siliconwafer writes "The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is looking to acquire a vehicle license plate tracking system, to be used at the national level. According to the solicitation obtained by the Washington Post, commercial readers, supplied by a private company, would scan the plate of vehicles and store them in a "National License Plate Recognition" (NLPR) database. This is already being done at the state level, and privacy advocates are up in arms, with EFF and ACLU suing California over their automatic plate readers. Now that this has potential to become a broad and national program."
[ED Note: "Shortly after the Washington Post broke the story on the national plate reading system, it appears the DHS has shelved their plans for the tracking system, by order of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, at least in the interim."]
(Score: 1) by weilawei on Sunday February 23 2014, @03:31PM
The point of pyschohistory in Asimov's novels was that it WASN'T intended to predict the individual human. It was meant to apply only on a mass scale. In fact, since I have copies of them handy:
Emphasis mine.
Now, while the beginning of the 1st novel suggests that Seldon developed psychohistory sufficiently well to predict the actions of individuals, the rest of the novels rely on the Foundation itself remaining largely ignorant, and later novels introduce the idea of psychic manipulation by outside forces, and various other twists that place less and less emphasis on psychohistory. The initial definition of psychohistory remains the most relevant to the span of novels in general.
From the second book: