I imagine most BB readers, as people with an interest in the intersection technology, society and culture, broadly speaking subscribe to the view that attempting to suppress (say) hacking tools because they can be used for $evil is foolish. The fallacy is that "hacking tools" (or knowledge of nuclear physics, or possession of "piracy software", using p2p, whatever) should be banned because they can be used for evil. Well, so can a garden fork; should we ban those? Of course not; the positive effects outweigh the negative. We are all familiar with this argument in many different forms.

So what are the possible positive uses of mass CCTV of public places, controlled by tens or hundreds of thousands of different individuals and organisations?

Is there no way that pervasive video can be used for good? If I didn't think the answer was "yes", I'd hand in my Nerd Pride card on the spot and vow never to use PGP again...

deviated underwear preverts! Alan Moore knows the score... ;)

I think they SHOULD be bombed - corporate America would be a much livlier place if Banksy-style graffiti art were more common.

You can give directly to Candlelighters here:
https://www.givedirect.org/give/givefrm.asp?CID=1516

@Cory: "The US is not a model nation by any means, but whatever privacy-discarding madness it is gripped by, the UK is likewise in the grasp of."

====Disclaimer====: I'm involved with my employer's CCTV and aware of the legal position of such systems. I'm also a member of ORG, Liberty, Amnesty and various other orgs active in this area.

Cory's statement is true, I think, but it is not inconsistent to point out that many of the civil libertarians who hold up the UK's CCTV setup as a national surveillance state (a) don't know anything about how it actually functions, and/or (b) are using it as an admittedly very efficient posterchild for the wider case about a surveillance society. Spooke was correct in all his factual statements, although getting into a "your country is more big-brothery than mine" is nonsensical and counter-productive.

That's not to say that there aren't /genuinely/ dangerous attempts to deploy a CCTV panopticon with ANPR and/or facial recognition - such systems are vastly more dangerous than individual systems operated by local businesses and the like.

Whether the UK or US is at greater risk of descending into V-for-Vendetta land is largely irrelevant, really; so far as I can tell, Cory's right that we're both enthusiastically abandoning our traditional rights to privacy. It's rather like the people who holler about global warming causing a 100 metre sea-level rise in the next few decades -- it's sufficiently wrong that it gives ammunition to the cynics and nay-sayers.

If in doubt, go to primary sources. There's a lot of stuff about the operation of the DPA and CCTV on the net. (Hint: google Mark Thomas' situationist comedy fun & games with CCTV systems.)

"Brother, brothers, surely we should be struggling together against the common enemy!" ("The People's Front of Judea??")

@31: that's not all; I often go for a fag break at work. (Speckled Jim? I thought you'd been run over.)

This story put me in mind of the following, from the late and enormously missed chairman Humphrey Lyttleton, on the BBC's gameshow parody "I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue", explaining why Samantha (the scorer) has to leave; something like --

"Samantha has to nip out now, as she's off to meet her new gentleman friend, who has a flock of domesticated game birds, and now also keeps young chickens. She can't wait to see his woodcock, pullet and swallow."

Humph was in his 80s, and this was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 at 12:30 on a Sunday afternoon; and this is one reason I'm happy to pay a license fee =)

Small detail: this wasn't a bomb, it was a WWII German parachute mine. (I live in the SW, this was the lead story on our local TV news the other day.) These things carried 2200 lbs of HE and were often sprinkled in along with conventional incendiary and HE bombs during the Blitz. They ran on a seventeen second timer, and there's a fantastic book of that title about the incredible bravery of the mine disposal officers, who sometimes had to painstakingly disarm such weapons when they landed in mud-flats - even thought there was no risk of damage to anything other than mud - so that newer variants could be safely defused on land. As they'd flatten a circle a mile in diameter, these were devastating weapons in built-up areas.

Seventeen Seconds book (now out of print) on Amazon.
parachute mines

C'mon, behaviour that appears to be purposeful is not the same thing as free will. Ants follow a sugar trail. Human males buy more of products advertised with images of attractive women. There's no need for any magical para-physical ego or soul sitting inside the flies' heads pulling levers and telling them what to do. I recommend a dose of Daniel Dennett - not exactly light reading, but on my shelf next to Dawkins and Skinner.

