If by "quietly" you mean, "telling everyone about how good it is and getting it in the press" then yes I guess so. Ahem. Did the submitter actually read the article they submitted?
It's worth RTFA and watching the short little video to see what the system does (I know, this is/. etc).
This is not some Big Brother style camera system covertly watching the students. This is a box on the wall which the students have to actively use to sign themselves in and out. They have to actively press buttons (well a touch screen) to use it.
While I am nervous about using biometrics for this sort of thing, the data being collected is exactly the same as would be recorded by the class register, the only difference is that it uses a computer rather than a teacher. Some schools have been using swipe-card systems for a few years, this is just a step up technologically.
There is a wider argument about the way schools are run, and the creeping use of biometrics, but this is primarily used to see who is in the building if there is a fire, so I'm not really sure that the "OMG, BIG BROTHER!1!!!!1!!" spin is warranted.
Especially since they have not exactly kept it quiet.
There are some things in this world that should never be run by private companies for the purposes of making a profit.
Prisons are one of them. The idea that people can make a profit by locking people up is repugnant. Much in the same way that mercenary forces are generally a bad idea. The last people you want are those that *want* more war because that way they make more money.
The profit incentive is fine in most cases, and generally I'm pro the free market, but there are some things we don't want to be encouraging.
And why is the POTUS so special that he can award the various Presidential Medals, or Congress so special that it can award the various congerssional medals?
Almost every country has some kind of honours system, the British system just has rather more levels to it than most.
Oops, that should have been the "Congressional Gold Medal", which is for Civilians, while the Medal of Honour is for service people.
Of course, a Knighthood is more in line with the Congressional Silver Medal (first recipient was Chuck Yeager apparantly), the Gold Medal being very rarely awarded.
The UK is a constitutional monarchy, which basically means that the queen has no real power.
The list of people who get "honours" is draw up by the government (with bi-partisan input from all the political parties and non-political parts of the civil service, and from the general public). A knighthood is no different to the Congressional Medal of Honour, or the Legion of Honour in France, we just kept the old titles which have existed for centuries.
The Queen is really just there as a ceremonial figurehead. For example, every year there is the "Queens Speech" at the opening of Parliament, at which the Queen sets out the legislation to be debated in that year, but the whole thing is written by the Prime Minister.
Personally I'm a republican (small r) and would happily see the back of them, because they are an anachronism and a bunch of landed gentry, but to think that the Queen has any real power (that she could actually exercise without causing a constitutional crisis) is just incorrect.
The current setup is the ultimate result of the second (or third depending on which ones you count) English Civil War, during which Charles I was executed and we briefly became a republic, and is probably why we still have a monarchy at all. With the restoration of Charles II, the power of the monarch became largely symbolic and ultimately subservient to the will of Parliament, with the unwritten understanding that a monarch who tried to control things would probably be the last.
Except that if you read the article (I know, this is/.), you would know that this isn't for any of those purposes. It is to stop people applying for multiple licenses under different identities.
Facial recognition is very hard to do well*, most systems have terrible accuracy rates. Since all the images in this system are from the same source, the BMV, they may as well try to standardise the images as much as possible to make the system as accurate as possible, reducing the number of misses and false positives.
* Despite what TV would like you to think. If you think it's easy to do well, you have been watching too much CSI.
However it isn't to do with facial recognition as such. UK passports (and some others I believe) are fitted with chips which store a fingerprint of the face (presumably encoded in some way) which describes the geometry of the face. This allows the photo in the passport to be confirmed against the chip, preventing someone from nicking your passport and replacing the photo. Eventually it will be possible for the passport's data to be confirmed against a record held on a central system.
The restrictions make it a real pain to get passport photos for kids.
Of course this hasn't stopped people hacking these, and demo fake passports have been produced. It also doesn't stop The Man from potentially tying the data into all those CCTV cameras we have.
The BMV use here is to prevent the same person getting multiple licenses, not for comparison against camera footage. Face recognition is much harder than the media (and companies that do it) would like you to think, and for this purpose, where all the images are from the same source, it makes sense to simplify the problem.
But my point was that these are not new, and yet have never taken off.
There have been attempts at making 3d interfaces stretching back decades, yet none of them were actually easier to use than the 2d interface that we use today, and the limiting factor has never been the technology.
3d user interfaces are like functional programming, clever people keep telling us that they are better than what we use today, and yet we never seem that impressed and they have both yet to dominate. Having said that, elements of all leak into the mainstream, which cherry picks the bits that it likes.
The same goes for voice control. Nice idea, up until you have to work in an office with three other people.
I'm not ruling out someone creating a working 3d interface, but personally I have more faith in the likes of tactile surface computing, especially for home gadgets.
It's as if a million voices cried out and then went: "Lively? What's that?"
Seriously, a knock off of Second-Life? What were they thinking. SL is pointless enough, did anyone there really think that this was going to be a goer?
There is this obsession with 3D worlds, computer interfaces, or file managers. People are convinced that just because something is technically more complex and sophisticated that it must be better. People keep telling us that soon we will be using voice controlled 3d AI interfaces, while missing the fact that none of these things actually make life easier. Why should I have to use a 3D world just to talk to someone? Why use a video phone when I just want to talk, not see their face?
Just because voice recognition is more sophisticated than a keyboard doesn't mean that it is intrinsically better.
The TV didn't kill the radio star. No matter how much more technically complex it might be, you can't watch TV while driving the car or walking down the street.
I've seen a bunch of articles about how bad iTunes is recently, and while I'm happy to concede there there are some negatives (the dumb software update process that replaces everything and quicktime and safari, the lack of FLAC support), but there are others which I just don't get.
Resource usage: people keep telling me how iTunes is a real resource hog, but I don't see any evidence of that.
I'm currently running both iTunes and Songbird on my first gen (Core 2, not duo) MacBook.
iTunes: 78MB real memory used. 8% cpu, steady. Songbird: 170MB real memory used. 10% cpu, spiking to 18% frequently and 30% occasionally. Firefox: 150MB. Between 3 and 10% cpu just sitting here idle.
Is the resource problem more an issue for the Windows version? I have never had a problem with iTunes slowing things down.
Themes: whenever people criticize iTunes on Windows, they point out that it doesn't fit in with the look and feel of windows (I'll concede that one, I think it should). But then people complain that it doesn't have theme support so they can have some wacky look and feel that is nothing like the base system. What is so important about what your music player looks like? Mine spends most of its time minimised. I guess it's a nice to have, but I'd rather they spent time on features like CoverFlow (which I use extensively to browse my music) than pretty niche features.
It organises your music for you: perhaps it's just me, but that's exactly why I use it. I don't *want* to have to organise my music. I import my music and then forget about it. It's just there. The internal directory structure is pretty sane if you really want to fiddle around, and you can always stop iTunes from organising your music (it's in the preferences).
Plugins: Ok, I can see that there might be some nice plugins about, but most people just use it to listen to their music.
I'm genuinely interested, can someone point me to a plugin for another player that would make me reconsider and go "wow, that's really useful"?
From what I have read, this only appears to apply to the speed of thought, which impacts on our reaction speeds. This would chime with most people's experience of ageing.
What I would be interesting in is whether it actually has a knock-on effect on the quality of cognitive ability. Does thinking faster equal thinking better?
Also, I wonder if the increase in experience is enough to overcome the reduction in reaction speeds. For example a 17 year old may have a great reaction speed, but that doesn't automatically make them a better driver than a 40 year-old with 20+ years of predicting the motion of objects travelling at speed and planning accordingly.
Anything that opens up the Wii platform is good news, so a hearty cheer from me.
If Nintendo created a proper home-brew platform, making it easier and cheaper to make small games and apps, the Wii could become a killer home entertainment platform (especially if they add DVD and local storage support). Something along the lines of the iPhone/Android apps store, where you can sell cheap games and they take a small cut. Currently the selection on WiiWare is pretty limited unless you want old NES games.
If they did that, I'd become a Wii developer overnight.
