2009/3/16 Udhay Shankar N <ud...@pobox.com>: > This is rather cool, though there are obvious implications for privacy here. > > Two things come to mind: > > * The "mapping a city using the sound of footsteps" bit from _Cryptonomicon_ > * This is "traffic analysis" in more than one sense. :-)
I, Robot, the collection of short stories by Asimov had one in which the entire election process was reduced to a vote by a single person. Extrapolating the one person's choice would enable a computer of gargantuan proportions determine how the entire population would vote. This is in effect an extension of the logic of statistics which say that a randomly selected sample is representative of the entire population, but given the amount of data about each person available on the net (which is increasing at a a very steady pace), this (or something quite close) may be possible? Kiran
