Keep in mind how big the us is and deverse. Head to the coasts and you will find that its like compairing night and day. Still it makes the us the butt of other peoples jokes.
I know you're only trying to help defend the image of the American education system, but please, stop. I'm not sure you could have packed more condemnation of your school's English curriculum into a three sentence reply.
You did remind me of a joke, though. "The bigger America is, diverse it gets."
With PIN-based transactions on financial cards, the PIN is defined by the contract as the method of your approval, so no other signature is required. And I have yet to meet a cashier who is qualified as a graphologist who is legally qualified to compare a signed charge slip with the signature on the back of the card. Instead, most cashiers are trained to ignore the signature, other than making sure they got one. Some chains don't even show the customer's signature to the cashier, and some don't require the customers to show their charge card.
As this rolls out, we will see that certain issuer's cards will have PIN requirements, others will have signature requirements. It will vary by bank.
Something to note is that many banks will certainly get it wrong as this rolls out. We observed this from Canada's EMV experience. The Canadian bankers all thought they'd define a certain set of rules with EMV that would ensure every card was secured by defining PIN requirements, offline transactions, dollar limits on the cards, etc. It turned out that their cards were almost unusable for a lot of transactions, and they succeeded in making lots of people switch back to cash. The US banks are not eager to repeat that experience, but they are just as likely to get it wrong.
This will likely not be a smooth transition. Merchants and customers are all going to run into roadblocks, and lots of people are going to be upset before it's all done. I'd suggest patience, and to politely let your bank know of trouble as soon as you encounter a problem. The more complaints they hear, the more incentive they'll have to fix it before their customers jump ship for the few banks that get it right.
The US market is moving rapidly to chip, as the PCI has mandated a liability shift as of October 2015. After that date, any merchants who don't demand a chip instead of a mag stripe will be fully liable for any fraud on the account, so the incentive for retailers to abandon mag stripes is very strong.
I have no doubt that Coin will be implemented well, and will provide a measure of physical security that plastic cards don't. However, be assured that retailers are indeed suspicious of them because they are not original cards. No institution has yet decided to officially say yes or no to them - everyone is kind of waiting for guidance from the PCI. And with Chip-and-PIN only a year out, they may just decide to not decide.
Once the merchants have the terminals in place and the liability has shifted to them, the issuers will have strong incentive to deploy chip cards, as they will have the least secure piece of the system. Mag stripes will be gone in just a few years.
Exactly the opposite... You're going to expect an 11y to polar align?
Yes. Teach him or her once, and they feel like they now know the secrets of science. They'll soon be looking up exact lat/lon for their location, and setting it more precisely than the affordable (cheap) mechanism can handle, which is just fine. This also teaches them how to find Polaris. And if they ever get the itch to take some photographs, they'll have the right tool for the job.
After looking at Saturn's rings and spotting the Galilean moons, they're going to want to see other famous features; looking for the Messier objects is a great challenge for kids. This will quickly teach them a few other foundational skills, too: how to read a star chart, Right Ascension and Declination, and sidereal time. All this can be done on a relatively inexpensive 4" reflector with a small equatorial mount on a tripod.
A Dobsonian will give much clearer pictures for the money, and is great for viewing easily identifiable objects, but it's not going to give them a working understanding of celestial mechanics.
I'm sorry that such hell holes persist in 21st century USA, but that has nothing to do with my comment. We have fiber criss-crossing the entire state, including the remotest northern towns. Yes, the money may have originated primarily from the cities, but it's being spent statewide. And we have impoverished areas, But public money can only pull fibers just so far. We can't drag one up every driveway in the state.
If you want to fix your state, start by voting to raise taxes by an order of magnitude across rich and poor alike. If you're always led by selfish people who won't ever raise taxes, nothing will continue to happen.
Interesting idea, but the data doesn't support it.
While Massachusetts has 858 people per square mile, the population density of Minnesota, 68.1, is almost identical to Mississippi, with 63.7 people per square mile.
