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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."
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.
I forgot to add: Now back to RTCW.
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
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
You'd think we'd have learned after that "Spider-Man" fiasco. ;o)
[PowerPoint] is a tool for capitalist presentation
Even more recent than that, the German version of Return to Castle Wolfenstein was modified so the antagonist is a mystic cult instead of the Nazis. (It seems that Germany is protecting the Nazis. I don't see how murdering digital Nazis in any way promotes their ideology.) Unfortunately for the Germans who demanded this alteration, patches are out on the Internet that change it back to the Nazis.
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.
I'm surprised that German gamers didn't demand a patch for Return to Castle Wolfenstein turning the Nazis into the French.
--Metrollica
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.
There is a law which bans the glorification of Nazi's. At least, I think. Also, in German culture, they're pretty much scared to mention anything regarding the Nazi past... It's still a touchy subject for Germany, and their answer is to not deal with it directly.
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
1) The Germans were both Nazis and murderers during WWII
Its exactly people like who who continue and propogate this hatred - the same hatred that killed six million Jews. All Nazis (originally) were Germans. Some Germans were Nazis. Your reasoning states that all Germans were Nazis... False! That's *exactly* like saying: All Democrats are American. Some Americans are Democrats. Therefore, all Americans are democrats.
Get your head out of your ass. The average German farm worker was not a Nazi - he was just a regular person caught up in an extremist government.
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
Not all Nazis were German. Some with Czech, French, Lithuanian, Latvian, Estonion, Croatian, Ukranian, Hungarian and especially Austrian - including the main one. There were plenty of collaborators and party members from outside of Germany.
Why does the German government seem to be so inconsistent with censoring/banning games?
Germany has this problem with violence, similar to the US trying to censor "indecent material". You can say "fuck" on German TV without problems.
My guess is that this dates back to WW2; Germans now have this built-in problem with anything related to violence and discrimination.
Quite a while back when the game Carmageddon came out I remember I read in the news that the German version had zombies to replace the people that you could run over in the original.
Actually, the zombies were in the UK version (who do have this violence problem too). In the German version, you had to run over traffic cones. Yes. Traffic cones. No joke.
How is Counterstrike different?
Well, the rationale as far as I understand it is this:
In Carmageddon, the purpose is to mindlessly kill people and get rewarded for it. While Counter-Strike lets you kill people, the focus of the game is on "strategical thinking and communicating in the team". Hey, don't flame me, that's the BPjS' explanation.
This is a failure? Is Could any human being you know do as well? Even close?
Given enough humans, yes. Human face recognition scales--you assign, say, 10 targets each to 25 people, have them memorize them, and they'll be able to pick one of their targets out of a crowd with the same ease you identify people you know from afar. It would be damn expensive, but unlike this system, it would actually work, given sufficent resources.
--
Benjamin Coates
I don't see what Nazis and running people over in a car game have in common....
e.g. mindless killing of people? Isnt it cynical to be rewarded for killing people who just pass by?
angel'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
ext 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??
I would say that depends on the flight simulator.
Most flight studends FIRST are forced to learn the basics with a flight simulator before they are allowed to make a real flight.
Its saver and saves costs.
If a flight simulator is realistic the minimum thing you learn in it is the "check list" of procedures you have to perform to start the machine up or to start the landing phase.
Plenty of people forget to to eject the wheels while landing.
Pleanty of people try the same while to fast.
angel'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
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'
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)
Next they'll be saying that people who play flight simulator a lot are more likely to be good at flying real planes.
So what if a video game makes you better at something? (even though flight simulators are probably a lot better at simulating flight than CS is at simulating combat) Why would millitary-style combat training compel someone to go shoot up a school?
--
Benjamin Coates
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...)
Not really. Most students have the instructor talk them through starting the plane, then sit quietly while he (or she) takes off and flies to a practise area, where the student then gets to try out some simple turns and such. The instructor then lands the plane.
Now, someone who has already some time as a pilot may well get checked out on a simulator before flying a new type of aircraft (particularly true of bigger more expensive aircraft), but a flight simulator (well, possibly excepting the expensive full cockpit 6-degrees-of-freedom motion platform simulators) won't teach you the basics, what it feels like.
(And I've yet to meet a PC-based simulator that responded properly to crossed-controls or let you put it in a spin -- both things I learned early on as a student pilot.)
-- Alastair
Actually, the German version of Carmageddon had robots to run over, not even zombies. The zombies were in the UK version. In the UK case at least, a "blood patch" was released, being an "upgrade" to the full-gore version. I'm guessing this got round the censorship because the patch itself wasn't for sale - it was free.
