Slashdot Mirror

This isn't the first time some neutrino experiments indicated an imaginary mass.
A 1993 article
But other experiments indicated an ordinary (yet tiny) neutrino mass.
Another article
A third article

http://webflash.ess.washington.edu/

"Computers don't lie."

Actually they do, when instructed to do so. It's easy to frame someone. See http://dmca.cs.washington.edu/

"Cosmics Leaving Outdoor Droplets" makes the acronym CLOD, you insensitive cloud!

I completely agree with you, but it's not even close to the worst example of bad acronym-ization I've seen.

Here at UW one group was working on an RFID-using location service for friends and co-workers. Since it allowed for instant notification, and because Twitter had recently exploded onto the public consciousness... although the acronym they picked was "RFIDder", they initially tried to get everyone to pronounce it as "fritter"* even though the letters are in the wrong order. Apparently they hoped no one would notice and it would take off if they repeated it enough. Anyway, they finally gave up and went with "ar-fidder" instead.

* Sorry that link is a PDF, but that group has done a pretty good job of scrubbing references to "fritter". See page 9 or search the doc for "fritter".

There certainly might be some weeding on the basis of subtler inherent capabilities lower down in the ranks; but the sheer amount of drill and practice(both playing and hammering at word lists) required to make a good scrabble player suggests a major 'effect' component.

I do find the notion that this is a 'good' development(outside of the environment of scrabble, where it is obviously useful) sort of interesting. When I am reading, the most pleasant, fastest, and most engaged state is when the words become 'transparent' to me. I'm no longer consciously aware of visually scanning the individual words, nor is their any vocal component(audible or subvocalising), the meaning of what I'm reading just sort of flows in, without any consciousness of the intermediate tasks that I have to perform to get it there. The state of immediate visual recognition of real/false, divorced from meaning, sounds like it would be rather distracting while trying to do anything with words that isn't a particular rather abstract word game...

It's like the Stroop effect tests: some people are better than others at them; but the illiterate knock them out of the park without effort, while the more proficient readers often have great difficulty completing the task instead of just responding to the meaning of the word. Obviously, you aren't likely to become a top tier scrabble player through illiteracy or other serious reading disorder; but I have to wonder if developing this specialized visual facility to such a high pitch detracts from one's general-purpose reading ease.

Or a printer.

There are other ways than rewriting the same thing several times. You don't even have to use C or C++. You already need at least different layouts for desktops, tablets (really just desktops without the input devices), and phones (or: tiny screen devices) for an application to be usable. So what is the advantage of using an overgrown design-by-committee hack that has repeatedly rejected all innovation in the name of compatibility? It doesn't help that HTML5 is probably more difficult to implement than the entire rest of an operating system.

How about Pine for those still on dusty terminals?

Irrelevant as a Hub of OSS tinkerers.

http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/klee/misc/slashdot.html

(anonymous because I alredy modded)

Bundler and CMVS, which are command-line tools that in combination can be used to generate 3D models from a set of ordinary camera photos (i.e. photogrammetry). Several people have taken that code and modified it into collections of tools (e.g., this one) that streamline the process and use GPU code to speed it up. You can then load up the output into Meshlab, a great tool for rendering and editing the resulting point clouds before bringing them into something like Blender 3D (which is well-known).

Even more technical is GPlates, a comprehensive, research-grade tool for doing plate tectonic reconstruction. It's like a combination of conventional GIS system and Google Earth, but you can position anything back in geological time with it. You can load up your own data and published plate motion models from the literature. You really have to understand how plate motion is represented in a technical sense to use it properly (i.e. Euler poles), but even if you don't, you can still use the reconstruction poles, plate outlines, etc. in the supplied data files, plus read the tutorial (a necessity), and then generate a map to your liking. Even better, the program can output a series of image frames that you can then turn into a movie. You can also output a series of projected data files that are easily used in GMT -- Generic Mapping Tools, another wonderful and adaptable open source tool for mapping that has been around for years. Although it is entirely command-line and has a very steep learning curve, if you're used to typical UNIX command-line tools, then GMT is not that bad, it integrates nicely with the UNIX tools you know, and it is very powerful. There are some GUI-based derivatives of it, but I haven't used them.

