The World According to Dick

Courtesy of Bruce Schneier, it seems that Philadelphia is getting the world's first Precrime Unit. University of Pennsylvania researchers are developing software to predict which offenders are statistically more likely to commit homicide.

"The Minority Report", the original short story by Philip K. Dick, originally envisioned this future as a world where the police and the U.S. Army had redundant systems composed of enormous computers deciphering the gibberish mutterings of severely retarded prognosticators. It's actually a quite good story, and the Tom Cruise film does not do it justice. The Dick story:

• has no dead son subplot
• actually makes sense
• is 100% Tom Cruise free
• is much darker
• punch cards, punch cards, punch cards!