Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Counterstrike, Identification, Patenxtortion
False negatives, false positives, anda false sense of assurance. coryboehne writes: "TechNews has a report on the face recognition system installed at the Palm Beach Internation Airport early results of face-recognition surveillance suggest the technology is proving once again to be unreliable.
The ACLU said the first four weeks of testing at the Palm Beach airport showed the technology was "less accurate than a coin toss." The system matched the faces of the volunteers just 455 out of 958 times, or about 47 percent of the time.
Seems to me that this is a controlled environment for the most part, and still they have problems this big? I wonder if this technology will ever be accurate enough to work properly. I suppose the biggest problem is the size of the database that would be necessary to hold the high quality pictures necessary for accurate identification.
However I must admit that I am rather glad that this is'nt working yet as I'm not too sure I even like the idea of being able to digitally locate and track anyone within range of a camera."
This is what's meant by "repeat offender." Audent writes: "Following on from this story on Slashdot about PanIP's nasty habits, InfoWorld is running a story about it all.
To quote from the story about PanIP's boss:
'These lawsuits aren't the first time that PanIP principal Lawrence Lockwood has initiated legal proceedings against companies he felt were infringing his patents. Lockwood filed a lawsuit against American Airlines in 1994, claiming that American's SABREvision airline reservation system infringed on other patents he holds. Lockwood lost the suit in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California and then lost again on appeal in 1997.'He's since had a bunch of patents disallowed. He's obviously learned from his earlier 'mistake' and is only going for the smaller companies.
Kick his ass I say. Disclaimer: I work for IDG Comms in New Zealand)."
Temporary sanity. CyberQ writes: "Some news from Germany on the censorship front: Despite demands from prominent politicians the responsible Federal Authority decided today not to ban the sale of Counterstrike to minors [Link in German, use the fish]. This came after weeks of public discussion following a school shooting by a student who apparently trained by playing CS."
This headline nearly made me crack up:
The worst mass murder in Germany...
since World War II.
Maybe it's not the video games after all?
leads to violent children is bogus.
It's logic like this (from my discreet math days)...
1)Penguins are black and white
2)Old TV shows are black and white
3)Therefore some penguins are old TV shows.
Fly Fish? Participate in our forum
Counter-Strike is horrible training. Imagine the inefficiency in a real-life situation stemming from wall-hack paranoia.
you would think by now germany would know better..
..
Bans don't work in the long run
Fro example the ban on nazism in Germany forced everything underground in which the German police have to expend more hours than otherwise to keep track and monitor theri actions..if they weren't banned everyone woudl know what they are doing due to the fact that they woudl be out in the open in public view..
Don't Tread on OpenSource
As much as I am against the banning of cs sales to minors, I must make one thing clear. Banning the sales to minors has absolutely nothing to do with censorship. Else it would be censorship as well if a minor wasn't allowed to buy porn. Sorry, but you messed two totally different things up here.
Still, glad to see they didn't ban it, I am neither from Germany, nor do I play cs, but still, I like the gaming community.
Ash nazg durbatulûk, ash nazg gimbatul
ash nazg thrakatulûk, agh burzum-ishi krimpatul.
Of course it was the game!!
The fact that he somehow got a gun, got it into a supposedly secure area and shot people without his parents knowing he was disturbed is irrelevent as always.
Bah!!
I suppose we are lucky he wasn't using OGC 8.2..
Was he bunny hopping??:)
" The best Bucket is a SCREAMING one "
Of course most people probably know this, but the babelfish link should be: fish.
The editor left out the http://
Cheers Koz
Games like Urbanterror, a mod for q3, are much better.
"Under real world conditions, Osama Bin Laden himself could easily evade a face recognition system."
:-)
Apparently the ACLU thinks that camera detection systems should give OBL preferential treatment. Either that, or they think he's one distinctively ugly mofo.
-Rob Ewaschuk
You'd think we'd have learned after that "Spider-Man" fiasco. ;o)
[PowerPoint] is a tool for capitalist presentation
From the poster: Seems to me that this is a controlled environment for the most part, and still they have problems this big? I wonder if this technology will ever be accurate enough to work properly.
A similar story on Wired indicates higher match rates (90%) at airports in Dallas Boston. The maker of the recognition system speculates that lighting was a factor in the Palm Beach for the low match rate. 90% still a bad rate (better than 99.9% or something like that would be ideal), but it shows how differences of environment can affect these things.
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
What the facial recognition software did was run approximately 1 in 1000 odds almost 50% of the time. If a medicine cut risks by 1000 times for half the people who took it, it would be a sensation.
Of course, what people really care about is not inconveniencing innocents.. I think it is a bad tactical move for the ACLU to pick on these points. Eventually, computers will be so much faster that we will have a pretty good recognition system and they will be up a creek.
IANAL: this means I cannot think totally illogically.
1) In exchange for patent rights, the company must make public the details of the design it wants to patent.
1.1) In a software patent case, this may consist of example code.
2) It is legal for any person to obtain the patent application for a succesful patent.
2.1) In a software patent case, this means you may posess the example code.
3) It is illegal to implement the patent without the patentholder's express consent.
3.1) This means it is illegal to compile and execute the example code.
So now: suppose someone takes the patent application form and translates it into a different language. That definately has to be legal.
Since code is speech, this may be a computer language.
Add a bit of embellishments and you have a full-fledged application that incorporates the patent. Still legal to posess, but illegal to compile or run.
Assume it's legal to publish this (free speech and all that), and furthermore assume that US citizens may download it.
I would assume some form of system needs to be in place that prevents US citizens from compiling and executing the code, otherwise it violates the patent.
