I don't know if I like the idea of random security people getting a peep show all day long. I think that's an invasion of privacy. Can't they at least fiddle with the contrast or something so the body outline and detail goes away, and just leaves bright areas for metal, etc?
Which part of an "voluntairy alternative of being frisked" didn't you understand? If you are afraid of other people seeing the outline of your body, opt for being frisked. Or better, don't carry things that offset the metal detector, and you're likely to pass on without further investigation.
If everybody in the us "decides" individually not to use airplanes, although it may be logical, there will be serious ramifications.
Oh yeah, certainly. But that's unlikely. It's more likely that when security gets less and more hijacks, bombing and shootings happen, more people decide to not use airplanes. I for one, prefer having security measures in place.
The customs service isn't a facility provided by any *airline*, it's in the airport: you have to go through it regardless of what airline you're flying on. in essence, what's forcing you to go through this is the government, to check you don't have any weapons/contraband/etc on you when you leave the country. hard to boycott that.
Don't confuse customs and security. The devices talked about are for security - which you have to go through regardless where you fly, although you don't need to go through security if you board your private plane. Security can be dealt with by the airport, the airline, the local autorities, or some combination. Security deals with the safety of people, and they usually give a rats ass whether you carry freshly cut flowers with you.
Customs on the other hand are concerned with goods going from one country to another. You won't go through customs if you fly from Chicago to New York, or from Paris to Amsterdam. But if you fly from London to Miami, even on your private plane, you go through customs. Usually you just get waived through customs when leaving the country (there are more laws and taxes for goods brought into a country than for goods leaving a country), and only deal with them entering a new country.
I don't think I've ever went through customs and had my luggage or myself go through a scanner, although I've seen the Californian agriculture department scan luggage.
Even if the hijacker gets into the cockpit, he now has a choice of passing out or having the pilot pass out.
That would be a bummer for the hijacker that hijacks a plane to get a large amount of money. However, it doesn't work for the political hijacker that's willing to die anyway - and that hasn't been uncommon in the past.
Furthermore, it's easily countered. Just start shooting people untill they drop the oxygen masks. Or have someone fake an illness that requires him or her to wear an oxygen mask and carry an oxygen tank.
There is nothing we can do to prevent a determined individual or group from commiting an act of terrorism.
And neither is there a way to stop Murphy from dropping planes out of the air. 100% security isn't possible, but even catching 50% of the bad guys means more safety. Safety is about *reducing* chances things go wrong - not a "don't bother if doesn't eliminate the risk". It's like seatbelts in a car. Seatbelts didn't stop people from dying in car accidents, but it saved a lot of lives.
What I care about is not being visually inspected beneath my clothing or touched without my consent.
That's something that has been answered a long, long time ago. If you don't want to be visually inspected, or touched without consent, you don't enter places where they do security checks, like airports, or concerts. You can always drive, take a private plane, or listen to a CD.
Planes and concerts aren't private places; you are there with a lot of other people. Which means that your rights aren't absolute - others have rights too. The right for safety for instance. Or fresh air. That's why on my airports you get checked, and on many flights, you aren't allowed to smoke.
When you buy a plane ticket, do you implicitly give consent for a strip search if the security detail deems it necessary?
Where is this "strip search" coming from? Strip search isn't discussed in the article. The scanner is a voluntary alternative to being frisked, which is already being done. If you don't want to be scanned, you can be frisked. Being searched invades your privacy, but with the new scanners you get a choice. I fail to understand why offering a choice is bad.
As for invading privacy due to security checks, it's too bad it's necessary. However, it would be foolish to ignore the freaks, criminals and terrorists out there, that would like to hijack planes, hostage people, or go on a killing spree for whatever reason they have. I feel safer, not because I'm searched, but because the other person is. And he/she feels safer because I'm searched. And yes, no security check is 100% waterproof. But even if they reduce the number of hijacks, hostages or other casualties by 10%, it's worth the little price.
Furthermore, how can we trust that no records are being kept.
You really think that putting hundreds of such machines on thousands of airports, that illegally take pictures will be kept a secret? In a country like the US?
Wouldn't a nice black and white photo be handy for prosecution purposes?
I think the prosecution will have a hard time getting an illegally obtained picture admitted as evidence.
I know I don't want my ass on airportscannergayporn.com.
Hmmm. I didn't know the scanners could detect someones sexual preferences. I also don't think security officers will let you do any sexual acts with a partner in front of the scanner. Furthermore, it's kind of hard to keep the fact that such scanners take illegal pictures a secret when you post them on a website, isn't it? And if you read the article, you'll see that the images won't show any details. You really think people would pay to see an image of your blurred ass?