Err, that's exactly what I said in my post. Netbooks are considerably cheaper than a replacement MacBook.
I'm not using the full power of the mac, so will not be getting a full laptop next-time round. I would however like a smaller, more rugged, and more portable laptop for carrying around.
The "netbook" market has moved so fast over the last year, I'm glad I didn't stump up for an early Eee PC. This looks like it may hit my sweet spot of price/performance/size.
I'm at least a year from buying a new laptop and I can't see me replacing my current MacBook with another mac. As much as I like MacOS, I can't justify the cost of a full spec laptop. Currently, little of what I do stretches my MacBook's performance, no games, no video editing. A cheap, portable and rugged netbook running linux is just up my street. Another MacBook would be a nice to have, but at a price-tag that I just cant justify.
I think this is something some manufacturers are missing, fewer and fewer people are pushing the limits of their existing hardware. There just doesn't seem to be the pressure from software as there used to be. I know there are applications that need more power than a cheap latop can deliver (games, high-end graphics work, video editing), but this is becoming an increasingly small segment of the whole market.
I'm sure Microsoft will be terribly upset about Amazon selling Windows VMs in huge numbers.
Speaking of which, I bet the licensing for this was rather complex.
Re:MPG is an obsolete measurement
on
1000-mph Car Planned
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· Score: 5, Insightful
As JFK once put it very succinctly...
"We choose to go to the moon, and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard"
If all we ever do is the easy stuff, nothing ever changes.
And for all the people saying this is easy, why don't you give it a try then? It isn't just the money, this stuff takes serious engineering and real talent on the part of the driver/pilot.
A lot of businesses may become increasingly unwilling to take risks, such as radically switching their technology.
It's easy to take risks when business is good and there is plenty of cash sloshing around, but changing mission critical systems during bad economic periods will be seen as a bit too radical for many businesses.
Having said that, I think smart businesses will be willing to make the change in many cases, especially when there is an OSS drop-in replacement, or where they are implementing a greenfield system.
The Drake equation is kind of interesting, but ultimately fruitless. Most of the variables are poorly understood. Arguing over the answer to the Drake equation has become the modern equivalent of arguing about the number of angels you can fit on a pin head.
There is an assumption that the equation is correct, but we can't know that until we actually get to measure the reality. There may be factors that no-one has even considered and are not part of the equation, and the factors we do know about are no poorly understood as to be worthless.
This is a perfect of theory obsession. It doesn't matter how good, or elegant, or clever a theory of reality is, at the end of the day if it's wrong, it's wrong.
In science, the final arbiter of truth is always the Universe itself.
When copyright was created it was to protect artistic work, music, writing, stories, images etc. It was designed to protect artistic endeavor.
The idea that you can copyright a fact, rather than its representation is just dumb.
Besides, you would think that a TV station would want people to know what was on. Objecting to this is like objecting to people linking to your site. Personally I think it would be great if we could just collectively ignore idiots like this, since that seems to be what they want.
Remembering back to my psych classes, colour and B&W dreaming tend to happen at different parts of the sleep cycle. Colour is more common in REM, while dreams during NREM sleep are more likely to be in B&W.
Since sleep patterns change as we age, it seems probable that this has far more to do with the age of the study participants. Since people were asked to record their dreams in the morning, they will tend to remember those dreams from their most recent sleep cycles.
A better approach would be to conduct a proper sleep study, in which people of different ages are woken at different parts of their sleep cycle (as detected by EEG) and asked about their dreams and whether they were in colour. Anything else is an extrapolation too far and subject to too many other factors.
Thanks for responding for me, yes that was basically my thinking.
I'd add that I doubt that Apple would have removed it unless they thought that the number of poeple inconvenienced, who wouldn't be prepared to move to a Pro, was smaller than the number they could entice with the new hardware.
Slashdot Mirror
"A UK school has quietly introduced..."
If by "quietly" you mean, "telling everyone about how good it is and getting it in the press" then yes I guess so. Ahem. Did the submitter actually read the article they submitted?
It's worth RTFA and watching the short little video to see what the system does (I know, this is /. etc).