There's some Free software that sort-of does something a bit like the first half of this for raw images coming down from the MER Mars rovers: Midnight Mars Browser, (screenshots on Flickr.)

(No 3D world model though, just multiple images automatically composited into perspective views.) And of course the images come with precise metadata on filters used, alt/az, time of day, etc. I can't see it being computationally feasible to do this without that metadata.

Wow, this is really good news. And it gives me the perfect opportunity to pimp some favourite freedom-fighter type organisations! Join up today and you too could get this warm glowing sense of self-righteousness and civic duty discharged! [1]

Liberty (Director - born star Shami Chakrabarti, but they don't seem to have membership commensurate with the fantastic work they do)
No2ID - the clue's in the name

Open Rights Group

[1] As a card-carrying Liberal Democrat - yes, my American friends, that really is the name of the UK's 3rd party - the only warm glow I have is liberal guilt; but the principle is sound, I believe :)

#81, BobDobbs:

Short answer: it wasn't a global phenomena, only regional.

Longer answer:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_Warm_Period

See also:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=33

and for the patient who prefer primary sources,
http://iri.columbia.edu/~goddard/EESC_W4400/CC/jones_mann_2004.pdf

JLBaun, #62:

I could care less, I don't even own a car.

I bet you use electricity, though. And I bet you posess lots of stuff that costs a lot of energy to manufacture and ship to you.

The question of what to do about it - or rather, how to slow or stop the increase in atmospheric CO2 - is of course secondary to the whole straw man argument that the science is somehow faked. The science is well established and not in dispute outside of supermarket tabloids and crank blogs. What to do about it seems to boil down to technological answers and/or changed human behaviour. The former is a last straw to clutch at. The price mechanism is pretty much the only way to change behaviour in any but the most jack-booted of authoritarian regimes. People don't really want to bite the bullet not because they don't want change, but because they don't want their standard of living to fall if they can possibly avoid it. Sadly I fear that this is the factor that will prevent effective action taking place at all; we'll just muddle through with a few million dead here from famine, a couple of hundred thousand in a flood there, and a few hundreds of millions of economic refugees from the flooded coastal cities. Seeing the amount of straw-clutching and basic ignorance on show here, a forum which definitely over-represents the smarts and knowledge of the general public, frankly makes me despair for the future of our civilisation.

Re: #45, postted by reptiles_and_samurai:

since we can barely predict the weather accurately (wasn't it supposed to rain this week in northern california?), I reserve the right to be suspicious of even the most convincing-sounding science that points to the polar ice caps turning into saunas thanks to cow farts.

There is a difference between "climate" and "weather". A little climatology 101:

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/pale/ctl/digging_weather.html

http://weathereye.kgan.com/cadet/climate/climate_vs.html

http://www.gcrio.org/gwcc/booklet1.html

Tom, post#32 (or @32 :) )

Either increased levels of anthropogenic CO2 will increase the heat content of the atmosphere and oceans, which will result in what I'm going to call "Direct Climate Change", or the climate will respond in ways that keep the heat content more-or-less constant, which will result in "Indirect Climate Change."

Not quite sure what you mean by "keep the heat content more-or-less constant". The global climate is considered as one system. The oceans, atmosphere etc have a certain capacity to absorb energy - the solar energy input. That energy has to "go somewhere" - the only way it could not affect the climate would be if it were re-radiated out to space at a higher rate (and radiation don't work that way - see Planck, et al.) This is really well understood physics, which is what I was getting at in #28. If electromagnetic radiation (such as the heat we get from the sun) didn't work like this, then -well, for starters, digital electronics wouldn't work, but on a more basic level the universe we live in wouldn't work, because matter would never condense out of the fireball following the big bang, so no galaxies, stars, supernovae, and thus no metals or anything else except hydrogen and helium in the universe. Which would be dull :)

KyleJBritt, Post #17:

There really are so many unknown factors that cause climate change

Were that the case, GCMs (global circulation models - "computer predictions", if you will, based on our current understanding of factors that cause climate change) would not be able to ,a href="">reproduce the historical record so accurately. (warning - longish PDF - see, e.g., FAQ 6.1 .)