What is it with Slashdot's dweeping of Beowulf clusters? Noone seems to be able to mention "new computer" without Beowulf being mentioned by someone.
Could someone please explain what on earth Hubble needs a Beowulf cluster for? It's kind of pointless of drooling over a Beowulf cluster without having an idea what to use it for.
-- Abigail
Re:Javalobby members lack of objectivity
on
RMS on Java and GPL
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· Score: 1
They WERE IN FAVOR of Sun dropping out of the EMCA and ISO talks, for example - yet paradoxically were against the 3% J2EE Sun licensing fees! So, Java Lobbiers - which is it? Will you continue to blindly support Sun and put up with all the licensing fees associated with that decision or will you all collectively sit on your asses hoping SOMEONE ELSE will provide you with free Java environment and tools instead of assisting GPL'd projects such as Classpath and Kaffe?
Have you stopped beating your wife yet?
I don't understand your question. If Javalobby was against the 3% J2EE fee, isn't it kind of obvious that they aren't blindly supporting Sun?
-- Abigail
Re:One example doesn't make the point strongly eno
on
RMS on Java and GPL
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· Score: 1
Free software often adds enhancements beyond the standards, but it rarely violates them. It would be counterproductive to do it.
But going beyond the standards can be counterproductive as well. Look at HTML for a prime example. I've also run into cases were I wanted to compile software that claimed to be compilable by "any ANSI compliant compiler", but forgot to mention "as long as the compiler is gcc". It's usually trivial things, (like C++ style comments for instance), but still.
Having development tools add enhancements beyond the standards make it harder to develop programs that are standard compliant - as often things like compilers are the only means the developer is aware off that tests for compliance. (Yes, I am aware of the -ansi switch of gcc. gcc isn't the point, adding enhancements is).
That doesn't mean adding enhancements is always bad - it's a double edged sword.
Because he invented [drumroll] Moderation! The whole concept of users rating comments, thus driving good comments upward and bad comments downward has resulted in tremendous time savings for every user of Slashdot.
Except of course it has been around on Usenet as 'NoCem' for many years. In a infinitely better form, as the reader can pick which moderators to listen to, and which moderators to ignore.
(But then, slashdot is just a reinvention of Usenet, in a worse way, and with spam^Wads on every page.;-))
Funny, a topic like this came up last Monday, a Perl Mongers (user group) meeting. We discussed person of the century (although it's a year early). Person of the century is probably more appropriate, as the article mentions names like Linus Torvalds, Jonathan Postel and Tim Berners-Lee, all of who might have been candidates for a person of the year, but not this year.
Here are some names in the category computer/net/geek person that were mentioned, in some random order.
Bill Gates. Noone likes him, but it's hard to deny his influence in the last decade.
Jonathan Postel. Too obscure for Time magazine of course. And giving an award to him is really giving an award to all the people that did the ground breaking work. But Postel was the first to die.
The person who invented the transistor (I forgot his name). Without the transistor, computing wouldn't have been were it is now.
Alan Turing, for his theoretical work, and his practical work with the first computing devices.
Jon Von Neumann, for formalizing the concept of a Von Neumann architecture.
Godel, because Turing build on his work.
Grace Hopper. For her work on the concept of programming languages.
John Backus of Fortran and Algol fame.
After thinking about it for some time, my vote would go to Grace Hopper. Interestingly enough, Thompson/Ritchie, Knuth, and Berners-Lee were not mentioned. That Thorvalds or Wall weren't mentioned didn't quite surprise me.
A general person of the century was discussed as well. Suggestions were Hitler, Churchill, Kennedy, Roosevelt, Ghandi. But someone mentioned Truman. Because he dropped "the bomb", and because of the Marshall plans. But also because he didn't drop "the bomb" in Korea. It took me a while to realize that first using atomic weapons, and then realizing that it's better not to ever do that again might have been the most important decision of the century. The world would have looked extremely different had we continued to use atomic weapons.
As for the person of the millennium, Galileo was the clear favourite, way ahead of Newton.
-- Abigail
Re:Forget vaccuming.. how about mowing the lawn?
on
Cool Personal Robots
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· Score: 1
I enjoy building robots and almost all of them have had more functionality than this and the most I've ever spent to design and build one was about $5000.
I really doubt that. Unless of course you're not counting labour. But with a robot, most of the costs go into R&D and programming, which is almost all labour costs. $100/hour on average is a low estimate. If the company consists of just 6 people, $5000 pays them for a single 8 hour day.