This is not some Big Brother style camera system covertly watching the students. This is a box on the wall which the students have to actively use to sign themselves in and out. They have to actively press buttons (well a touch screen) to use it.
While I am nervous about using biometrics for this sort of thing, the data being collected is exactly the same as would be recorded by the class register, the only difference is that it uses a computer rather than a teacher. Some schools have been using swipe-card systems for a few years, this is just a step up technologically.
There is a wider argument about the way schools are run, and the creeping use of biometrics, but this is primarily used to see who is in the building if there is a fire, so I'm not really sure that the "OMG, BIG BROTHER!1!!!!1!!" spin is warranted.
Especially since they have not exactly kept it quiet.
There are some things in this world that should never be run by private companies for the purposes of making a profit.
Prisons are one of them. The idea that people can make a profit by locking people up is repugnant. Much in the same way that mercenary forces are generally a bad idea. The last people you want are those that *want* more war because that way they make more money.
The profit incentive is fine in most cases, and generally I'm pro the free market, but there are some things we don't want to be encouraging.
Paul
And why is the POTUS so special that he can award the various Presidential Medals, or Congress so special that it can award the various congerssional medals?
Almost every country has some kind of honours system, the British system just has rather more levels to it than most.
Paul
Oops, that should have been the "Congressional Gold Medal", which is for Civilians, while the Medal of Honour is for service people.
Of course, a Knighthood is more in line with the Congressional Silver Medal (first recipient was Chuck Yeager apparantly), the Gold Medal being very rarely awarded.
The UK is a constitutional monarchy, which basically means that the queen has no real power.
The list of people who get "honours" is draw up by the government (with bi-partisan input from all the political parties and non-political parts of the civil service, and from the general public). A knighthood is no different to the Congressional Medal of Honour, or the Legion of Honour in France, we just kept the old titles which have existed for centuries.
The Queen is really just there as a ceremonial figurehead. For example, every year there is the "Queens Speech" at the opening of Parliament, at which the Queen sets out the legislation to be debated in that year, but the whole thing is written by the Prime Minister.
Personally I'm a republican (small r) and would happily see the back of them, because they are an anachronism and a bunch of landed gentry, but to think that the Queen has any real power (that she could actually exercise without causing a constitutional crisis) is just incorrect.
The current setup is the ultimate result of the second (or third depending on which ones you count) English Civil War, during which Charles I was executed and we briefly became a republic, and is probably why we still have a monarchy at all. With the restoration of Charles II, the power of the monarch became largely symbolic and ultimately subservient to the will of Parliament, with the unwritten understanding that a monarch who tried to control things would probably be the last.
Paul
Except that if you read the article (I know, this is /.), you would know that this isn't for any of those purposes. It is to stop people applying for multiple licenses under different identities.
Facial recognition is very hard to do well*, most systems have terrible accuracy rates. Since all the images in this system are from the same source, the BMV, they may as well try to standardise the images as much as possible to make the system as accurate as possible, reducing the number of misses and false positives.
* Despite what TV would like you to think. If you think it's easy to do well, you have been watching too much CSI.
However it isn't to do with facial recognition as such. UK passports (and some others I believe) are fitted with chips which store a fingerprint of the face (presumably encoded in some way) which describes the geometry of the face. This allows the photo in the passport to be confirmed against the chip, preventing someone from nicking your passport and replacing the photo. Eventually it will be possible for the passport's data to be confirmed against a record held on a central system.
The restrictions make it a real pain to get passport photos for kids.
Of course this hasn't stopped people hacking these, and demo fake passports have been produced. It also doesn't stop The Man from potentially tying the data into all those CCTV cameras we have.
The BMV use here is to prevent the same person getting multiple licenses, not for comparison against camera footage. Face recognition is much harder than the media (and companies that do it) would like you to think, and for this purpose, where all the images are from the same source, it makes sense to simplify the problem.
But my point was that these are not new, and yet have never taken off.
There have been attempts at making 3d interfaces stretching back decades, yet none of them were actually easier to use than the 2d interface that we use today, and the limiting factor has never been the technology.