Those are pretty specialized and would only interest people interested in those subjects, but just today I found PDFtk, a command-line tool to manipulate PDF files (split, merge, rotate pages, etc.). It's exactly what I've been looking for to automate PDF document generation from multiple sources.

Bundler and CMVS, which are command-line tools that in combination can be used to generate 3D models from a set of ordinary camera photos (i.e. photogrammetry). Several people have taken that code and modified it into collections of tools (e.g., this one) that streamline the process and use GPU code to speed it up. You can then load up the output into Meshlab, a great tool for rendering and editing the resulting point clouds before bringing them into something like Blender 3D (which is well-known).

Even more technical is GPlates, a comprehensive, research-grade tool for doing plate tectonic reconstruction. It's like a combination of conventional GIS system and Google Earth, but you can position anything back in geological time with it. You can load up your own data and published plate motion models from the literature. You really have to understand how plate motion is represented in a technical sense to use it properly (i.e. Euler poles), but even if you don't, you can still use the reconstruction poles, plate outlines, etc. in the supplied data files, plus read the tutorial (a necessity), and then generate a map to your liking. Even better, the program can output a series of image frames that you can then turn into a movie. You can also output a series of projected data files that are easily used in GMT -- Generic Mapping Tools, another wonderful and adaptable open source tool for mapping that has been around for years. Although it is entirely command-line and has a very steep learning curve, if you're used to typical UNIX command-line tools, then GMT is not that bad, it integrates nicely with the UNIX tools you know, and it is very powerful. There are some GUI-based derivatives of it, but I haven't used them.

Those are pretty specialized and would only interest people interested in those subjects, but just today I found PDFtk, a command-line tool to manipulate PDF files (split, merge, rotate pages, etc.). It's exactly what I've been looking for to automate PDF document generation from multiple sources.

I'd like to offer some counterpoint. There is some truth to what you say, certainly. Fluency/competence is important in both arenas. However, quite a number of years ago (1990), I made the observation (in the context of a discussion about intellectual property and whether copyright should apply) that literature is essentially a "divergent" activity and that programming, being an engineering activity, is "convergent". That is, if assigned an English paper to write, there's a very high chance that you will be graded down if you turn in the same answer as someone else. By contrast, if assigned a piece of code to write, you will often be graded down if you turn in a different answer than someone else.

This should give you pause as you consider things like copyrights and patents, given that the engineering activity wants to guide you to both copy and independently create works similar to what others have done, while that's not true of literature, yet the same copyright property laws span both of these areas. There's something odd about that.

Anyway, independent of the IP issues, there are good reasons that we want engineers to learn to do similar things and writers to do different things. So I don't doubt that you're right that there is some overlap of skill and activity, but I wanted to point out that the skill of being a writer of literature and of being a writer of code also have some really material differences.

Thanks everyone for their feedback. Nothing like getting slash-dotted for finding out what the world thinks.

Now that its off the front page, I'm going to to take the opportunity to get the last word.

Few more points:
1) In the initial description it does say "... this application is a general guide and not a true prediction" and so yes I agree flood fill isn't the most accurate algorithm for predicting tsunamis. More accurate is GeoClaw which has a lot of fortran and phython code and some very detailed wave models - but obviously its not easy to incorporate into a simple Applet like mine.

2) IMHO, flood fill is better than simply testing the elevation of all points against the wave cause it prevents the water moving through mountain ranges. The logic for flood fill is very simple (maybe 100 lines of code) and its a small extension to basic elevation testing we can handle.

3) Keep watching the web site, cause I do have some improvements planned. Namely handling more than a 10km by 10km area and taking what we do map down to lower level of detail. But for the algorithm I'll probably be sticking with flood fill at least in the short term.

Finally, if someone is bored I am open to collaboration - in particular to with regard to point 1 above, I'm sure someone with the right knowledge could make a much better algorithm. Check the site for email address.

http://www.npl.washington.edu/AV/altvw94.html -- reference (not the one I was looking for, but it is mentioned)

Some other ideas about different boundary conditions at t=0 may be found at these pages:
http://www.npl.washington.edu/npl/int_rep/dtime/node4.html [conventional view]
http://www.space.com/4019-glimpse-time-big-bang.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7440217.stm
http://www.universetoday.com/15051/thinking-about-time-before-the-big-bang/

http://www.npl.washington.edu/AV/altvw94.html -- reference (not the one I was looking for, but it is mentioned)

Some other ideas about different boundary conditions at t=0 may be found at these pages:
http://www.npl.washington.edu/npl/int_rep/dtime/node4.html [conventional view]
http://www.space.com/4019-glimpse-time-big-bang.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7440217.stm
http://www.universetoday.com/15051/thinking-about-time-before-the-big-bang/

Don't forget this thing that he planted in the middle of Seattle.