Therefore, code anything you want, make one deliberate error, publish the code and allow downloads. Citizens of a country that's stupid enough to allow patents on software must therefore be stupid enough not to be able to compile and execute broken code! (No flames please, my <sarcastic> tags don't work!)
Please, shoot holes in my argument! Where'm I going wrong? It can't be this simple!
The ACLU said the first four weeks of testing at the Palm Beach airport showed the technology was "less accurate than a coin toss."
Now, a coin toss generally turns up the null hypothesis (completely random). So it's worse than completely random?
I've got an easy solution, then. All they have to do is reverse the answers and they'll be MORE accurate than a coin toss!
I got my Linux laptop at System76.
Hmmm. Lets see...
We have 4 weeks of 10,000 face captures a day. That's 280,000 face captures. This test generated 1000 false positives, and caught any of 250 people about 50% of the time passing through. That makes the system correct about 278,500 times out of 280,000 samples, according to my count (500 false negatives and 1000 false positives).
This is a failure? Is Could any human being you know do as well? Even close? And how does 99.5% correct translate to "less effective than a coin toss".
Honestly, this was pretty pitiful argument by the ACLU. I hate face recognition on unreasonable search grounds, like most people I know. However, this kind of argument doesn't help their cause! Anyone who can do a bit of arithmetic (and I think we can count on the systems designers to supply it to any decision makers who can't do math for themselves) can see for themselves that this looks pretty damn successful.
This is something I came up with a while back. If you're going to ban the sale of violent video games to minors, why not ban violent books to minors?
Books are full of violence ranging from rape, murder, war, you name it, books are just as bad as television and video games alike. If you're going to ban the same of such games as Unreal Tournament, Counter-Strike, or Quake III Arena, then you might as-well ban books involving material I just mentioned.
Actually, no. It's considerably more accurate than a coin toss!
Let's say you have 1,000 faces in your (rather small) database. You walk these 1,000 people by the camera, and some guy with a quarter.
The camera was able to identify, of the 1,000 people, which person it was 47% of the time.
The guy with the quarter would get (on average) 0.1%, (1 in 1,000 odds) and this is assuming that the guy knows that the person in front of him is actually in the database! That's 470 times better!
However, this is a test done in a real airport! Run 10,000 people by, and let's say the camera gets 47% right.The guy with the quarter now averages around 0.001%
In this scenario, the camera would do 47,000 times better than the guy randomly guessing!
But even that is not as rigorous as the actual test! In this case, they ran it 10,000 times per day for 8 weeks, or (potentially) 560,000 faces.
What we should be looking at, is that it's choosing the right guy (out of 250) almost 50% of the time in a sample size of 560,000.
That's quite a feat. When that hits 95%, and it's pattern matching Osama Bin Laden, what do you think airport security would do if there's a match?
Even with that, I don't think it's going to reach that point without 3D modeling with two cameras. Isn't there an article here someplace about how great and wonderful NVIDIA is at 3D stuff?
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
So, what we should do is keep our eyes out for companies that are violating his "patents" (e.g., get a phone book) and start notifying them that they appear to be in violation. Copy PanIP on the notice, and see what happens. If enough people (hundreds? thousands?) do this to enough companies, it should surely stir up some dust.
Foe good measure, 1) pick companies that look big enough to fight him (or obvious sympathy cases), 2) also copy the patent office on the message, and 3) send a copy to the journalists who have covered the story.
Smirk. One good way to kill things that live under rocks is to expose them to daylight.
-- MarkusQ
The ACLU has a good point, but their coin flip analogy is a little misleading. If they were really using a coin flip to 'guess' who each person was (i.e., guessing randomly), accuracy would have been much lower, with expected normalized discriminibility score (d') of 0. For example, their target set was of 250 people. So, a dumb guessing system would have less than a .4% hit rate: compared to that, 50% is pretty good. Furthermore, this wasn't a simple categorization task: there were 5000 passengers a day that were tested. Over 4 weeks there were around 1000 false alarms, which is a false alarm rate of .007 (and a d' of 2.5). Note that they could have increased the hit rate to above 50% if they wanted to allow for more false alarms, but they tuned the algorithms to err on the side of letting people through if there was any question. To me, this sounds like something the ACLU should be happy about, and they should perhaps recognize the difficulty of setting these thresholds and attempt to provide guidelines about how to do it and what to do after you register a hit. Face it, automated detection devices are going to exist, and they won't be perfect. But, in order to optimize the detection criteria, costs must be assigned to false alarms relative to misses. This is something that we shouldn't let the engineers and businessmen and law enforcement do alone--it is something that the humanists and the civil libertarians and the policy-makers and you and I need a voice in too.
Even with all the technological advances we have today, we still can't reproduce one of the common tasks the human brain performs, face recognition. It just shows you how complex our brains really are. Although, we're not perfect at face recognition either, but I'm sure the average person could do far better than 47%. Someday, a computer will be better, but I guess not today...
"Karma can only be portioned out by the cosmos." -Homer Simpson
Next they'll be saying that people who play flight simulator a lot are more likely to be good at flying real planes...! Where's the logic in that??
he was also a member of the local gun club. I'm sure that gave him far more training than playing CS did.
Photos.
How many people on death row have:
cpeterso
it was not egg troll, it was me!
That's "Kraut", like "Sauerkraut."
You (and I) might believe that banning a political movement, however odious, is unacceptable on principle. But it's just possible that it would have been much worse for Germany and Europe and the world if the ban hadn't been placed. There's no way to know one way or the other.
Sorry if it's O/T.
