[Speed Gibson,
Tuesday June 28, 2005 at 10:17pm]
The Dreaded Database!
A lot of little things are coalescing. First, Wisconsin and other states are demanding excise and sales taxes on goods "imported" from other states. Four red light cameras are up and running in Minneapolis, and soon there will be twelve, generating perhaps one million dollars in fines a year. GPS and tollway transmitters know where you're driving. Your credit cards, your library card, your drivers license, whatever else is in your wallet track your commerce. Google and cookies watch your internet usage. Your cell phone and Wi-Fi connections are there for anyone to tap. It's all coming together to build - The Database!
Yes, this was the great fear in the mid seventies, that Big Brother was going to track you in a giant database! Back then, databases were a relatively new concept to business at least. They were conjectured to be some sort of bottomless pit capable of assimilating, storing, and correlating everything about you.
Of course, disk storage was then at least $2,000 per megabyte in today's money. Now we track megabytes per penny. The PC I am using is at least 100 times faster than anything IBM made even 25 years ago, and 10,000 times cheaper.
But now we are finally at the point where such databases could be built, maybe have already been, and probably must be in this age of terrorism. I'm not really worried yet, but I am starting to wonder about it all.
President Bush talks about an ownership society, of defined contributions for retirement and health care that you can take from job to job and/or will to your children. Maybe that's not enough. Maybe we have to insist that cities don't run the Wi-Fi, that the Internet remain essentially unregulated as today, that we adopt a less intrusive tax system, and so on to keep our freedom.
Yes, this was the great fear in the mid seventies, that Big Brother was going to track you in a giant database! Back then, databases were a relatively new concept to business at least. They were conjectured to be some sort of bottomless pit capable of assimilating, storing, and correlating everything about you.
Of course, disk storage was then at least $2,000 per megabyte in today's money. Now we track megabytes per penny. The PC I am using is at least 100 times faster than anything IBM made even 25 years ago, and 10,000 times cheaper.
But now we are finally at the point where such databases could be built, maybe have already been, and probably must be in this age of terrorism. I'm not really worried yet, but I am starting to wonder about it all.
President Bush talks about an ownership society, of defined contributions for retirement and health care that you can take from job to job and/or will to your children. Maybe that's not enough. Maybe we have to insist that cities don't run the Wi-Fi, that the Internet remain essentially unregulated as today, that we adopt a less intrusive tax system, and so on to keep our freedom.