That leaves you $200 to buy the materials. And they all have to do their work on the street, writing their programs with pen and paper.
There are various reasons. First, the cost of producing a robot is more than just the cost of assembly and raw materials. It took investment to design the thing, and the investment has to pay off. Then there's the cost of infrastructure, and capital goods (like machinery) to produce it.
The other reason has to do with the economic market. The market for robots like this only has a few producers. Hence, they can basically set the price to anything they want - most companies will set the price to a level that yields the highest expected returns. This is about the most basic economic rule that exists.
This task takes a lot of time, especially in buildings built in the pre CADD days that need rennovation/expansion. I can imagine letting this thing loose after buisness hours in a building, or at someone's house, and it could map all of the walls, etc and then one could add neccessary details
That's not very practical at all. Very few offices and houses have their furniture arranged in such a away that a robot could roam around freely to survey the walls. A human could do such things much faster, also mapping windows, staircases, etc.
Why doesn't he map his own paths based on previous collisions?
I got the impression from the article that the robot certainly could do it that. However, that's a long process, and it'll have to bumb at every possible place of a wall to know for certain he can't go through it. And since there isn't much fun in a robot bumbing into things, the fast drawing of a map is an option.
Excuse me? You just gone done telling me how happy you were that someone could take your code and relicense it as proprietary software. If you want things that way, that's fine, but the proprietary company is clearly preventing the users from doing what they did to that copy of the software.
Therein lies the rub. The real problem with these systems is that the "George's"(dumb+cheap security guards, think Half-Life) of the world won't be happy being interrupted by false positives. No matter how tuned these systems get, there will always be perfectly innocuous activities that will trigger the alarms.
But it isn't that no surveillance is going on now. Is there for a person being watched a real difference whether the computer makes a false positive, or the human? You mention:
Don't flirt in a certain manner--it causes the sensors to think you're a rapist.
Well, yes, but it now might cause a human to think you're a rapist. What's the difference? Is being wrongly accused of being a rapist fine if it's a human accusing you, but it's wrong if it's a combination of a human and a computer?
Don't laugh too loud while raising your hands--the sensors might think you have a gun.
Is that worse than being shot by a cop who thinks you have a gun?
It's wrong if you get arrested because of "the computer told me so", but it isn't worse than "because Harry told me so".
Ok, bad examples, but the point is, you can't follow what people do and try to make expectations. Most humans are by desire unpredictable, they will do what they can to be, because it gets them noticed.
I guess there aren't many people here that have studied psychology, or behavioral sciences, but you're wrong. While not true for each individual act, people do act in predictable ways on the average. And yes, there will be cases missed - be it missed by the computer, or the human, or both. There will be false positives, by the computer, by humans, by both. (Of course, human security guards missing crimes, and making false positives have been around for as long as there have been security guards, 5000, 6000 years). Noone is going to argue the system will detect every potential crime/congestion/suicide, and never score a false positive. That's unrealistic, from both the computer and the human. But a system that detects a high number of positive cases, with a low number of false positives certainly has merrit.
Suppose there's a car thief in the parking lot. He looks suspicious and you call the cops. Great, what has he done? The cops have no legal right to arrest him, and he goes free, even if he was going to steal a car. Great.
Great indeed. Someone out there will still have his car to drive home.
Or take a picture of scissors at a very weird angle.
If they really want to do this (whatever the merits are) they need to get serious about how they recognize and place objects,
How often do you drive around the parking lot on two wheels, creating pictures of weird angles of your car?
Numbers in the article mentioned 98% detection of positives, and 1% false positives. That's not bad for heuristics. And don't forget, we are talking about computer aid, not computer decision. It's just the computer saying "you might want to look at this".
Slashdot Mirror
Which part of an "voluntairy alternative of being frisked" didn't you understand? If you are afraid of other people seeing the outline of your body, opt for being frisked. Or better, don't carry things that offset the metal detector, and you're likely to pass on without further investigation.
If everybody in the us "decides" individually not to use airplanes, although it may be logical, there will be serious ramifications.
Oh yeah, certainly. But that's unlikely. It's more likely that when security gets less and more hijacks, bombing and shootings happen, more people decide to not use airplanes. I for one, prefer having security measures in place.
-- Abigail
Don't confuse customs and security. The devices talked about are for security - which you have to go through regardless where you fly, although you don't need to go through security if you board your private plane. Security can be dealt with by the airport, the airline, the local autorities, or some combination. Security deals with the safety of people, and they usually give a rats ass whether you carry freshly cut flowers with you.
