In a game, if you find yourself playing the game rather than working out how to defeat the AI algorithms then that's good AI... and you're not noticing the AI, you're just playing the game.
(1) Some people are able to leave the house only due to the presence of cameras. Without the cameras they would be too frightened, despite the real statistics that show that in fact little old ladies are almost never the victims of street crime. So, stick up some cameras and give some people a vast improvement in their quality of life.
(2) When shown the movie perps tend to put their hands up, thus saving vast amounts of time and hassle, and saving the victims a court appearance.
(3) Sometimes the pictures do actually show that the suspected perp who was nicked at the scene was in fact innocent.
All these are wins. Concentrating on the fact that someone who is too drunk to notice the cameras is still going to commit the crime is only one part of the picture.
It is true of course that most users of computers these days do not write their own accounting systems; do not write their own payroll systems; do not write their own word processors; and do not even keep a team of operating system tweakers in house ("system programmers" from the IBM mainframe days, needed just to keep the thing running).
Er, yes, I'd think so - you'd have to add a per-unit provisioning step to the production line, and a new database (or new hooks into an existing one), and, hardest of all, some way of getting the password to actually match the serial number label.
Then, you'd have to have a back door, for the units that went out with the wrong password, resulting in the owners of their brand new doorstops phoning up for support. So, you'd also have the expense of more training for support, rejigging the scripts, and so on.
OK, so you spend all this money. Then, how many more units will you sell as a result?
(1) The slashweenie community don't want to pay for anything, so they aren't customers, so keeping them out won't lose any money.
(2) On the other hand the sort of people who hack DRM systems are most likely nerds who have a religious antipathy to IE, so won't be able to get onto to site in order to work out how to hack it.
(3) So, by restricting access to IE they have achieved the following: (a) delayed, possibly by as much as many days, the hacking of the DRM system, thus protecting their business model for long enough for them to actually make a little money (b) lost exactly $0.00 in business that they wouldn't have got from the slashweenies anyway.
... and manually assigning memory to each application with command-line gobbledegook, and retuning every time you wanted to run a different mix of applications?
Welcome to the Brave New World of Java applications! - any computer with less than many gigabytes of physical RAM is going to involve you in all these contortions if you want to run anything non-trivial written in Java.
What else... now let me see...... ah yes, user interfaces that might well look like the same application running on a different platform but that's not what the punter wants - what the punter wants is consistency of user interface across all applications on the one platform he actually uses. It is absolutely of no interest to him at all whatosever that the reason that Bloggit 4.7 doesn't behave remotely like a standard Windows app is that it is carefully designed to behave exactly like Bloggit 4.7 on a MAC!!
What else... now let me see...... ah yes, type safe collections, sane enums, and all the other things we've been used to for decades in C++. Nuff said.
What else... now let me see...... ah yes, lowest common denominator libraries. "You can't do that in Java, because it can't be implemented on Linux/OSX/whatever." Duh!! It's provided natively in Windows for heaven's sake, why can't I have it for my Windows app? (And don't get me started on the various broken non-working "solutions" for sortable JTables when the native control on Windows does exactly what's wanted...)
Having said which, if clients really insist on paying me to write in Java I'll take the money, being a professional. And years later what do I get? - "er, yes, maybe you did have a point, maybe we should have let you write it in C++". Ho hum.
Not round here. The local authority watch the screens, and call the police only when there's something they need to attend to. (The operatives can, but don't have to be, retired police officers.)
The main advantages of the camera system in the UK are:
(1) It makes things a lot cheaper and quicker. The perp is far less likely to put in a lying "not guilty" plea when they've seen themselves doing it on the screen.
(2) People who didn't do it, but just happened to be standing rather too close to the action, can be cleared by the recorded pictures. This really happens in real life.
(3) Punters (ie voters) feel safer if there are cameras about, however rightly or wrongly. If that means that a little old lady is no longer housebound that's a win, surely to goodness, even if she was never really at any serious risk in the first place.
CCTV succeeding in catching a perp here is so commonplace it's not news. What is news sometimes is when the cameras miss an incident (because there aren't enough of them to point in all directions in all places at once): then there's a public outcry asking for more cameras.
You tend to end up as the subject of a money laundering investigation. (He says having just been given £800 cash which he's somehow got to get into a bank account.)
Having said which, I solve the original problem by simply choosing not to visit the USA. It's too much hassle, and there's plenty of other bits of world to go to.
