fool because they will have to live with whatever position they took for the rest of their life. That is very different from the information discussion forum that USENET was supposed to be.
who are we to question the removal of features?
We can question whatever we want to: this isn't the Soviet Union. You may consider it gauche to question a free-as-in-beer service, but I have to disagree there, too. Google is not a charity and their service is a business venture. There are a lot of services that are free-as-in-beer that are ultimately just loss leaders or attempts to monopolize a market. If Microsoft gives you your first copy of Windows for "free", don't you question their motives? If someone walks up to you on the street and offers you cocain for "free", don't you question their motives?
Whether something free-as-in-beer is good or desirable depends on the motivations of the people offering it and the consequences its acceptance has for you. I think the jury is still out on whether Google's free-as-in-beer services are actually a good thing or not.
Perhaps you'd like to start your own archive of the USENET message boards?
Actually, I would like Google to stop their archive because I think it sets a bad precedent.
Google's argument is that those were public electronic conversations, so there is no harm in republishing them. But think about that. The same argument applies to public conversations in real life: you don't have an expectation of privacy. So, it should be perfectly OK for Google (or anybody else) to blanket cities with microphones and cameras, use face recognition and people tracking software to identify individuals, record every interaction and conversation, and make all that data available searchable on the Internet. I don't think that's a good thing, and even if you want to argue that you like it, it definitely represents a huge change for how things operate, and that's not something a company should just be able to decide on their own.