Customs on the other hand are concerned with goods going from one country to another. You won't go through customs if you fly from Chicago to New York, or from Paris to Amsterdam. But if you fly from London to Miami, even on your private plane, you go through customs. Usually you just get waived through customs when leaving the country (there are more laws and taxes for goods brought into a country than for goods leaving a country), and only deal with them entering a new country.
I don't think I've ever went through customs and had my luggage or myself go through a scanner, although I've seen the Californian agriculture department scan luggage.
-- Abigail
Why don't you read the article? This question is answered there, using simple words.
-- Abigail
That would be a bummer for the hijacker that hijacks a plane to get a large amount of money. However, it doesn't work for the political hijacker that's willing to die anyway - and that hasn't been uncommon in the past.
Furthermore, it's easily countered. Just start shooting people untill they drop the oxygen masks. Or have someone fake an illness that requires him or her to wear an oxygen mask and carry an oxygen tank.
-- Abigail
And neither is there a way to stop Murphy from dropping planes out of the air. 100% security isn't possible, but even catching 50% of the bad guys means more safety. Safety is about *reducing* chances things go wrong - not a "don't bother if doesn't eliminate the risk". It's like seatbelts in a car. Seatbelts didn't stop people from dying in car accidents, but it saved a lot of lives.
-- Abigail
That's something that has been answered a long, long time ago. If you don't want to be visually inspected, or touched without consent, you don't enter places where they do security checks, like airports, or concerts. You can always drive, take a private plane, or listen to a CD.
Planes and concerts aren't private places; you are there with a lot of other people. Which means that your rights aren't absolute - others have rights too. The right for safety for instance. Or fresh air. That's why on my airports you get checked, and on many flights, you aren't allowed to smoke.
-- Abigail
Where is this "strip search" coming from? Strip search isn't discussed in the article. The scanner is a voluntary alternative to being frisked, which is already being done. If you don't want to be scanned, you can be frisked. Being searched invades your privacy, but with the new scanners you get a choice. I fail to understand why offering a choice is bad.
As for invading privacy due to security checks, it's too bad it's necessary. However, it would be foolish to ignore the freaks, criminals and terrorists out there, that would like to hijack planes, hostage people, or go on a killing spree for whatever reason they have. I feel safer, not because I'm searched, but because the other person is. And he/she feels safer because I'm searched. And yes, no security check is 100% waterproof. But even if they reduce the number of hijacks, hostages or other casualties by 10%, it's worth the little price.
Furthermore, how can we trust that no records are being kept.
You really think that putting hundreds of such machines on thousands of airports, that illegally take pictures will be kept a secret? In a country like the US?
Wouldn't a nice black and white photo be handy for prosecution purposes?
I think the prosecution will have a hard time getting an illegally obtained picture admitted as evidence.
I know I don't want my ass on airportscannergayporn.com.
Hmmm. I didn't know the scanners could detect someones sexual preferences. I also don't think security officers will let you do any sexual acts with a partner in front of the scanner.
Furthermore, it's kind of hard to keep the fact that such scanners take illegal pictures a secret when you post them on a website, isn't it? And if you read the article, you'll see that the images won't show any details. You really think people would pay to see an image of your blurred ass?
-- Abigail
What is it with Slashdot's dweeping of Beowulf clusters? Noone seems to be able to mention "new computer" without Beowulf being mentioned by someone.
Could someone please explain what on earth Hubble needs a Beowulf cluster for? It's kind of pointless of drooling over a Beowulf cluster without having an idea what to use it for.
-- Abigail
Have you stopped beating your wife yet?
I don't understand your question. If Javalobby was against the 3% J2EE fee, isn't it kind of obvious that they aren't blindly supporting Sun?
-- Abigail
But going beyond the standards can be counterproductive as well. Look at HTML for a prime example. I've also run into cases were I wanted to compile software that claimed to be compilable by "any ANSI compliant compiler", but forgot to mention "as long as the compiler is gcc". It's usually trivial things, (like C++ style comments for instance), but still.
Having development tools add enhancements beyond the standards make it harder to develop programs that are standard compliant - as often things like compilers are the only means the developer is aware off that tests for compliance. (Yes, I am aware of the -ansi switch of gcc. gcc isn't the point, adding enhancements is).
That doesn't mean adding enhancements is always bad - it's a double edged sword.
-- Abigail
Except of course it has been around on Usenet as 'NoCem' for many years. In a infinitely better form, as the reader can pick which moderators to listen to, and which moderators to ignore.