Any kid who doesn't want to be tracked has a number of options including:
(1) Turn the phone off.
(2) Leave the phone at home (one of my kids does this regularly when he's out of credit).
(3) Leave the phone somewhere harmless, eg at an approved-of friend's house, whilst off doing something less harmless.
Now, all these involve not having the phone with you, so the kid might also wish to:
(4) Get another phone for real-life use, which you don't tell your parents about.
Or, sometimes even cheaper, don't get a whole new phone:
(5) Get another SIM for real-life use, which you don't tell your parents about.
OK, so none of these work if the parent is phoning the child every five minutes and expecting them to actually answer - there's a limit to how often the child can "not hear" the ringtone, or claim that "I don't answer the phone whilst sitting on the loo", or whatever. But, as ever, such a family has people-issues to which a technological solution ain't gonna work anyway.
If you have used Windows 2000 until now, you have used it for several years now. It's not like your initial investment in the OS hasn't delivered it's return by now.
I've recently done a new install of Win2k, so have had only a few months' use.
(The box was previously running NT Server, and has been retired from that role. It doesn't have the hardware to run XP, so Win2k was the obvious choice. Win2k will be fine for that particular user, until such time, perhaps, as they start getting PDF files that need a new version of the reader that won't run on Win2k, or something like that. It was the inability of modern third party software to run on NT that essentially forced the upgrade, not anything that Microsoft have done.)
A very high proportion of aircraft don't have transponders, so won't be seen by the TCAS in an UAV.
Most gliders don't, most hot air balloons don't, most Permit aircraft don't, most microlights don't, most paragliders don't, and so on.
Then when you move on to "real" aircraft, most 1940s cloth-and-stick taildraggers don't... and so on up to 1970s spamcans, some of which do admittedly have transponders fitted, but whether they work at all is one thing and whether the altitude encoder is also working is another.
Plus, depending on where you are and what you're doing, you might not turn the thing on anyway (it's quite common to be asked not to in the circuit), and there are plenty of people who don't turn on mode C even though they've got it and it works. (Quite why they don't I've never understood, but it's a fact of life.)
No thanks, I don't want anything flying around up there that will fly into me quite happily because its TCAS hasn't seen me.
You understand quite a lot of the individual words, but once they're put together into sentences you (or, more precisely I, as a native English speaker, YMMV of course) end up without the remotest clue what the overal paragraph means.
... the parent is "insightful". I'd have thought "ignorant" was more to the point.
There's just so much wrong with this analysis of CCTV in Britain that I don't know where to begin... maybe I won't bother, I've got to go to work in the morning so it'd better be bedtime.
On one issue (a policy matter before Cambridge City Council) I did have an opinion but reckoned that it wasn't worth as much as others who had studied the matter more than I had. So I asked for my vote to be recorded as half a vote.
Surprisingly enough there was no mechanism to record this... but as the side I was supporting lost handsomely it didn't matter in the end.
"Because it's in the Torygraph" is surely to goodness an adequate answer.
Apart from its political failings, it panders to a most bizarre class of pornography consumers. Just take a look at page two - several times a week there will be a story about a dead child. Now, children do die, and this does from time to time make the news, and from time to time is legitimately newsworth, but the Torygraph seems to find far more of these stories "newsworthy" than anyone else, and they always put the stories in the same place in the newspaper where any sickos who are into dead-children-porn know where to look.
(For American readers: the Torygraph would probably seem a bit Euro-communist to you if you actually read it, but to us it's towards the right of the political spectrum. Not that that means as much as it used to, with Tony Bliar's "Labour" party even further to the right.)
Slashdot Mirror
... good management or good typography.
... and you're not noticing the AI, you're just playing the game.
You don't notice them.
You only notice their existence when they're bad.
In a game, if you find yourself playing the game rather than working out how to defeat the AI algorithms then that's good AI
Sigh. Yet again, for the 437th time:
(1) Some people are able to leave the house only due to the presence of cameras. Without the cameras they would be too frightened, despite the real statistics that show that in fact little old ladies are almost never the victims of street crime. So, stick up some cameras and give some people a vast improvement in their quality of life.
(2) When shown the movie perps tend to put their hands up, thus saving vast amounts of time and hassle, and saving the victims a court appearance.
(3) Sometimes the pictures do actually show that the suspected perp who was nicked at the scene was in fact innocent.
All these are wins. Concentrating on the fact that someone who is too drunk to notice the cameras is still going to commit the crime is only one part of the picture.