If PanIP got the patents in 1996, doesn't that make sites such as eBay which was created in 1995 as prior art? I'm mean ebay is a pretty good example of prior art for a video-based sales terminal. Or perhaps ATM machines that have been around since the 70's / 80's. I think this case should be a cakewalk.
Code is speech and speech conveys an idea. In the case of code speech, the idea that is conveyed is a mathematical one. Changing the form of the equation does not change its function. So, its not the code that is important, its the function of the code.
The massacre in Erfurt had little to do with video games and everything to do with guns. All guns or gun lookalikes need to be banned including toys, BB guns, paintball guns, etc as even these promote gun violence. Only the government has a need for guns and only they should have them. I can't wait for the day when the government cracks down and seizes and arrests those who own guns. The world has moved on folks, this isn't 1776, it's 2002. By the way, the 2nd amendment is a protection of the *GOVERNMENT'S* right to bear arms, not some libertarian nutcase.
several YEARS ago i saw a show ongerman television about a program that could do face recognition alot better than wht u ppl have. They took a picture of a guy across the street with a normal canon camera and he was wearing a beard and mustache (fake) and the program still identified it as him. this program was still in delopment back then so it should have been finished a year ago. wonder where the ppl u call "leaders" are lookin'.....
Proof:
- Alexander the Great was a great general.
- Great generals are forewarned.
- To be forewarned is to be fore-armed
- Four is an odd number of arms for a person to have
- Four is an even number
- The only number that can be both even and odd is infinity
Conclusion: Therefore, Alexander the Great had an infinite number of arms."The dead do not shoo-bop-aloo-bah." -- Kai, 'Lexx'
following a school shooting by a student who apparently trained by playing CS.
So THAT"S what it's called nowadays...
-DrkShadow
...had he been using an OpenGL wallhack.
My words are backed with NUCLEAR WEAPONS!
I hope they don't ban Counter-Strike. Without Counter-Strike, I will have no way of procuring an army of children trained well enough to guard my secret, well defendedisland fortress.
using namespace slashdot;
troll::post();
How many people on death row have:
played a violent video game?
read a book?
4.
Just 4.
El Karma: excelente(principalmente la suma de moderación hecha a los comentarios de los usuarios)
I hate having public eyes everywhere now, but the statistical argument against them isn't going to work.
Miko O'Sullivan
If they go about causing enough pain for enough people... perhaps congress will get involved and fix the monster that they have created? (or perhaps they will just make it worse...)
The author/editor is trying to say that flipping a coin 1000 times would have a higher percentage of "successes" than this machine did.
He's partially correct, and partially incorrect.
probability of getting 470 heads or less out of 1000 flips:
z=(.47-.50)/(sqrt(1000(.50)^2)=-.00189.
p(z<=-.00189)=.49924.
Thus, there's almost a 50% chance of getting 47% or less successes purely by chance.
Now, a two proportion Z Test:
2-PropZTest(x1:500,n1:1000,x2:470,n2:1000,test p1!=p2)=z=1.3422.p=.1795
From the data presented in the article, there is no evidence that the proportion of correctly matched faces in the sample given is different from the proportion of heads you would receive if you flipped a fair coin 1000 times.
Conclusion:
Well, I would have to say that even after subtracting the cost of the coins, the airports would save lots of money if they just bought rolls of coins instead.
-braxton
Of course I am not a lawyer, but I play one on TV!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I suppose the biggest problem is the size of the database that would be necessary to hold the high quality pictures necessary for accurate identification.
I suppose you're an idiot. The biggest problem is the vast complexity of the computations involved. Trying to compensate for lighting, eyewear, angle of face, these are the problems. Not the "size of the database"
-Chuck
That 90% figure comes from Visiontronics spokesperson Meir Khatan, so I'd take it with a grain of salt, especially since the only data that can be independently verified suggest more like 50%.
What I want to know about facial recognition technology is how well it can spot a fugitive one-eyed mullah, or an extremely tall Saudi guy with a long beard and a Kalashnikov. Until it can outperform your average airport security guard, it will ammount to nothing but boondoggle-- unless, of course, its intended purpose is not what was advertized. I'm glad the ACLU is on top of this one.
Tonight I was coincendently looking for good software for my own surveilance system. I remembered a rather impressive program I had seen demonstrated on cebit a couple of years ago: the software grabbed faces on the fly and it added them to a database then you could select "evil" people and an alarm would go off when they passed a camera. Also you could see stats on the people that were in the database about when they passed it for the last time and stuff like that.
I was delighted to see there was an evaluation version available, too bad it's for nt-clones only, but if you also happen to have a video-capture system, I'd say it's worth try.
The program is called Face It and you can download it here
... except pro-Nazi things, apparently... and that's the irony, and that's the problem: a faux respect for democratic opinion, unless it is the "wrong" one. I'm not German, and I cannot really prescribe to Germans how to handle this tension in democracy. But I am an American, and without being too jingoistic, I think we get this one right: Allow a free market of ideas. Don't allow the government, or the moral minority, or "the People" to legislate that some ideas are "wrong". Let them all fight it out. Because I believe in democracy and in the basic dignity of humankind (both possibly ludicrous beliefs, but hey...), I also believe that the right and the true will triumph.
This isn't mealy-mouthed bleeding-heart East Coast liberalism. It's a hard-eyed view drawn from the history of a free people: The only cure for darkness is light -- it's never more darkness.