(But then, slashdot is just a reinvention of Usenet, in a worse way, and with spam^Wads on every page. ;-))
-- Abigail
Here are some names in the category computer/net/geek person that were mentioned, in some random order.
After thinking about it for some time, my vote would go to Grace Hopper. Interestingly enough, Thompson/Ritchie, Knuth, and Berners-Lee were not mentioned. That Thorvalds or Wall weren't mentioned didn't quite surprise me.
A general person of the century was discussed as well. Suggestions were Hitler, Churchill, Kennedy, Roosevelt, Ghandi. But someone mentioned Truman. Because he dropped "the bomb", and because of the Marshall plans. But also because he didn't drop "the bomb" in Korea. It took me a while to realize that first using atomic weapons, and then realizing that it's better not to ever do that again might have been the most important decision of the century. The world would have looked extremely different had we continued to use atomic weapons.
As for the person of the millennium, Galileo was the clear favourite, way ahead of Newton.
-- Abigail
You want to build a goat?
-- Abigail
Cooking food is *not* a simple task. Specially not if you have to perform it within the compounds of a normal household kitchen.
-- Add salt and pepper to taste Abigail
I really doubt that. Unless of course you're not counting labour. But with a robot, most of the costs go into R&D and programming, which is almost all labour costs. $100/hour on average is a low estimate. If the company consists of just 6 people, $5000 pays them for a single 8 hour day.
That leaves you $200 to buy the materials. And they all have to do their work on the street, writing their programs with pen and paper.
-- Abigail
There are various reasons. First, the cost of producing a robot is more than just the cost of assembly and raw materials. It took investment to design the thing, and the investment has to pay off. Then there's the cost of infrastructure, and capital goods (like machinery) to produce it.
The other reason has to do with the economic market. The market for robots like this only has a few producers. Hence, they can basically set the price to anything they want - most companies will set the price to a level that yields the highest expected returns. This is about the most basic economic rule that exists.
-- Abigail
That's not very practical at all. Very few offices and houses have their furniture arranged in such a away that a robot could roam around freely to survey the walls. A human could do such things much faster, also mapping windows, staircases, etc.
-- Abigail
I got the impression from the article that the robot certainly could do it that. However, that's a long process, and it'll have to bumb at every possible place of a wall to know for certain he can't go through it. And since there isn't much fun in a robot bumbing into things, the fast drawing of a map is an option.
-- Abigail
The person to be blamed is the one who told the security to turn off his brains. Which could be the security guard themself.
Of course, any legal system that allows "looking suspicious" as a defense is to blame as well - computer aided surveillance doesn't change that.
You seem to be making a case against surveillance, that's fine, but that's the point of the discussion.
-- Abigail
Indeed. That's a feature.
-- Abigail
But it isn't that no surveillance is going on now. Is there for a person being watched a real difference whether the computer makes a false positive, or the human? You mention:
Don't flirt in a certain manner--it causes the sensors to think you're a rapist.
Well, yes, but it now might cause a human to think you're a rapist. What's the difference? Is being wrongly accused of being a rapist fine if it's a human accusing you, but it's wrong if it's a combination of a human and a computer?
Don't laugh too loud while raising your hands--the sensors might think you have a gun.
Is that worse than being shot by a cop who thinks you have a gun?
It's wrong if you get arrested because of "the computer told me so", but it isn't worse than "because Harry told me so".
-- Abigail
I guess there aren't many people here that have studied psychology, or behavioral sciences, but you're wrong. While not true for each individual act, people do act in predictable ways on the average. And yes, there will be cases missed - be it missed by the computer, or the human, or both. There will be false positives, by the computer, by humans, by both. (Of course, human security guards missing crimes, and making false positives have been around for as long as there have been security guards, 5000, 6000 years). Noone is going to argue the system will detect every potential crime/congestion/suicide, and never score a false positive. That's unrealistic, from both the computer and the human. But a system that detects a high number of positive cases, with a low number of false positives certainly has merrit.
-- Abigail
Great indeed. Someone out there will still have his car to drive home.
-- Abigail
If they really want to do this (whatever the merits are) they need to get serious about how they recognize and place objects,
How often do you drive around the parking lot on two wheels, creating pictures of weird angles of your car?
Numbers in the article mentioned 98% detection of positives, and 1% false positives. That's not bad for heuristics. And don't forget, we are talking about computer aid, not computer decision. It's just the computer saying "you might want to look at this".
-- Abigail
Because the killers at Columbine wore black trenchcoats, anyone wearing a black trenchcoat is a killer.
While I don't agree with what the faculty did, could you please explain how "disrespectful" becomes "killer"?
-- Abigail