3d user interfaces are like functional programming, clever people keep telling us that they are better than what we use today, and yet we never seem that impressed and they have both yet to dominate. Having said that, elements of all leak into the mainstream, which cherry picks the bits that it likes.
The same goes for voice control. Nice idea, up until you have to work in an office with three other people.
I'm not ruling out someone creating a working 3d interface, but personally I have more faith in the likes of tactile surface computing, especially for home gadgets.
It's as if a million voices cried out and then went: "Lively? What's that?"
Seriously, a knock off of Second-Life? What were they thinking. SL is pointless enough, did anyone there really think that this was going to be a goer?
There is this obsession with 3D worlds, computer interfaces, or file managers. People are convinced that just because something is technically more complex and sophisticated that it must be better. People keep telling us that soon we will be using voice controlled 3d AI interfaces, while missing the fact that none of these things actually make life easier. Why should I have to use a 3D world just to talk to someone? Why use a video phone when I just want to talk, not see their face?
Just because voice recognition is more sophisticated than a keyboard doesn't mean that it is intrinsically better.
The TV didn't kill the radio star. No matter how much more technically complex it might be, you can't watch TV while driving the car or walking down the street.
They can save energy by not having to turn the lights on.
Everything has it's own "natural" glow.
Hot water for the staff won't be a problem either.
I've seen a bunch of articles about how bad iTunes is recently, and while I'm happy to concede there there are some negatives (the dumb software update process that replaces everything and quicktime and safari, the lack of FLAC support), but there are others which I just don't get.
Resource usage: people keep telling me how iTunes is a real resource hog, but I don't see any evidence of that.
I'm currently running both iTunes and Songbird on my first gen (Core 2, not duo) MacBook.
iTunes: 78MB real memory used. 8% cpu, steady.
Songbird: 170MB real memory used. 10% cpu, spiking to 18% frequently and 30% occasionally.
Firefox: 150MB. Between 3 and 10% cpu just sitting here idle.
Is the resource problem more an issue for the Windows version? I have never had a problem with iTunes slowing things down.
Themes: whenever people criticize iTunes on Windows, they point out that it doesn't fit in with the look and feel of windows (I'll concede that one, I think it should). But then people complain that it doesn't have theme support so they can have some wacky look and feel that is nothing like the base system. What is so important about what your music player looks like? Mine spends most of its time minimised. I guess it's a nice to have, but I'd rather they spent time on features like CoverFlow (which I use extensively to browse my music) than pretty niche features.
It organises your music for you: perhaps it's just me, but that's exactly why I use it. I don't *want* to have to organise my music. I import my music and then forget about it. It's just there. The internal directory structure is pretty sane if you really want to fiddle around, and you can always stop iTunes from organising your music (it's in the preferences).
Plugins: Ok, I can see that there might be some nice plugins about, but most people just use it to listen to their music.
I'm genuinely interested, can someone point me to a plugin for another player that would make me reconsider and go "wow, that's really useful"?
Paul
From what I have read, this only appears to apply to the speed of thought, which impacts on our reaction speeds. This would chime with most people's experience of ageing.
What I would be interesting in is whether it actually has a knock-on effect on the quality of cognitive ability. Does thinking faster equal thinking better?
Also, I wonder if the increase in experience is enough to overcome the reduction in reaction speeds. For example a 17 year old may have a great reaction speed, but that doesn't automatically make them a better driver than a 40 year-old with 20+ years of predicting the motion of objects travelling at speed and planning accordingly.
Anything that opens up the Wii platform is good news, so a hearty cheer from me.
If Nintendo created a proper home-brew platform, making it easier and cheaper to make small games and apps, the Wii could become a killer home entertainment platform (especially if they add DVD and local storage support). Something along the lines of the iPhone/Android apps store, where you can sell cheap games and they take a small cut. Currently the selection on WiiWare is pretty limited unless you want old NES games.
If they did that, I'd become a Wii developer overnight.
Err, that's exactly what I said in my post. Netbooks are considerably cheaper than a replacement MacBook.
