Its legal to lie to government investigators in your jurisdiction? From the indictment: "trained an individual posing as a federal law enforcement officer to lie and conceal involvement in criminal activity from an internal agency investigation"
Your own citation proves you mistaken. He in fact knew about the illegal use.
He installed a trap. It malfunctioned. The vehicle was brought back for repair. The illegal contents revealed. He told the owners to get the stuff off his property. He then continued to do work for these people. He in fact transition from a state of "not knowing" to "knowing" and continued working with them.
... a former police officer has been dragged into court by the U.S. Department of Justice for teaching people how to beat a pseudoscientific method of detecting whether somebody is lying, a method that itself isn't even admissible as evidence courts in most parts of the world? What's next? Will the surgeon general drag people into court for pointing out that when consuming a homeopathic remedy with 30C dilution, one would need to swallow a volume greater than all the water present in all the oceans of our entire planet in order to stand a good chance of swallowing just one molecule of the original substance?
He entered into a conspiracy to lie to government investigators.
Here I thought he was teaching people how to see through the lies of government investigators.
From the indictment: "trained an individual posing as a federal law enforcement officer to lie and conceal involvement in criminal activity from an internal agency investigation"
Since polygraphs are not working, the investigators claim they do, and the only effect they have is if people believe in them.
So they are useful, a prop of intimidation. Belief trumps reality. If a subject is tricked into honesty or tricked into avoiding circumstances where they will face a polygraph its a win from the government's perspective.
A logical government would take this as evidence that the polygraph itself is a bullshit test, and dump it. However, we have a bunch of petulant man-children in charge who just prefer to stamp their feet and hit somebody over the head instead of thinking.
Investigators often rely on intimidation. A polygraph is a tool of intimidation. It does not matter so much if it in fact works reliably. All that matters is that the subject fears that it will work reliably. It may lead such subjects to being more honest, to crack under pressure or to avoid circumstances where they will face a polygraph.
It doesn't matter if its a con to the gov't, as long as it tends to modify behavior in the desired direction.
It doesn't matter what he said. The 1st Amendment is supposed to protect his right to say it. You can't just go around implying restrictions that are not written into the law. But that is what is happened and it's wrong.
The First Amendment protects his right to teach anti-polygraph techniques. The Bill of Rights protects him against being compelled to self incrimination. There is no protection against voluntary incrimination, which seems to be what happened. His self promotion of his services admitted a criminal conspiracy.
You're quite right, of course, but the thought of a 21st century government defending voodoo pseudo science still seems horribly anachronistic.
The device does not have to work. The subject only has to fear that it will work and be more inclined to answer truthfully or to simply avoid entering into circumstances where they will be tested.
Plus some circumstances do not need courtroom level precision. Lets say a company needs to pick one employee to count the cash at closing time and prepare a bank deposit. If the false negative rate is sufficiently low it could be argued that a polygraph test could be a useful supplement to other considerations. No one is going to jail. No one is being denied a job. It was just used to help pick who among a group would be assigned a task.
The preceding is just a hypothetical, I'm not actually advocating it.
... a former police officer has been dragged into court by the U.S. Department of Justice for teaching people how to beat a pseudoscientific method of detecting whether somebody is lying, a method that itself isn't even admissible as evidence courts in most parts of the world? What's next? Will the surgeon general drag people into court for pointing out that when consuming a homeopathic remedy with 30C dilution, one would need to swallow a volume greater than all the water present in all the oceans of our entire planet in order to stand a good chance of swallowing just one molecule of the original substance?
He entered into a conspiracy to lie to government investigators. He promoted himself as having the ability to teach people to lie to investigators. He claimed past clients have successfully lied to investigators for decades.
If he taught people to beat a polygraph and **always** said to never lie to government investigators he would not be in trouble.
He is in trouble not because he taught how to defeat a polygraph machine, but rather he taught people how to do it with the explicit intent to defeat government background and security checks. He explicitly said so. By saying so he enters into a conspiracy. He explicitly advised people to lie during a government investigation and agreed to help them conceal those lies. He admitted past clients have used his techniques to successfully lie to investigators for decades. And yes I know a polygraph detects stress not lies. Yet the fact remained he promoted his services as a method to conceal lies.
