You hear those footsteps coming up behind you, REASON?

It's Popular Science about to overtake you as the standardbearer of libertarian magazines.

Case In Point.

Here's a sample:

Wearing a baseball cap and sunglasses, I walked into an AT&T store and immediately noticed several black half-globes suspended from the ceiling: surveillance cameras. I needed to keep my head down. When I tried to pay for my new phone, the cashier swiped its bar code, looked up at me with her fingers poised above her keyboard, and asked me for identification. “I don’t have any on me,” I lied.

She seemed mildly annoyed and asked for my name and address.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “but I don’t really want my information in the system.”

“We need your information.”

“Why?”

“For billing purposes.”

“But it’s a prepaid card. You don’t need to bill me.”

This, apparently, was irrelevant. “We need to put your information into the system,” she said again. “Otherwise you can’t buy the phone.”

There's an equally excellent article in the same print issue on drug-testing sewage and the probable-cause problems that would generate, but it doesn't seem to have made it's way onto the online edition yet.

On a somewhat related note, here's one of those Kipesque questions one PopSci article raises: Is a lack of empathy for others a disease?

And what if you think the cure (compassion in a pill) is worse than the disease? And if I choose the disease over the cure, does the government have the power to overrule me?

(Husky, whispered voice from the shadows:) Take your Soma, citizen. Leave the philosophical questions to the experts, who always have your best interests in mind.