For those of you that haven’t already heard of The Streisand Effect. The term is entering the mainstream.

Hopefully we’ll continue to see more big-organisations considering the social pressures, and not just the legal basis for their actions.

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This article explains, briefly, why privacy is important to society and law-abiding people.

For if we are observed in all matters, we are constantly under threat of correction, judgment, criticism, even plagiarism of our own uniqueness. We become children, fettered under watchful eyes, constantly fearful that — either now or in the uncertain future — patterns we leave behind will be brought back to implicate us, by whatever authority has now become focused upon our once-private and innocent acts. We lose our individuality, because everything we do is observable and recordable.

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There are already ways for police and intelligence agencies to snoop on suspected criminals; they get a warrant, by justifying the need to snoop.

The government is looking to make it easier to snoop on suspected individuals, with less oversight. That in itself is scary, because we are supposed to able to live our law-abiding lives without scrutiny.

It’s also scary, because more data will be held about us in central locations, making ripe targets for criminals to harvest.

Sign this petition to object to the surveillance laws.

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Yeah, right. I’d much rather be in my controlled-environment cocoon.

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This video is great. Great CGI and tracking, and pretty funny.

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Sounds like this new SimCity has everything you’d have wanted in the old SimCities, but were limited by technology.

The look/feel style is a model town. Everything is fully simulated (i.e. your town is full of simulated families and individuals, going to work every day, turning to crime if opportunities are poor etc). And it’s a persistent online world; your neighbors are other, real players.

Despite the big advancements you might imagine big changes to gameplay, but the game seems faithful to the originals; you can’t jump into a version of The Sims and interact with the people directly, and the interactions with player-neighbors is similar to the interactions with CPU-neighbors of old.

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It looks spectacular. This is the view from Earth in 3.75 billion years. The Milky Way (our galaxy) on the right, and on the left: Andromeda – a whole other galaxy – on a collision course. Apparently we’ll be quite safe from the collision, though there’s plenty of other ‘disasters’ to survive before then.

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Pretty interesting outcome to a fairly controversial experiment.

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