I wish that we could get any form of expiry date on mails that we send, that would be honored by mail servers like Google.

a) we could have mail expiry dates like Microsoft Outlook on headers, that would make the mail client or server delete them;
b) we could have a working version of something like this http://vanish.cs.washington.edu/

Herp derp. Here is the project page. (It's 3 AM, what do you want from me.)

This course is about how to use theoretical ideas to formulate and solve problems in computer science. It integrates mathematical material with general problem solving techniques and computer science applications. Examples are drawn from Algorithms, Complexity Theory, Game Theory, Probability Theory, Graph Theory, Automata Theory, Algebra, Cryptography, and Combinatorics. Assignments involve both mathematical proofs and programming.

To the best of my knowledge, this course is currently taught and will continue to be taught using functional functional programming. I took the Fundamental Data Structures and Algorithms course referenced in the article. It has some of the problem-solving ideas from Great Theoretical Ideas, but it's more about just knowing what algorithms are out there. Up to this point, the course has been taught in Java with heavy focus on object-oriented ideas, but that will now change to functional programming with ML. I appreciate the benefits of the knowledge it provides, but its mathy nature was sufficient to convince me never to take Great Theoretical Ideas. I'm more of a systems guy.

So, the professor, Brad Vander Zanden, appears to be a professor at the University of Tennessee. Great, it seems to be an ok school; it's a top 50 public school, and a top 100 overall US school. That's a respectable ranking. He even has something of a research page. However (and I don't live anywhere near there so I don't have personal experience, and things could have changed since this list was compiled), their computer science program is ranked rather low, so I don't know if he's all that great an authority.

Here's my opinion (disclaimer: please don't trust my opinion, a random guy on slashdot, either): basically, if you know math, you will use it. You don't need it; you will still find a way to survive in the software world without knowing math, but math will open many doors for you. Would you really want to be shut out from understanding computer graphics, understanding artificial intelligence, and algorithmic complexity? That's just in computers, if you close your mind to math you'll be closing your mind to understanding the way the physical world works, too. You'll be losing the logical/mental discipline that comes from understanding math. Why would you want to give up all that, and try to live as a code monkey?

But spiders venoms are not very deadly http://www.washington.edu/burkemuseum/spidermyth/myths/downunder.html:
"Authoritative sources state that over 7,000 authentic cases of human bites from these spiders have been recorded, with only around 10 known deaths, and about 2% of cases serious enough to need antivenom."

It was due to copyright reasons, from wikipedia:

"From version 3.9.2, the holder of the copyright, the University of Washington, changed the license so that even if the source code was still available, they did not allow modifications and changes to Pine to be distributed by anyone other than themselves. They also claimed that even the old license never allowed distribution of modified versions.[3]"

So there is now alpine.

not everyone has outlook,

So use Thunderbird or Mutt or Mulberry or Evolution or Alpine or hell how about any of the others in this list under freeware or open source.

Email is based on open standards. There are hundreds of email clients if you are willing to take the time to look for them, and all of them (arguably) are better than Outlook.

What's your point? You think everyone should have their kids indoctrinated by cheekyjohnson?

You're a bad parent if you think mere facts are all that a child needs. Children imitate[1] what they observe. They often are able to imitate something way before they can understand the reasons (fact is most humans don't understand many of the devices they use in modern society).

If parents are doing their jobs, their kids would be getting "indoctrinated" by them, not by Foxnews or Disney or McD or "the education system" or the Government.

That's the whole duty and responsibility of being a parent.

Educating parents on the other hand is the responsibility of society (e.g. everyone including the parents themselves).

