Big brother (or SkyNet) is coming... to a PC near you.

I loved the book 1984, even though it was almost 1984 by the time I read it. The fact that the date was around the corner and technology wasn't anywhere close kind of took the punch out of the story. I guess it didn't scare me the way it scared "previous generations" (to put it politely). Perhaps being able to fool a lie detector later in life clinched it for me... Any system can be beaten; you just have to figure out how.

Labor unions said they fear that employees could be dismissed on the basis of a computer's assessment of their physiological state.
Microsoft System May Monitor Workers' Brains, Bodies (FOXNews.com)

I'm not concerned about the automated dismissal so much as I am about where and how we're going to store all of that telemetry data. Wow! Imagine how much sensor data would have to be collected every polling period (1 second?), centralized and sanitized to make it useful... Multiply that times 100,000 employees over the course of a couple years and you've got a serious data warehousing problem. Not to mention the AI for alerting someone in HR that a pink slip cannon needs to be activated.

Watching Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles this past two evenings did make me starting knoodling about the complexities of the database systems required for SkyNet's C3 systems (command, control and communications). Wouldn't that be a fun database to model on SQL Server 2008? Wish I had more free time!

Fiction is rapidly becoming science. Brought to you by Microsoft.