Imagine how many dead-beat dads would be forced to pay.
About the same as now - ID cards don't force someone to pay up, nor do they determine your true financial status.
Imagine how many jobs would would newly occupied by legal workers.
Very few - many illegal workers take shady jobs for cash where the employer couldn't care less about their identity.
Imagine how much nicer getting on a commercial airplane would be.
It will be exactly the same, only slower, because you'll have to submit to a biometric scan.
Imagine how much this is going to cost. Imagine that the money could instead be used for something that would make a significant difference to security.
1. If you live in the UK (as I do) you can be required to provide ID already, at any time, for practically any reason, by the boys (and girls) in blue.
Nope. I'm not required to carry any ID whatsoever under the current laws. As a driver I can be stopped and required to _later_ provide my drivers license and other driving-related documents, but that's all. I'm not required to have a passport.
3. If you've set foot outside your house in the last 10 (ish) years your face is known - see all those cameras?
My face being seen and my face being known are not the same thing. The CCTV doesn't track and identify individuals, nor does it stop them in the street to demand their papers.
TrueCrypt has this sort of functionality. You create an encrypted volume (chunk of random data), then put another, secret encrypted volume inside it (more random data). You can put a few soft pr0n files in the outer volume, and give up that key when the police demand it. There's no way to determine that the inner volume even exists.
Perhaps you could tell that to the families of those who died on 911.
Sure - when you've explained to them why their government responded to that tragedy by going to war with a country that had nothing to do with it.
Reminding us that bad things happened to innocent people does not automatically win arguments, nor does it excuse governments from actually justifying their actions.
I am also sure that the families are smart enough to want useful action, not a vague declaration of "war" against "some bad guys, somewhere"
The "War on Terror" is a meaningless phrase used to justify anything that the US feels like doing in another country.
If you were less keen on wiping people out who disagree with you, there might be less people who disagreed with you.
And Londeners have known about terrorism for decades due to the bombing activities of the IRA - partly funded by American donations. Go figure.
Re:At least they're taking extra precautions...
on
Tinfoil Hat House
·
· Score: 2, Informative
'Space blankets' are AFAIK absolutely standard hiking/camping gear - you'd be an idiot to go away without one.
They're compact, light, and they could save you from hypothermia.
And they are no more use than any other sheet of light plastic (except to keep the sun off you). Most heat is lost from the body by convection and conduction and evaporation of water or sweat - NOT by radiation.
Hillwalkers in the UK are recommended by instructors to carry orange plastic survival bags instead - a little more bulky, but more effective since you can get inside, it'll keep water and wind out better, and it's less likely to blow away. And you can fold the damn thing up again properly.
Well, im belgian, and this eID is actually a great advance for us, we will be able to fill out tax forms and other administrative forms, maybe vote and in the future us this eID as authentification for buying prescription drugs (yeah we get most of our medical costs paid for).
Funny, I can fill out tax forms and collect medicines just fine without an ID card already.
It also solves a lot of problems between the different language communities we have around here, since a frenchman in flanders (where they speak dutch) could fill out his forms in french.
What's language translation got to do with ID cards?
Indeed this will mean that with time, you could make sure your Credit card could only be used by you (or anyone who stole your card, has an untracable card reader device AND has your 4 digit pin code).
Or anyone who installs a trojan onto your PC to incercept the electronic credentials, probably.
They aren't even necessarily unique - at least, not at the level of detail used in practice. There's only a statistical assurance that your fingerprint/iris/hand-shape etc doesn't come appear the same as someone else's. Real problems have been encountered with the use of fingerprints in criminal cases.
All depends what you're trying to achieve; yes, you get grain in film - but you get bad noise in CCDs in low light, for example. And artifacts from JPEG compression, unless you enjoy storing just a handful of monster TIFF images on your groaning flashcard.
As for raw resolution, IIRC, lens tests for good 35 mm lenses will reach 80-100 line-pairs per mm, on normal ISO/ASA 125 film (i.e. not slow high-res film). So for a 24x36mm negative, that's 22-35 megapixels. That's the limit of the lenses - so CCD approaching this will be just as good res as 35mm film.
And you can forget digital for anywhere remote, unless you're going to carry spare batteries and a solar charger too...
If people don't understand it they won't trust it. And if they don't trust it they won't use it.
Exactly.
There's a recent article: Security Considerations for Remote Electronic Voting, Communications of the ACM, December 2002, Vol 45, No 12, pp 39-44
which concludes that we should steer well clear for the moment. Why?:
Although fraud exists in the offline election system, it is tolerated because there is no choice. The system is localized so it's hard to propagate fraud beyond a district.
Possibility of DDOS - the whole election system crashes
Unreliability of DNS
Well-financed groups have a big incentive to interfere, including foreign governemnts and multinational corporations
Widespread cluelessness - most people would not be able to assess whether the system was secure or whether a voting website was a fake, or whether a certificate was valid, etc.
Exploits that change setting to a remote, hostile web proxy (and other types of virus or worm attack coinciding with an election)
No way to audit the whole system; software vendors could even install code in commonly used applications (can you think of a suitable one?) to interfere with the election.
Various social engineering attacks (Latest! election system bugged - please submit your vote again)
Grid computing is definied as super-efficient, superfast clustering... provided you use any languaged BESIDES Java to impliment your algorithms
That's rather missing the point; sure, for the heavy numerical stuff you'll write in C or (gasp) FORTRAN, but for setting up, coordinating and monitoring the distributed processes, Java is ideal - performance doesn't matter much there, and all the networking stuff is relatively painless.
This was also used a long time back in the Acorn RiscPC (RISC OS ) - any spare VRAM was automatically added to the system memory. It was a big deal when you only had 8MB main RAM but 4MB VRAM...I guess things have come full circle now that video cards have so much memory.
No, jackoff, Brazil is in The Americas, or maybe South America. Show me a region of the world outside the US borders called simply "America", and I'll go down on your mom. Again. Now stop nitpicking, and start thinking.
There's a tiny village north of Cambridge, England, called America. IRMFI.
Have a look at this - using semantic web stuff (RDF, etc) for photo indexing:
Ontology-Based Photo Annotation, A. Th. (Guus) Schreiber, Barbara Dubbeldam, Jan Wielemaker and Bob Wielinga, IEEE Intelligent Systems, no. 3, May/June 2001, 66-74
I'd guess it'd depend on how you defined speeding. Is going 35 in a 30 zone speeding...?
There was (is) an interesting anti-speeding advertisement on TV here in the UK. They show a car travelling in an urban street at 35 mph, which suddenly slams on the brakes...The voice-over indicates where the car would have stopped, had it been observing the 30mph limit. The cars slides on...and on...and hits a child more than 20 feet beyond the 30 mph stop point.
The point being, most drivers don't appreciate stopping distances fully, and aren't capable of choosing a safe speed for the road and conditions.
I would second the recommendation for "Just Java 2" by Peter Van Der Linden. It's clearly written, (with humorous interludes!) and actually explains the ideas, unlike some books that just give a dry language reference with no context or rationale. He is also honest about some of Java's shortcomings, which is useful.
When I first heard about Smalltalk I downloaded Squeak and it put me off completely. The default demo looks decades out of date; blocky clashing colours, alien look-and-feel and (by their own admission) poor documentation. Looks awful to the uninitiated.
The Dolphin demo and tutorial is completely different - much more in the vein of Sun's excellent Java tutorials. That's one of the things Smalltalk needs if it is ever going to recover some mainstream interest.
So I'd encourage you to look at modern open-source GUIs before you assume they need a lot of help in that department.
The original poster didn't say there was anything wrong with open-source GUIs in particular; presumably it's just that one can play around with them in a way that won't be possible with certain proprietary GUIs.
And all modern (G)UIs could do with improvement; there are lots of operations that require the user to do unnecessary work, or slow them down.
How long will this classification take and how long would any information be good?
How long did it take for everybody to put in META tags and register their pages regularly with search engines? It's a gradual continuous process, not all-or-nothing.
Joe Blow over at Geocities just put up his Britney Spears page. One day he may find Bjork his muse. He sure isn't going to inform some search engine of his updates. How long before the search engine comes back around to check his page out? Anything can be outdated by the time you find it in a search engine, which is not so different a situation than exists now,
Exactly - the situation isn't any different as far as registering the information goes. The difference is in the quality of the information, and the fact that machines can do something useful with it, and that we can now tell easily that the Spears page is about Britney, not about primitive weaponry.
but no one is trying to put any handcuffs on web publishers now.