[1] http://ilabs.washington.edu/meltzoff/pdf/05Meltzoff_Like%20Me%20Hypoth.pdf

This is a very, very old story. The SnowWorld project at UW's HITLab has been around for a very long time. Here's the earliest publication, from 2001, that I could find. Only a decade ago:
Hoffman, H.G., Patterson, D.R., Carrougher, G.J. and Sharar, S. (2001). The effectiveness of virtual reality based pain control with multiple treatments. Clinical Journal of Pain, 17, 229-235. PDF

Not only is it trivial, it doesn't even run any optimizations passes over the resulting point cloud in order to reduce error and produce nice surfaces. This process is very similar to the work done here except the resulting solution will be quicker because you already have some decent depth information for the points.

Importantly, this looks to be a Facebook-specific implementation of Vanish, a project with the goal of making data "self-destruct" after a set period of time done by Roxana Geambasu and her colleagues at the University of Washington, linked here. They describe in their USENIX Security paper why encryption alone doesn't solve the problem.

Yes, the Gates foundation is all about altruism.

Simple. Arctic ice extent is mostly a function of local conditions, while 2010 being the warmest year is a global average. The low 2007 ice extend was due to some unusual weather patterns that we don't get every single year.

Instead of focusing on the outliers, look at the big picture, and the long term trend:
http://tamino.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/nhem.jpg

Even better is to look at the ice volume, rather than just the surface area. Despite the fact that area has recovered from the all time low in 2007, the volume has continued to decline.
http://psc.apl.washington.edu/ArcticSeaiceVolume/images/BPIOMASIceVolumeAnomalyCurrent.png

Science illiteracy is strongly rooted in math illiteracy. Cliff Mass, a Seattle area Professor of Meteorology, gives his incoming freshman students a math test. This is a test of basic math skills that should be mastered before high school. Yet the average score for college freshman science students is only 58%.

You can find the answers to the above test in his blog article.

Except that Piers Corbin is not a climatologist, is a borderline quack, and none of his "research" in this area is backed up by peer reviewed articles.

Now add to this that the past three winters have actually been some of the warmest winters (especially in the arctic) we've had, there is nothing very "harbinger" about it. Warmer winters mean more precipitation, which is what we've been seeing. Currently, there are wide swaths of the arctic that are as much as 20F warmer than their average, hence for the first time on record there has actually been an arctic ice REDUCTION in winter which you can see for yourself here http://www.iup.uni-bremen.de:8084/amsr/amsre.html, or you can go by ice volume here http://psc.apl.washington.edu/ArcticSeaiceVolume/IceVolume.php . In addition, global temperatures have still been rising even during a solar minimum. Even with the moderate La Nina we're still having near record warmth for the globe.

I think I'll continue following the consensus of the body of climate science, thanks.

From what I can see, it's pretty much OneSwarm, but without the anonymity.

Still not seeing any citations, but perhaps you should be reviewing your own examples. The hockey stick has been confirmed by multiple independent lines of evidence:

McIntyre 2004 claimed that the Mann 1999's hockey-stick graph shape was a result of the analysis method used (principal components analysis), and was not statistically significant. However, the National Center for Atmospheric Research reconstructed (Wahl 2007) the graph using a variety of techniques (with and without principal components analysis), and with some slightly different temperatures in the 15th century, confirmed the hockey stick. Furthermore, independent measurements from boreholes (Huang 2000"), stalagmites (Smith 2006) and glaciers (Oerlemans 2005) all confirm the same dramatic recent temperature rises. Mann 2008 combines these with ice cores, coral and lake sediments to confirm the same hockey stick shape over the last 1300 years, without requiring the disputed tree-ring data.

If you're referring to Steig 2009, perhaps you can point us to evidence that discredits this? You'll have to forgive us for not taking your claims that it is "unmitigated bollocks" at face value. Rather, measurements from the GRACE satellite (Velicogna 2009) show very clearly that the Antarctic land ice sheet has lost around 900 gigatonnes in the last 7 years, and this loss rate is accelerating, even in the previously-thought-stable East Antarctica (Chen 2009). The Antarctic sea ice sheet is actually increasing, however, for numerous possible reasons, but at a lower rate than the land ice loss.

hm, that's a really old story (I had assumed it was new because I saw I somewhere else today as well) dating back to 2005. Here's the full abstract with links to the full paper in PDF: http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/yoshi/papers/PDF/

I see no sample code, and the paper was too verbose for me to quickly skim to find how it does its measurements, but the conclusion sticks out a bit:

Although the techniques we described will likely remain applicable to current generation systems, we suspect that future generation security systems might offer countermeasures to resist some of the finger-printing techniques that we uncover.