Scissorman, Post #15:

That's one thing about the global warming debate that I find irksome... on both sides people are looking at a window of time that is so minute as to be statistically irrelevant when compared to the length of time the Earth and Sun have been interacting with one another, and then trying to pin the results on human activity.

For statistically useful direct measurements of climate variables(which actually extend back further than you'd think - several centuries, and there are plenty of incomplete or regionally limited records before then) you're right that the data cover a very short period relative to the Earth's history.

However, there is a substantial and well-established science of paleo-climatology that (amongst other techniques) uses proxies for various climate variables. For instance, the ratios of specific isotopes of carbon in sea-floor sediments work as a proxy for atmospheric temperatures. (Obviously the temporal resolution decreases as the records get older - sediments that have been lying below five miles of water for hundreds of thousands of years will tend to form very thin layers.) And so on and so forth.

There are also more direct proxies, such as polar ice cores which actually contain minute bubbles of atmospheric gases which can be measured directly. This is why thousands of grad students spend months living in steel huts in a desolate, howling wilderness for months at a time for. (And when their grant applications are approved, they get to visit Antarctica as well! =) )

Naturally these data sources are useless unless they can be calibrated and compared with the historical record, and indeed other sources of proxy data that overlap; this is a discpline in itself.

Secondly, what you refer to as "pinning the blame on humans" is called by climatologists "detection and attribution". First you detect a signal in the noise of climate records. Then you seek to attribute that to a causative agent. In this case, a human contribution has been unambiguously detected and attributed to anthropogenic CO2 emissions.

Tim, Post #10:
So I can assume from this that the global warming on Mars is being caused by Martians?

Myth. Mars is not warming.

Jeff, Post #8:

"Really "Good" science states a hypothesis (the world is warming up because...). Then the hypothesis needs to be tested. Over time. A long time. Until then, global warming is a theory that seems to make sense, but it's only just a theory.

"What happens if there is a 15% increase in volcanic activity over the next 100 years? Guess we'll have to see what happens in the next 100 years to find out. That's how science works."

Nonsense. Were that the case we would not have sciences of astronomy and cosmology for starters. You seem to be confusing hypotheses and theories.

"I predict an Ice Age is coming. "They" were saying that less than 30 years ago. Guess what, "They" were wrong. People are such lemmings."

Well-known to be a myth, by anyone who's been paying attention anyway. Insofar as lemmings are popularly believed to blind hurl themselves to their destruction from cliffs, the comparison with humanity is apposite.

Re: manicbassman, post #6

One factor that doesn't get mentioned much is the solar systems' passage through the different arms of the galaxy... those density waves don't stay put going round the galaxy at the same rate as the stars do... who's to say whether we haven't recently passed through a slightly denser patch that caused the solar heliopause to get pushed in and resulted in more cosmic rays getting through to form clouds...

The reason it doesn't get mentioned much is that it's bollocks.

Old news for anyone who follows the field; detection & attribution studies eliminated all the usual alternative sources of the increasing global temperatures long ago. On top of that, the skeptics have never been able to answer the basic physics question: "If the irrefutably higher levels of CO2 over the last century have NOT lead to a rise in temperature, where has all the extra forcing (heat trapped within the atmosphere), that basic physics shows will be trapped in the atmosphere and oceans, gone instead? And by what miraculous new process hitherto unknown to science did it get there?"

"A whole lot of people believe that it's more important to do what you're told than to do what you think is right.... " (comment #20)

For them, doing what you're told is the right thing to do.

The "UK has more CCTV cameras per capita than any other country" meme is an urban myth, based on bad methodology - some cops counted the cameras on Putney High Street, then multiplied that figure by the number of high streets in Britain.