If a people is presented with the neo-Nazi thugs and the radical idiocies, and given the chance to honestly evaluate them, and still fall for them... well, there is no power in Heaven or on Earth that keep such a people free. If they cannot be trusted to see through this propaganda, then they cannot possibly be protected from it. And no well-intentioned political elite is ever going to safeguard them from their own democratic process.
People are free, or they are not. They are not made free by the actions of someone else; they are free by the strength of their commitment to freedom. Let the idiots, the racists, the radicals bray and howl. I know that a free and educated people will rise above that, will see them for the sham they are, will cast them back into the darkness and ooze from which they crawled.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
Who REALLY gives a shit?
I love the "those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it" line.....
Guess what? At some point in our future we WILL repeat it regardless of if
we remember. Life is messy, no matter what you think, we are animals with a
VERY thin veneer of civilization applied.
Was it horrible? Yes. Was it worse than other
wars, killing, pillaging, salting the earth
episodes we have had? On a numbers scale
I believe Stalin killed more.
The people who did it are dead. It is time to get
over it.......
What you are saying is that the way to prevent the subversion of freedom and democracy is to subvert freedom and democracy? The nazis came to power because Germany was in terrible shape after World War I. They were impoverished and they were looking for any solution. They wanted somebody to blame, a new direction to go. It has little to do with the specific message of nazism, it has far more to do with the state of the society they lived in.
This scene has played out in history time and time again. Desperate people do stupid things, and they will back insane radicals because they've got little to lose. Do you really think that if nazism was allowed to show it's head in public they would actually gain significant power? My supicion is that if it came out into the open, the nazism would face a backlash from people who now don't worry about it because it's all underground.
Granted, I don't live in Germany. Perhaps I'm seriously underestimating the tendancies of the german citizenry. My sense is that without some reason to drive them to the false promises of nazism, they'll just push nazism to the margins where it belongs.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
Whether tis nobler in the world
to bear the slings and arrows of
outrageous thinkers, or
to make laws against a sea of
idiots and by banning hide them.
Perchance we can live with the idiots,
and just vote against their ideals.
If fascists come to power through a FAIR vote, guess what
that is DEMOCRACY in action. If the
people are idiotic enough to vote them in
so be it.
To Ban a group of people from running for office
or to even express their ideas is to PAY LIPSERVICE to democracy.
It says that in your opinion the average citizen
is incapable of thinking and choosing for himself.
Which is the fundamental ideal which democracy is founded upon.
If you are too afraid of the average citizens vote, then at least be HONEST about it, and abolish your "so-called" democracy for
a monarchy or some other such idea where the "enlightened" elite can decide for everyone else......
Hitler came to power due to 2 things:
1. A Terrible economy due to an unjust and crippling peace treaty for World War I
2. A lack of Previous democratic principals in Germany. I.e. Democracy had no time to take
"root"
It really pisses me off when people decide they know best what others should or should not be allowed to think, all the while making proclamations about freedom and democracy etc. etc......
Service guarantees Citizenship! Questions Guarantee GITMO.... Amerika Uber Alles!
...by a student who apparently trained by playing CS.
Hmmm... so, I'm assuming he was jumping down the hallways like some kind of rabbit on crack, shooting randomly? Because that's about the only thing that CS teaches you.
If your odds are worse than 50%, just stick a big fat 'not' in front of your oracle, and now they are better than 50%!
"Normally I'm not a fighting type of guy," he said, but the broadness of PanIP's claims and the $30,000 they want in licensing fees led him to decide "we're going to rumble, we're going to fight this thing," he said.
...
I can't help thinking that the slashdot thread on this situation may have influenced Allan Dickson's thinking on this matter.
However
without people who have the backbone to fight back, we are at the mercy of those who would claim unlimited IP rights.
Innovation belongs to those who created it. I support IP rights, but those who come along later and file "business method" patents claiming that they created something that was already being done is NOT "innovation."
utter rubbish
As Steve Matrin liked to say.... Weeeelllll Excuuuuuuuuusssssseeeeee Meeeeeeeeeee!!!!! If they weren't standing around drinking cappucino's and frappucino's and walking around obliviousl, their thoughts preoccupied with whatever little sim pedestrians are preoccupied with then they might notice the big, shiny, blood-spattered, death-mobiles with open headers driven by homicidal maniacs more than 2 seconds before they get splattered all over the sidewalk. And anyway, the reward for killing pedestrians is nowhere near what you get for a Cunning Stunt Bonus.
I wonder if this technology will ever be accurate enough to work properly. I suppose the biggest problem is the size of the database that would be necessary to hold the high quality pictures necessary for accurate identification.
It kind of makes you wonder... how do humans do facial recognition? After all, in this department we tend to be pretty damn good compared to machines. The truth is we rely on lots of other information like body movement, facial expressions (movement), sounds, etc. Not that I like this sort of invasion of privacy, but maybe a simple mugshot compared against crappy security camera video at poor angles just isn't enough information to make a positive id out of thousands of candidates. Now if we can just get the terrorists to pose for the camera. Okay, Mr Bin Laden, let's see what your smile looks like. Thanks, ok now frown. I'll give you a cookie if we can see your angry face. Say cheese.
Suppose 1 out of 10000 people in the US are terrorists. This strikes me as an absurdly high ratio, but let's assume for the sake of argument that it is this high. This system claims to scan 10000 faces in one day. At that rate, it will catch one airport terrorist and nine innocent people per day.
See something wrong here? I do.
If we assume a more realistic ratio of 1 terrorist per 100000 people, then you end up catching 99 innocent people and 1 terrorist every 10 days. At this point the utility of the system looks very questionable indeed. And this is without even considering the ease of importing new terrorists that aren't in the system yet.