If he had claimed the training was for some other purpose and always told people to never employ these techniques during a real government polygraph and to always tell government investigators the truth he would not be in trouble.
In short the method he used to promote his services got him in trouble, not the services themselves.
Laptop. The wall socket only needs to be powered to charge. Leave it plugged in all the time if availability is unknown. The battery should be charged enough for plenty of coding time. Its not like the person is going there to practice coding in isolation, it sounds as if they will be there for other reasons and want to continue development despite a lack of an internet connection. I.e. coding in their spare time.
I teach physics and the list of software I can't run and for which there is no full equivalent is longer than the list of software equivalents I do use on Chromebooks.
I have had to maintain a classroom lab of Windows computers to run the software I need for data import and analysis, video analysis, computational physics, and simulations. If IT stops supporting them, I could easily run all of that software on Linux on the same machines for the foreseeable future.
A classroom machine for the teacher and/or classroom scale events is one thing. A machine for each student to carry around and use on a daily basis is something entirely different.
I once wrote chemistry software for the educational market. We targeted Windows and Mac because that is what schools/students had. If schools/students had ChromeBooks we would target ChromeBooks. OK, it would be a web app rather than a native app. Sad for the old C/ASM programmers like me. Hardly matters to the student.
And if it is via iOS 6 and Safari, that means all older devices are now unsafe to use as Web devices and Apple will probably never release a patch for them.
Actually Apple has released patches for "obsolete" OS versions when a critical security bug has been found. Especially for OS versions that are the final version that some particular device can upgrade to. I believe iOS 6.1.6 was exactly such an upgrade eight months ago for the iPhone 3GS. I recall my circa 2008 MacBook receiving a patch for Mac OS X Lion 10.7 in recent months.
I've used chrome books, dell laptops, mac books and iPads with external keyboards. The iPads are the least portable for typing. You need a decent desk/table for the iPad. Again, for typing not tapping. The more traditional laptop format is easier to balance and orient the screen if you want to just sit down on the grass somewhere and type. Plus when the lid closes the screen is protected, the iPad has to go into a sleeve of some sort for protection.
Chromebooks... There are things you simply can't do, full stop
As a school oriented laptop that is probably a plus. Email, browser, google docs,... plus the education focused classroom stuff... that sounds highly capable. Being "locked down" doesn't seem like a negative here, probably solves more problems than it creates.
When does this shit start to count as criminal? Say a company encrypts all communications with their mailserver and this is part of their legal requirements to protect privacy. Can we sue the pants off them yet?
No. Because they are not removing *your* encryption. Think for a second, how could they do that, short of your ISP being the NSA.:-)
What they are failing to do is encrypt the channel between you and the ISP, its like you asked for secure https and they redirected you to plain http.
Its a non-issue for the legal and medical community since they will encrypt things as needed before it gets to the ISP.
This is true, but the whole reason the NRA and AARP are effective is that they have large numbers of people who will actually show up and ruin political careers over one vote in Congress. You have to have enormous unanimity in your organization to make it work. What's the single "99%" issue that you think you can make millions of people take that kind of stand?
An elected official egregiously voting against the interests of the people, of demonstrating a far greater loyalty to campaign contributions than to votes. The point being to punish those politicians who consider voters secondary to donors, and to tolerate politicians who consider donors secondary to voters. Ie to remind politicians where the true power lies. And "tolerate" doesn't necessarily mean voting for, it simply means returning to voting on a politician's stance on issues when neither candidate warrants punitive voting.
There is no need for a single issue, just a consensus as to how the politician ranks voters vs donors. And keep in mind we don't need agreement of 99%, just enough to remove a person from office. Hell, it might take nothing more than people stopping to vote loyally for their party. To just be perfectly willing to vote against their party's officials when those officials are obviously bought and paid for.
