Nasor,
I agree with you. I was making a broad assessment on consumerism as a hole. There has to be an up side otherwise no one would want to purchase it.

#$%^#@ I knew it!!!!

There is a "passing lane", which is generally called the fast lane; and slower cars are supposed to stay in the right lane.

Back on topic, I heard that GM refused to stop cars for the police until it was nationalized. Now the the government owns GM, how can they say no?

there is a passing lane. not sure about ion canada but i am assuming this is not the case.

That only happens on TV. I asked a cop about it and he just laughed and said, "I wish!"

But obviously all of this will be possible with future technology, probably while you younger people are still alive. That genie is out of the bottle and we might as well learn to make nice with him. I was angry when they started fingerprinting everybody, but now they can check your DNA!I don't have the numbers handy, but I believe I read that there are now more so-called "security" cameras in tiny England than in the entire United States. Just for the sheer irony of it someone carefully counted all the cameras that have a practical view of the house where George Orwell, the author of 1984, lived. The count was 80! I've been told that when a new speed camera is installed in England, sometimes the residents pile old tires and other trash around it and set it on fire, to obscure its view with the smoke.That's not a high priority in enforcement, but it does happen. In Virginia a cop recently pulled over a bus driver in the HOV (high-occupancy vehicle) lane that was going only 55mph and holding up a long stream of auto traffic behind him. He said his bus was packed fuller than usual so people were standing in the aisles, and he didn't think it would be safe to go any faster. The cop told him that was his problem: either speed up or merge back into the slow lanes.

We actually do have "speed lanes" on some freeways: the car-pool and bus lanes ("HOV"), which move faster than the regular lanes.

LOL. when will people learn that books should never be taken literally. orwell wrote a book that came from his imagination, he was compensated for it and that is all.

No, Orwell wrote a book that was inspired by what he saw happening around him in the U.K.

It was frighteningly prophetic and is considered a literary masterpiece. Forty years after its publication (1949) it had been translated into more languages than any other book. Many of the words he invented have entered the language, such as doublethink and newspeak.

Much of what he foresaw is now commonplace in the Western world. Surveillance cameras, for example, are perhaps more ubiquitous than even he predicted since TV was then in its infancy and digital storage was a laboratory experiment.

Orwell did not postulate how England got into its dystopian state; when I read the book in the early 1960s we all assumed that a military coup or some such violent discontinuity in government had taken place before the noble English people would succumb to such tyranny. Instead, in real life, not just England but the traditionally rebellious United States have become Orwellian (another word that is now in the dictionary) incrementally and peacefully, with official circumventing of the law and restriction of freedom accepted with fatalistic resignation, or even without conscious consideration. People now accept urine testing for job applications, x-ray machines in airline terminals, fingerprinting of newborns, and video cameras literally everywhere. DNA testing and cellphone records open up vistas of government snooping and tracking that even Orwell could not have foreseen.

Just as in the book, the government uses the threat of foreigners invading our countries to frighten us into giving up our freedom in a quest for security. Living close enough to the Pentagon to have endured exhaustive analyses of 9/11, I'm satisfied that it was not a government plot; but those who think it was are merely stating the fact that the government might do something like that if they thought it was necessary to keep us from questioning their restrictions.

One of the inevitabilities of the internet age that I as a writer, scholar and software engineer find especially foreboding--yet I have never seen it discussed--is that it will soon be at least theoretically possible to edit back issues of publications in order to erase inconvenient facts about the past and rewrite history.

All of this has occurred with almost no organized opposition. The libertarian movement and the Libertarian Party are treated as amusing footnotes in American culture and politics. Neither voters nor officeholders take us seriously, with so few exceptions that our voice is not heard and we make no substantive difference in the discourse about the future. I'm sure it's even worse in countries like England, Germany and Japan, where people tend to have much greater respect for authority than we Americans do.

"Those who are willing to sacrifice a little bit of freedom for a little bit of security will end up with neither. And that is fine, for it's what those people deserve."

it's just common sense. he knew, from being around media, that t.v was going to be very common. he just worked it into the story line and of course if there is crime there would be technology used. makes sense to me.

Seems to me that as far as dystopian literature is concerned, we are far closer to Huxley's vision than Orwell's. 1984 has a "You ask for liberty, we'll give you death" sort of feel to it, while Brave New World is definitely "Give me my cable TV and cheeseburgers, don't bother me with liberty."

As far as the OnStar thing, even if the company / government does have the ability to shut down your car at any given moment, what does that mean? I can think of only one situation where they would even have a reason to shut down the vehicles of law-abiding citizens, and that would be during a state of emergency. This technology does not give the government any power that it does not already possess, it just gives them the ability to utilize that power at less risk to the population. I see no downside here.

But the frelling government gets to decide who's a "law-abiding citizen" by enacting laws for the sole purpose of consolidating their authority and making it more difficult for us to circumvent it. The primary purpose of most traffic laws, for example, is to generate revenue rather than to make the highways safer. Red-light cameras and speed cameras now make it possible for them to forgo the salaries of flesh-and-blood cops and the expense of their cars and doughnuts, vastly increasing their profit margin on citations.

This has become such a cash cow that they've actually done a minimax analysis. The fines for camera violations are a fraction of cop-written tickets. This makes people more willing to speed or push a yellow light and take the risk of getting nailed. By eliminating the middlepig, the total revenue from tickets has been maximized.

While this is certainly true and probably a cause for concern, it's also worth noting that the very same technology makes it much easier for people to publicly debunk such attempts. Twenty years ago if a book/news story/whatever came out that was full of inaccuracies or outright lies, and you were part of the relatively small fraction of people who were able to recognize it as such, your options for publicly rebutting it would be very limited; at best, you could probably tell everyone you personally knew. Now you can just whip up a little essay about how X is full of shit, put it on your blog (or whatever), and anyone/everyone can access it. If it's of any importance, people will likely start directing others to it.

It is good to know the source of the corruption that destroys public freedom.