I'm not that big a fan of face recognition technology in general, but airport terrorism is just about one of the absolute poorest possible applications of the idea.
Okay, first let me say I have no idea how you got 1:1000 odds, or a medicine that reduced risk by 1000 times... Those people were people -in the database-. If this was a medical test, it would be one that identified you as having the disease if you truly did have it only half the time. That's not good!
.00001. We also know what the odds of a Match given Not Terrorist P(M|!T) are, which from the article appears to be about 1000/280000.
.0014.
Okay. Let me do the math for ya'll again once again.
What we know is that for a person in the database, the program identified them about 50% of the time. So, given a database of terrorists and a known terrorist, the probability of Match given Terrorist P(M|T) = 0.5. That's not good. That means that if a terrorist is actually trying to board a plane, this device is only 50% likely to catch them. That doesn't make me feel any safer.
Now, what I really want to know is what are the odds that a person identified as a terrorist is actually a terrorist? This is the point the ACLU is bringing up with the false positives.
For that, we need to know what the odds of being a Terrorist are. For the sake of this argument, lets say the odds are really high -- 1 in 100,000. That is ludicrously high, if you think about the amount of airline traffic each day. But for this calculation, P(T) =
Now, what we want to know is the probability of being a Terrorist given a Match. By Baye's Rule,
P(T|M) = P(M|T)P(T)/(P(M|T)P(T) + P(M|!T)P(!T)) =
That's a 0.14% chance that a person -identified- as a terrorist is actually a terrorist. For every thousand people you accuse of being terrorists, you've only caught one, and the other nine hundred ninety nine are innocent people! And don't forget that while you're harrassing all those innocents, half of the real terrorists are walking through the gate unmolested!
So no, this system is not a "sensation". It's a piece of shit that is only going to make people's lives worse while providing nothing but a false sense of security.
The enemies of Democracy are
...you'd think that they'd get suspicous when the Queen is spotted boarding three time in a row...
"The big question in our lives is how to be at the same time a hedonist and in a hurry" - Alain Ducasse (?)
WRONG STATISTICAL ANALOGY
If you have a choice between two objects, and the correct one is chosen 50% or so of the time, then you have a random system, and it is roughly equivalent to a coin. If you have a choice of three (one is correct, two are incorrect), and the wrong one is chosen 33.3% of the time, you have a random system. (D6/2 for AD&Ders out there.)
ERGO, the probability to chose one correct item randomly from a field of n items is 1/n. Face recognition is one in a practical infinity. A success rate of 1% is therefore a stupendous technical achievement. A success rate of 47% is a marvel of design.
Of course, if it is to be used in any real-world application, then a success rate of 99.9% would be a Good Thing, with an independantly thinking human being to check for false positives or negatives. Maybe the software could show a phot of who it thinks the person is for a human to quickly verify.
If this is used for biometrics in private or secure building access, then it is showing strong possibilities. If it is being used to scan for wanted criminals (putting aside concerns about civil liberties and privacy in public places (if there is any such thing)), then a tightly controlled system of checks is required. A flag to say 'Hey, I think I just saw Osama bin Laden, you might want to check', rather than automatically setting off all the alarms and releasing the hounds.
Also, they say they are testing it at an airport? Doesn't sound like a controlled lab to me! Unless you have a limited set of faces, in a controlled studio environment, you are in an uncontrolled environment. Of course some environments are more controlled than others, but an airport?
Just because the possible (allright, probable) misuses of a technology are disturbing does not diminish the technical achievement of making that technology work. Remember that this tech is also necessary for AI vision systems, etc. (You could say that when this system becomes as good as a human you have effectively built an AI anyway).
"This is a Hollywood movie: when it comes to the Laws of Physics, they're lucky if they get Gravity!" --- my wife
Yesterday already, only the main page was visible. Today, even the cover page is gone! Too bad that their stats subdirectory is password protected, it'd be interesting to have a peek ;-)
Say no to software patents.
Mit Computer Spielen, es sollte derselbe in Deutschland sein, als es in den USA ist. Die eltern müssen sich entschieden was ihren kinder sollten und sollten nicht spielen. Zensur ist nicht die korrekte Lösung zu den Problemen einer Gesellschaft oder einer Einzelperson. Das ist meine Meinung über die Angelegenheit.
...at the company which is either;
a) The cheapest contractor
b) Run by a family member
c) Paid the biggest bribes. Sorry, campaign dontations.
Damn right! I've played video games since I could reach the coin-slot on a Pacman machine.
Nahhh... if Pacman had affected us as kids, we'd all be running around in dark rooms munching pills and listening to electronic music. Oh wait...
>probability of getting 470 heads or less out of 1000 flips:
>p(zThus, there's almost a 50% chance of getting 47% or less successes purely by chance.
.5) /(sqrt(1000(.50)^2)= -0.03162.
>z=(.47-.50)/(sqrt(1000(.50)^2)=-.00189.
Sorry dude... Your standard deviation is wrong.
Using your method... suppose there was 0 heads... your formula would read
z= (0 -
(and Pr(Z = z) ~= 0.487)
Obviously the chance of getting 0 heads out of a thousand tosses is not approx 48%!
The correct standard deviation is sqrt (0.5^2/1000)
using this, the 470 out of 1000 result has a Z score of -1.897. Pr(Z = z) = 0.0289
which is much more reasonable.
Maybe if you knew something about them other than "something you heard" you would have a more reasonable attitude.
If there is a "next time", I hope we fight with them, and not against them, and if you knew anything about the history you are quoting you would think the same way.