What handcuffs are you referring to? Nobody controls the web, you know that - you can publish your pages however you want.
If we can create better ways then you're free to use them or not, but better ways will mean more of the right people find your site.
Slashdot Mirror
Have you ever USED a Java application or applet on Windows? Once they launch they perform pretty good. Once they launch.
On every computer I use with Windows it takes up to 20-30 seconds to launch Java.
Takes about 2-3 seconds on all the PCs I use. Perhaps you need to defrag your disks ;-).
Imagine how many dead-beat dads would be forced to pay.
About the same as now - ID cards don't force someone to pay up, nor do they determine your true financial status.
Imagine how many jobs would would newly occupied by legal workers.
Very few - many illegal workers take shady jobs for cash where the employer couldn't care less about their identity.
Imagine how much nicer getting on a commercial airplane would be.
It will be exactly the same, only slower, because you'll have to submit to a biometric scan.
Imagine how much this is going to cost. Imagine that the money could instead be used for something that would make a significant difference to security.
1. If you live in the UK (as I do) you can be required to provide ID already, at any time, for practically any reason, by the boys (and girls) in blue.
Nope. I'm not required to carry any ID whatsoever under the current laws. As a driver I can be stopped and required to _later_ provide my drivers license and other driving-related documents, but that's all. I'm not required to have a passport.
3. If you've set foot outside your house in the last 10 (ish) years your face is known - see all those cameras?
My face being seen and my face being known are not the same thing. The CCTV doesn't track and identify individuals, nor does it stop them in the street to demand their papers.
TrueCrypt has this sort of functionality. You create an encrypted volume (chunk of random data), then put another, secret encrypted volume inside it (more random data). You can put a few soft pr0n files in the outer volume, and give up that key when the police demand it. There's no way to determine that the inner volume even exists.
Pigs are convenient, in that, well, how can I put this...according to a vet friend, pigs have an impressive, er, volume.
Sure - when you've explained to them why their government responded to that tragedy by going to war with a country that had nothing to do with it.
Reminding us that bad things happened to innocent people does not automatically win arguments, nor does it excuse governments from actually justifying their actions.
I am also sure that the families are smart enough to want useful action, not a vague declaration of "war" against "some bad guys, somewhere"
Now there's logic! Only on Slashdot (or the NYT) is that +4.
Oh really? I suppose you think that bombing the crap out of people brings their neighbours around to your point of view?
Fair point - consider it replaced.
The "War on Terror" is a meaningless phrase used to justify anything that the US feels like doing in another country.
If you were less keen on wiping people out who disagree with you, there might be less people who disagreed with you.
And Londeners have known about terrorism for decades due to the bombing activities of the IRA - partly funded by American donations. Go figure.
They're compact, light, and they could save you from hypothermia.
And they are no more use than any other sheet of light plastic (except to keep the sun off you). Most heat is lost from the body by convection and conduction and evaporation of water or sweat - NOT by radiation.
Hillwalkers in the UK are recommended by instructors to carry orange plastic survival bags instead - a little more bulky, but more effective since you can get inside, it'll keep water and wind out better, and it's less likely to blow away. And you can fold the damn thing up again properly.
Funny, I can fill out tax forms and collect medicines just fine without an ID card already.
It also solves a lot of problems between the different language communities we have around here, since a frenchman in flanders (where they speak dutch) could fill out his forms in french.
What's language translation got to do with ID cards?
Indeed this will mean that with time, you could make sure your Credit card could only be used by you (or anyone who stole your card, has an untracable card reader device AND has your 4 digit pin code).
Or anyone who installs a trojan onto your PC to incercept the electronic credentials, probably.
If you do something like this, semantics ARE included in the tags.
No they aren't. The above XML is precisely equivalent to
The only reason it appears to have semantics is that the names have English meanings to humans. It means diddly-squat to a machine.
They aren't even necessarily unique - at least, not at the level of detail used in practice. There's only a statistical assurance that your fingerprint/iris/hand-shape etc doesn't come appear the same as someone else's. Real problems have been encountered with the use of fingerprints in criminal cases.
