Watching brief
Samsung warned users of its voice-activated televisions that what they said in front of the TV could be transmitted to other people. The story attracted comparison with the telescreens in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, but the principle of keeping a population under control by surveillance was foreseen a century earlier by Jeremy Bentham.
— In 1791 he came up with the idea for a Panopticon, a circular prison with one-way observation holes which would allow a single gaoler to patrol several hundred prisoners, none of whom could tell whether they were being watched at any one moment.
— Bentham saw the government’s eventual rejection of the scheme as ‘sinister’, a word now more likely to be used to describe the idea itself.
Land of the sinking price
Britain was predicted to be heading for ‘Japanese-style deflation’. How far did prices fall in Japan? It had consumer-price deflation in eight of the past 20 years:
| 1995 | -0.4% |
| 1999 | -1.1% |
| 2001 | -1.3% |
| 2003 | -0.4% |
| 2005 | -0.4% |
| 2009 | -1.7% |
| 2011 | -0.2% |
| 2012 | -0.1% |
Source: www.
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