Als Amerikaner, der Deutsch spricht, es tut mir leid, dass Idioten wie dieser Arschloch existieren...
David
Actually this is not necessarily true.
Every Customs normally takes a semi-random few people who are passing through and gives them a more intense interrogation. Most of these are probably innocent.
However if you base your selection decision on a system that gives false positives, then you have a means of deciding who gets extended interrogation/ ID/ baggage searches at customs points and similar checkpoints. The fact that false positives turn up is irrelavent, as the recognition system is just a means of identifying people on whom further checks should be performed.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
Quoting from the article:
Counter-Strike war nach Erfurt in die Kritik geraten, weil der
19-jährige Schtze es angeblich vor seiner Tat gespielt haben soll.
So, why don't they forbid bread and water because
he surely has eaten and drunk shortly before he went amok.
Oh no, even _my_ gouvernment is gone mad these days.
My Karma isn't excellent, damn it! (And
Well, I won't get involved with whether CNN is
accurate, but the Frankfurfurter Algemeine(Sp?)
Zeitung english edition also reported
the guns as being legally owned, acquired via
membership in a gun club. This seems to have
focussed some (negative) attention on German gun
clubs. The article I read mentioned that the largest gun club federation did not permit pump
shotguns, but that other clubs did (or more
precisely what they said was that not all clubs
are part of this federation).
FAZ can make mistakes too of course.
When the last LAN party has been closed,
when Counterstrike is banned,
when the Internet is censored,
only then will parents discover that they still have to educate their children...
Two Worlds - One Sun [Spirit]
Leaving the simple fact aside that a certain few aspects of weapon combat/massacres ARE simulated/trained by playing Egoshooters - the largest portion of skill Robert Steinhauser used in the Effurt massacre he trained in action shooting training Sessions in the local "Schuetzenverein" (the tradtional german musketeers clubs). The only place in germany where civilians can optain the right to legaly own and handle such heavy weapons as a pumpgun.
Conservative german politicians in the now-all-present pre-election phase like to leave this little detail aside nowadays whilst demanding prohibition of "Killergames". For the simple reason that a large portion of conservative voters actually come from these "traditionalists" parts.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
"Mein Kampf" is not directly banned in Germany.
But the Bavarian State holds the (german) copyright at "Mein Kampf" and makes sure that only commented Copys get printed and are sold. Additionally they make sure that copies are only sold to libraries and researchers, but I'm not 100% sure about this.
But there are libraries where you can read this book.
There is a law against "Volksverhetzung"
(= large scale hate spreading ?) but there is also aquestion how this would be applied to historic books. The situation will get interesting when the Bavarian State looses it's copyright in some years.
Mein Kampf has been banned in Germany for 57 years. Either provide an example of a non-Nazi point of view which has been banned during that period or admit that your slippery slope argument is without empirical foundation.
-- the most controversial site on the Web
Actually it would seem to me that a lot more people would have died had there been more guns around.
A prison guard would be far more likely to shoot someone if there was a constant threat of hidden weaponry, no?
If you are considering shooting an official (like a prison gaurd) you must believe that he no longer deserves to live. For example he is helping with systematic executions of people without a trial. Quite by definition you can no longer place any faith in said official.
So what's worse then: A guard in an aweful regime nervously shooting people he fears may have guns or a guard in an aweful regime systematically shooting people because he was told to?
On the back it says "NIETZSCHE IS DEAD." -God
Cracks me up.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
CS would have been indexed, the kids here in Germany would not care.
In my grade (I'm 17 years old) nobody asks whether a certain game is indexed or not. The fact, that it's illegal makes it even more exciting to play this game.
...I'm still going to point this out.
Anyone in Germany who works with Americans will agree, and anyone in the USA who works with Germans will agree - despite teh fact that we seem superficially the same, we're very different cultures, with very different assumptions about life, the universe and everything.
People have already flamed Alex for his views and, as an American I totally understand and agree with what they are saying. But in a GERMAN context, what he is saying makes damn good sense. In the German cultural context (this is all IMO, but you knew that) the idea of 'seduction by ideas' is totally possible. Their expectations and societal roles (especially vis a vis authority) are totally different.
Of course, from an American view, one would have to point out the seriously-begged question of whether a society is entitled to define some sort of 'right way' that these people are being seduced away from...
It's the same with Yahoo - the German government is suing them to try to de-link railroad sabotage websites. I'll never forget the last line of the story I read, when the reporter asked why the German government was suing them in Europe and not the USA, the chief lawyer for the authorities said plaintively that in the USA such a suit would never succeed on 5th Amendment grounds "...because they let people put ANYTHING on the web over there...".
You can almost hear his confused frustration with a system that would be so uncontrolled.
The principles that we feel are so totally clear and obvious are not necessarily clear to others. Others contexts may be far different from our own.
(Again, as an American while I may have some insight into the German view, that doesn't mean I agree it's the right one...I'm a product of my own culture too!)
-Styopa
Be careful lest you become that which you despise.
After catching up on my casual history reading lately, and learning quite a bit about the socialist and democratic struggles of the 19th century, I now know that this is a fairly common attitude historically. I was also appalled to learn how uncivilized and backward Europe was compared to America during the 19th century, which is very ironic considering the classic European snobbishness toward Americans...
Historical note that applies later on: we (America) did not have a socialist revolution or the serious threat of one because our government was not in the business of squashing every lower-class worker who wanted better working conditions, or even--God forbid!--the vote. At the time, our government was in the business of handing out 40 acres to anyone who wanted to leave the Eastern factories and settle out west. And all those poor workers in America already had the vote. (Thank Ben Franklin for that. If Alexander Hamilton had gotten his way, the U.S. would have devolved into an oligarchy of rich landholders). Wonder why we had so much immigration from Europe during that period?