As with global warming, it's very important to stick to unarguable facts and figures to back up the case, lest opponents scream and shout about "media myths" and so on in an attempt to discredit the campaigning work of No2ID, Liberty and the like. (Full disclosure, I'm a member of these and other civil liberties/ digital rights organisations.)

"After all, the reason terrorists will never try useng boxcutters again isn't because of our awesome security. It's because they know the passengers will kill them if they try it again."
(Comment #11)

-Actually the reason is much simpler than that: armoured cockpit doors. It defeats the entire attack.

To the many people relating awful experiences at Heathrow: this is mostly because it's running at something like 98% capacity all the time. Whether you think the answer is fewer landing slots or more runways partly depends on how close you live to the flight path. This new terminal is intended to relieve the massive pressure on the existing facilities.

The BBC also reported calls from BA staff saying that they tried reporting upwards that they hadn't had any training and that the tests showed it wasn't going to work - the message must have mutated from "it's full of horse shit" to "it is fertile and will bring forth a bountiful harvest" on it's way up the hierarchy. They also said there were appeals to staff to go in voluntarily on their days off to help sort the mess out. Many responded to such requests for emergency help during similar fiascos such as the "liquid bombs" security checks, and long term pressure on pay and conditions, no-one showed up.

One point I've seen mentioned in multiple reports of this world-beating systems catastrophe, but which hasn't IMO attracted as much attention as it might have done, is that even though they'd already abandoned the ballyhooed fingerprint biometrics security systems after the Information Commissioner pointed out it was probably illegal a few days before launch, slow security was one of the root causes. Staff were unable to get through security to get to where they needed to be to do their jobs. As a card-carrying member of a whole range of orgs such as No2ID, Liberty, Open Rights Group and EFF, I really hope this tarnishes some of the "ooh, shiney!" fascination with gadget-powered security theatre, biometrics and other intrusive and oppressive "security" systems.

I'm also hugely anticipating the next edition of RISKS Digest (Great fun for fans of armchair schadenfreude!)

The sad truth is that the UK doesn't have the same level of public awareness of the erosion of civil liberties this sort of nonsense promotes. Here's a BBC story from 18 months ago about fingerprints being required for car rental, for goodness' sake.

UK-based readers who would like to support the fight against it may find the wonderful human rights organisation Liberty a good fit.

I think this is probably making a mountain out of a molehill. The tube (which, judging from the typography, which where this poster is from) and buses have had "be alert - suspicious packages" posters as long as I've been using it (20 years). Having left a bag of groceries on a tube one day during the height of the IRA bombing campaign, I called them up as soon as I realised, on the basis that I didn't want them to shut the line down on my account. They were totally blase, "right, thanks for letting us know, if you pop back tonight you should be able to pick it up at the ticket office - we'll get someone to pick it up at the end of the line."

Point being, just because they've put the posters up doesn't mean anything about what they do with the eager beaver paranoid Daily Mail readers who actually report people. I suspect they get "thank-you very much for your help" *pat pat pat* "now run along..." , heavy sigh and a roll of the eyes. London and UK police are well aware of the ratio of false alarms to genuine reports.

Dupe!
Fascinating stuff that bears repeating, nevertheless...

Oh dear, every time I login to post a comment it's something negative. Bad me! :)

Anyway, in the article, for "will" read "might", as in "could conceivably happen", meaning "not actually physically impossible, but..." As Jeff (#3) says, the whole "back to the moon, on to Mars" is dead, it just doesn't know it yet. The Plantetary Society just won a long battle to get previous-planned space science funding that had been slashed in favour of the drive to develop a new manned launcher, a heavy lift booster and the CEV (all of which will be needed just to get back into LEO after the Shuttle's retired in the year after next.)

They're nice pictures, and all, but real cable monkeys use lacing, not ties...

http://www.dairiki.org/hammond/cable-lacing-howto/

http://www.tecratools.com/pages/tecalert/cable_lacing.html

http://www.tellurian.com/california/img_8065_std.jpg

(and check the rest of the images in that directory - google images "cable lacing" has much more.

