Taken to it's logical conclusion (where all road vehicles are automated) things like processing visuals becomes a lot simpler.

Most of the information will be preprocessed data - the road infrastructure, and knowledge of every other vehicle in the system. That's what it becomes - one homogeneous and optimisable system; not a single robot car making it's own decisions. Processing is done by servers in advance, not individual vehicles.

Real time visual processing then only has to be on the look out for things that are out of the ordinary, such as a deer running onto the road, and take caution. Something that is much easier to do when done with well coordinated cooperation with every other vehicle around you. The car behind isn't going to hit you; nor is the oncoming car in the opposite lane.

Even if every car in the situation doesn't have the stopping distance, they will all turn (where possible) in a coordinated manner to avoid or reduce collisions. The situation may be avoided in the first place, because the system knows about dangers specific to this stretch of road and will have limited speed and increase distance between vehicles appropriately.

If there is one thing that humans absolutely suck at, it's unspoken mass cooperation in an emergent system; our roads being the prime example.

People can't even keep the appropriate distance from the car in front to prevent collisions in an emergency stop; let alone leave enough distance to prevent traffic jams. Imagine a red light (real or virtual) turns green, and every car for a mile back accelerates at the same time. There's no queuing (the cause of jams).

Emergency services get a clear, safe and direct path to their destination.

Who knows, maybe the system even knows you have a flight reservation or a business meeting, or if you're just going to the mall or visiting friends and can prioritise intersections accordingly (though that is getting a little Orwell meets Skynet).

The hard part is going to be getting from our current fully manual and emergent system to a fully automated and coordinated system; but I'm really excited by the prospect it might happen in my lifetime.

Since when is Suey Park a conservative? She's the one who started it, which is what cracks me up. I love it when these progressives play it too clever by half and get beat up by other progressives. Progressives are the ones who want to control everyone's speech. A black conservative, for instance, is no longer a black person. They are an 'uncle tom'. Progressives will shut you down faster than the Department of Groupthink.

George Orwell, call your office.

"I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually. "
-James Baldwin

“The difference between treason and patriotism is only a matter of dates.”
- Alexandre Dumas

"During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act."
- George Orwell

Snowden, like Manning before him, spoke truth to power. In a difficult situation, he saw something that was wrong and took the incredibly brave decision to do something about it, even at the cost of his life as he knew it.

If you found out something you knew to be immoral (and on a massive scale), would you have the bravery to follow his example? When it meant probably never seeing your friends and family again?

I suspect history will ultimately come to see him as more a patriot than a traitor.

It's a set-up for what's going to be ubiquitous in less than 20 years A10anis, cameras on every pole (wi-fi, infrared, audio, facial recognition software) and a cop's nose up every corner of your ass at the great cost of having ended the 'great experiment' -

Feinstein is only a shill for power-brokers and a miniature version of someone whose mentality of "I, Me, Mine" let's a few people dictate the their will over of every person on the planet who is not in their small circle.

Mind you, they believe that the bulk of humanity are not suited to dictate the course of the planet but hey; The same people who have chosen to guide the course of humanity's burst off the planet would keep us rhesus monkeys in small, manageable boxes while they romp freely around the globe with the bulk of our assets and the maximum amount of power to dictate further every aspect of our lives.

The real power they will not wield is to provide for the basic needs and education of the throw-backs of humanity who would rather perpetrate violence and promulgate fear to maintain arcane sensibilities and uncivilized backward ideologies which are anti-evolutionary and savage, using anti-evolutionary and savage people to enforce what looks like order, which is in actuality, the same barbaric practice of subjugation, imprisonment, and fear.

The solution is to limit expansion of population until these ideologies are stamped-out like the insectoid disease that they are, that of a limited perspective based on arcane patterns of thought. We could do this through compassion and education but the established powers see a different solution that will protect their interests-

People like Diane Feinstein and her ilk see the rest of humanity as dogs and cattle. Unprivileged, unworthy flesh with which to extort from them their labor, their minds and souls to their utopian ends, at the cost of our unique humanity.

The same virulence that atheist's have against the western Christan diaspora, these elites have for anyone not aligned with their totalitarian ends.

That they justify their courses of action with propaganda like this, fear-induced surrender to force and control, is against all that is humane and righteous.

Bombs in subways?? Solution: No one has privacy or freedom of expression or thought beyond that which exist behind their eyes and between their ears-Greeeeeat. Your world, not mine.

Next will come thought crimes, cordoned neighborhoods, etc.

Start now by getting some of the comparatively neanderthal segments of humanity into those boxes, limit THEIR freedoms through educating them to at LEAST the level of 17th-century socialization before turning the entire world into a forced labor-camp.

Bread and circuses only work for so long before the emperor's clothes are set alight by those less inclined to hear shit as well as being forced to eat it.

Anarchy would solve some of the discord in civilized countries.

Fucking China-Get those insects to stop cranking-out useless consumption items at an exponentially toxic pace as well-Their version of the world makes Orwell's look like a clam bake. How? Stop using it. Create artisans and craftsman again and develop in every human an appreciation for THAT WHICH LASTS, rather than I WANT NOW, FIRST!

Americans, Europeans drunk on technology, disposable clothing, instant gratification and entertainment are a herd of disposable mental midgets to the Diane Feinsteins of the world.

Sick dance we're learning....I just hope we can stand the dervish without blacking-out.

"Fort George "Orwell" Meade" nice.