I think five years counts as more than fair with respect to a 'future generation' or two. Even if the paper was being overly optimistic about its own impact (which was probably the case...), system bus speeds have radically improved since the Pentium 4's quad-pumped 100MHz and the CPU die size shrank from 90nm to 45nm and are about to hit 32nm; it remains unclear whether or not those and similar improvements have increased the clock precision to a level that is surpassed by noise that might render this fingerprinting method ineffective.

Here's the paper that I'm basing that part of my argument on.

It's well worth a read in its entirety, but to quote some of the relevant segments:

By default, BitTorrent trackers record the source IP address from the request as the actual address of the peer to be delivered to others. But, some BitTorrent tracker implementations support an optional extension to the peer request message that allows requesting clients to specify a different IP address that the tracker should record in its list of peers instead. This is intended to provide support for proxy servers and peers/trackers behind the same NAT. But, when combined with the lack of verification of tracker responses by monitoring agents, this extension also allows malicious clients to frame arbitrary IPs for infringement via a simple HTTP request.

The current monitoring approach for BitTorrent, simply issuing a tracker request, requires only a single HTTP request and response, generating at most a few kilobytes of network traffic, a single connection, and minimal processing.

Because BitTorrent tracker responses are not encrypted, man-in-the-middle attacks at the network level are straightforward. Anyone on the path between tracker and a monitoring agent can alter the tracker’s response, implicating arbitrary IPs.

A tracker need not be malicious to falsely implicate users. Consider the following scenario. Bob participates in an infringing BitTorrent swarm from a laptop via WiFi with an IP address assigned via DHCP, e.g., at a university or coffee shop. Bob then closes his laptop to leave, suspending his BitTorrent client without an orderly notification to the tracker that he has left. Some time later, Alice joins the same WiFi network and, due to the DHCP timeout of Bob’s IP, Alice receives Bob’s former address. Simultaneously, a monitoring agent queries the tracker for the swarm Bob was downloading and the tracker reports Bob’s former IP. The monitoring agent then dispatches a DMCA notice to the ISP running the WiFi network naming Bob’s IP but with a timestamp that would attribute that IP to Alice, a false positive. Whether this is a problem in practice depends on the relative timeouts of BitTorrent trackers and DHCP leases, neither of which is fixed.

The majority of the population here is all in favor of education and healthcare, we just don't believe that a state income tax is the way to fund them.

Or that we should fund them at all, given how politics in Washington seem to go. This PDF illustrates some of the recent declines in state funding for the University of Washington, but I think the declines have been going on for longer than that.

It's hard to reconcile the legislature's funding for colleges and universities with the idea that we "are all in favor of education."

AFAIK this is one way OneSwarm works. It can 'torrent' but only from a trusted network. Trusted peers can act as proxies to the untrusted, anonymizing peer/file discovery and downloading. It's probably insanely slow in practice, but I wouldn't know.

Here's one notable example. I'm sure you can find many others.

Part of the problem is that filing a DMCA notice requires no concrete evidence of wrongdoing, and that the automated systems used in detecting infringement are far from perfect.

Paper here: http://sockeye.cs.washington.edu/research/pubs/Cohn_SNUPI_ubicomp10.pdf

At the end, the authors are grasping at straws to describe potential applications.

I don't think anyone cares about "ubiquitous computing" hidden in a crawl space or behind a wall, come on. That's not really an application.

There is no point in embedding this into anything which is plugged into an outlet, because then you can use direct power-line networking; there is no need for a wireless hop to the power line! And you have AC power, so the battery life saving is moot.

The authors neglect to address the obvious objection: that non-mobile devices, such as those installed in a wall or crawl space, do not have to be wireless!!! You can just run a section of cable to them. There is already wiring in walls; just tap into it! If you're going to go through the trouble of cutting through a wall to install something, surely you can do wiring.

The medical uses are the most promising, like glucose monitoring and whatnot. But unless these devices are surgically implanted in the body, who really cares about their battery life? There are rechargeable batteries. The one good thing would be that the tinfoil hat crowd would approve of the use of less transmitter power and lower frequencies, especially near the human body. This would be the way to sell this technology: it is "safer".

