No, that's not what I mean. You've removed the new "useful" features that I'm okay with - and might want - but in doing so you've told me to replace everything I have with systemd.
Much more useful to me would be to get that listing, with those log tails, on a sysVinit. And that is far from impossible.
What we have here is bundling issues. Want the nice feature that does something quite simple? Then change everything you have to our system.
That's systemd's problem (and your response is their attitude) in a nutshell.
My problem with things like systemd is not that they have nice features - lots of things have nice features. Windows' Shadow Copies is a lovely feature that's a lot easier to configure that some alternative equivalents, etc.
It's that they put those nice features into some new paradigm of configuration when you could have just added them to the existing system.
From someone who's had state-paid health services since the day they were born, and not had cause to use them since I became an adult, and could comfortably afford additional medical cover if necessary:
- - Welcome to your first glimpse of civilisation. - -
By your argument, all kinds of things are redistributions of wealth. Back in the dark ages, you had to pay for fire insurance. If you didn't, and your house burned down, fire trucks would turn up to watch it burn or ask for a huge premium before they would pour water on it. Your insured neighbours, however, they'd douse with water to make sure they weren't damaged. You used to get little badges to put on your house to show your premium was up-to-date and which houses which fire brigade (because there were several competing ones) was to save.
Police, fire and medical are three essential services in a modern civilisation. You don't want people paying to get their own private police force that responds to them in preference to you. You benefit from paying into a central fund that funds all police activity for everyone.
You don't want to do the same for fire. And you don't want to do the same for medical. Trust me. You're blinkered by living in a country that's not known anything else. Even medical insurance is a disgusting state of affairs, before we get into actually having to PAY for medical attention.
If "poor" is a life choice, it's amazing that those people don't just go and make money, isn't it?
You work hard and you pay tax. That tax goes to the country. The country spends it on things that need doing WHETHER OR NOT YOU PERSONALLY BENEFIT. Street lighting on roads that you never intend to use, pregnancy and childcare services even if you're a man, flood defences even if you live inland, tornado funds even if you don't live in an affected state.
If you don't get this, it's just sheer arrogance.
What an ignorant... Really not worth my time to reply.
To be honest, the rest of the developed world is still pointing and laughing at you as a country for NOT GOING FAR ENOUGH. Making people pay private companies in order to get medical attention... it's abominable.
A citation is nothing more than a note that you used this particular method and rather than include your own justification of the accuracy of that method, you cite the papers you need. They are basically a scientific "include".
For any technique where you don't need to include the obvious, you won't bother to cite them either. Unless you're purely citing for the sake of it. In the same way that you don't cite the papers that your citations do, it's pointless if nobody is going to question the accuracy of the method you've chosen to cite.
As such, "most cited paper" is like "most followers on Twitter". It's used as a metric only by idiots who think celebrity is more important than substance.
If someone can replace the URL's passed to wget as root, presumably it's only a small step to actually have them execute without needed wget to actually overwrite existing filesystem files.
But if you have arbitrary FTP URL's from untrusted sources piped straight into wget on a server you run, you have bigger problems than someone trashing your filesystem or overwriting your/etc/passwd.
As an opinion that has been held by many a scientist, that's fine.
We don't know what went bang. We can't even begin to have the language to discuss multi-dimensional physics and what happened before time began. There's a dark area from a certain part in time backwards. Though people may argue where that area is, they can't argue that beyond it is the unknown.
Those people who choose to refer to the unknown as "God"... that makes sense. You can understand that. Whether you personally agree or not, it's a logical, consistent, unproveable but not unreasonable belief.
The problem comes when people draw the dark areas to be 6000 years ago, or the bounds of the Earth. The problem comes when people who believe in a "God" (of whatever name, concept or type) but not in the Bible and are attacked for that.
That's always been the problem. Unfortunately, those people will also ignore the Pope too. The Bible doesn't mention Popes, except through the same interpretation as it mentions just about anything else if you try hard enough to twist the words.
As an atheistic/agnostic person of a scientific bent, I have always accepted the "There's space for a God in the unknown" arguments. That's fine. No problem at all. Some pretty major scientists believe the same, not that that's an influence or accreditation in any way.
But the ideological problem you get is that, historically, the dark area has shifted further and further back in time and in space and still people hold onto it. At one time the skies were the raft of the gods because they were unreachable and unknowable to the peoples of the time. That slowly gets pushed back until the boundary of the unknown is so far away as to be ludicrous, from mere memory to recorded history to inference from dinosaur bones, to carbon dating, to universe expansion, and further back.
And, actually, we have a number of theories of why the Big Bang happened. Nobody studying it really believes that something in the middle of nothing clicked its ethereal fingers and in no time the universe came into being. The theory is that that are substrates and energy fields permeating outside the universe and that when those waves of energy collide, matter, space and time can occur as a result of the fallout. It's kind of what the Higgs Boson is all about - a particle that results from Higgs fields that permeate everything.
If and when we prove that, the dark area will shrink back again and I'm sure the religious will still continue to point at the square millimeter that is left and say "Ah ha! God could still be in there!", and so on, ad infinitum.
The recognition of this slowly grows over time. The papacy refused to believe Copernicus at one point. But he was right. So they accepted, and shifted God back two spaces again. It happens all the time, and has happened for thousands of years.
Nobody wants religious people to have no place in which to put their God, if they want to believe in him. But equally, we don't really want God sitting on the front porch where he's easily disproved by everything around him either.
Being logical is not incompatible with religion. Never has been. However being illogical is incompatible with science.
However, ignorance is also the domain of the ignorant.
It's okay not to be aware that someone has investigated an area before, or even to ignore people because you have a hint they may be wrong because of some anomaly. But ignorance of the in-depth side of what you're ignoring is dangerous.
As such, you aren't aware that information cannot travel faster than c (lower-case). The wavefront of a particular wave might be seen to but it cannot be usefully used to transmit information (or objects, or anything) faster than c. That's why nobody's bothered to look further into your phenomenon - we realised the limit and have no reason to doubt it. And the plasma antenna stuff is unrelated, sorry.
Getting a firm grasp of a topic you choose to ignore is vital.
To be honest, even without a firm grasp on the intricacies of space-time, light-speed, and relativity, your post just seems like nonsense anyway.
There has rarely (I would state never but I'm a scientist in my mind, so I can't without proof that's true) been a time in history when someone has found something that everyone else had totally ignored. They may have not believed it. They may have not fully understood the principles underlying it. They may have been uninterested and didn't pursue the details further. They may have been unable to test it. But scientific revolutions don't happen because some guy in a shed decided to ignore quantum physics and stamp his own path.
They happen because that guy looks at the established science in another way, or digs into a hole in the science that nobody had looked into before, or finds a hole that nobody else had seen. That doesn't happen from guesses and ignorance of what the previous science held true. The gentleman scientist of yesteryear could "know" all of known science at the time, or as near as damn it. Thus people like Newton etc. were coming from a position of knowledge and expanding it. Nowadays, you can spend your life following just one tiny branch of any particular science, so it's all the easier to be ignorant.
I'm sorry, but you read like a crackpot. Determined that someone with no scientific knowledge will walk in and spot a hole in relativity. It's not what happens. What happens is that patent clerks get up to speed on the latest science, go one step further (which is the really hard part, and the reason such people get to be called Doctor or Professor of the relevant science - those titles confer the knowledge that you found something in academia that nobody else knew, no matter how trivial), and realise the science wasn't "wrong" so much as "incomplete".
I have any number of personal hypotheses about scientific phenomena, it entertains my head to have them and even if they are misconceptions, they help me understand "my" science. When my doctorate-holding or lecture-giving friends come round, I keep my mouth shut. Because I'm certain that they are beliefs held from a position of ignorance of the relevant science and that bringing me up to speed (which would, inevitably, explain my theories into the bin) would take the length of their career.
If you've ever received the answer "It doesn't quite work like that", then you need to dig further yourself.
It's a sad fact that even from the doctors and professors of science I know, the number of "breakthroughs", no matter how tiny, is infinitesimally small. I don't claim to come close to their knowledge on the basics, I've never found something new to science in my life, and I don't think I could understand most of what I try to. Or why it's wrong.
Pet theories are nice pets. When you have the knowledge to prove them true, you'll have the knowledge to abandon them just as easily. Until then, I suggest you err on the side of abandonment.
Sometimes it's better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt. Until, that is, you truly have something that a science journal is willing to publish.
The problem would be that the virtualisation of ARM on Intel or vice versa would suffer quite large performance problems. You're basically into emulation, rather than virtualisation.
So even if they could do that, you wouldn't see much point in doing it over just running your Intel stuff on Intel hypervisors and your ARM stuff on ARM hypervisors. What you'd gain would be, well, almost nothing.
At least it's a showing, though, that the Microsoft code is in a big better shape that they can port things across. That is, of course, assuming it ever comes to fruition. Microsoft has had a lot of non-Intel architectures over the years and they've always played second-fiddle and then been obsoleted.
Quite what they expect to get from aiming at ARM, I can't see. You won't get Intel compatibility, so you're effectively running another OS that - actually - only specialist places that are running huge compute farms etc. are using, or smaller gadgets where you'll struggle to sell a non-compatible Windows (like Windows CE was).
It all depends on scale. If you're expecting us to be up and running with a populous of 7bn within a year, maybe you're right.
But if there's only 100,000 left, spread out over the globe, with the rich pickings of a former civilisation to kickstart from, then we don't actually need a lot of raw materials as you suggest.
You know what you'd need long before coal, iron, copper, zinc? Food. And though the initial pickings may be easy, before long you'll turn any old bit of scrap into a plough (not plow, fecking Americans) so you can ensure some future longevity.
It's this stuff we're talking about - getting from "damn, the food has run out and scavenging is useless" to "comfortable farm life" for those with some foresight and backbone.
Natural wood isn't hard to come by, even in cities like London. It has one of the country's oldest forests. Coal isn't a necessary - we did without it for many millennia. Land fertility will always be an issue but only if you want to intensively farm like we do today, to feed the entire countries from a handful of fields. For personal and small community use, even a carrot the size of a pencil is viable if you work at it (and they used to be exactly that size). And humans have dealt with changing climate for millions of years - we came through the last ice age with nothing but a flint axe and an animal skin.
Seeds, also, happen to grow naturally. We just don't collect them. And they aren't viable in intensive modern farming but there's absolutely nothing wrong with them for the uses we need them for. Farm animals are the same - we wouldn't have the huge, bloated cows. But you know what? My girlfriend's family keep two miniature goats, and she's looking at doing the same in our little suburban house in London. Grass and scrap food to milk (butter, cheese, yoghurt), meat and as many other goats as you can keep. There's a reason that the desert tribes have goats, even in the damn desert where there is no grass.
Minerals are the last thing to worry about. Sure, they make the return to full civilisation easier but, by then, you're looking at a collective of hundreds of thousands who are self-sustaining before they go" Right, we should open up a mine". And, to be honest, even today in some countries some people live their entire lives with nothing more than a bit of scrap metal to live under and an old T-shirt.
It's not a waste of time. But to see that, you have to have some concept of survival priorities. Worry about your food first. By the time you're cursing the lack of zinc, you won't have much else to worry about anyway.
The British don't like to make a fuss if we win. "Oh, well glad that nonsense is all over. Game of cricket, anyone?"
To quote Dambusters:
"You say you need a Wellington Bomber for test drops. They're worth their weight in gold. Do you really think the authorities will lend you one? What possible argument could I put forward to get you a Wellington?
Barnes Wallace: Well, if you told them I designed it, do you think that might help?"
But we also don't mind to see people lose. But only if they do it with the same kind of style. And that's "classy" style, not over-the-top "WOOHOO!!" American "style".
Hence, Scott wins because even though he lost - he managed to lose saying "Things have come out against us, and therefore we have no cause for complaint" where everyone knows his internal monologue is saying something more akin to "Oh, bollocks, we're fucked. And I'm all out of dogs."
Also, Oates' "I may be some time" is up there with "Frankly my dear, I don't give a damn" and "Hang on lads, I've got an idea.... Erm..." (and if you know where that one's from... Frankly, my dear....)
We don't care if we win or lose. So long as we do it with style. Amundsen didn't have style. He's just a winner. It's an entirely different class of person.
To understand that, you probably have to be British.
I have to say, as what people here would probably regard as only an amateur programmer, the setup of a build environment and initial compiles suck up way, way more time than they need to.
It's extremely frustrating. C is a wonderful language that I love to program in. There are compilers on every platform. There are cross-platform libraries for anything I need and my favourite IDE is cross-platform.
But actually getting basic shit to work is an absolute nightmare. And that's the stuff that I'm familiar with. It involves far too much pissing about with paths, switches, versions, system-level installations, scripts, extra options and all kinds of voodoo to make what I know works work how it should. And I often have to replicate it for every new project.
Fuck knows what it's like when you go multi-language, when you go to more obscure platforms, and when you're not familiar with things or am using someone else's code without the benefit of knowledge of their build environment.
I consider it the weak-point of open-source. Like science, one of the big pluses of open-source is reproducibility. You got working code? Good. Then so do I. All I need to do is make it compile. The problem is that "All" in that sentence.
There are languages that encapsulate more into the language but even that causes problems. I've fought with Java environments where the JRE and JDK differ and are in multiple versions, have architecture differences, and require explicit paths, and all kinds of nonsense. Python can be a fucking nightmare on Windows. Even shit like Cygwin interferes with ITSELF on Windows systems.
I don't know what the solution is, but I can't help but feel it's outside the language - it's in the system design and OS interaction. Operating systems just aren't designed with source being a big part of the end product.
Maybe the solution is one of the ideas I constantly toy with (and almost certainly has been done in the 60's on some archaic architecture) - an executable format that incorporates the source as well as the binary. When the executable moves to a new platform, the binary and source visibly differ and the binary can be recreated from the source. To do that requires complete encapsulation of all source, options, compilers and everything else into the executable.
But I'm sick at getting something as standardised as SDL working on the three big platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux) in using one of the largest open-source IDE's (Eclipse) utilising an industry-standard compiler (GCC). It should NOT be as hard as it is.
Anyone who's ever lived in a Victorian-era house can do better than this.
In the last hundred years, doors that were perfectly shaped to allow entry now have their upper limit at eye-height. You literally cannot walk into an old house without ducking all the time.
And that's just a couple of hundred years, a handful of generations.
Sure it might be something other than "environmental" factors, but it's telling you that species can change extraordinarily rapidly given the right conditions.
The problem with critical thinking is that it makes people... critical.
It's nonsensical to do an awful lot of things that the average business will do. Critical thinking questions that. Rightly so, but that's not compatible with the way many do business.
And I dispute that you can "teach" critical thinking. You can expose students to it, and ask them to practice it, but teaching it is another matter.
I work in schools, including private schools. The difference is clear - private schools take no shit and make the kids work at learning - by rote, critical thinking, free-form learning and even attaching themselves to the IT guy outside of lessons to "help out" if they are keen geeks. They allow this, and encourage this, and aren't constrained by what's on some table of what must be learned.
They also know that they are there for the children, not solely to get "Five A-C's" so that the league tables look good to next year's parents.
I have said for many years that, with an appropriate restaurant-savvy partner, I'd like to open an automated restaurant. In-table PC's to order things, with card-readers.
I don't want to wait for the waiter to come over until I can order a drink. I might have driven a long way and be gasping of thirst before I care about a menu. Press, press, done before I've even taken my coat off.
I want to see the whole menu. The ingredients. A picture. The price. The associated special offers. Does it have pepper on it? A fully interactive menu would be great, and not be covered in the gravy-stains of the last patron, or have bits scribbled out on it. Plus, when something is no longer available, bam, you can't order it. I could even press the "I have an allergy button" and see if anything is incompatible with that without relying on the waiter to run back and forth to the kitchen.
I might want to tip one member of staff, but not know their name (or they happen to have finished their shift by then). Press "tip", select staff member photo (or select "All staff"), type in a reason, swipe card, done. And no arguments over who I intended it for.
I might well want to pay for my own stuff and not have to wait for the end of the meal and argue with friends. Or order a slice of cake to take home as a last minute thought after I've paid. Or split the bill via various common calculations. Or even tag five items as what John has to pay and let him pay that off the bill because he has to leave early. Press, press, swipe. Done.
I might wall desire a human to talk to, if something cocks up. Big green help button lights up the table, which summons a waiter, much like airplane call buttons. The waiter still has to be around to shuttle things from the kitchen, and this way seems easier - and politer - than having to flag him down as he passes with a table full of plates. Press, done.
I might well decide to change the order mid-flow. So long as the kitchen hasn't started on it yet, why not? Until the order's locked in, I can alter it. And I can even "lock" certain portions if one person at the table wants the starter now while the others only want mains and want to argue over it. Press, press, done.
I might want to pay first, or pay once I've eaten everything. I can choose.
I might want to buy some wifi access, or get a code for the toilet (I disagree with limiting toilets to paying customers only, except on an honesty agreement, but some places do just that and your receipt contains your code for the toilet), or donate to the charity associated with the restaurant, or buy the chef's recipe book. Press, press, swipe, done.
I might want to move tables mid-order, or take my drinks outside. Press, press, done and the waiters and kitchen automatically know where I am.
The back-end? The waiters still wait. The bar tabs are still on the EPOS. The kitchen still gets a ticket about what table wants what. And those that want manual service press one button.
We've already automated every part of the experience but the customer's.
"As many many people have said the right and legal thing was to simply stop working and post a message to the user that the chip is a counterfeit/clone."
As lots of OBD2 software does if you don't use a genuine ELM327 chip.
By the same token, if some bloke down the pub gives me a Windows key, shouldn't Microsoft allow it to activate?
It doesn't work like that.
Unfortunately, there's a difference between having a driver that won't drive a counterfeit chip, and one that actively "breaks" counterfeit chips.
In the same way that Microsoft are quite entitled to refuse to activate illegal copies of Windows, but they aren't entitled to take it upon themselves to format your hard drives when they find them.
So, maybe losing all your content visibility on Google was worse than them publishing a small article headline?
So, maybe, just maybe, Google's exposure was actually to your advantage?
So maybe you've been biting the hand that feeds you?
If the threat of Google doing EXACTLY what you ask for (taking your content off their site) is enough to make you back down, maybe your original intention was something other than was stated?
Maybe you just wanted a free payment?
And maybe Google weren't being so evil in the first place?
Erm... how do you think the traffic apps work on your satnav?
They ask you to "anonymously" contribute statistics, they talk home over 3G to service centres, who spot traffic moving slowly (given speed and position is easy on a satnav), mark those roads with appropriate average speeds and then transmit that out to everyone with traffic services.
Sure, they use roadside monitors and other things as well but the "HD" traffic you might get from any large satnav provider uses exactly the same technology.
The question is not whether this is worrying data to collect, but exactly what portion of the collected data needs to be collected? If they are hashing the MAC's really quickly and then discarding the original MAC data, and only keeping MAC-hash and position data, then there's nothing to worry about.
Or, you know, you could write an inflammatory article about a technology that every satnav, every shopping mall, and even festival organisers have been using for years.
Is it just me that wasn't even aware that telnet had an encrypted mode (let alone a horribly-broken one)?
Not been an issue as I always switch it off unless the device is entirely in-house (and, there, someone sniffing the packets is much more of a problem than the fact they might end up with a device password by doing so).
I'm not scared by the maths. That is working back from a series of 2D images to reconstruct a 3D model, with appropriate error. It's horribly complex, but it's not anything more than a time-saving calculation. It isn't a new realm of science (mathematical or otherwise).
And, again, even the example images in the introduction of the book belie the actual capabilities. The mathematics of 3D geometry are complex, yes, but well-known. Reversing them is difficult, yes, but again well-known - with appropriate error.
Taking enough photographs to be able to identify points (edge-detection, heuristics, manual placement...) in several of those photographs and thus form a correlation between the images to allow you to form a volumetric object is DAMN HARD. I have no doubt.
But it cannot extrapolate the window frame hidden behind another object in a 2D painting, as that book's introductory images suggest. Computer vision is notorious in this area for making undeliverable promises. The point-clouds that result have to be cleansed and interpreted, and information not given to the computer cannot be inferred (of course... why would it? But that's the credibility of the claims at stake).
Taking one example from the book, where a 2D painting is converted to a 3D scene: Sure, the window-frame that's obscured by a foreground object probably DOES extend symmetrically and with the same colour but you cannot know that - and hence the error creeps back in again unaccounted for by having humans "fix" things that the computer can't.
Yes, it saves time if you want to get a 3D sculpture into your computer, or recreate a crime-scene from evidence, but it requires tweaking and a lot of human work - it's back into the realms of the time-saving tool, rather than a whole new paradigm of (as the article is originally about) machine learning and automated extrapolation. The acid-test is how admissible this stuff would be in court, and though a lot of it would be provable, the error margins would need to be stated and then it's not as clear-cut as first impressions might give.
CV is a horribly complex task that performs all kinds of useful functions. But it isn't, and can't yet be, anything beyond a tool that speeds up human calculations. I guarantee that even an average artist would be able to recreate that scene in 3D to a greater degree of accuracy than a computer could (I actually have a personal like for those "we've layered a 2D image over a sidewalk/car to make it look like a black-hole, or that the car isn't there" etc. images).
And, again, it's the usefulness that's limited in scope, and the automation that's only doing the legwork for a human-led interpretation.
CV is maths. That's the end of it (don't be insulted... similarly, quantum physics is "just maths"). Horribly complex maths, with associated error. It gives us useful answers when we apply it. But, as the article is wont to point out, we need to apply it. Or design something that will apply it in a particular circumstance.
This is vastly different from the claims that the CV industry makes, and from those illustrations they choose to adorn their books. Hence why CV comes up in the topic of machine learning. The machine isn't learning, it isn't thinking, it isn't extrapolating, it isn't guessing, it's doing lots of maths very fast that we could do if we had the time. Thus the usefulness extends only so far as a human is willing to work out how to apply it.
And, at the end of the day, when you want to scan in a 3D structure, chances are that some laser distance-based measurement is more accurate and less easily "misinterpreted" by the computer than anything it might get from someone running a camera around it. That's why most of those 3D reconstruction projects make the point-cloud with a laser measuring device first, not rely on the interpretation of a 2D image to infer it.
The problem with computer vision is not that it's not useful, but that it's sold as a complete solution comparable to a human.
In reality, it's only used where it doesn't really matter.
OCR - mistakes are corrected by spellcheckers or humans afterwards.
Mail systems - sure, there are postcode errors, but they result in a slight delay, not a catastrophe of the system.
Structure from motion - fair enough, but it's not "accurate" and most of that kind of work isn't to do with CV as much as actual laser measurements etc.
Photo stitching - I'd be hard pushed to see this as more of a toy. It's like a photoshop filter. Sure, it's useful, but we could live without it or do it manually. Probably biggest use in mapping, where it's a time-saver and not much else. It doesn't work miracles.
Number plate recognition - well-defined formats on tuned cameras aimed at the right point, and I guarantee there are still errors. The systems I've been sold in the past claim 95% accuracy at best. Like OCR, if the number plate is read slightly wrongly, there are fallbacks before you issue a fine to someone based on the image.
Face detection is a joke in terms of accuracy. If we're talking about biometric logon, it's still a joke. If we're talking about working out if there's a face in-shot, still a joke. And, again, not put to serious use.
QR scanners - that I'll give you. But it's more to do with old barcode technology that we had 20 years ago, and a very well defined (and very error-correcting) format.
Pick-and-place rarely relies on vision only. There's much better ways of making sure something is aligned that don't come down to CV (and, again, usually involve actually measuring rather than just looking).
I'll give you medical imaging - things like MRI and microscopy are greatly enhanced with CV, and the only industry I know where a friend with a CV doctorate has been hired. Counting luminescent genes / cells is a task easily done by CV. Because, again, accuracy is not key. I can also refer you to my girlfriend who works in this field (not CV) and will show you how many times the most expensive CV-using machine in the hospital can get it catastrophically wrong and hence there's a human to double-check.
CV is, hence, a tool. Used properly, you can save a human time. That's the extent of it. Used improperly, or relied upon to do the work all by itself, it's actually not so good.
I'm sorry to attack your field of study, it's a difficult and complex area as I know myself being a mathematician that adores coding theory (i.e. I can tell you how/why a QR code works even if large portions of the image are broken, or how Voyager is able to keep communicating, despite interference on an unbelievable magnitude).
The problem is that, like AI, practical applications run into tool-time (saving a human having to do a laborious repetitive task, helping that task along, but not able to replace the human in the long run or operate entirely unsupervised). Meanwhile, the headlines are telling us that we've invented "yet-another-human-brain", which are so vastly untrue as to be truly laughable.
What you have is an expertise in image manipulation. That's all CV is. You can manipulate the image to be easier read by a computer which can extract some of the information it's after. How the machine deals with that, or how your manipulations cope with different scenarios, requires either a constrained environment (QR codes, number plates), or constant human manipulation to deal with.
Yet it's sold as something that "thinks" or "sees" (and thus interprets the image) like we do. It's not.
The CV expert I know has code in an ATM-like machine in one of the southern American counties. It recognises dollar bills, and things like that. Useful? Yes. Perfect? No. Intelligent? Far from it. From what I tell, most of the system is things like edge detection (i.e. image manipulation via a matrix, not unlike every Photoshop-compatible filter going back 20 years), derived heuristics and error-margins.
Hence, "computer vision" is really a misnomer, where "Photoshopping an image to make it easier to read" is probably closer.
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No, that's not what I mean. You've removed the new "useful" features that I'm okay with - and might want - but in doing so you've told me to replace everything I have with systemd.
Much more useful to me would be to get that listing, with those log tails, on a sysVinit. And that is far from impossible.
What we have here is bundling issues. Want the nice feature that does something quite simple? Then change everything you have to our system.
That's systemd's problem (and your response is their attitude) in a nutshell.
My problem with things like systemd is not that they have nice features - lots of things have nice features. Windows' Shadow Copies is a lovely feature that's a lot easier to configure that some alternative equivalents, etc.
It's that they put those nice features into some new paradigm of configuration when you could have just added them to the existing system.
From someone who's had state-paid health services since the day they were born, and not had cause to use them since I became an adult, and could comfortably afford additional medical cover if necessary:
- - Welcome to your first glimpse of civilisation. - -
By your argument, all kinds of things are redistributions of wealth. Back in the dark ages, you had to pay for fire insurance. If you didn't, and your house burned down, fire trucks would turn up to watch it burn or ask for a huge premium before they would pour water on it. Your insured neighbours, however, they'd douse with water to make sure they weren't damaged. You used to get little badges to put on your house to show your premium was up-to-date and which houses which fire brigade (because there were several competing ones) was to save.
Police, fire and medical are three essential services in a modern civilisation. You don't want people paying to get their own private police force that responds to them in preference to you. You benefit from paying into a central fund that funds all police activity for everyone.
You don't want to do the same for fire. And you don't want to do the same for medical. Trust me. You're blinkered by living in a country that's not known anything else. Even medical insurance is a disgusting state of affairs, before we get into actually having to PAY for medical attention.
If "poor" is a life choice, it's amazing that those people don't just go and make money, isn't it?
You work hard and you pay tax. That tax goes to the country. The country spends it on things that need doing WHETHER OR NOT YOU PERSONALLY BENEFIT. Street lighting on roads that you never intend to use, pregnancy and childcare services even if you're a man, flood defences even if you live inland, tornado funds even if you don't live in an affected state.
If you don't get this, it's just sheer arrogance.
What an ignorant... Really not worth my time to reply.
To be honest, the rest of the developed world is still pointing and laughing at you as a country for NOT GOING FAR ENOUGH. Making people pay private companies in order to get medical attention... it's abominable.
A citation is nothing more than a note that you used this particular method and rather than include your own justification of the accuracy of that method, you cite the papers you need. They are basically a scientific "include".
For any technique where you don't need to include the obvious, you won't bother to cite them either. Unless you're purely citing for the sake of it. In the same way that you don't cite the papers that your citations do, it's pointless if nobody is going to question the accuracy of the method you've chosen to cite.
As such, "most cited paper" is like "most followers on Twitter". It's used as a metric only by idiots who think celebrity is more important than substance.
And only as the user running wget.
If someone can replace the URL's passed to wget as root, presumably it's only a small step to actually have them execute without needed wget to actually overwrite existing filesystem files.
Neat trick.
But if you have arbitrary FTP URL's from untrusted sources piped straight into wget on a server you run, you have bigger problems than someone trashing your filesystem or overwriting your /etc/passwd.
As an opinion that has been held by many a scientist, that's fine.
We don't know what went bang. We can't even begin to have the language to discuss multi-dimensional physics and what happened before time began. There's a dark area from a certain part in time backwards. Though people may argue where that area is, they can't argue that beyond it is the unknown.
Those people who choose to refer to the unknown as "God"... that makes sense. You can understand that. Whether you personally agree or not, it's a logical, consistent, unproveable but not unreasonable belief.
The problem comes when people draw the dark areas to be 6000 years ago, or the bounds of the Earth. The problem comes when people who believe in a "God" (of whatever name, concept or type) but not in the Bible and are attacked for that.
That's always been the problem. Unfortunately, those people will also ignore the Pope too. The Bible doesn't mention Popes, except through the same interpretation as it mentions just about anything else if you try hard enough to twist the words.
As an atheistic/agnostic person of a scientific bent, I have always accepted the "There's space for a God in the unknown" arguments. That's fine. No problem at all. Some pretty major scientists believe the same, not that that's an influence or accreditation in any way.
But the ideological problem you get is that, historically, the dark area has shifted further and further back in time and in space and still people hold onto it. At one time the skies were the raft of the gods because they were unreachable and unknowable to the peoples of the time. That slowly gets pushed back until the boundary of the unknown is so far away as to be ludicrous, from mere memory to recorded history to inference from dinosaur bones, to carbon dating, to universe expansion, and further back.
And, actually, we have a number of theories of why the Big Bang happened. Nobody studying it really believes that something in the middle of nothing clicked its ethereal fingers and in no time the universe came into being. The theory is that that are substrates and energy fields permeating outside the universe and that when those waves of energy collide, matter, space and time can occur as a result of the fallout. It's kind of what the Higgs Boson is all about - a particle that results from Higgs fields that permeate everything.
If and when we prove that, the dark area will shrink back again and I'm sure the religious will still continue to point at the square millimeter that is left and say "Ah ha! God could still be in there!", and so on, ad infinitum.
The recognition of this slowly grows over time. The papacy refused to believe Copernicus at one point. But he was right. So they accepted, and shifted God back two spaces again. It happens all the time, and has happened for thousands of years.
Nobody wants religious people to have no place in which to put their God, if they want to believe in him. But equally, we don't really want God sitting on the front porch where he's easily disproved by everything around him either.
Being logical is not incompatible with religion. Never has been. However being illogical is incompatible with science.
However, ignorance is also the domain of the ignorant.
It's okay not to be aware that someone has investigated an area before, or even to ignore people because you have a hint they may be wrong because of some anomaly. But ignorance of the in-depth side of what you're ignoring is dangerous.
As such, you aren't aware that information cannot travel faster than c (lower-case). The wavefront of a particular wave might be seen to but it cannot be usefully used to transmit information (or objects, or anything) faster than c. That's why nobody's bothered to look further into your phenomenon - we realised the limit and have no reason to doubt it. And the plasma antenna stuff is unrelated, sorry.
Getting a firm grasp of a topic you choose to ignore is vital.
To be honest, even without a firm grasp on the intricacies of space-time, light-speed, and relativity, your post just seems like nonsense anyway.
There has rarely (I would state never but I'm a scientist in my mind, so I can't without proof that's true) been a time in history when someone has found something that everyone else had totally ignored. They may have not believed it. They may have not fully understood the principles underlying it. They may have been uninterested and didn't pursue the details further. They may have been unable to test it. But scientific revolutions don't happen because some guy in a shed decided to ignore quantum physics and stamp his own path.
They happen because that guy looks at the established science in another way, or digs into a hole in the science that nobody had looked into before, or finds a hole that nobody else had seen. That doesn't happen from guesses and ignorance of what the previous science held true. The gentleman scientist of yesteryear could "know" all of known science at the time, or as near as damn it. Thus people like Newton etc. were coming from a position of knowledge and expanding it. Nowadays, you can spend your life following just one tiny branch of any particular science, so it's all the easier to be ignorant.
I'm sorry, but you read like a crackpot. Determined that someone with no scientific knowledge will walk in and spot a hole in relativity. It's not what happens. What happens is that patent clerks get up to speed on the latest science, go one step further (which is the really hard part, and the reason such people get to be called Doctor or Professor of the relevant science - those titles confer the knowledge that you found something in academia that nobody else knew, no matter how trivial), and realise the science wasn't "wrong" so much as "incomplete".
I have any number of personal hypotheses about scientific phenomena, it entertains my head to have them and even if they are misconceptions, they help me understand "my" science. When my doctorate-holding or lecture-giving friends come round, I keep my mouth shut. Because I'm certain that they are beliefs held from a position of ignorance of the relevant science and that bringing me up to speed (which would, inevitably, explain my theories into the bin) would take the length of their career.
If you've ever received the answer "It doesn't quite work like that", then you need to dig further yourself.
It's a sad fact that even from the doctors and professors of science I know, the number of "breakthroughs", no matter how tiny, is infinitesimally small. I don't claim to come close to their knowledge on the basics, I've never found something new to science in my life, and I don't think I could understand most of what I try to. Or why it's wrong.
Pet theories are nice pets. When you have the knowledge to prove them true, you'll have the knowledge to abandon them just as easily. Until then, I suggest you err on the side of abandonment.
Sometimes it's better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt. Until, that is, you truly have something that a science journal is willing to publish.
The problem would be that the virtualisation of ARM on Intel or vice versa would suffer quite large performance problems. You're basically into emulation, rather than virtualisation.
So even if they could do that, you wouldn't see much point in doing it over just running your Intel stuff on Intel hypervisors and your ARM stuff on ARM hypervisors. What you'd gain would be, well, almost nothing.
At least it's a showing, though, that the Microsoft code is in a big better shape that they can port things across. That is, of course, assuming it ever comes to fruition. Microsoft has had a lot of non-Intel architectures over the years and they've always played second-fiddle and then been obsoleted.
Quite what they expect to get from aiming at ARM, I can't see. You won't get Intel compatibility, so you're effectively running another OS that - actually - only specialist places that are running huge compute farms etc. are using, or smaller gadgets where you'll struggle to sell a non-compatible Windows (like Windows CE was).
It all depends on scale. If you're expecting us to be up and running with a populous of 7bn within a year, maybe you're right.
But if there's only 100,000 left, spread out over the globe, with the rich pickings of a former civilisation to kickstart from, then we don't actually need a lot of raw materials as you suggest.
You know what you'd need long before coal, iron, copper, zinc? Food. And though the initial pickings may be easy, before long you'll turn any old bit of scrap into a plough (not plow, fecking Americans) so you can ensure some future longevity.
It's this stuff we're talking about - getting from "damn, the food has run out and scavenging is useless" to "comfortable farm life" for those with some foresight and backbone.
Natural wood isn't hard to come by, even in cities like London. It has one of the country's oldest forests. Coal isn't a necessary - we did without it for many millennia. Land fertility will always be an issue but only if you want to intensively farm like we do today, to feed the entire countries from a handful of fields. For personal and small community use, even a carrot the size of a pencil is viable if you work at it (and they used to be exactly that size). And humans have dealt with changing climate for millions of years - we came through the last ice age with nothing but a flint axe and an animal skin.
Seeds, also, happen to grow naturally. We just don't collect them. And they aren't viable in intensive modern farming but there's absolutely nothing wrong with them for the uses we need them for. Farm animals are the same - we wouldn't have the huge, bloated cows. But you know what? My girlfriend's family keep two miniature goats, and she's looking at doing the same in our little suburban house in London. Grass and scrap food to milk (butter, cheese, yoghurt), meat and as many other goats as you can keep. There's a reason that the desert tribes have goats, even in the damn desert where there is no grass.
Minerals are the last thing to worry about. Sure, they make the return to full civilisation easier but, by then, you're looking at a collective of hundreds of thousands who are self-sustaining before they go" Right, we should open up a mine". And, to be honest, even today in some countries some people live their entire lives with nothing more than a bit of scrap metal to live under and an old T-shirt.
It's not a waste of time. But to see that, you have to have some concept of survival priorities. Worry about your food first. By the time you're cursing the lack of zinc, you won't have much else to worry about anyway.
Article meets Advert in Slashdot Mash-up Junk
The British don't like to make a fuss if we win. "Oh, well glad that nonsense is all over. Game of cricket, anyone?"
To quote Dambusters:
"You say you need a Wellington Bomber for test drops. They're worth their weight in gold. Do you really think the authorities will lend you one? What possible argument could I put forward to get you a Wellington?
Barnes Wallace: Well, if you told them I designed it, do you think that might help?"
But we also don't mind to see people lose. But only if they do it with the same kind of style. And that's "classy" style, not over-the-top "WOOHOO!!" American "style".
Hence, Scott wins because even though he lost - he managed to lose saying "Things have come out against us, and therefore we have no cause for complaint" where everyone knows his internal monologue is saying something more akin to "Oh, bollocks, we're fucked. And I'm all out of dogs."
Also, Oates' "I may be some time" is up there with "Frankly my dear, I don't give a damn" and "Hang on lads, I've got an idea.... Erm..." (and if you know where that one's from... Frankly, my dear....)
We don't care if we win or lose. So long as we do it with style. Amundsen didn't have style. He's just a winner. It's an entirely different class of person.
To understand that, you probably have to be British.
Welcome to British Sarcasm, lesson 1 (not 101, this ain't fucking America).
I have to say, as what people here would probably regard as only an amateur programmer, the setup of a build environment and initial compiles suck up way, way more time than they need to.
It's extremely frustrating. C is a wonderful language that I love to program in. There are compilers on every platform. There are cross-platform libraries for anything I need and my favourite IDE is cross-platform.
But actually getting basic shit to work is an absolute nightmare. And that's the stuff that I'm familiar with. It involves far too much pissing about with paths, switches, versions, system-level installations, scripts, extra options and all kinds of voodoo to make what I know works work how it should. And I often have to replicate it for every new project.
Fuck knows what it's like when you go multi-language, when you go to more obscure platforms, and when you're not familiar with things or am using someone else's code without the benefit of knowledge of their build environment.
I consider it the weak-point of open-source. Like science, one of the big pluses of open-source is reproducibility. You got working code? Good. Then so do I. All I need to do is make it compile. The problem is that "All" in that sentence.
There are languages that encapsulate more into the language but even that causes problems. I've fought with Java environments where the JRE and JDK differ and are in multiple versions, have architecture differences, and require explicit paths, and all kinds of nonsense. Python can be a fucking nightmare on Windows. Even shit like Cygwin interferes with ITSELF on Windows systems.
I don't know what the solution is, but I can't help but feel it's outside the language - it's in the system design and OS interaction. Operating systems just aren't designed with source being a big part of the end product.
Maybe the solution is one of the ideas I constantly toy with (and almost certainly has been done in the 60's on some archaic architecture) - an executable format that incorporates the source as well as the binary. When the executable moves to a new platform, the binary and source visibly differ and the binary can be recreated from the source. To do that requires complete encapsulation of all source, options, compilers and everything else into the executable.
But I'm sick at getting something as standardised as SDL working on the three big platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux) in using one of the largest open-source IDE's (Eclipse) utilising an industry-standard compiler (GCC). It should NOT be as hard as it is.
Anyone who's ever lived in a Victorian-era house can do better than this.
In the last hundred years, doors that were perfectly shaped to allow entry now have their upper limit at eye-height. You literally cannot walk into an old house without ducking all the time.
And that's just a couple of hundred years, a handful of generations.
Sure it might be something other than "environmental" factors, but it's telling you that species can change extraordinarily rapidly given the right conditions.
20 years too late
The problem with critical thinking is that it makes people... critical.
It's nonsensical to do an awful lot of things that the average business will do. Critical thinking questions that. Rightly so, but that's not compatible with the way many do business.
And I dispute that you can "teach" critical thinking. You can expose students to it, and ask them to practice it, but teaching it is another matter.
I work in schools, including private schools. The difference is clear - private schools take no shit and make the kids work at learning - by rote, critical thinking, free-form learning and even attaching themselves to the IT guy outside of lessons to "help out" if they are keen geeks. They allow this, and encourage this, and aren't constrained by what's on some table of what must be learned.
They also know that they are there for the children, not solely to get "Five A-C's" so that the league tables look good to next year's parents.
I have said for many years that, with an appropriate restaurant-savvy partner, I'd like to open an automated restaurant. In-table PC's to order things, with card-readers.
I don't want to wait for the waiter to come over until I can order a drink. I might have driven a long way and be gasping of thirst before I care about a menu. Press, press, done before I've even taken my coat off.
I want to see the whole menu. The ingredients. A picture. The price. The associated special offers. Does it have pepper on it? A fully interactive menu would be great, and not be covered in the gravy-stains of the last patron, or have bits scribbled out on it. Plus, when something is no longer available, bam, you can't order it. I could even press the "I have an allergy button" and see if anything is incompatible with that without relying on the waiter to run back and forth to the kitchen.
I might want to tip one member of staff, but not know their name (or they happen to have finished their shift by then). Press "tip", select staff member photo (or select "All staff"), type in a reason, swipe card, done. And no arguments over who I intended it for.
I might well want to pay for my own stuff and not have to wait for the end of the meal and argue with friends. Or order a slice of cake to take home as a last minute thought after I've paid. Or split the bill via various common calculations. Or even tag five items as what John has to pay and let him pay that off the bill because he has to leave early. Press, press, swipe. Done.
I might wall desire a human to talk to, if something cocks up. Big green help button lights up the table, which summons a waiter, much like airplane call buttons. The waiter still has to be around to shuttle things from the kitchen, and this way seems easier - and politer - than having to flag him down as he passes with a table full of plates. Press, done.
I might well decide to change the order mid-flow. So long as the kitchen hasn't started on it yet, why not? Until the order's locked in, I can alter it. And I can even "lock" certain portions if one person at the table wants the starter now while the others only want mains and want to argue over it. Press, press, done.
I might want to pay first, or pay once I've eaten everything. I can choose.
I might want to buy some wifi access, or get a code for the toilet (I disagree with limiting toilets to paying customers only, except on an honesty agreement, but some places do just that and your receipt contains your code for the toilet), or donate to the charity associated with the restaurant, or buy the chef's recipe book. Press, press, swipe, done.
I might want to move tables mid-order, or take my drinks outside. Press, press, done and the waiters and kitchen automatically know where I am.
The back-end? The waiters still wait. The bar tabs are still on the EPOS. The kitchen still gets a ticket about what table wants what. And those that want manual service press one button.
We've already automated every part of the experience but the customer's.
"As many many people have said the right and legal thing was to simply stop working and post a message to the user that the chip is a counterfeit/clone."
As lots of OBD2 software does if you don't use a genuine ELM327 chip.
By the same token, if some bloke down the pub gives me a Windows key, shouldn't Microsoft allow it to activate?
It doesn't work like that.
Unfortunately, there's a difference between having a driver that won't drive a counterfeit chip, and one that actively "breaks" counterfeit chips.
In the same way that Microsoft are quite entitled to refuse to activate illegal copies of Windows, but they aren't entitled to take it upon themselves to format your hard drives when they find them.
So, maybe losing all your content visibility on Google was worse than them publishing a small article headline?
So, maybe, just maybe, Google's exposure was actually to your advantage?
So maybe you've been biting the hand that feeds you?
If the threat of Google doing EXACTLY what you ask for (taking your content off their site) is enough to make you back down, maybe your original intention was something other than was stated?
Maybe you just wanted a free payment?
And maybe Google weren't being so evil in the first place?
Erm... how do you think the traffic apps work on your satnav?
They ask you to "anonymously" contribute statistics, they talk home over 3G to service centres, who spot traffic moving slowly (given speed and position is easy on a satnav), mark those roads with appropriate average speeds and then transmit that out to everyone with traffic services.
Sure, they use roadside monitors and other things as well but the "HD" traffic you might get from any large satnav provider uses exactly the same technology.
The question is not whether this is worrying data to collect, but exactly what portion of the collected data needs to be collected? If they are hashing the MAC's really quickly and then discarding the original MAC data, and only keeping MAC-hash and position data, then there's nothing to worry about.
Or, you know, you could write an inflammatory article about a technology that every satnav, every shopping mall, and even festival organisers have been using for years.
Is it just me that wasn't even aware that telnet had an encrypted mode (let alone a horribly-broken one)?
Not been an issue as I always switch it off unless the device is entirely in-house (and, there, someone sniffing the packets is much more of a problem than the fact they might end up with a device password by doing so).
Honestly, we just need to kill this "protocol".
I'm not scared by the maths. That is working back from a series of 2D images to reconstruct a 3D model, with appropriate error. It's horribly complex, but it's not anything more than a time-saving calculation. It isn't a new realm of science (mathematical or otherwise).
And, again, even the example images in the introduction of the book belie the actual capabilities. The mathematics of 3D geometry are complex, yes, but well-known. Reversing them is difficult, yes, but again well-known - with appropriate error.
Taking enough photographs to be able to identify points (edge-detection, heuristics, manual placement...) in several of those photographs and thus form a correlation between the images to allow you to form a volumetric object is DAMN HARD. I have no doubt.
But it cannot extrapolate the window frame hidden behind another object in a 2D painting, as that book's introductory images suggest. Computer vision is notorious in this area for making undeliverable promises. The point-clouds that result have to be cleansed and interpreted, and information not given to the computer cannot be inferred (of course... why would it? But that's the credibility of the claims at stake).
Taking one example from the book, where a 2D painting is converted to a 3D scene: Sure, the window-frame that's obscured by a foreground object probably DOES extend symmetrically and with the same colour but you cannot know that - and hence the error creeps back in again unaccounted for by having humans "fix" things that the computer can't.
Yes, it saves time if you want to get a 3D sculpture into your computer, or recreate a crime-scene from evidence, but it requires tweaking and a lot of human work - it's back into the realms of the time-saving tool, rather than a whole new paradigm of (as the article is originally about) machine learning and automated extrapolation. The acid-test is how admissible this stuff would be in court, and though a lot of it would be provable, the error margins would need to be stated and then it's not as clear-cut as first impressions might give.
CV is a horribly complex task that performs all kinds of useful functions. But it isn't, and can't yet be, anything beyond a tool that speeds up human calculations. I guarantee that even an average artist would be able to recreate that scene in 3D to a greater degree of accuracy than a computer could (I actually have a personal like for those "we've layered a 2D image over a sidewalk/car to make it look like a black-hole, or that the car isn't there" etc. images).
And, again, it's the usefulness that's limited in scope, and the automation that's only doing the legwork for a human-led interpretation.
CV is maths. That's the end of it (don't be insulted... similarly, quantum physics is "just maths"). Horribly complex maths, with associated error. It gives us useful answers when we apply it. But, as the article is wont to point out, we need to apply it. Or design something that will apply it in a particular circumstance.
This is vastly different from the claims that the CV industry makes, and from those illustrations they choose to adorn their books. Hence why CV comes up in the topic of machine learning. The machine isn't learning, it isn't thinking, it isn't extrapolating, it isn't guessing, it's doing lots of maths very fast that we could do if we had the time. Thus the usefulness extends only so far as a human is willing to work out how to apply it.
And, at the end of the day, when you want to scan in a 3D structure, chances are that some laser distance-based measurement is more accurate and less easily "misinterpreted" by the computer than anything it might get from someone running a camera around it. That's why most of those 3D reconstruction projects make the point-cloud with a laser measuring device first, not rely on the interpretation of a 2D image to infer it.
The problem with computer vision is not that it's not useful, but that it's sold as a complete solution comparable to a human.
In reality, it's only used where it doesn't really matter.
OCR - mistakes are corrected by spellcheckers or humans afterwards.
Mail systems - sure, there are postcode errors, but they result in a slight delay, not a catastrophe of the system.
Structure from motion - fair enough, but it's not "accurate" and most of that kind of work isn't to do with CV as much as actual laser measurements etc.
Photo stitching - I'd be hard pushed to see this as more of a toy. It's like a photoshop filter. Sure, it's useful, but we could live without it or do it manually. Probably biggest use in mapping, where it's a time-saver and not much else. It doesn't work miracles.
Number plate recognition - well-defined formats on tuned cameras aimed at the right point, and I guarantee there are still errors. The systems I've been sold in the past claim 95% accuracy at best. Like OCR, if the number plate is read slightly wrongly, there are fallbacks before you issue a fine to someone based on the image.
Face detection is a joke in terms of accuracy. If we're talking about biometric logon, it's still a joke. If we're talking about working out if there's a face in-shot, still a joke. And, again, not put to serious use.
QR scanners - that I'll give you. But it's more to do with old barcode technology that we had 20 years ago, and a very well defined (and very error-correcting) format.
Pick-and-place rarely relies on vision only. There's much better ways of making sure something is aligned that don't come down to CV (and, again, usually involve actually measuring rather than just looking).
I'll give you medical imaging - things like MRI and microscopy are greatly enhanced with CV, and the only industry I know where a friend with a CV doctorate has been hired. Counting luminescent genes / cells is a task easily done by CV. Because, again, accuracy is not key. I can also refer you to my girlfriend who works in this field (not CV) and will show you how many times the most expensive CV-using machine in the hospital can get it catastrophically wrong and hence there's a human to double-check.
CV is, hence, a tool. Used properly, you can save a human time. That's the extent of it. Used improperly, or relied upon to do the work all by itself, it's actually not so good.
I'm sorry to attack your field of study, it's a difficult and complex area as I know myself being a mathematician that adores coding theory (i.e. I can tell you how/why a QR code works even if large portions of the image are broken, or how Voyager is able to keep communicating, despite interference on an unbelievable magnitude).
The problem is that, like AI, practical applications run into tool-time (saving a human having to do a laborious repetitive task, helping that task along, but not able to replace the human in the long run or operate entirely unsupervised). Meanwhile, the headlines are telling us that we've invented "yet-another-human-brain", which are so vastly untrue as to be truly laughable.
What you have is an expertise in image manipulation. That's all CV is. You can manipulate the image to be easier read by a computer which can extract some of the information it's after. How the machine deals with that, or how your manipulations cope with different scenarios, requires either a constrained environment (QR codes, number plates), or constant human manipulation to deal with.
Yet it's sold as something that "thinks" or "sees" (and thus interprets the image) like we do. It's not.
The CV expert I know has code in an ATM-like machine in one of the southern American counties. It recognises dollar bills, and things like that. Useful? Yes. Perfect? No. Intelligent? Far from it. From what I tell, most of the system is things like edge detection (i.e. image manipulation via a matrix, not unlike every Photoshop-compatible filter going back 20 years), derived heuristics and error-margins.
Hence, "computer vision" is really a misnomer, where "Photoshopping an image to make it easier to read" is probably closer.