Same for Carmageddon II.
The UK version of Carmageddon TDR 2000 (or III) never had an official blood patch. But a non-official one is readily available, made by fans, using the artwork from the US version. Unfortunately the pedestrians, though skinned as humans, still seem to have the zombie animation cycles! It looks a bit weird sometimes. Great game, though.
Any sufficiently self-referential snowcloned
Germany has this problem with violence, similar to the US trying to censor "indecent material". You can say "fuck" on German TV without problems.
.
:) )
:) )
;)
/think/ they are. . . .) and has not had a repub in position in, err, heh. Since the early 80s or so. :)
Ignoring translation issues posed by the above AC;
you can say pretty much whatever you want to on network TV in America now days as well, just so long as it is not during prime time or preschooler kiddie hours.
Hell you seen what MadTV and SNL are putting out these days? Apparently after the humor mill ran dry they decided to go for pure shock value instead. . .
(though more MadTV then SNL, and Fox does traditionally Not Give A Fuck as to what their more popular shows say vocally. Well they occasionally give a fuck, but it is an on again off again thing.
Hell pretty much anything except for full frontal nudity (though that does at time slip by as well) goes past on US tv now.
Hell people this ain't the 50s, while it may be against the law to show full blown orgies on the 6'oclock news, hell that is about the ONLY restriction TV stations seem to have.
(though in the bible belt things can indeed be different. Hell do NOT take them seriously, the rest of us American's sure don't.
Heck I have seen the local news show autopsy photos before. The really really gruesome ones of the same type that you can find on rotten.com.
Sex? no problem. Graphical descriptions of how some guy rapped some preschool child? Ok to show. Nobody in this area has (to my knowledge) showed footage of a sex change operation yet though.
Disclaimer: I live in a very liberal part of the nation that holds yearly nudist parades (no not state endorsed, err, at least I do not
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
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?
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
Heck, ever listened to a rap song on the radio?
.)
:)
:) )
:) )
Yah, I wonder how the shit gets on the air.
One more description of how to 'rape a bitch' 'fuck a hoe' or otherwise insert a penis into a females body and I am going to shove the next boombox I see up some whiteboy wannabe gangbangers ass.
(and yah thats the Radio, the station annoucements pretty much guarantee that. . .
Radio does have somewhat stricter limitations then TV does though, but then again those are for good reasons. Almost anybody can easily get access to a radio, and what is more, people often times have to contend with OTHERS who force feed their chosen radio preferences down surrounding people's throats.
A parent can easily tell JR to not watch the tv, but it would be a bit harder keeping somebody else from playing sexually explicit songs on their own private radio and playing them far to loudly.
Heck even just switching between radio stations should not involve hearing a auditory stream that resembles
"Fuck thaScrew her in thCunt lickiMy Whores lik"::peaceful blues music comes into focus::
Not a good thing.
The low cost of entry to listeners likely predominates the reasons as to why radio still has some rather minimal censorship on it though.
And it is NOT like the *COUGH*artists*COUGH* (like hell they are) are being censored completely by the government though. If they can get a big label to publish them, the government is not going to stop them. Though in some cases I think that they should have. . . . (I am all for freedom of speech and freely sharing information, but some dickhead shouting out profanity at the top of his lungs does NOT count in my book as being free speech. Wouldn't be so bad, but, aah, see above comment about pasty faced whiteboys with boomboxs.
If a big 5 label won't have yah then you can always publish your own CDs, many have done it, and a few have even made a living from it. Nothing stopping you from doing so. (though do not use blank Music CDs, since part of their cost goes to the RIAA. Use regularly labeled CDRs instead.
This is not like, say, Australia, in which ALL works have to go through a government review*cough*censorship*cough* board (eeeew!).
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
Yeah, but he had the Swiss more or less in his pocket, it seemed, so it probably wouldn't have come to that unless Germany had the war already won... don't forget, there was also Petain's France, in the same situation, only overtly so...
/Brian
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
When they build robots that can be controlled with WASD and mouse look, THEN we'll be in trouble.
...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
Larouche is a fascist.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
While this smells an awful lot like an offtopic troll, I'll bite.