Enjoy ;)

Lord Harpole was also famous for his advertorial inclusions in the popular British journal, 'Viz Comic'. Like South Park crossed with the the Eagle multiplied by lots of awful Ben Stiller films raised to the power of Python (monty, not Guido).

Michael (#29, 30): that's what you pay for your electricity. You don't know what it actually costs. (Hint: externalities.)

This, IMNSHO, is great news. Flying (especially non-essential, "recreational" travel - absurd idea), be made as expensive, unpleasant, difficult and hassle-filled as possible if you don't want your grandchildren to be agricultural peasants due to collapse of global socioeconomic structures caused by the end of oil and the 6m sea-level rise that's destroyed every world city on the coast or navigable river (hint: cities grow near sources of transport and trade.) Actually, that's all probably inevitable by now, but bringing a little unnecessary unpleasantness into the lives of those people who've grown up with the bizarre idea that international travel for the price of a few hours' wages is a right brings me a small amount of bitter, vindictive satisfaction. That probably means I'm a bad person, but hey, who's perfect?

"This wall is called Schengen, imposed against the Others in the region who will not comply with the standards emanating from Brussels. Every state around Serbia has come to make its peace, more or less, with the huge fact of European soft-power. Serbs do not comply."

A quibble, but as JT says in the paragraph before this:

"Nine countries have joined - bringing to 24 the number of nations to have abolished internal passport controls."

Rewind to say 1960. You needed a passport to travel from pretty much any European country to any other one. Schengen agreement allows travel without passports between signatories. So the borders between those EU/Schengen countries are disappearing; it's nothing new that you need a passport to travel to/from Serbia to, well, anywhere else as far as I know. So it's not a wall around Serbia (though of course it has changed a lot in the last decades.)

Second Life? Is that still going?

Readers who enjoy this may also like: "Lint", Steve Aylett's spoof biography of Jeff Lint, "author of some of the strangest and most inventive satirical SF of the twentieth century. He transcended genre in classics such as Jelly Result and The Stupid Conversation, becoming a cult figure and pariah."

There are a dozen or so colour plates too, with wonderful reproductions of various imaginary pulp paperback and zine covers.

http://www.steveaylett.com/Pages/LINTpage.html

enjoy...

Re: #22:

"The Great Global Warming Swindle" was the biggest troll perpetuated by the mass media since Orson Welles.

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/03/swindled/

If you're reasonably au fait with the scientific background to these and similar stories, here's a very interesting paper by Hansen, Sato, Kharecha, Russell, Lea and Siddall:

http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/2007/2007_Hansen_etal_2.pdf

(If you don't recognise the names, suffice to say they're not cranks.) The paper summarises the case for the IPCC having incorrectly discounted the probability of major ice-sheet loss and hence sea-level rise, due to their neglect of an important feedback loop. (Melting ice is much darker than frozen ice, so as soon as the surface of a glacier starts to melt, it absorbs more of the incoming solar radiation, which leads it to melt more...) If you're allergic to the science you can skim the technical paragraphs, just watch for words like "catastrophic" or "unprecedented".

I seem to have forwarded this paper to dozens of people since I read it. Scary stuff, and spooky that I read it last week, then all this stuff about ice-sheet melting turns up... :o

Oh yeah, an RealClimate is very good as well:
http://www.realclimate.org

...although their concept of what the intelligent layperson can cope with in terms of science is a little over-optimistic.

(Re: #13 "We ARE rodents. . ,"):
Actually, we're pigeons; however, the rats are sufficiently advanced that they're indistinguishable from pigeons.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B._F._Skinner

The link gives me:

"This Article is Available to Subscribers Only. Subscribe today and get 4 Weeks FREE, or, you can take our 4-week Free trial offer and try out TNR Digital at no risk. [...]"

Or... I could just google the headline?
http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=%22How%20Political%20Psychology%20Explains%20Bush%27s%20Ghastly%20Success%22&meta=

Schneier just commented on a related topic:
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/08/perceptions_of.html

I don't think humans being terrible at assessing risk and probability is news to many.