U.S. Census data also shows a significantly higher percentage of residents with internet connectivity in both Minnesota and Massachusetts, and significantly lower percentage in Mississippi. (Sorry, the source, http://www.census.gov/prod/201..., doesn't list the exact percentages, but I'm sure they'd be available if they were relevant.)
If density were that much of a factor, I would expect the states with similar density to have similar connectivity rates. The data doesn't bear that out.
Comparing the average ACT scores of the three states, Massachusetts comes in at 24.1, Minnesota at 22.8, and Mississippi at 18.7. Minnesota is closer to Massachusetts than Mississippi.
It's also worth noting that Minnesota's more recent governors have made statewide high speed internet a priority to help grow the economy.
Heartbleed may be a huge IT problem, but you seem to have forgotten that health care system decisions are not made by IT security managers. They are run by demi-gods that we mere mortals are instructed to refer to as "doctors." And the doctor's prioritized view of IT is this:
#1. Be Available. I may need this system right this second in order to save a life. I don't care if it's my kid's Nintendo DS, I'm telling you it might save a life. #2. Stay The Hell Out Of My Way. Don't interrupt me when I'm saving someone's life. And you don't know when that is; just that if you're interrupting me, it probably is now. #3. Give Me Exactly What I Want. For I am the giver of life and death, and you must respect me.
So unless a problem is currently causing them an outage (so not just any old problem, it has to be causing an actual outage), it won't rise to the level of severity that says "skip all quality control processes and immediately patch this."
It doesn't matter if the router is vulnerable to hacking. It doesn't matter if a hacker who pwns the router could brick it. It doesn't matter if he is stealing patient records. Those things aren't interfering with #1, 2, or 3. So follow procedures, deploy it in a lab, go through testing and QA, and install it only on Wednesday afternoons when the hospital admins are all on the back nine.
Given our track record with Juniper, "drop everything and patch now" is a foolhardy approach, especially with something as important as a border router or firewall. I wouldn't apply any of their patches without seeing a long track record of safety. With heartbleed there was an unknown level of risk that they would be attacked; with any given Juniper patch there is a known risk the network would just go down.
Of course, given the choice, I wouldn't select a Juniper device to route packets to a doghouse, and would never place one as a mission critical node on any network. Then again, that's not my choice to make, just one we have to live with.
I'm going to assume most phones already have actual microphones, so how does this add any additional kind of insecurity? I'm going to assume most phones already have actual microphones, so how does this add any additional kind of insecurity?
Apparently the sound from your mic and the echo from your gyroscopes were both parsed by your speech-to-text converter. I guess it works better than we thought!
When you look at the technical advancements in agriculture, they're composed of small features integrated in to (or bolted on to) existing equipment. You don't need a new tractor, you just need to mount a GPS receiver and a database onto your old one. A processor no bigger than a cell phone can do lots of that. Adding electrically operated valves to an existing fertilizer or pesticide spray system? Again, very small. It doesn't have to auto-steer, it just has to know where it is, and where it's been.
The makers don't have to build the tractors, they just want to improve them.
I realize reading the article is considered bad form, but if you read it you'd learn they think they were breached sometime between April and June. Heartbleed was announced in April. That's somewhere between zero to two months. Lots of big shops have a monthly patching cycle, and you don't just drop every patch into a mission critical system the day it arrives.
They said they think they were breached sometime between April and June. Heartbleed was announced in April. The window was zero to two months, not five.
And it's not that data security is a low priority, it's just that it may not be as high a priority as network availability. This is health care, where problems in communication might affect patient outcomes. "Hey, sysadmin, Doctor Green couldn't respond to his page last night, and the patient died as a result." These are the kinds of arguments that are thrown at the IT departments at every health care provider. Whether or not we consider them rational or valid is irrelevant.