Nothing new here. Climate Change was identified as a global destabilization factor long ago by the US military. Crop failures, droughts, flooding, etc leading to mass migrations and the conflict and strife that will arise our of these migrations.
Well, duh! Most people don't want to switch because that would mean they were wrong before.
Either that or money doesn't buy votes as much as some believe it does.
Absolutely correct. The true currency of politics is votes not money. Its still a one person one vote system, not a one dollar one vote system. The 99% actually have the power, they just fail to use it.
Money is just a tool to persuade the indifferent voters and money's influence is magnified by party loyalty. If you are loyal to your party you are irrelevant. Your party can ignore you because they have your vote, the other party can ignore you because they can not get your vote.
There is a simple way for the 99% to regain power. Punitive Voting. If a candidate misbehaves or egregiously fails to act in the best interests of the citizenry then vote against that candidate. Period. No exception. It is only through punitive voting that voters can teach politicians to fear the voters wrath.
Want example of punitive voting, look at the most powerful lobbies in the country. The NRA and the AARP. They do not control politicians through money, they control them with their literally millions of members who *will* show up on election day and vote punitively if the politician have voted against the lobby. This is why Democrats who never accept a single dollar from the NRA will vote the NRA's way. They fear the NRA membership (and like minded folks). This punitive voting scheme needs to be used on a larger scale by the public at large.
If a sufficient number of voters have decided to remove a candidate from office no amount of campaign contributions can save the candidate.
Note that this is a long term strategy. It relies on a darwinian process. Politicians need to be seen as losing office due to large scale punitive voting. Only them will they adapt and the 99% regain control.
If you think there is a quick solution, an easy fix, you have been deluded by the status quo. Its going to take time and the longer we delay the farther off regaining control is.
Interpreting a large number of edges over perhaps a large part of the field of view to recognize the immediate environment using a memory of stored models and templates has completely different computational requirements and an entirely different opportunity (or relative lack of it) regarding parallelization.
Determining how well input matches a particular model is independent on how well it matches another model, and can thus be done in parallel. And of course, since neural networks don't separate memory and processing units like von Neuman architecture does, it's hard to see how such operations could avoid parallelism.
I'm not saying there is no parallelism in pattern/template matching, just probably a lot less relative to low level primitives like edge detection.
Sorry but at what point does it become cognition ?
Far above "the level of individual neurons". Its conceivable that an individual neuron may be triggered by the magnitude of an edge, or the orientation of an edge. This is something that can be massively parallel. Now the matching of a collection of edges to a template, that could conceivably be paralleled -- testing some number of templates in parallel, but that would be something less massive than edge detection. I think this template matching, say collection of edges == cat, is getting to the point where its fair to speak of cognition. I don't want to defend the paper itself, but the notion that things at the cognition level are only modestly parallel is something plausible.
> Its about punishing bad representatives. Instilling fear into representatives that if they go too far they will loose their office
the system is set up to prevent this on two accounts:
1. there is no method of removing sitting politicians in federal office from power, without accusing them of a crime(i.e. recall)
You are having a massive "woosh" moment. One person, one vote. The 99% ***have*** the power, they just fail to ***use*** it. I realize that you have been indoctrinated with this notion that we are powerless but you really need to step back and think about this. Seriously, what is so hard to grasp about the concept that it **is** one person one vote, it **is not** one dollar one vote. No one is preventing the 99% from exercising this power other than the 99% themselves.
2. the conversation on politics is controlled via news media. the news can make issues go away if need be, and causes distractions.
Are they making this conversation go away? Do they stop conversations between you and family and friends? Classmates, coworkers, neighbors?
3. In a two party system people often have serious moral objections to policy, but at the same time don't like the other party's values.
You are not following what I have said. In a punitive voting scheme you vote against the incumbent who misbehaves or drifts too far from the interests of the people, period, no exception. It is only the certainty that a large block of voters will vote **against them** in the next election that adjusts their behavior. Again, this is **exactly** what the most successfully lobby groups in the country do, the NRA and the AARP. Democrats who do not accept NRA money will still not support gun measures opposed by the NRA due to punitive voting. Punitive voting works. It just needs to be used on a wider scale by the ordinary citizenry.
Once the occurrence of punitive voting is recognized a darwinian effect will take place. Politicians will fear going t far astray since not amount of campaign contributions can save them. Only when the politician stays in bounds does positions on issues come into play. This is the price for regaining control.
The system is currently rigged but you have completely misdiagnosed it. It is loyalty to a political party that makes the system rigged. If you are loyal to a party then they can ignore you because they have your vote, and the other party can ignore you because they can not attain your vote. This is the simple truth. This is what enables politicians to focus on things other than the voter's wishes.
Oh Please Edge Detection and Motion Detection. Are well known to be massively parrallel and occur at the level of individual neurons. It looks like this is just muddying the waters between functional units and internal parallelism
A vision system has multiple tasks to perform, low and high level tasks. The edge detection and motion detection that you describe are primitive feature extraction operators, low level tasks. Cognition, the interpretation of these features that allows the building of a model of what is being seen is something very very different, a high level task.
For example determining the magnitude of an edge and the direction of an edge by looking at a pixel and its immediate neighbors is a very simple mathematical operation. And because of the locality of the inputs, pixel and immediate neighbors, it lends itself to massive parallelization. Interpreting a large number of edges over perhaps a large part of the field of view to recognize the immediate environment using a memory of stored models and templates has completely different computational requirements and an entirely different opportunity (or relative lack of it) regarding parallelization.
What if I say that there's a strong likelihood that X districts are gerrymandered after comparing statewide election results to popular votes in that state and other states?
If you say there is a strong likelihood after quickly visually scanning the boundaries of all the districts, then OK.:-)
If you want to say that X districts are gerrymandered after you take a look at their boundaries I'll accept that.
If you want to say X districts are gerrymandered after comparing statewide election results to the popular votes I'll reject that. Its not that simple.
Slashdot Mirror
Your laws are ridiculous.
Its legal to lie to government investigators in your jurisdiction? From the indictment: "trained an individual posing as a federal law enforcement officer to lie and conceal involvement in criminal activity from an internal agency investigation"
Your own citation proves you mistaken. He in fact knew about the illegal use.
He installed a trap. It malfunctioned. The vehicle was brought back for repair. The illegal contents revealed. He told the owners to get the stuff off his property. He then continued to do work for these people. He in fact transition from a state of "not knowing" to "knowing" and continued working with them.
... a former police officer has been dragged into court by the U.S. Department of Justice for teaching people how to beat a pseudoscientific method of detecting whether somebody is lying, a method that itself isn't even admissible as evidence courts in most parts of the world? What's next? Will the surgeon general drag people into court for pointing out that when consuming a homeopathic remedy with 30C dilution, one would need to swallow a volume greater than all the water present in all the oceans of our entire planet in order to stand a good chance of swallowing just one molecule of the original substance?
He entered into a conspiracy to lie to government investigators.
Here I thought he was teaching people how to see through the lies of government investigators.
From the indictment: "trained an individual posing as a federal law enforcement officer to lie and conceal involvement in criminal activity from an internal agency investigation"
Since polygraphs are not working, the investigators claim they do, and the only effect they have is if people believe in them.
So they are useful, a prop of intimidation. Belief trumps reality. If a subject is tricked into honesty or tricked into avoiding circumstances where they will face a polygraph its a win from the government's perspective.
A logical government would take this as evidence that the polygraph itself is a bullshit test, and dump it. However, we have a bunch of petulant man-children in charge who just prefer to stamp their feet and hit somebody over the head instead of thinking.
Investigators often rely on intimidation. A polygraph is a tool of intimidation. It does not matter so much if it in fact works reliably. All that matters is that the subject fears that it will work reliably. It may lead such subjects to being more honest, to crack under pressure or to avoid circumstances where they will face a polygraph.
It doesn't matter if its a con to the gov't, as long as it tends to modify behavior in the desired direction.
It doesn't matter what he said. The 1st Amendment is supposed to protect his right to say it. You can't just go around implying restrictions that are not written into the law. But that is what is happened and it's wrong.
The First Amendment protects his right to teach anti-polygraph techniques. The Bill of Rights protects him against being compelled to self incrimination. There is no protection against voluntary incrimination, which seems to be what happened. His self promotion of his services admitted a criminal conspiracy.
You're quite right, of course, but the thought of a 21st century government defending voodoo pseudo science still seems horribly anachronistic.
The device does not have to work. The subject only has to fear that it will work and be more inclined to answer truthfully or to simply avoid entering into circumstances where they will be tested.
Plus some circumstances do not need courtroom level precision. Lets say a company needs to pick one employee to count the cash at closing time and prepare a bank deposit. If the false negative rate is sufficiently low it could be argued that a polygraph test could be a useful supplement to other considerations. No one is going to jail. No one is being denied a job. It was just used to help pick who among a group would be assigned a task.
The preceding is just a hypothetical, I'm not actually advocating it.
... a former police officer has been dragged into court by the U.S. Department of Justice for teaching people how to beat a pseudoscientific method of detecting whether somebody is lying, a method that itself isn't even admissible as evidence courts in most parts of the world? What's next? Will the surgeon general drag people into court for pointing out that when consuming a homeopathic remedy with 30C dilution, one would need to swallow a volume greater than all the water present in all the oceans of our entire planet in order to stand a good chance of swallowing just one molecule of the original substance?
He entered into a conspiracy to lie to government investigators. He promoted himself as having the ability to teach people to lie to investigators. He claimed past clients have successfully lied to investigators for decades.
If he taught people to beat a polygraph and **always** said to never lie to government investigators he would not be in trouble.
He is in trouble not because he taught how to defeat a polygraph machine, but rather he taught people how to do it with the explicit intent to defeat government background and security checks. He explicitly said so. By saying so he enters into a conspiracy. He explicitly advised people to lie during a government investigation and agreed to help them conceal those lies. He admitted past clients have used his techniques to successfully lie to investigators for decades. And yes I know a polygraph detects stress not lies. Yet the fact remained he promoted his services as a method to conceal lies.
If he had claimed the training was for some other purpose and always told people to never employ these techniques during a real government polygraph and to always tell government investigators the truth he would not be in trouble.
In short the method he used to promote his services got him in trouble, not the services themselves.
Laptop. The wall socket only needs to be powered to charge. Leave it plugged in all the time if availability is unknown. The battery should be charged enough for plenty of coding time. Its not like the person is going there to practice coding in isolation, it sounds as if they will be there for other reasons and want to continue development despite a lack of an internet connection. I.e. coding in their spare time.
If ChromeBooks become popular in schools then 'Pearson Shovelware 2013' becomes a web app: 'Pearson Shovelware 2015 Cloud Edition'.
I teach physics and the list of software I can't run and for which there is no full equivalent is longer than the list of software equivalents I do use on Chromebooks.
I have had to maintain a classroom lab of Windows computers to run the software I need for data import and analysis, video analysis, computational physics, and simulations. If IT stops supporting them, I could easily run all of that software on Linux on the same machines for the foreseeable future.
A classroom machine for the teacher and/or classroom scale events is one thing. A machine for each student to carry around and use on a daily basis is something entirely different.
I once wrote chemistry software for the educational market. We targeted Windows and Mac because that is what schools/students had. If schools/students had ChromeBooks we would target ChromeBooks. OK, it would be a web app rather than a native app. Sad for the old C/ASM programmers like me. Hardly matters to the student.
And if it is via iOS 6 and Safari, that means all older devices are now unsafe to use as Web devices and Apple will probably never release a patch for them.
Actually Apple has released patches for "obsolete" OS versions when a critical security bug has been found. Especially for OS versions that are the final version that some particular device can upgrade to. I believe iOS 6.1.6 was exactly such an upgrade eight months ago for the iPhone 3GS. I recall my circa 2008 MacBook receiving a patch for Mac OS X Lion 10.7 in recent months.
