The W3C has, somewhat unintentionally, become a central clearinghouse that defines how humans fundamentally communicate with each other in this digital age. As a result, it is necessarily the W3C's responsibility to pay attention to how their actions affect society.
I would like to know, both from a W3C standpoint, and from your own personal belief, how you feel that RAND will improve human society. Also, do you feel that it is befitting a standards organization to approve a standard that is patented?
Which is more important in such a case, that the patent is honored, which could kill the standard or even cause hardship for those who can't afford it, or that the standard is released royalty free so that all of humanity can benefit? How do you reconcile this statement with W3C's role in society?
I'd really like to see a mobile computing version of this. This idea applied to some of the mobile computing input technologies I've seen may actually get your input rates up and your learning curve down - both crucial to the continued growth of mobile computing.
First off, hats off to a career that has been inspiring to us all. I know that I, for one, cried for joy on the day that cryptographic export was opened up.
Now, the question:
It is hard for the public to hear the message "crypto backdoors are bad" without associating it with an anarchist anti-gov't message.
First off, do you believe it is possible for the gov't to implement a crypto backdoor without "Bad Guys" getting into the backdoor and thereby compromising security?
Secondly, do you have any positive examples or anecdotes of why strong crypto is good for gov't, or at least not detrimental?
Apparantly you don't understand the point of a list such as this. You seem to think this music has been banned from the radio for all time? Music on the radio is meant to be enjoyed. Most people, after the WTC events, would pick up on these "keywords" or themes and stop enjoying the music -- and possibly TURN THE CHANNEL.
I understand that, and you make good points about a few of the songs I mentioned, but I think they are clearly erring on the side of stupidity in this case. A lot of the songs on the list are ANTI-war or ANTI-terrorism, just the sort of thing we should be listening to. And about turning the channel? I'm already calling all my friends, asking them not to support Clear Channel radio. I don't see how they really accomplished that objective...
The entire list seems to be, much like the FBI's monitoring program, generated from keywords. I agree entirely with your comment about Rage... but check this out:
Dave Matthews Band "Crash into me"... Apparently the word Crash is just bad stuff. Of course, every time I hear this song, it makes me want to go buy a gun.
Smashing Pumpkins "Bullet with Butterfly Wings"... I'm assuming for the refrain "music is my airplane"... ummm. That's all I got to say. Ummm. Those lyrics sure are questionable!
Red Hot Chili Peppers, "Aeroplane"... see above
Frank Sinatra "New York"... what were they thinking!!!
People, if you haven't, go read the list. Some of the songs on the list are certainly questionable and callous, but a lot of them are really good music that just happens to mention a word or two. The music itself and its message doesn't come anywhere near questionable, but it has a keyword in it...
I couldn't follow the link, so I navigated the site a little... Not sure if tomshardware is slashdotted or if the link was wrong... in any case here's the mirror I got to, page came up immediately:
Only the rich people with lots of money can afford the lawyers to defend their freedom and liberty
You bring up an excellent problem with our society currently. But the problem is more one of how does one fairly defend freedom and liberty more than how does one obtain them. The mere fact that this is an issue that many people acknowledge points out that it works. The only way to ever obtain perfect freedom is to be a society of one. Other humans will always be impinging on your freedom, intentionally or not.
The question then is not how free you are, but whether your freedom is recognized, and how fair the arbitration process is. Granted, it could be made more fair here in the states, but I would wager that the vast majority of Americans never butt up against that problem.
You ask what I believe in... my belief in this matter is that certain rights are inalienable, but fragile. That every individual deserves the same basic freedoms and liberties, and that they must be fought to be preserved. In this case, that means walking carefully until all the facts are known.
I don't mean having a full trial by any means, but I do mean having irrefutable proof that Bin Laden (or whoever the evidence points to) did it. The events of yesterday were indeed an act of war, but a war like mankind has only begun to see. These were not the actions of a people-sanctioned or supported government. These were the actions of a few men out of a large population. The answer is not missles or bombs or wholesale slaughter. The answer is surgery. Cut the ugly tumor out of the heart of the nation and let it heal.
What I meant about freedom of speech is you can't condemn someone for hating America or for wanting to be responsible for this or for cheering that this happened. Sure, these things may be morally criminal after yesterday's events, but they are not legally criminal. I urge caution pointing the finger at anyone, for how terrible it would be to find out later that we pointed at the wrong person.
Casualty means an injury, not necessarily a death... I used to have the same misconception about the definition, took me a while to get it straightened out...
Lots of other people seem to have it too, I've been hearing the two terms used interchangeably today...
To set the record straight:
Main Entry: casualty
Pronunciation: 'ka-zh&l-tE, 'kazh-w&l-, 'ka-zh&-w&l-
Function: noun
Inflected Form(s): plural -ties
Date: 15th century
1 archaic : CHANCE, FORTUNE
2 : serious or fatal accident : DISASTER
3 a : a military person lost through death, wounds, injury, sickness, internment, or capture or through being missing in action b : a person or thing injured, lost, or destroyed : VICTIM
Casualty therefore is anyone who could be considered injured seriously enough to be out of action for a while, but still alive. When reporting casualty figures, those deceased are usually listed seperately to differentiate between the two.
I'd just like to second what everyone else has been saying.
Someone somewhere does need to be taught the lesson that America will defend its people viciously against actions of this sort. But lots of people everywhere need to know for a fact that America stands for freedom and liberty, and that we will never as a people let stand any action that takes freedom or liberty away from any individual. The moment that we condemn anyone, criminal, terrorist organization, or foreign country without due process we have given up all of our freedoms.
Oh, and I'm sure this is a VERY unpopular sentiment today, but most so-called "terrorist organizations" are perfectly legal, legitimate organizations. They're generally illegal in their countries due to sedition, but freedom of speech means freedom of speech for everyone. Sure, a large number of them don't see any harm with hurting people to get their point made, but we, the American People, have to give them the benefit of the doubt. Until and unless we have irrefutable proof that a particular organization is responsible, we should do NOTHING in terms of retaliation.
Okay, I'm done with my rant. Now will all the stupid ignorant people that want to bomb the whole fucking world just cause they're hurting please shut the fuck up and think about what you're saying?
I spoke with a friend who was on one of the top five floors of Tower One, the second tower to be hit. Actually, I spoke to the guy that was talking on the phone with him at the time. When the first tower (Tower Two) was hit, he said "There's been some kind of bomb or something, we're evacuating, I gotta go." (click)
So, they started evacuating both towers when the first plane hit... I can imagine that many people got out. Noone's heard from him since then, of course... but that's not exactly unusual today.
Actually, many historians have said that war is a failure of the diplomatic process.
Until Hitler, the bulk of humanity believed that war is never the answer. Hitler (and others that were not quite so well known at the time, such as Napolean or Genghis Khan) was a megalomaniac and this changed things. Up until then, the main goal of war was not wholesale slaughter, the killing of people, but convincing your enemy you are right. Either in annexing land or in diplomacy or whatever.
But Hitler convinced us that sometimes you just have to stop talkinga and start dropping bombs.
For those responding with flames about this, this information is public knowledge. If I know it, then the great enemy (whoever it turns out to be) certainly knew it before I did. Now details on where they're going, etc. I would of course not give out (not that I have those details). Understand, a family member is on that plane. I don't want it hurt anymore than anyone else does.
I have a direct line to certain officials involved in this... for those interested in details:
The outer facing of corridor 5 has fallen. It was a mostly empty section and the fire is mostly under control. Many casualties, but no deaths confirmed yet.
The US military is on alert. For security reasons I can't post more details, but the 82nd airborne division has been told to suit up and according to one report one unit is already in the air, though they're not sure where they'll be landing yet. Speculation is that they'll land at a known friendly base in the middle east and then decide where to go from there.
Obviously, I can't reveal my source for this, but its a close relative who is 'in the know'.
DFLP has said that they are not responsible. The TV station confirmed that the call they received this morning was anonymous. High level DFLP officials are in contact with the US gov't, and according to ABC are offering to cooperate fully.
Well, I didn't mean my quick Matrix analogy to be entirely representative; just a quick example of what might be possible. Also, I agree that the midi analogy is somewhat accurate. Assume that there is a large quantity of images you'll find in film that could be loaded into a codetable, then just transmit the index into the codetable. Unfortunately, the codetable must have significantly less images that the total number of possible images in it for this to be effective.
I still think IFS is involved in here somewhere. I did a quick overview of IFS several years ago, and it certainly had the potential for this sort of thing, if you could figure out how to add coloring algorithms to the standard...
Okay, sounds pretty bogus, huh? I mean, take full quality video and stereo cd sound, you're talking about 310 Megabits of data every second at the sizes they talk about.
Even if you take lossy compression such as DivX and reduce the video size, you're still talking about 100 k for decent video and 1 Mbit for anything close to full screen quality.
But we're talking data here... what about information? Data is bits. Information is the meaning of the bits, and a lot of information is highly redundant. Take english. I heard once that there are 1.2 bits per character in the english language; that's why text files get such good compression rates with gzip.
Video is not so highly compressible, mainly because the codec doesn't understand images. Codecs generally just split the image up into smaller and smaller blocks and look for exactly repeating patterns. Lossy compression allows them to look for roughly repeating patterns, and pretend they're exact. Not exactly rocket science.
Take a scene; any one. Like the one from the Matrix. Where Keanu Reeves is in his trench coat, black t-shirt, and black jeans, and an evil computer agent is standing in the background firing at him. You see Keanu bent over at the knees and there's 5 bullets coming at him with a particular trajectory pattern, with cool spiral air deformations coming off the back. Know the one I'm talking about?
Guess what? I just described it in 312 characters. About 400 bits. Through in another 100 to precisely place everything and another 500 to describe background scenery, etc. Sure, it was REALLY lossy compression, but that's an example of the kind of thing you can do if you have an understanding of what's in video. At the very least, you can decide WHAT you can ignore and focus on preserving the really important stuff.
Like, most people won't notice if the sky isn't the exact same shade of blue. Or if the flat blue areas of the sky have a slightly different texture applied to them.
Okay, this is all so far pure pie-in-the-sky theorizing so far... I just wanted to set all that up to point out that this seems possible. HOW could it be done? Well, this is pure speculation but...
A few years ago lots of people were looking at using various types of fractals to compress images down. This flourished briefly as the IFS file format (c. 1995), but the patents on the algorithm allowed the author to charge an exhorbitant royalty, so it never got off the ground other than for a few high-end video conferencing systems. These systems used (you guess it!) regular phone lines. Sure, maybe not 28.8 modems and maybe not full screen (though I distinctly remember that the frame rate was between 24 and 30 fps, depending on what kind of processor you used), but from there it's just process improvements.
Plus, I imagine that MP3 has taught us a lot about lossy compression that could be applied to this sort of thing. I don't personally know anything about the details of MP3, but assume that its methods can be applied to fractal compression with approximately the same rate, e.g. at 3x-6x compression at negligible quality loss and 12x at maximal compression... and that would be enough to take this technology to the levels this guy is talking about...
Ok, I'm done dreaming. Anyone have any comments? Does anyone remember this IFS format or have any more info on it than my hazy recollection?
Here's the e-mail I (and I imagine about 100,000 other people) got from their Customer Care Supervisor, Laura Meurer. Interesting to note that the e-mail address this came from was "REMEDY01@borders.com", indicating to me that they changed their story to remedy the PR problem... anyways, without further ado, here's the e-mail:
8/27/01
Dear James McCracken,
Thank you very much for your expression of concern regarding the Glasgow
Herald article ('Big Borders bookshop is watching you," Sunday 26 August).
In common with most large retailers, we use security cameras throughout our
stores as part of a range of security and loss prevention tools. We have
overt cameras installed in public areas throughout the store, as well as
behind the tills etc., for the protection of staff and customers. We do not
use cameras in any private space.
Borders (UK) Ltd. was approached by Dectel, the British distributors of
SmartFace, to pilot its security system that is designed to identify known
shoplifters. The device scans visitors entering a store and measures the
distances between 80 facial features to create a unique digital "face map."
The digital image is then converted to a mathematical formula and searches
the database for a match. Visionics, the USA manufacturer of this system
reports that images that are not matched on the database are discarded.
Borders was offered a trial of this system in our two London store locations
on Charing Cross Road and Oxford Street. We will not participate in a trial
of the technology and have made no commitment to implement this security
system.
Borders strongly values the human rights and privacy of our staff and our
customers. At Borders, we feel we have an obligation to provide a safe
environment for our customers and staff. Just as important is our obligation
to respond fully and honestly to customers' concerns. We promise to continue
to do so, while offering the best range and service available anywhere.
Actually, the machines running these are likely to have a very trimmed kernel, specifically built for this kind of thing...
Forget the seven nines thing, point is, this is a BIOS for a system that has to be up and up all the time. If it ever needs to reboot, it can't stand a reboot of more than a couple seconds... and for whatever reason, you can't have redundant processors (think in-car computer)
Well, it's an old desktop system, so a sleep or suspend mode wouldn't be supported by the BIOS...
Besides which, the idea of having my own code for the BIOS is VERY cool. I could do all sorts of things (like sending init messages to other pieces of hardware in my car, such as LCD screens, GPS units, etc.) with that...
Slashdot Mirror
The W3C has, somewhat unintentionally, become a central clearinghouse that defines how humans fundamentally communicate with each other in this digital age. As a result, it is necessarily the W3C's responsibility to pay attention to how their actions affect society.
I would like to know, both from a W3C standpoint, and from your own personal belief, how you feel that RAND will improve human society. Also, do you feel that it is befitting a standards organization to approve a standard that is patented?
Which is more important in such a case, that the patent is honored, which could kill the standard or even cause hardship for those who can't afford it, or that the standard is released royalty free so that all of humanity can benefit? How do you reconcile this statement with W3C's role in society?
Thanks,
Jim McCracken
I'd really like to see a mobile computing version of this. This idea applied to some of the mobile computing input technologies I've seen may actually get your input rates up and your learning curve down - both crucial to the continued growth of mobile computing.
Oh no! We have to stop this travesty of the modern age! CD Copy protection is evil!!!
I say we boycott N*Sync!
Oh, wait... that wouldn't have any effect...
Never mind, resume what you were doing before I barged in...
First off, hats off to a career that has been inspiring to us all. I know that I, for one, cried for joy on the day that cryptographic export was opened up.
Now, the question:
It is hard for the public to hear the message "crypto backdoors are bad" without associating it with an anarchist anti-gov't message.
First off, do you believe it is possible for the gov't to implement a crypto backdoor without "Bad Guys" getting into the backdoor and thereby compromising security?
Secondly, do you have any positive examples or anecdotes of why strong crypto is good for gov't, or at least not detrimental?
Thanks, and once again congrats.
Apparantly you don't understand the point of a list such as this. You seem to think this music has been banned from the radio for all time? Music on the radio is meant to be enjoyed. Most people, after the WTC events, would pick up on these "keywords" or themes and stop enjoying the music -- and possibly TURN THE CHANNEL.
I understand that, and you make good points about a few of the songs I mentioned, but I think they are clearly erring on the side of stupidity in this case. A lot of the songs on the list are ANTI-war or ANTI-terrorism, just the sort of thing we should be listening to. And about turning the channel? I'm already calling all my friends, asking them not to support Clear Channel radio. I don't see how they really accomplished that objective...
Thanks for the correction! That puts Bullet with Butterfly Wings on the barely questionable list...
Yeah, a lot of this just doesn't make sense. I'm calling friends now, urging them to boycott ClearChannel radio in our area.
The entire list seems to be, much like the FBI's monitoring program, generated from keywords. I agree entirely with your comment about Rage... but check this out:
Dave Matthews Band "Crash into me"... Apparently the word Crash is just bad stuff. Of course, every time I hear this song, it makes me want to go buy a gun.
Smashing Pumpkins "Bullet with Butterfly Wings"... I'm assuming for the refrain "music is my airplane"... ummm. That's all I got to say. Ummm. Those lyrics sure are questionable!
Red Hot Chili Peppers, "Aeroplane"... see above
Frank Sinatra "New York"... what were they thinking!!!
People, if you haven't, go read the list. Some of the songs on the list are certainly questionable and callous, but a lot of them are really good music that just happens to mention a word or two. The music itself and its message doesn't come anywhere near questionable, but it has a keyword in it...
I couldn't follow the link, so I navigated the site a little... Not sure if tomshardware is slashdotted or if the link was wrong... in any case here's the mirror I got to, page came up immediately:
x .html
http://www6.tomshardware.com/cpu/01q3/010917/inde
I tried the same link both in the www6 and in the root subdomain, and both gave me a 404... try this link if thats still the case...
Only the rich people with lots of money can afford the lawyers to defend their freedom and liberty
You bring up an excellent problem with our society currently. But the problem is more one of how does one fairly defend freedom and liberty more than how does one obtain them. The mere fact that this is an issue that many people acknowledge points out that it works. The only way to ever obtain perfect freedom is to be a society of one. Other humans will always be impinging on your freedom, intentionally or not.
The question then is not how free you are, but whether your freedom is recognized, and how fair the arbitration process is. Granted, it could be made more fair here in the states, but I would wager that the vast majority of Americans never butt up against that problem.
You ask what I believe in... my belief in this matter is that certain rights are inalienable, but fragile. That every individual deserves the same basic freedoms and liberties, and that they must be fought to be preserved. In this case, that means walking carefully until all the facts are known.
I don't mean having a full trial by any means, but I do mean having irrefutable proof that Bin Laden (or whoever the evidence points to) did it. The events of yesterday were indeed an act of war, but a war like mankind has only begun to see. These were not the actions of a people-sanctioned or supported government. These were the actions of a few men out of a large population. The answer is not missles or bombs or wholesale slaughter. The answer is surgery. Cut the ugly tumor out of the heart of the nation and let it heal.
What I meant about freedom of speech is you can't condemn someone for hating America or for wanting to be responsible for this or for cheering that this happened. Sure, these things may be morally criminal after yesterday's events, but they are not legally criminal. I urge caution pointing the finger at anyone, for how terrible it would be to find out later that we pointed at the wrong person.
Casualty means an injury, not necessarily a death... I used to have the same misconception about the definition, took me a while to get it straightened out...
Lots of other people seem to have it too, I've been hearing the two terms used interchangeably today...
To set the record straight:
Main Entry: casualty
Pronunciation: 'ka-zh&l-tE, 'kazh-w&l-, 'ka-zh&-w&l-
Function: noun
Inflected Form(s): plural -ties
Date: 15th century
1 archaic : CHANCE, FORTUNE
2 : serious or fatal accident : DISASTER
3 a : a military person lost through death, wounds, injury, sickness, internment, or capture or through being missing in action b : a person or thing injured, lost, or destroyed : VICTIM
Casualty therefore is anyone who could be considered injured seriously enough to be out of action for a while, but still alive. When reporting casualty figures, those deceased are usually listed seperately to differentiate between the two.
I'd just like to second what everyone else has been saying.
Someone somewhere does need to be taught the lesson that America will defend its people viciously against actions of this sort. But lots of people everywhere need to know for a fact that America stands for freedom and liberty, and that we will never as a people let stand any action that takes freedom or liberty away from any individual. The moment that we condemn anyone, criminal, terrorist organization, or foreign country without due process we have given up all of our freedoms.
Oh, and I'm sure this is a VERY unpopular sentiment today, but most so-called "terrorist organizations" are perfectly legal, legitimate organizations. They're generally illegal in their countries due to sedition, but freedom of speech means freedom of speech for everyone. Sure, a large number of them don't see any harm with hurting people to get their point made, but we, the American People, have to give them the benefit of the doubt. Until and unless we have irrefutable proof that a particular organization is responsible, we should do NOTHING in terms of retaliation.
Okay, I'm done with my rant. Now will all the stupid ignorant people that want to bomb the whole fucking world just cause they're hurting please shut the fuck up and think about what you're saying?
Not that I'm too hopeful that will happen...
I spoke with a friend who was on one of the top five floors of Tower One, the second tower to be hit. Actually, I spoke to the guy that was talking on the phone with him at the time. When the first tower (Tower Two) was hit, he said "There's been some kind of bomb or something, we're evacuating, I gotta go." (click)
So, they started evacuating both towers when the first plane hit... I can imagine that many people got out. Noone's heard from him since then, of course... but that's not exactly unusual today.
Actually, many historians have said that war is a failure of the diplomatic process.
Until Hitler, the bulk of humanity believed that war is never the answer. Hitler (and others that were not quite so well known at the time, such as Napolean or Genghis Khan) was a megalomaniac and this changed things. Up until then, the main goal of war was not wholesale slaughter, the killing of people, but convincing your enemy you are right. Either in annexing land or in diplomacy or whatever.
But Hitler convinced us that sometimes you just have to stop talkinga and start dropping bombs.
For those responding with flames about this, this information is public knowledge. If I know it, then the great enemy (whoever it turns out to be) certainly knew it before I did. Now details on where they're going, etc. I would of course not give out (not that I have those details). Understand, a family member is on that plane. I don't want it hurt anymore than anyone else does.
I have a direct line to certain officials involved in this... for those interested in details:
The outer facing of corridor 5 has fallen. It was a mostly empty section and the fire is mostly under control. Many casualties, but no deaths confirmed yet.
It may be redundant, but I don't care... I definitely agree. Funny does not apply.
The US military is on alert. For security reasons I can't post more details, but the 82nd airborne division has been told to suit up and according to one report one unit is already in the air, though they're not sure where they'll be landing yet. Speculation is that they'll land at a known friendly base in the middle east and then decide where to go from there.
Obviously, I can't reveal my source for this, but its a close relative who is 'in the know'.
DFLP has said that they are not responsible. The TV station confirmed that the call they received this morning was anonymous. High level DFLP officials are in contact with the US gov't, and according to ABC are offering to cooperate fully.
Response to the replies:
Well, I didn't mean my quick Matrix analogy to be entirely representative; just a quick example of what might be possible. Also, I agree that the midi analogy is somewhat accurate. Assume that there is a large quantity of images you'll find in film that could be loaded into a codetable, then just transmit the index into the codetable. Unfortunately, the codetable must have significantly less images that the total number of possible images in it for this to be effective.
I still think IFS is involved in here somewhere. I did a quick overview of IFS several years ago, and it certainly had the potential for this sort of thing, if you could figure out how to add coloring algorithms to the standard...
Okay, sounds pretty bogus, huh? I mean, take full quality video and stereo cd sound, you're talking about 310 Megabits of data every second at the sizes they talk about.
Even if you take lossy compression such as DivX and reduce the video size, you're still talking about 100 k for decent video and 1 Mbit for anything close to full screen quality.
But we're talking data here... what about information? Data is bits. Information is the meaning of the bits, and a lot of information is highly redundant. Take english. I heard once that there are 1.2 bits per character in the english language; that's why text files get such good compression rates with gzip.
Video is not so highly compressible, mainly because the codec doesn't understand images. Codecs generally just split the image up into smaller and smaller blocks and look for exactly repeating patterns. Lossy compression allows them to look for roughly repeating patterns, and pretend they're exact. Not exactly rocket science.
Take a scene; any one. Like the one from the Matrix. Where Keanu Reeves is in his trench coat, black t-shirt, and black jeans, and an evil computer agent is standing in the background firing at him. You see Keanu bent over at the knees and there's 5 bullets coming at him with a particular trajectory pattern, with cool spiral air deformations coming off the back. Know the one I'm talking about?
