Unknown to most motorists, Big Brother is probably riding along in their cars. And he's taking good notes. Almost all vehicles built today have a "black box" recorder, a simpler version of the flight data recorders found in airplanes.
Since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, worries about hackers and viruses abound, yet little has been made of the Internet's physical security.
Responding to the threat of terrorism, the federal government is taking steps to establish a more reliable nationwide identification system, despite protests from some that privacy and civil liberties are threatened.
Experts are warning that the real technological challenge behind a national identification system isn't the flashy iris scanning, face recognizing or fingerprinting on the front end, its the database. The best biometric technology is of little use without a central database and those vast databases are notoriously mistake-prone, difficult to secure, open to abuse, and expensive to compile and operate.
Experts caution that the most threatening scenario for cataclysmic nuclear war is an accidental nuclear launch from Russia due to their deteriorating early warning system.
Ray Kurzweil argues within 35 years, the line between man and machine will blur, as atom-sized 'nanobots' map the human brain from the inside out.