I'm not using the full power of the mac, so will not be getting a full laptop next-time round. I would however like a smaller, more rugged, and more portable laptop for carrying around.
Paul
The "netbook" market has moved so fast over the last year, I'm glad I didn't stump up for an early Eee PC. This looks like it may hit my sweet spot of price/performance/size.
I'm at least a year from buying a new laptop and I can't see me replacing my current MacBook with another mac. As much as I like MacOS, I can't justify the cost of a full spec laptop. Currently, little of what I do stretches my MacBook's performance, no games, no video editing. A cheap, portable and rugged netbook running linux is just up my street. Another MacBook would be a nice to have, but at a price-tag that I just cant justify.
I think this is something some manufacturers are missing, fewer and fewer people are pushing the limits of their existing hardware. There just doesn't seem to be the pressure from software as there used to be. I know there are applications that need more power than a cheap latop can deliver (games, high-end graphics work, video editing), but this is becoming an increasingly small segment of the whole market.
Paul
I'm sure Microsoft will be terribly upset about Amazon selling Windows VMs in huge numbers.
Speaking of which, I bet the licensing for this was rather complex.
As JFK once put it very succinctly...
"We choose to go to the moon, and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard"
If all we ever do is the easy stuff, nothing ever changes.
And for all the people saying this is easy, why don't you give it a try then? It isn't just the money, this stuff takes serious engineering and real talent on the part of the driver/pilot.
What amazing stuff have you done in your life?
A lot of businesses may become increasingly unwilling to take risks, such as radically switching their technology.
It's easy to take risks when business is good and there is plenty of cash sloshing around, but changing mission critical systems during bad economic periods will be seen as a bit too radical for many businesses.
Having said that, I think smart businesses will be willing to make the change in many cases, especially when there is an OSS drop-in replacement, or where they are implementing a greenfield system.
Paul
You would reach "beard critical mass", at which point the Large Hadron Collider would turn into a very surprised sperm whale and a bowl of petunias.
Why do you think you never see them together?
to hide the fact they have been spending the defence budget on giant Nerf guns.
There are as many civilisations as there are.
The Drake equation is kind of interesting, but ultimately fruitless. Most of the variables are poorly understood. Arguing over the answer to the Drake equation has become the modern equivalent of arguing about the number of angels you can fit on a pin head.
There is an assumption that the equation is correct, but we can't know that until we actually get to measure the reality. There may be factors that no-one has even considered and are not part of the equation, and the factors we do know about are no poorly understood as to be worthless.
This is a perfect of theory obsession. It doesn't matter how good, or elegant, or clever a theory of reality is, at the end of the day if it's wrong, it's wrong.
In science, the final arbiter of truth is always the Universe itself.
Paul
When copyright was created it was to protect artistic work, music, writing, stories, images etc. It was designed to protect artistic endeavor.
The idea that you can copyright a fact, rather than its representation is just dumb.
Besides, you would think that a TV station would want people to know what was on. Objecting to this is like objecting to people linking to your site. Personally I think it would be great if we could just collectively ignore idiots like this, since that seems to be what they want.
Remembering back to my psych classes, colour and B&W dreaming tend to happen at different parts of the sleep cycle. Colour is more common in REM, while dreams during NREM sleep are more likely to be in B&W.
Since sleep patterns change as we age, it seems probable that this has far more to do with the age of the study participants. Since people were asked to record their dreams in the morning, they will tend to remember those dreams from their most recent sleep cycles.
A better approach would be to conduct a proper sleep study, in which people of different ages are woken at different parts of their sleep cycle (as detected by EEG) and asked about their dreams and whether they were in colour. Anything else is an extrapolation too far and subject to too many other factors.
Yep :)
It's still a good thing, whoever came up with it.
Yay for the EU (sometimes).
Thanks for responding for me, yes that was basically my thinking.
I'd add that I doubt that Apple would have removed it unless they thought that the number of poeple inconvenienced, who wouldn't be prepared to move to a Pro, was smaller than the number they could entice with the new hardware.