So in that backdrop, we might try to understand that they probably don't just slam in every patch that the vendor has to offer, at least not without a giant process circus. I would guess that they have a patch intake process, where they have to run the patch by some engineering team that evaluates the nature of the patch, and devises some kind of testing plan to execute in their lab environment. They then have to pass it to the testing team who will set up and execute the patch process in the lab, document all their findings, and then turn the patch over to the production network team. They'll put it on their list, and they'll have their own manager who says "whoa, why are you security guys rushing to slam this patch in to my border router? Let's slow down and think about this one."
I could easily see it taking a month in a big, regulated corporate environment.
There are the ethics of the money collected, but that can be fixed. I'm more concerned about the inequity of the penalty. If I had to pay a $300.00 fine for a red light violation, it would be slightly annoying. If my unemployed neighbor had to pay $300.00, he'd fall further behind on his rent, or possibly go hungry. Conversely, if I had to unexpectedly sit in jail for a day, my projects would suffer, my employer would have no sympathy, and my job might be at stake; while my neighbor would simply wait out his days with little else of consequence. So if I know the penalty is monetary, I can afford to run the occasional red light. If we know the penalty is to serve time, my neighbor might run a red light just to get three squares.
How to best create a fair penalty is a difficult proposition.
And thus this is likely yet another solution without a problem.
No, I think the desire here is for it to be Open Source. Current agricultural tools are proprietary, where you pay a ton of money for the special GPS receiver, arrays of sensors, a database of moisture, fertilizer, and yield readings, continuously variable spray systems, auto-steering systems, and everything else.
The current systems are brilliant: they can reduce fertilizer usage by 60% or more by applying the proper amount of fertilizer on the areas that need it. This reduces cost, excess chemicals, and greatly reduces polluting runoff. They also measure how much water the crops need, and adjust irrigation accordingly. And in a greenhouse, they can even measure and control the light.
But all of that is not all that difficult to solve, apart from the hardware. Makers are getting pretty good at producing open source hardware for a lot of smaller things; and there is a desire to get open source solutions in the hands of the developing nations.
So I think there's a lot of problem out there that this could yet solve.
Actually, I was thinking about the radioactive iodine isotope the doctors used to successfully treat my wife's thyroid cancer. That's something very positive about radiation.
Actually, the more I look at the Rockwell and the Bazille, the more sophisticated the results of the comparison appear to be. You've got a group of men, off in the background, engaging in a conversation that you are not able to hear. They're the subjects of the piece, but you don't see much of them, you can't hear what they're saying, and what they're talking about is partially obscured. You assume that because they're invited to the back room of the barbershop that they're more than just customers, similarly the men discussing the painting appear to share a common interest. The stoves suggest that a warmth exists, and that the people are physically comfortable in both places. The empty foreground spaces indicate a purpose that's going partially unused at the moment. The chairs give an identity to each place: the barbershop chair helps you understand that it's a shop, and because no one is sitting in it, you realize that a discussion other than banal haircut chatter about the ballgame is going on. The empty salon chair lets you know that the studio is underutilized - maybe this is a showing of unpopular works?
I still think that the paintings are likely unrelated to each other, but it seems that both artists were thinking similar thoughts when they chose to paint these. And that's the sophistication of the algorithm.
It's not just the furniture and the occupants, but how the artist chooses the scene. There is a balance to a picture, with different ways to give the painting a sense of place, or to guide the eye to focus on that which is more important to the artist. The artist could choose to leave out the stove. He could choose a time when the room has more or fewer people, or when the faces are distinct or obscured, whether or not they're facing the artist, etc. Rockwell chose to paint a barbershop with no customer in the chair, but instead used the illumination to highlight the barber and his friends otherwise occupied in the back room. He even went so far as to place himself outside of the shop entirely, looking through the front window with no chance of overhearing. Bazille chose to include a group of people talking at the back of a salon, highlighted by the light coming in from a window; they're set far enough away that you might not overhear them. Neither artist had to include the stove or the chair, but might have done so to help provide extra distance between the viewer and the subjects.