All depends what you're trying to achieve; yes, you get grain in film - but you get bad noise in CCDs in low light, for example. And artifacts from JPEG compression, unless you enjoy storing just a handful of monster TIFF images on your groaning flashcard.
As for raw resolution, IIRC, lens tests for good 35 mm lenses will reach 80-100 line-pairs per mm, on normal ISO/ASA 125 film (i.e. not slow high-res film). So for a 24x36mm negative, that's 22-35 megapixels. That's the limit of the lenses - so CCD approaching this will be just as good res as 35mm film.
And you can forget digital for anywhere remote, unless you're going to carry spare batteries and a solar charger too...
Exactly.
There's a recent article: Security Considerations for Remote Electronic Voting, Communications of the ACM, December 2002, Vol 45, No 12, pp 39-44
which concludes that we should steer well clear for the moment. Why?:
Grid computing is definied as super-efficient, superfast clustering... provided you use any languaged BESIDES Java to impliment your algorithms
That's rather missing the point; sure, for the heavy numerical stuff you'll write in C or (gasp) FORTRAN, but for setting up, coordinating and monitoring the distributed processes, Java is ideal - performance doesn't matter much there, and all the networking stuff is relatively painless.
This was also used a long time back in the Acorn RiscPC (RISC OS ) - any spare VRAM was automatically added to the system memory. It was a big deal when you only had 8MB main RAM but 4MB VRAM...I guess things have come full circle now that video cards have so much memory.
There's a tiny village north of Cambridge, England, called America. IRMFI.
Momma's waiting...
Have a look at this - using semantic web stuff (RDF, etc) for photo indexing:
Ontology-Based Photo Annotation, A. Th. (Guus) Schreiber, Barbara Dubbeldam, Jan Wielemaker and Bob Wielinga, IEEE Intelligent Systems, no. 3, May/June 2001, 66-74
www.swi.psy.uva.nl/usr/Schreiber/papers/Schreibe r0 1a.pdf
"fluorescent" is spelt thus. It's not that hard.
Thank you for your attention.
There was (is) an interesting anti-speeding advertisement on TV here in the UK. They show a car travelling in an urban street at 35 mph, which suddenly slams on the brakes...The voice-over indicates where the car would have stopped, had it been observing the 30mph limit. The cars slides on...and on...and hits a child more than 20 feet beyond the 30 mph stop point.
The point being, most drivers don't appreciate stopping distances fully, and aren't capable of choosing a safe speed for the road and conditions.
I would second the recommendation for "Just Java 2" by Peter Van Der Linden. It's clearly written, (with humorous interludes!) and actually explains the ideas, unlike some books that just give a dry language reference with no context or rationale. He is also honest about some of Java's shortcomings, which is useful.
When I first heard about Smalltalk I downloaded Squeak and it put me off completely. The default demo looks decades out of date; blocky clashing colours, alien look-and-feel and (by their own admission) poor documentation. Looks awful to the uninitiated.
The Dolphin demo and tutorial is completely different - much more in the vein of Sun's excellent Java tutorials. That's one of the things Smalltalk needs if it is ever going to recover some mainstream interest.
The original poster didn't say there was anything wrong with open-source GUIs in particular; presumably it's just that one can play around with them in a way that won't be possible with certain proprietary GUIs. And all modern (G)UIs could do with improvement; there are lots of operations that require the user to do unnecessary work, or slow them down.
How long did it take for everybody to put in META tags and register their pages regularly with search engines? It's a gradual continuous process, not all-or-nothing.
Joe Blow over at Geocities just put up his Britney Spears page. One day he may find Bjork his muse. He sure isn't going to inform some search engine of his updates. How long before the search engine comes back around to check his page out? Anything can be outdated by the time you find it in a search engine, which is not so different a situation than exists now,
Exactly - the situation isn't any different as far as registering the information goes. The difference is in the quality of the information, and the fact that machines can do something useful with it, and that we can now tell easily that the Spears page is about Britney, not about primitive weaponry.
but no one is trying to put any handcuffs on web publishers now.
What handcuffs are you referring to? Nobody controls the web, you know that - you can publish your pages however you want.
If we can create better ways then you're free to use them or not, but better ways will mean more of the right people find your site.