That's why radical groups are banned. That's why they have to operate underground. That's why Germany is quite keen to ban 'ideas' (I can hear the flames already) and things that are 'dangerous'.
The monarchs of Europe were also quite keen to ban dangerous ideas like "democracy", "freedom of the press", and "labor unions", too. Those ideas were dangerous--to dictators and absolutist monarchies. Again, this is history speaking.
Because people in general are easily seduced by things that make them feel good about themselves. Hitler told Germans that they were special and superior.
That is the classic excuse used by monarchs and oligarchs for not allowing democracy: the people will let themselves be seduced by bad ideas that might lead to chaos and violence. Of course, the real fear was that these ideas might lead to things like the rulers losing priviledges and power--which is, of course, Bad for Society. From their point of view.
Which is to say, it is always the excuse of the elite: we know better than you, you are as children who are easily swayed by the candy in the store window and don't know what's best for you. Frankly, history has shown that so-called elites don't know what's best for anyone, either, and are just concerned with maintaining their own selfish privileges, and that the average adult is quite capable of minding his own affairs if he hasn't been deliberately made incapable of handling them by lack of education and forced dependence. (Which, BTW, is why Jefferson, et al, insisted that an educated citizenry was necessary for democracy to work).
Now, I've never heard that Germans were uneducated, so what are you afraid that your neighbors might want or do, if they were allowed to hear about Nazis, or see a swastika?
Thus, you want to make sure that radical groups that want to dismantle democracy are not allowed a popular mandate. You do not want to legitimize them by allowing them to exist in the public sphere. You do not want to allow them to become coalition partners, to enter local governments, and to slowly subvert and destroy freedom, tolerance, and democracy.
Because that's what they want.
What they want and what they get are two different things. I see a problem with the European approach: who decides which groups are "dangerous radicals"? The government? In that case, anyone who threatens the political class' privileges, perks, and position will be deemed a "radical", count on it. Popular opinion? Well, if so-called "radicals" are unpopular, they aren't much of a threat in a democracy, are they? OTOH, allowing the majority to decide who should be suppressed introduces you to the tyranny of the majority, aka mob rule.
And they're not going to get it. We've been here, we're not going back. We like democracy, we like freedom, we like being able to say whatever we want without being locked up, we don't want to be herded into camps because of our racial distinctions or religious beliefs, and we sure as fuck don't want to let radicals who want to destroy all of that back into the limelight.
But you will, if you keep going as you are. They won't call themselves Nazis, and they won't use swastikas, but they will re-appear, and they will be the guys telling you who are the "dangerous radicals" that need to be suppressed, which speech and ideas are too dangerous to be published, and so on. They will tell the people what they want to hear, and they will be "democratically" chosen, because they will have suppressed all those other, "dangerous" voices. And you will have helped them.
So go on all you want about 'bans are bad!' and 'information wants to be free!'. Naivety will only get you so far, and jackbooted thugs will exploit all of it quite happily while you sit there letting them take away everything you hold dear.
Let me tell you something: we have Nazis and Aryan supremacist radicals in America, too. In Germany, you ban them and try to suppress them, and they have become a significant underground movement in some circles, with a lot of people being sympathetic to their views. In America, they are perfectly free to publicize themselves, preach their views and run for public office, as long as they don't break any of the laws that apply to ALL citizens (murder, theft, fraud, assault, etc.). In America, we laugh at them and consider them a bunch of jerks, and they are nothing more than a fringe movement--and they certainly don't have the passive support of the police when they commit violence (as I have heard has happened with some cases of anti-immigrant attacks in East Germany). If they do something violent, we arrest their asses and thrown them in jail like any other criminal.
Which method of dealing with radicals is working better?
---dragoness
Last summer I arranged for a group of guys to play paintball -- for the most part the regular CounterStrike and Quake players sucked at the game.
Games like CS and Quake 'teach' an unrealistic strategy that doesn't work in the real world - the disturbing strategy of mass killing in a school yard.
They also do not teach someone how to load, aim, fire, kill, reload, etc. For that you need to go to a firing range (which I guess this kid was a member of one).
A flight simulator is a different -- because it tries to simulate real world conditions. Tell me where in this world do you find 8t's + 8ct's in a closed space doing one another in? Maybe a Paintball field? Well as I stated, it doesn't do a very good job training people for that, either.
Grip
Failure is not an option. It comes automatically enabled in every Microsoft product.
Although I agree with much of what you said and feel that you said it rather eloquently, I disagree with you on a couple key points. Just as those with rascist agendas can use fear and legitimate facts to further their objectives (well beyond the ground that they might gain on more rational terms), so to can those with other agendas use fear of, say, the Nazis to crush any thoughtful analysis and policy. In other words, just because the Nazis can be said to have been anti-foreigner at their core does not mean that any movement that questions, say, immigration policy is of the same spirit, has the same potential for violence, or is intrinsically wrong. I do agree with you that the vast majority of the ill-will expressed on slashdot and in other forums against H1B visas and such are wrong-headed, often-irrational, and somewhat mean spirited. Their assertions are at their core emotional, not intellectual; most of their points do not hold up to intellectual scrunity or to the facts. Nonetheless, it is a dangerous mistake to cast aspersions on anyone whose questions may share some sliver of fact or desired policy in common.