So given that, look at why someone would find these paintings interesting. Is it that there's a conversation going on that we have to imagine, but cannot hear? Do both of these paintings appeal to someone who likes to eavesdrop on others? Is there a universal desire being triggered? If so, was there influence? Did Bazille's painting ask a question that Rockwell tried to reinterpret, or is it simply that they both coincidentally wanted to dig into the same aspect of human nature in the same way?
I think it's a very relevant and interesting question; at least in this field. It might still be coincidence, but it might not. And we'll never know just by looking at the painting.
The human can only do that if both pictures come to his attention. But there is so much out there that it's almost impossible for someone to be familiar with every piece to the extent they'd be able to recognize them. The computer has infinite patience, it can attend to vast quantities of the most minute details, it has a catalog that doesn't fade with time, and the ability to re-run increasingly sophisticated algorithms as new ideas are brought to bear.
For example, Rockwell's barber shop and Bazille's studio share a few subjects in a few common locations, but it's hard to look at them and say "there was an artistic influence." Rockwell was noted for realistic depictions of idyllic Americana, so any influence there would likely have been the architecture of the setting and the choices of overall composition and balance. Choosing to include a group of three people, an unoccupied chair, and a wood stove, does not seem to imply much more than coincidence. But if you weren't comparing every item in the catalog with every other item in the catalog, you might not have bothered to notice at all.
Which brings us to the real question: how would knowing the answer (or even asking the question) make a difference to the world?
No, but the point is that it was viewed as a revenue generator, instead of a public safety tool. It wasn't because "this will reduce accidents by X%" or "this will save X lives annually", he said out loud "this will make us $(money)." And that is the true corruption here, not simply that some scamologists benefited from it.
Really, public safety issues should always be revenue neutral so they avoid the conflict with revenue generation, and instead focus on delivering the purported benefit. But how do you take money out of the equation? Make everyone who runs a red light sit in jail for a day?
Slashdot Mirror
Keep in mind how big the us is and deverse. Head to the coasts and you will find that its like compairing night and day. Still it makes the us the butt of other peoples jokes.
I know you're only trying to help defend the image of the American education system, but please, stop. I'm not sure you could have packed more condemnation of your school's English curriculum into a three sentence reply.
You did remind me of a joke, though. "The bigger America is, diverse it gets."
With PIN-based transactions on financial cards, the PIN is defined by the contract as the method of your approval, so no other signature is required. And I have yet to meet a cashier who is qualified as a graphologist who is legally qualified to compare a signed charge slip with the signature on the back of the card. Instead, most cashiers are trained to ignore the signature, other than making sure they got one. Some chains don't even show the customer's signature to the cashier, and some don't require the customers to show their charge card.
As this rolls out, we will see that certain issuer's cards will have PIN requirements, others will have signature requirements. It will vary by bank.
Something to note is that many banks will certainly get it wrong as this rolls out. We observed this from Canada's EMV experience. The Canadian bankers all thought they'd define a certain set of rules with EMV that would ensure every card was secured by defining PIN requirements, offline transactions, dollar limits on the cards, etc. It turned out that their cards were almost unusable for a lot of transactions, and they succeeded in making lots of people switch back to cash. The US banks are not eager to repeat that experience, but they are just as likely to get it wrong.
This will likely not be a smooth transition. Merchants and customers are all going to run into roadblocks, and lots of people are going to be upset before it's all done. I'd suggest patience, and to politely let your bank know of trouble as soon as you encounter a problem. The more complaints they hear, the more incentive they'll have to fix it before their customers jump ship for the few banks that get it right.
It's kind of sad that you underestimate kids like that.
The US market is moving rapidly to chip, as the PCI has mandated a liability shift as of October 2015. After that date, any merchants who don't demand a chip instead of a mag stripe will be fully liable for any fraud on the account, so the incentive for retailers to abandon mag stripes is very strong.
I have no doubt that Coin will be implemented well, and will provide a measure of physical security that plastic cards don't. However, be assured that retailers are indeed suspicious of them because they are not original cards. No institution has yet decided to officially say yes or no to them - everyone is kind of waiting for guidance from the PCI. And with Chip-and-PIN only a year out, they may just decide to not decide.