There is no point in using this in any battery-powered device which itself has a significant current drain, such that the additional drain from wireless transmission is negligible. (Suppose 10% of the overall power consumption is spent on transmitting; a ten fold improvement in that will cut only 9% of the overall power consumption). So for instance, using this in a laptop computer is useless.

Also, there is another limitation: currently, the SNUPI devices can only transmit and not receive.

Bandwidth could be a problem; these things use a low-frequency. Forget about 802.11{g,n}.

This is just someone's school project that is unlikely to result in a product, but you never know. The perception of a reduced health hazard due to lower emissions could be a big selling point.

It's 3.8 cm by 3.8 cm by 1.4 cm (second page, first column, second paragraph).

But the total volume of ice in the Arctic is lower than it was in 2007 & 2008. Volume is probably more important in the long run than extent since the thickness of the ice is an indicator of how long it's likely to last.

You'd think by now UW would have written their own mail client or something.....

Problem is - those both suck (yes I'm at UW).

Of course like many universities, UW now offers hosted Gmail - a much better web option than pine or alpine IMHO. I reailze there are security implications using hosted Gmail, but when the other main option is UW servers accessed via Outlook then it's a bit harder to argue about Gmail's security.

Unfortunately, my department's default mail client is still Outlook. That decision was made by someone who's never used anything BUT Outlook, and so doesn't realize just how behind it is... several of us have argued for Thunderbird (which UW does officially support) but PHB always gives a rambling, incoherent statement against and it doesn't happen.

You'd think by now UW would have written their own mail client or something.....

Problem is - those both suck (yes I'm at UW).

Of course like many universities, UW now offers hosted Gmail - a much better web option than pine or alpine IMHO. I reailze there are security implications using hosted Gmail, but when the other main option is UW servers accessed via Outlook then it's a bit harder to argue about Gmail's security.

Unfortunately, my department's default mail client is still Outlook. That decision was made by someone who's never used anything BUT Outlook, and so doesn't realize just how behind it is... several of us have argued for Thunderbird (which UW does officially support) but PHB always gives a rambling, incoherent statement against and it doesn't happen.

You'd think by now UW would have written their own mail client or something.....

You'd think by now UW would have written their own mail client or something.....

A synapse is an intracellular junction that allows for the propagation of binary electrical information between neurons.Like transistors, synapses have threshold voltages that need to reached before the information can be sent. In a sense, synapses = transistors. A single neuron in the brain may have on the order of several hundred to tens of thousands of synapses. Considering there are about 100 billion neurons in the human brain, the number of synapses add up to a daunting number. Here's where I got the info: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1188961/pdf/jpn00078-0049a.pdf http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/facts.html

A google search for "tea party racism study" turns up a survey which found a measurable difference in racial attitudes between the tea party folks and the general population, as the very first result. And criticizing someone for not doing research is not a proof or disproof of anything; what matters is the evidence that *exists*, not the evidence that was provided. And while you shouldn't accept conjectures without evidence for them, you shouldn't *reject* conjectures without evidence against them, either.

The rules of reasoning and evidence are not as obvious as most people think, and most people, including you and me, get at least a few of them wrong. (It is especially hard to think clearly about politics). I recommend reading the Less Wrong sequences [lesswrong.com] for guidance on how to evaluate hypotheses.

Let's not get hasty here. Before you bark about rules of reasoning and evidence, you need to keep in mind that you've just presented one study of dubious provenance and dubious conclusions. I asked for evidence that racism was more prevalent in the "tea party" group than general society. The study merely indicates that there is a difference in racial attitudes, which is far from the same thing. Given that we would expect different ethnicities to collectively have somewhat different stakes in political measures, I don't see this as significant in itself. Second, the study indicates some questionable racial attitudes among the study researchers as well. For example, in the blurb (by the school that sponsored the study researcher), we have:

Many believed that the election of Barack Obama brought to a close the long, painful, and ugly history of race and racism in the United States. But as the incident with Henry Louis Gates last summer, and the more recent outbursts of the Tea Party activists suggest, racial divisions remain.

The only notable bigotry I see is some degree of homophobia (which is something shared with a number of other groups, for example, the ethnic groups, Latinos and Blacks). Again, that doesn't seem significant though compared to the general population.

I submitted this story earlier because I agree with Jens Best that it is wrong to claim that Google Street View is violating people's privacy.