As an example, there is an unwillingness in the United States and Canada to question immigration policy and to do anything substantial to change it. It is possible to believe STRONGLY in immigration and its benefits but also question the rate, direction, and nature of it. I, for one, believe that the United States is creating real problems for itself in the way that immigration, education, and other elements of our country have been configured. To allow any one group to rapidly populate an area without the presence of an environment where those people can be integrated into our society as a whole is problematic. For instance, I point to central and south americans massive immigration into in southern california over the past couple decades. We allow this immigration (both legal and illegal), without any real regaurd for that group's ability to land productive jobs, meanwhile we turn away many hundreds of thousands of people that are much better educated and capable with, often, as great of a need. We then compound the problem by creating a system where their children are not expected to learn English because we don't require that they be taught in their native tongue in school (I know, this has been since changed, but only with the community's bitter fight for it). Policy like this creates an environment where the immigrant community truly does not buy into what America stands for, lacking the common language, the integration into the broader social community (given the very high density in parts of the country), and the level and kind of employment necessary. (Yes, our country has undergone waves of immigration before, but often from much wider arrays of nationality, culture, with wider dispersion, and without any sort of welfare system to allow slacking.) Yet every time any meaningful debate might arrise, no one with any political viability is willing to ask the hard questions. (The fact that it's left to the fringe groups, to the extent that they remain on subject, while the problem grows is quite troublesome because it lends them some degree of legitimacy and a potential audience.)
Having read the Mein Kampf and related works and speeches (in similar settings) it is quite apparent that they are, by and large, appeals to emotion and lack the rational, reasoned, and intellectual nature that we generally expect and demand when making other decisions. I assert that it is the reasoning (or lack thereof) and openness (to debate) of the assertions that defines the nature and the danger, not the mere fact that it happens to bear some emphasis or direction in common. We should focus on and try the reasoning and not just dismiss any and everything based on some irrational fear that we may have something in common with some hate group. To do otherwise, to be intellectually dishonest, can do far more to promote hate and violence that that which you might resist.
Hehe ;-) Too bad only that the source code for Web Servinator cannot be found anywhere or else we could have some more fun...
Say no to software patents.
I think it's a perfectly valid point. I am a CS addict but I've never even seen a real gun. I wouldn't even know where to look for the safety catch. I usually get a high kill ratio on CS but had trouble hitting anything using my brother's air pistol. There is a gulf of difference imho between being physically trained in using a weapon designed to kill, and playing a computer game which may use a lot of keys but is still nothing like reality.
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
The patent statute gives a patent owner the right to exclude others from making, using, or selling the patented invention. Therefore, infringement does not depend on commercial activity, and you are infringing even if you make it for private use, or make it and give it away.
Nontheless, I'm not willing to ban them because they're NAZIs. I'm willing to ban, as Canada does, the promotion of hatred and violence against people, and I'm willing to accept if that bans aspects of what the NAZIs or neo NAZIs do.
I will not, however, ban them by name.
I would much rather see things like the French people rising into the streets to extort their countrymen to vote against people like Lepen. This means that they are active in the protection of their own freedom, and the freedom of the people around them. This leaves me feeling far more safe than the German rules that are at the whim of a government to create and destroy -- whether or not the people of Germany agree with it.
Rules restricting freedom to protect the people from 'nasty people' is the first step that the NAZIs used to turn the Republic into the Reich.
Laws don't protect freedoms.
Governments don't protect freedoms
People protect freedoms. People who are willing to fight to protect those freedoms
On September 11, three airplains were slammed into American landmarks while their passengers used their cell phones and air phones to call for help.
Passengers of the fourth airplane finally got the message. "Don't wait for the cavalry. They can't reach 10,000 feet."
Those passengers died fighting to get control back from the hijackers. If they hadn't been shot down, they might have even made it home alive. yes, I believe -- based on the original news reports -- that they were shot down,. I'm not going to criticize the decision made to do that. It should be noted, however, that 'the cavalry' really only had two choices: Shoot them down, or let them fly closer to their destination. The only real question was timing.
Since then, the flying public has learned one lesson. We are responsible for our own safety and freedom. There is no superhero coming to our rescue. Unfortunately, most of us still think that that rule only applies in the air. I believe that it applies everywhere and eveywhen.
The NAZIs destroyed libery in the name of protecting the German people from the enemy. Back then, the enemy was Jews. These days, some people consider NAZIs to be the enemy against whom it is OK to surrender our liberties. Those Jews who survived the holocaust learned from their experience -- but only in relation to themeselves. (When dealing with other minorities (palestinians) they have, unfortunately, learned the lessons more directly from their former oppressors )
These days, Jews are not a valid scapegoat for our freedoms so the true neo-nazis will need to find a different scapegoat. The current 'anti-imigration' stuff of the far-right is one possible approach, but more sophisticated neo-NAZIs might choose more palpable targets, like neo-NAZIs, hackers or terrorists -- and use the blatent neo-nazis as decoys to draw fire.
For me, the enemy is not in the name. It is by their actions that I judge people by, and that is how I will decide to either support them, or fight them.
Pick a name -- any name, and I will defend your freedoms -- but if you attack my liberty, I reserve the right to fight back.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
Nietzsche's ideas, mostly in the form of sound bites, were used to support the Nazi cause. However, so were some Christian ideas. However, Christian ideas can also be used to oppose the actions of the Nazis. I'm still struggling with the problem that Nietzsche can't be used to argue against Nazism, as far as I can tell. I would be thrilled if you could find some passage for me that could be used against Nazi ideals.
I have a similar problem with Heidigger - I find many of his ideals logically consistant, but I can't get past the point that he became the philosopher for the Nazi movement, and that he never seemed to find a way to argue that one form of becoming was better than another.