Once the merchants have the terminals in place and the liability has shifted to them, the issuers will have strong incentive to deploy chip cards, as they will have the least secure piece of the system. Mag stripes will be gone in just a few years.
That will depend on your bank, and your account. Some banks will require customers to use PINs, others may not.
Exactly the opposite ... You're going to expect an 11y to polar align?
Yes. Teach him or her once, and they feel like they now know the secrets of science. They'll soon be looking up exact lat/lon for their location, and setting it more precisely than the affordable (cheap) mechanism can handle, which is just fine. This also teaches them how to find Polaris. And if they ever get the itch to take some photographs, they'll have the right tool for the job.
After looking at Saturn's rings and spotting the Galilean moons, they're going to want to see other famous features; looking for the Messier objects is a great challenge for kids. This will quickly teach them a few other foundational skills, too: how to read a star chart, Right Ascension and Declination, and sidereal time. All this can be done on a relatively inexpensive 4" reflector with a small equatorial mount on a tripod.
A Dobsonian will give much clearer pictures for the money, and is great for viewing easily identifiable objects, but it's not going to give them a working understanding of celestial mechanics.
I'm sorry that such hell holes persist in 21st century USA, but that has nothing to do with my comment. We have fiber criss-crossing the entire state, including the remotest northern towns. Yes, the money may have originated primarily from the cities, but it's being spent statewide. And we have impoverished areas, But public money can only pull fibers just so far. We can't drag one up every driveway in the state.
If you want to fix your state, start by voting to raise taxes by an order of magnitude across rich and poor alike. If you're always led by selfish people who won't ever raise taxes, nothing will continue to happen.
Interesting idea, but the data doesn't support it.
While Massachusetts has 858 people per square mile, the population density of Minnesota, 68.1, is almost identical to Mississippi, with 63.7 people per square mile.
U.S. Census data also shows a significantly higher percentage of residents with internet connectivity in both Minnesota and Massachusetts, and significantly lower percentage in Mississippi. (Sorry, the source, http://www.census.gov/prod/201..., doesn't list the exact percentages, but I'm sure they'd be available if they were relevant.)
If density were that much of a factor, I would expect the states with similar density to have similar connectivity rates. The data doesn't bear that out.
Comparing the average ACT scores of the three states, Massachusetts comes in at 24.1, Minnesota at 22.8, and Mississippi at 18.7. Minnesota is closer to Massachusetts than Mississippi.
It's also worth noting that Minnesota's more recent governors have made statewide high speed internet a priority to help grow the economy.
At least someone is thinking of the children!
Heartbleed may be a huge IT problem, but you seem to have forgotten that health care system decisions are not made by IT security managers. They are run by demi-gods that we mere mortals are instructed to refer to as "doctors." And the doctor's prioritized view of IT is this:
#1. Be Available. I may need this system right this second in order to save a life. I don't care if it's my kid's Nintendo DS, I'm telling you it might save a life.
#2. Stay The Hell Out Of My Way. Don't interrupt me when I'm saving someone's life. And you don't know when that is; just that if you're interrupting me, it probably is now.
#3. Give Me Exactly What I Want. For I am the giver of life and death, and you must respect me.
So unless a problem is currently causing them an outage (so not just any old problem, it has to be causing an actual outage), it won't rise to the level of severity that says "skip all quality control processes and immediately patch this."
It doesn't matter if the router is vulnerable to hacking. It doesn't matter if a hacker who pwns the router could brick it. It doesn't matter if he is stealing patient records. Those things aren't interfering with #1, 2, or 3. So follow procedures, deploy it in a lab, go through testing and QA, and install it only on Wednesday afternoons when the hospital admins are all on the back nine.
Given our track record with Juniper, "drop everything and patch now" is a foolhardy approach, especially with something as important as a border router or firewall. I wouldn't apply any of their patches without seeing a long track record of safety. With heartbleed there was an unknown level of risk that they would be attacked; with any given Juniper patch there is a known risk the network would just go down.