I've used chrome books, dell laptops, mac books and iPads with external keyboards. The iPads are the least portable for typing. You need a decent desk/table for the iPad. Again, for typing not tapping. The more traditional laptop format is easier to balance and orient the screen if you want to just sit down on the grass somewhere and type. Plus when the lid closes the screen is protected, the iPad has to go into a sleeve of some sort for protection.
Chromebooks ... There are things you simply can't do, full stop
As a school oriented laptop that is probably a plus. Email, browser, google docs, ... plus the education focused classroom stuff ... that sounds highly capable. Being "locked down" doesn't seem like a negative here, probably solves more problems than it creates.
When does this shit start to count as criminal? Say a company encrypts all communications with their mailserver and this is part of their legal requirements to protect privacy. Can we sue the pants off them yet?
No. Because they are not removing *your* encryption. Think for a second, how could they do that, short of your ISP being the NSA. :-)
What they are failing to do is encrypt the channel between you and the ISP, its like you asked for secure https and they redirected you to plain http.
Its a non-issue for the legal and medical community since they will encrypt things as needed before it gets to the ISP.
They are not removing encryption. Its more like you requested a secure https connection and they give you a plain http connection.
If you encrypted your email before sending it then it will remain encrypted.
This is true, but the whole reason the NRA and AARP are effective is that they have large numbers of people who will actually show up and ruin political careers over one vote in Congress. You have to have enormous unanimity in your organization to make it work. What's the single "99%" issue that you think you can make millions of people take that kind of stand?
An elected official egregiously voting against the interests of the people, of demonstrating a far greater loyalty to campaign contributions than to votes. The point being to punish those politicians who consider voters secondary to donors, and to tolerate politicians who consider donors secondary to voters. Ie to remind politicians where the true power lies. And "tolerate" doesn't necessarily mean voting for, it simply means returning to voting on a politician's stance on issues when neither candidate warrants punitive voting.
There is no need for a single issue, just a consensus as to how the politician ranks voters vs donors. And keep in mind we don't need agreement of 99%, just enough to remove a person from office. Hell, it might take nothing more than people stopping to vote loyally for their party. To just be perfectly willing to vote against their party's officials when those officials are obviously bought and paid for.
Nothing new here. Climate Change was identified as a global destabilization factor long ago by the US military. Crop failures, droughts, flooding, etc leading to mass migrations and the conflict and strife that will arise our of these migrations.
Well, duh! Most people don't want to switch because that would mean they were wrong before.
Either that or money doesn't buy votes as much as some believe it does.
Absolutely correct. The true currency of politics is votes not money. Its still a one person one vote system, not a one dollar one vote system. The 99% actually have the power, they just fail to use it.
Money is just a tool to persuade the indifferent voters and money's influence is magnified by party loyalty. If you are loyal to your party you are irrelevant. Your party can ignore you because they have your vote, the other party can ignore you because they can not get your vote.
There is a simple way for the 99% to regain power. Punitive Voting. If a candidate misbehaves or egregiously fails to act in the best interests of the citizenry then vote against that candidate. Period. No exception. It is only through punitive voting that voters can teach politicians to fear the voters wrath.
Want example of punitive voting, look at the most powerful lobbies in the country. The NRA and the AARP. They do not control politicians through money, they control them with their literally millions of members who *will* show up on election day and vote punitively if the politician have voted against the lobby. This is why Democrats who never accept a single dollar from the NRA will vote the NRA's way. They fear the NRA membership (and like minded folks). This punitive voting scheme needs to be used on a larger scale by the public at large.
If a sufficient number of voters have decided to remove a candidate from office no amount of campaign contributions can save the candidate.
Note that this is a long term strategy. It relies on a darwinian process. Politicians need to be seen as losing office due to large scale punitive voting. Only them will they adapt and the 99% regain control.
If you think there is a quick solution, an easy fix, you have been deluded by the status quo. Its going to take time and the longer we delay the farther off regaining control is.