Guess what? I just described it in 312 characters. About 400 bits. Through in another 100 to precisely place everything and another 500 to describe background scenery, etc. Sure, it was REALLY lossy compression, but that's an example of the kind of thing you can do if you have an understanding of what's in video. At the very least, you can decide WHAT you can ignore and focus on preserving the really important stuff.
Like, most people won't notice if the sky isn't the exact same shade of blue. Or if the flat blue areas of the sky have a slightly different texture applied to them.
Okay, this is all so far pure pie-in-the-sky theorizing so far... I just wanted to set all that up to point out that this seems possible. HOW could it be done? Well, this is pure speculation but...
A few years ago lots of people were looking at using various types of fractals to compress images down. This flourished briefly as the IFS file format (c. 1995), but the patents on the algorithm allowed the author to charge an exhorbitant royalty, so it never got off the ground other than for a few high-end video conferencing systems. These systems used (you guess it!) regular phone lines. Sure, maybe not 28.8 modems and maybe not full screen (though I distinctly remember that the frame rate was between 24 and 30 fps, depending on what kind of processor you used), but from there it's just process improvements.
Plus, I imagine that MP3 has taught us a lot about lossy compression that could be applied to this sort of thing. I don't personally know anything about the details of MP3, but assume that its methods can be applied to fractal compression with approximately the same rate, e.g. at 3x-6x compression at negligible quality loss and 12x at maximal compression... and that would be enough to take this technology to the levels this guy is talking about...
Ok, I'm done dreaming. Anyone have any comments? Does anyone remember this IFS format or have any more info on it than my hazy recollection?
Here's the e-mail I (and I imagine about 100,000 other people) got from their Customer Care Supervisor, Laura Meurer. Interesting to note that the e-mail address this came from was "REMEDY01@borders.com", indicating to me that they changed their story to remedy the PR problem... anyways, without further ado, here's the e-mail:
8/27/01
Dear James McCracken,
Thank you very much for your expression of concern regarding the Glasgow
Herald article ('Big Borders bookshop is watching you," Sunday 26 August).
In common with most large retailers, we use security cameras throughout our
stores as part of a range of security and loss prevention tools. We have
overt cameras installed in public areas throughout the store, as well as
behind the tills etc., for the protection of staff and customers. We do not
use cameras in any private space.
Borders (UK) Ltd. was approached by Dectel, the British distributors of
SmartFace, to pilot its security system that is designed to identify known
shoplifters. The device scans visitors entering a store and measures the
distances between 80 facial features to create a unique digital "face map."
The digital image is then converted to a mathematical formula and searches
the database for a match. Visionics, the USA manufacturer of this system
reports that images that are not matched on the database are discarded.
Borders was offered a trial of this system in our two London store locations
on Charing Cross Road and Oxford Street. We will not participate in a trial
of the technology and have made no commitment to implement this security
system.
Borders strongly values the human rights and privacy of our staff and our
customers. At Borders, we feel we have an obligation to provide a safe
environment for our customers and staff. Just as important is our obligation
to respond fully and honestly to customers' concerns. We promise to continue
to do so, while offering the best range and service available anywhere.
Thank you for contacting us.
I'll check tonight... I was almost positive it was 5.4, though.
Actually, the machines running these are likely to have a very trimmed kernel, specifically built for this kind of thing...
Forget the seven nines thing, point is, this is a BIOS for a system that has to be up and up all the time. If it ever needs to reboot, it can't stand a reboot of more than a couple seconds... and for whatever reason, you can't have redundant processors (think in-car computer)
Well, it's an old desktop system, so a sleep or suspend mode wouldn't be supported by the BIOS...
Besides which, the idea of having my own code for the BIOS is VERY cool. I could do all sorts of things (like sending init messages to other pieces of hardware in my car, such as LCD screens, GPS units, etc.) with that...