Of course, given the choice, I wouldn't select a Juniper device to route packets to a doghouse, and would never place one as a mission critical node on any network. Then again, that's not my choice to make, just one we have to live with.
I'm going to assume most phones already have actual microphones, so how does this add any additional kind of insecurity? I'm going to assume most phones already have actual microphones, so how does this add any additional kind of insecurity?
Apparently the sound from your mic and the echo from your gyroscopes were both parsed by your speech-to-text converter. I guess it works better than we thought!
Apple fixed that problem. The iPhone has no battery door, so it can't be removed in case you don't want the phone to spy on you.
When you look at the technical advancements in agriculture, they're composed of small features integrated in to (or bolted on to) existing equipment. You don't need a new tractor, you just need to mount a GPS receiver and a database onto your old one. A processor no bigger than a cell phone can do lots of that. Adding electrically operated valves to an existing fertilizer or pesticide spray system? Again, very small. It doesn't have to auto-steer, it just has to know where it is, and where it's been.
The makers don't have to build the tractors, they just want to improve them.
I realize reading the article is considered bad form, but if you read it you'd learn they think they were breached sometime between April and June. Heartbleed was announced in April. That's somewhere between zero to two months. Lots of big shops have a monthly patching cycle, and you don't just drop every patch into a mission critical system the day it arrives.
They said they think they were breached sometime between April and June. Heartbleed was announced in April. The window was zero to two months, not five.
And it's not that data security is a low priority, it's just that it may not be as high a priority as network availability. This is health care, where problems in communication might affect patient outcomes. "Hey, sysadmin, Doctor Green couldn't respond to his page last night, and the patient died as a result." These are the kinds of arguments that are thrown at the IT departments at every health care provider. Whether or not we consider them rational or valid is irrelevant.
So in that backdrop, we might try to understand that they probably don't just slam in every patch that the vendor has to offer, at least not without a giant process circus. I would guess that they have a patch intake process, where they have to run the patch by some engineering team that evaluates the nature of the patch, and devises some kind of testing plan to execute in their lab environment. They then have to pass it to the testing team who will set up and execute the patch process in the lab, document all their findings, and then turn the patch over to the production network team. They'll put it on their list, and they'll have their own manager who says "whoa, why are you security guys rushing to slam this patch in to my border router? Let's slow down and think about this one."
I could easily see it taking a month in a big, regulated corporate environment.
There are the ethics of the money collected, but that can be fixed. I'm more concerned about the inequity of the penalty. If I had to pay a $300.00 fine for a red light violation, it would be slightly annoying. If my unemployed neighbor had to pay $300.00, he'd fall further behind on his rent, or possibly go hungry. Conversely, if I had to unexpectedly sit in jail for a day, my projects would suffer, my employer would have no sympathy, and my job might be at stake; while my neighbor would simply wait out his days with little else of consequence. So if I know the penalty is monetary, I can afford to run the occasional red light. If we know the penalty is to serve time, my neighbor might run a red light just to get three squares.
How to best create a fair penalty is a difficult proposition.
And thus this is likely yet another solution without a problem.
No, I think the desire here is for it to be Open Source. Current agricultural tools are proprietary, where you pay a ton of money for the special GPS receiver, arrays of sensors, a database of moisture, fertilizer, and yield readings, continuously variable spray systems, auto-steering systems, and everything else.
The current systems are brilliant: they can reduce fertilizer usage by 60% or more by applying the proper amount of fertilizer on the areas that need it. This reduces cost, excess chemicals, and greatly reduces polluting runoff. They also measure how much water the crops need, and adjust irrigation accordingly. And in a greenhouse, they can even measure and control the light.
But all of that is not all that difficult to solve, apart from the hardware. Makers are getting pretty good at producing open source hardware for a lot of smaller things; and there is a desire to get open source solutions in the hands of the developing nations.
So I think there's a lot of problem out there that this could yet solve.