Determining how well input matches a particular model is independent on how well it matches another model, and can thus be done in parallel. And of course, since neural networks don't separate memory and processing units like von Neuman architecture does, it's hard to see how such operations could avoid parallelism.
I'm not saying there is no parallelism in pattern/template matching, just probably a lot less relative to low level primitives like edge detection.
Sorry but at what point does it become cognition ?
Far above "the level of individual neurons". Its conceivable that an individual neuron may be triggered by the magnitude of an edge, or the orientation of an edge. This is something that can be massively parallel. Now the matching of a collection of edges to a template, that could conceivably be paralleled -- testing some number of templates in parallel, but that would be something less massive than edge detection. I think this template matching, say collection of edges == cat, is getting to the point where its fair to speak of cognition. I don't want to defend the paper itself, but the notion that things at the cognition level are only modestly parallel is something plausible.
> Its about punishing bad representatives. Instilling fear into representatives that if they go too far they will loose their office
the system is set up to prevent this on two accounts:
1. there is no method of removing sitting politicians in federal office from power, without accusing them of a crime(i.e. recall)
You are having a massive "woosh" moment. One person, one vote. The 99% ***have*** the power, they just fail to ***use*** it. I realize that you have been indoctrinated with this notion that we are powerless but you really need to step back and think about this. Seriously, what is so hard to grasp about the concept that it **is** one person one vote, it **is not** one dollar one vote. No one is preventing the 99% from exercising this power other than the 99% themselves.
2. the conversation on politics is controlled via news media. the news can make issues go away if need be, and causes distractions.
Are they making this conversation go away? Do they stop conversations between you and family and friends? Classmates, coworkers, neighbors?
3. In a two party system people often have serious moral objections to policy, but at the same time don't like the other party's values.
You are not following what I have said. In a punitive voting scheme you vote against the incumbent who misbehaves or drifts too far from the interests of the people, period, no exception. It is only the certainty that a large block of voters will vote **against them** in the next election that adjusts their behavior. Again, this is **exactly** what the most successfully lobby groups in the country do, the NRA and the AARP. Democrats who do not accept NRA money will still not support gun measures opposed by the NRA due to punitive voting. Punitive voting works. It just needs to be used on a wider scale by the ordinary citizenry.
Once the occurrence of punitive voting is recognized a darwinian effect will take place. Politicians will fear going t far astray since not amount of campaign contributions can save them. Only when the politician stays in bounds does positions on issues come into play. This is the price for regaining control.
The system is currently rigged but you have completely misdiagnosed it. It is loyalty to a political party that makes the system rigged. If you are loyal to a party then they can ignore you because they have your vote, and the other party can ignore you because they can not attain your vote. This is the simple truth. This is what enables politicians to focus on things other than the voter's wishes.
Oh Please Edge Detection and Motion Detection. Are well known to be massively parrallel and occur at the level of individual neurons. It looks like this is just muddying the waters between functional units and internal parallelism
A vision system has multiple tasks to perform, low and high level tasks. The edge detection and motion detection that you describe are primitive feature extraction operators, low level tasks. Cognition, the interpretation of these features that allows the building of a model of what is being seen is something very very different, a high level task.
For example determining the magnitude of an edge and the direction of an edge by looking at a pixel and its immediate neighbors is a very simple mathematical operation. And because of the locality of the inputs, pixel and immediate neighbors, it lends itself to massive parallelization. Interpreting a large number of edges over perhaps a large part of the field of view to recognize the immediate environment using a memory of stored models and templates has completely different computational requirements and an entirely different opportunity (or relative lack of it) regarding parallelization.
What if I say that there's a strong likelihood that X districts are gerrymandered after comparing statewide election results to popular votes in that state and other states?
If you say there is a strong likelihood after quickly visually scanning the boundaries of all the districts, then OK. :-)
If you want to say that X districts are gerrymandered after you take a look at their boundaries I'll accept that.
If you want to say X districts are gerrymandered after comparing statewide election results to the popular votes I'll reject that. Its not that simple.