He is making reference to Orwell's "Slavery is Freedom." The hawks do wage endless war to end war and taxation is theft, as Chodorov and others have demonstrated, and social democrats do advocate massive taxation. Your gripe is a bit like complaining of ad hominem when saying Communists and Nazis engage in theft and murder. Sometimes people do bad things and that needs to be pointed out. There are however plenty of non-ad hominem argument provided by Murphy, which I encourage you to read.
Furthermore, "argumentum ad hominem is a general category of fallacies in which a claim or argument is rejected on the basis of some irrelevant fact about the author of or the person presenting the claim or argument."

These you cited above are not "fallacies" and hardly irrelevant, as they provide reasons why the current system is not desirable. In any case, I can put you in touch with the author to see if he'd like to respond to your response to his essay.

Robert is used to this kind of BS and has worked out some really good replies. This is the man who, after all, is challenging Krugman to a debate it seems Krugman will continue to avoid.

In any case, whether the rest of it is "worth your time" or not, only you can decide on that.

"From each according to their abilities, to each according to their need."

I do have some anger issues-The crux of that issue perhaps possibly, my perception that I might be living in an era of mass-hypnotism of the planet's inhabitants through technologies envisioned originally to afford power now hi-jacked (and historically so) by charlatans posing as world leaders?

Another obvious turd lodged in my craw? How about a social-evolutionary path akin to Bradbury's "Fahrenheit" or Orwell's "84" turning an entire continent of what formerly consisted of self-determined, practical, and classically educated hard-working sorts into a cast of extras from "Idiocracy?"

Yeah, it pisses me off that so many people are distracted by what they are being told about some illusory process in which the common citizen might take part to imagine some bright future for mankind falling somewhere between the golden rule and the code of Hammurabi. The planet is being hi-jacked by a new breed of criminals frighteningly similar to the most egregious of old-For everything there is a season my friend, Solomon's wisdom in Ecclesiastes 3 it just as pertinent today as it will be for humans for the next 10,000 years-"a time to kill and heal, a time to break down, and a time to build up."

I'd like to imagine the new-construction-upon-the-ashes to include projects both organic and nano-technological in nature with the transformation of our specie's bodies, minds, souls and spirits as a prime objective.

You are living in these wonderful and frightening times, consider this incarnation your most favorable having been born when, where, how, why, and what you are-You are an amazing collection of cellular consciousness manifest in the wonder of flesh.
It's pretty fucking cool actually, and these are the ideas upon which I try to meditate upon every waking hour.

Oh yeah, and I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore, Hail Satan, Hail Eris, Jesus Saves.


(BTW, to answer your inquiry as to the "knowledge" that administrations keep in the dirty-little-secrets folder? Do you really have to ask about need-to-know information that would end the lives of yourself and everyone you know, because that's what the United States can do for you alla-Hoover, alla-Bush, alla-New World Order Über Alles.
What you think you know you don't, and you can't form an opinion or come to a conclusion on a subject for which you have incomplete data with which to arrive at those opinions or conclusions. Simple deductive reasoning or even a pragmatic model of the scientific method should make this screamingly clear to anyone who distrusts the anemically hostile Babylonian system .

You really don't have to go back that far. Try the late 80's.
Can you imagine what the StaSi of East Germany could have done with the kind of access the NSA has? They couldn't even dream of that shit.
George Orwell must feel pretty stupid now.

Snowden isn't a hero but he certainly deserves some applause. He did exactly the right thing, he did what I'd expect from somebody who fights for freedom. You know, like the people living in the land of the free.

And regarding O'Donnell's point, he's absolutely right. Somebody in a position like Boehner should know his language better and choose it more appropiately. Unfortunately, Boehner would wipe his butt with the constitution if you'd give him enough Super PAC money.

"One of the world's leading scientists behind the development of smart cameras is Professor James Orwell."

You couldn't make that up.

Personally, I don't like where this is going. It's bad enough Google and similar companies are making millions off tracking your surfing habits; just wait till these become popular. How long did he/she look at that cereal box or car or whatever? And at what part of it? Better get that info off to marketing to increase the font size and change the color. Meanwhile, let's bombard the user with up-to-date advertisements in real time.

Not to mention invasion of privacy (outward facing camera), increasing our already short attention spans and isolation from one another, draconian EULA's -- don't resell 'em, don't lend 'em out, otherwise our data gathering will be shit. What's next? Don't take them off?

Yes, I can see the thousands of beneficial uses these could provide too. Don't mean to go all Kaczynski/Orwell here but it seems an awful lot of trade just to be able to watch cat videos instantly.

I love the newspeak dictionary dot com
http://www.newspeakdictionary.com/ns-new.html

Great forum for new entries and old favorites, Orwell's complete dictionary s included, as well as many in-progress layers. Another is:
http://wiki.newspeakdictionary.com/wiki/Main_Page

INSOC for Oceania and beyond, ya buncha monkeys!!

An RQ-4B with SIGINT package had its maiden flight today over central Europe. Orwell is laughing his ass off.

.....from Orwell's 1984, "Freedom is Slavery".....Sugar is freedom my friends...everything in moderation!

I used to think the term "fascist" was highly overrated and over-used. Bring it back, they are here. Orwell wouldn't roll over in his grave, he wold resurrect, watch the TV, read a newspaper, mutter "shit, it's worse than I thought", find a pistol, blow his brains out.

"And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed-if all records told the same tale-then the lie passed into history and became truth. 'Who controls the past' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.'"
- George Orwell, 1984, Book 1, Chapter 3