Actually, I was thinking about the radioactive iodine isotope the doctors used to successfully treat my wife's thyroid cancer. That's something very positive about radiation.
Came for this:
One .png to rule them all .jpeg to compress them all
one wavelet to find them
one
and with the imagemagick library bind them.
Left satisfied.
Actually, the more I look at the Rockwell and the Bazille, the more sophisticated the results of the comparison appear to be. You've got a group of men, off in the background, engaging in a conversation that you are not able to hear. They're the subjects of the piece, but you don't see much of them, you can't hear what they're saying, and what they're talking about is partially obscured. You assume that because they're invited to the back room of the barbershop that they're more than just customers, similarly the men discussing the painting appear to share a common interest. The stoves suggest that a warmth exists, and that the people are physically comfortable in both places. The empty foreground spaces indicate a purpose that's going partially unused at the moment. The chairs give an identity to each place: the barbershop chair helps you understand that it's a shop, and because no one is sitting in it, you realize that a discussion other than banal haircut chatter about the ballgame is going on. The empty salon chair lets you know that the studio is underutilized - maybe this is a showing of unpopular works?
I still think that the paintings are likely unrelated to each other, but it seems that both artists were thinking similar thoughts when they chose to paint these. And that's the sophistication of the algorithm.
It's not just the furniture and the occupants, but how the artist chooses the scene. There is a balance to a picture, with different ways to give the painting a sense of place, or to guide the eye to focus on that which is more important to the artist. The artist could choose to leave out the stove. He could choose a time when the room has more or fewer people, or when the faces are distinct or obscured, whether or not they're facing the artist, etc. Rockwell chose to paint a barbershop with no customer in the chair, but instead used the illumination to highlight the barber and his friends otherwise occupied in the back room. He even went so far as to place himself outside of the shop entirely, looking through the front window with no chance of overhearing. Bazille chose to include a group of people talking at the back of a salon, highlighted by the light coming in from a window; they're set far enough away that you might not overhear them. Neither artist had to include the stove or the chair, but might have done so to help provide extra distance between the viewer and the subjects.
So given that, look at why someone would find these paintings interesting. Is it that there's a conversation going on that we have to imagine, but cannot hear? Do both of these paintings appeal to someone who likes to eavesdrop on others? Is there a universal desire being triggered? If so, was there influence? Did Bazille's painting ask a question that Rockwell tried to reinterpret, or is it simply that they both coincidentally wanted to dig into the same aspect of human nature in the same way?
I think it's a very relevant and interesting question; at least in this field. It might still be coincidence, but it might not. And we'll never know just by looking at the painting.
The human can only do that if both pictures come to his attention. But there is so much out there that it's almost impossible for someone to be familiar with every piece to the extent they'd be able to recognize them. The computer has infinite patience, it can attend to vast quantities of the most minute details, it has a catalog that doesn't fade with time, and the ability to re-run increasingly sophisticated algorithms as new ideas are brought to bear.
For example, Rockwell's barber shop and Bazille's studio share a few subjects in a few common locations, but it's hard to look at them and say "there was an artistic influence." Rockwell was noted for realistic depictions of idyllic Americana, so any influence there would likely have been the architecture of the setting and the choices of overall composition and balance. Choosing to include a group of three people, an unoccupied chair, and a wood stove, does not seem to imply much more than coincidence. But if you weren't comparing every item in the catalog with every other item in the catalog, you might not have bothered to notice at all.
Which brings us to the real question: how would knowing the answer (or even asking the question) make a difference to the world?
No, but the point is that it was viewed as a revenue generator, instead of a public safety tool. It wasn't because "this will reduce accidents by X%" or "this will save X lives annually", he said out loud "this will make us $(money)." And that is the true corruption here, not simply that some scamologists benefited from it.
Really, public safety issues should always be revenue neutral so they avoid the conflict with revenue generation, and instead focus on delivering the purported benefit. But how do you take money out of the equation? Make everyone who runs a red light sit in jail for a day?