A street is a public space. By definition, a public space is where you expect anyone can see what you're doing, and that includes taking pictures. Is it wrong for average joe to take a photo on the street which include random people and plate number? No. So then why should it become wrong when Google is taking photos on the street?

So what's wrong with that? Logically there's really nothing wrong. You only feel it wrong because you don't want so many people to see you appear on that street. But remember its a public space, whether you like it or not there're always people watching you.

Hence, the root of the problem is not Google taking your photo, but its that Google makes it easy for anyone in the world to see photos taken on a street. I'd stress it again, its EASIER now for anyone to see photos of a street - the problem is on the EASINESS, not publicness or privateness.

Generalizing the problem, we can see that the root problem is on the advance of technology. With the wide adoption of digital camera equipped smartphones, anyone has the right to take pictures at any public space. The technology also make it easier for anyone to see the taken photos on the Internet. Now as long as the photo is not taken at private space, logically there is nothing wrong for anyone to do that. Google is only pioneering the technology to make it extremely easy to view photos of any street.

But even if Google took down street view, it is definitely possible to have user generated street view in the near future, especially with the assist of technologies such as PhotoSynth and geo-tagging. The technology is improving in extremely fast pace, and it will be soon that we can even see entire reconstruction of streets and buildings become a practical reality. I for one definitely hope that such technology could arrive to my country so that I can preserve the heritage of my own town "perfectly" without needing to wait for Google to come to my country.

With CCTV and Street View already watching us all around, the bad news is that there will definitely be more digital eyes watching on us from anywhere at all. If people already complaining on Street View, can they even accept a decentralized peer to peer street view? Should they ban the collaboration website or ban users from submitting photos? Or would it become prohibited to even take photos using hand phone in public spaces? Or is every tourists and photographers are under obligation to blur people's faces and car plate numbers in every photo they've taken?

Although I certainly agree that Street View would not necessary bring no harm to anyone, but I also think that it is wrong to ban such activities for personal reasons. This is not a privacy problem, this is a technological problem. The only way to make it not happen is to prevent the technology to advance. The public space already has a meaning, that is, public. I think nobody should demand for privacy in a public space, and it does no good to impose any privacy restriction to spaces that are already public. Sure you can define more non-public spaces like in your own house and impose privacy restriction there, but street is public, so don't complain.

Finally, I'd like to make disclaimer that I'm writing this not because I'm opposing privacy. I'm just stating the facts here about the root cause of privacy problems and the real challenge on solving them. As far as I know, I think it is wrong to define the problem as "privacy invasion" and such, and I don't think there are any other ways to prevent that other than redefining the meaning of "public" and stop technology from progressing. If anyone else can come out with a better solution, I'd definitely more than happy to accept it. And I really hope my 2 cent can make people think more deeply on the problem and solve the root cause instead of bashing the surfaces by blaming the corporations.

Actually, football (soccer here in the US) has risk factors of its own including heading the ball causes neuronal damage.

Where have you been for the past 10 years? Most ISPs (read: Telcos & Cablecos) have long demonstrated their inability to be honest.

Where have I been? In the trenches.

I was one of the researchers behind the web tripwires project for detecting ISP injected advertisements. I was one of the developers of the RST injection detector that was used to monitor how ISPs were disrupting traffic with injected Resets. And I'm one of the developers of Netalyzr.

And overall, most ISPs are actually honest, and even the dishonest ones have gotten a fair bit better.

EG, Comcast was incredibly dishonest at the start on their BitTorrent shaping (denying what they were doing altogether), but in the end were honest about it once they got caught (it did indeed only affect upload-only BitTorrent flows, we were able to independently verify this), and has become much more transparent about their traffic shaping and port filtering policies since then (they even have done IETF drafts on how their traffic management is done today).

And this is why I believe that thing that really makes a difference is being able to validate that what an ISP says is actually true: If ISPs know that manipulations will be detected, they have a much lower incentive to manipulate traffic. This is why I believe in network transparency.

You notice how you don't have ISPs talking about doing advertisement injection. Why? because its detectable. You notice how most ISPs no longer mess with BitTorrent? Why: because its detectable.

This is the biggest benefit of transparency and enforcing transparency by measuring for violations: it keeps honest ISPs honest, and punishes the dishonest when (not if, but when) you catch them.