"One more description of how to 'rape a bitch' 'fuck a hoe' or otherwise insert a penis into a females body and I am going to shove the next boombox I see up some whiteboy wannabe gangbangers ass"
Why not shove it up a wannabe blackboy gangbanger's ass? Or a chinese guy's ass? Why does it have to be a white person? I follow your argument but wonder why you have to discriminate when it comes to bad rap (yes there IS good rap but you may never hear it). Bad rap is played by black folks as much as white. Same set of stereotypes used in the music (that of the artist being a pimp on top of the world or whatever) and of women being nothing more than sex objects. But it sells, there's no denying that. I attribute that to the LCD theory, if you cater to the lowest common denominator (wannabe gangstas of any color) you'll hit your mark and make money.
It's one thing to hate bad rap and the morons who blast it, but no reason to get all racist.
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
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.
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...
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
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 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
Bear in mind that SCi went voluntarily trolling to stir up some controversy pre-launch, courtesy of their trashy publicist Max Clifford. They didn't have to submit it for certification at all, and the blood patch was available from day 1 (and everybody knew it). The German version (of Carmageddon at least, you may be talking about Carmageddon II) had robots instead of zombies or humans.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
On the back it says "NIETZSCHE IS DEAD." -God
Cracks me up.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
...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
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
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.
No one can ever justify the statement -insert music genre here- sucks monkey ass donkey balls.
.
Sure I can.
The singers are horrific, little if any vocal training, sometimes just enough to make them sound 'great' to people who have never heard a real singer's voice, those who know better recognize crap when some RIAA exec tries to disguise it as pansies.
The instrumentals often times either suck or are covered up by previously mentioned crappy vocals. I remember one SNL episode where a band came out and started playing this LOVELY instrumental piece, absolutely great stuff, violinists playing such wondrous music;
and then some damn rapper had to happen his mouth and start shouting obscenities. . .
::sighs::
But even cases like that are the exception rather then the rule.
Generic repetitive instrumentals, seem like they were composed by a four year old.
Of course each Genre does indeed have its songs that ARE good, hell even rap has put out a good song or two, but in general those are quite rare and something that is occasional palatable is not worth* having to listen to all of the other crap that people insist on playing out loud on their boomboxs.
I really would not have too much of a problem with other musical genres, but that so many people who listen to them seem insistent on sharing their obscenities of choice with the rest of the world.
Just as or even more annoying;
people with headphones who then sing the lyrics out loud anyway.
Yah it is mostly a listener thing that I have a problem with (don't get me wrong, the music is crap and it is repetitive), but the listeners are generated by the community surrounding the music.
A community that often times seems to generate a "I don't give a fuck" sort of an attitude.
(And no that is NOT how teenagers have to act, that is actually a relatively modern happening. Just because I know somebody is going to bitch about that one, heh. Obviously 20somethings who have their fancy ricer cars with their stereos blaring are just as annoying as well. Or even 20somethings without ricer cars but with the same blaring stereo.)
Besides, there are few modern composers out there, the music that is generated today IS INDEED TECHNICAL AND ARTISTIC CRAP.
Repetitive lyrics, repetitive instrumentals, and the thinking that goes into the generation of those songs is negligible.
Well except for the thinking that goes into SELLING those songs. Oh now THAT is quite sufficient.
Until the RIAA came around and told us that 'everybody deserves to be heard' society had NO PROBLEM saying that something was crap.
Hell crap is crap, if you cannot RECOGNIZE IT you run the risk of letting crap exist.
Look at how many pop singers people have only latter on realized where absolutely horrible. But at the time they were MARKETED into BUYING those singers. Not because of any qualities that the 'artist' might have possessed, but because of sheer marketing forces.
Thus crap was sold and people where encouraged to buy it because "denying the artist is soooo judging others and that's wrong m'kay?".
Bullshit. People HAVE TO make judgements and assumptions or else they will end up dead or dumb or dead and dumb rather quickly.
Hell I make Judgements as to my various Professors's teaching abilities each time I decide which classes to sign up for next quarter. Some of them do indeed suck. Now I make sure to separate my sense of "they are not a good teacher" from "I do not like them." Hell I have taken classes from Professors whom I do not like but whom I know are GOOD teachers. In the same way I have had Professors whom I liked but who I had to admit where not good teachers.
Yes there is indeed a difference and I have talked about both in this message. It works the same way for music, art, teachers, or people in general. There is indeed a definable level of crap out there;
one easy way to tell is to figure out how hard something is being marketed on you. The heavier the marketing the lower the likely hood of artistic value. Now it does not always work this way, (especially NOT for movies) but hell, once the "Don't judge it, it is art!" propaganda movement starts turning up, you can pretty much be assured that something is rotten.
*Most debatable point right here, how much pain should we tolerate to generate that one piece of non-crappy music?
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
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
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.