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Strategies & Market Trends : Drillbits & Bottlerockets -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: AugustWest who wrote (1708)	1/24/2001 11:16:43 AM
From: Original Mad Dog	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 15481

FWIW, anyone else think we're headed to a Big Brother society? Throughout the history of mankind, there have always been Big Brother-wannabees. Probably always will be. Some view ancient religious leaders as the Big Brothers of their day.....others look to political leaders, military leaders, warriors, dictators ..... throughout history. The common thread is that these leaders sought to control others, and their purposes were not pure. So how does technology, like the ability to sell school lunches based on a fingerprint (as the story you linked talked about) make the world worse? I guess it means that the tools at the disposal of the next would-be Big Brother will be more terrifying. But throughout human progress, that has always been true. Nazi Germany was so terrifying in part because of the "new" technologies -- of warfare, of mass communications, of destruction -- at its disposal. Yes, the degree of evil was particularly horrible, but evil existed before, and it has since. I think it is a big mistake to fear technology just because bad people can do worse things with it. Do we fear photography because some would use it to make and distribute child porn? Would the human race have been better off sticking with cave painting as its sole means of visual expression? Would we be better off without radio just because radio can be misused as a totalitarian propaganda tool? How about TV? Computers? I welcome the use of fingerprinting technology to track school lunch money. I welcome doing away with the problem of the lunch money being extorted by the school bully, or misspent by the kid on things other than food. I agree that the fingerprinting technology could be put to bad purposes, but it is not the technology that causes that. It is the simultaneous ability of mankind to invent such technology and be evil enough to misuse it. I remember the "no-nukes" movement, which was really popular 20 or so years ago and probably still exists. People would march and protest "against" nuclear weapons, and argue that they should all be dismantled, done away with, wiped from the face of the planet. That's all well and good, I thought, but..... the knowledge of how to make these weapons exists. Yes, you could burn all the diagrams, but even if you did, inside somebody's head would be the ability to think it up all over again. Along with things ten times worse than our present day weapons of mass destruction. The physical manifestation of the idea can be temporarily done away with, but that does not rid us of the thing itself. My belief has always been that we should embrace the good things that the new technology brings us and learn enough about ourselves and others so that we can deal with and prevent the evil which periodically surfaces around us. Teach people not only about digits and optics but about humanity. Fight against the misuse of technology while at the same time embracing good uses. Every year billions of dollars and millions of hours of good people's time is spent fighting credit card fraud. A fingerprinting system for point of sale (even over the Internet) has the potential of almost completely doing away with that problem. The evil people who perpetrate those crimes would undoubtedly find some other bad thing to do. But would the technology of fingerprint identification really make our everyday lives worse? Or better? And now, back to the pursuit of Nasdaq 3000......and 4000.....and 10000.....

To: AugustWest who wrote (1708)	1/24/2001 11:28:19 AM
From: Jorj X Mckie	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 15481

Yikes!!!