It is true of course that most users of computers these days do not write their own accounting systems; do not write their own payroll systems; do not write their own word processors; and do not even keep a team of operating system tweakers in house ("system programmers" from the IBM mainframe days, needed just to keep the thing running).
... someone has to write all this stuff!
But
Too hard to implement?
Er, yes, I'd think so - you'd have to add a per-unit provisioning step to the production line, and a new database (or new hooks into an existing one), and, hardest of all, some way of getting the password to actually match the serial number label.
Then, you'd have to have a back door, for the units that went out with the wrong password, resulting in the owners of their brand new doorstops phoning up for support. So, you'd also have the expense of more training for support, rejigging the scripts, and so on.
OK, so you spend all this money. Then, how many more units will you sell as a result?
Duh!
Is it perhaps the same as:
"maximising shareholder value"
which is something that company directors are required to do by law??
(They are here. YMMV.)
(1) The slashweenie community don't want to pay for anything, so they aren't customers, so keeping them out won't lose any money.
(2) On the other hand the sort of people who hack DRM systems are most likely nerds who have a religious antipathy to IE, so won't be able to get onto to site in order to work out how to hack it.
(3) So, by restricting access to IE they have achieved the following:
(a) delayed, possibly by as much as many days, the hacking of the DRM system, thus protecting their business model for long enough for them to actually make a little money
(b) lost exactly $0.00 in business that they wouldn't have got from the slashweenies anyway.
Sounds like a good decision.
... and manually assigning memory to each application with command-line gobbledegook, and retuning every time you wanted to run a different mix of applications?
... now let me see ... ... ah yes, user interfaces that might well look like the same application running on a different platform but that's not what the punter wants - what the punter wants is consistency of user interface across all applications on the one platform he actually uses. It is absolutely of no interest to him at all whatosever that the reason that Bloggit 4.7 doesn't behave remotely like a standard Windows app is that it is carefully designed to behave exactly like Bloggit 4.7 on a MAC!!
... now let me see ... ... ah yes, type safe collections, sane enums, and all the other things we've been used to for decades in C++. Nuff said.
... now let me see ... ... ah yes, lowest common denominator libraries. "You can't do that in Java, because it can't be implemented on Linux/OSX/whatever." Duh!! It's provided natively in Windows for heaven's sake, why can't I have it for my Windows app? (And don't get me started on the various broken non-working "solutions" for sortable JTables when the native control on Windows does exactly what's wanted ...)
Welcome to the Brave New World of Java applications! - any computer with less than many gigabytes of physical RAM is going to involve you in all these contortions if you want to run anything non-trivial written in Java.
What else
What else
What else
Having said which, if clients really insist on paying me to write in Java I'll take the money, being a professional. And years later what do I get? - "er, yes, maybe you did have a point, maybe we should have let you write it in C++". Ho hum.
Blair is leaving this year ... the trick is to force him out before the May election, got to be good for everybody else.
Slamming customers isn't acceptable in any other profession
I've never thought that the air transport industry calling passengers SLF was terribly polite.
Anywhere else such a vastly high murder rate as 1% would get some action.
... "only years later did I work out that all my successful driving tests, interviews etc were at times when I was fertile".
Police watching the screens??
Not round here. The local authority watch the screens, and call the police only when there's something they need to attend to. (The operatives can, but don't have to be, retired police officers.)
The main advantages of the camera system in the UK are:
(1) It makes things a lot cheaper and quicker. The perp is far less likely to put in a lying "not guilty" plea when they've seen themselves doing it on the screen.
(2) People who didn't do it, but just happened to be standing rather too close to the action, can be cleared by the recorded pictures. This really happens in real life.
(3) Punters (ie voters) feel safer if there are cameras about, however rightly or wrongly. If that means that a little old lady is no longer housebound that's a win, surely to goodness, even if she was never really at any serious risk in the first place.
CCTV succeeding in catching a perp here is so commonplace it's not news. What is news sometimes is when the cameras miss an incident (because there aren't enough of them to point in all directions in all places at once): then there's a public outcry asking for more cameras.
BTW, is the UK really that paranoid?
Nah, not really, I exaggerate somewhat, a grand is no problem.
But don't sell a house for cash and try to deposit it in a bank account!!
You tend to end up as the subject of a money laundering investigation. (He says having just been given £800 cash which he's somehow got to get into a bank account.)
Having said which, I solve the original problem by simply choosing not to visit the USA. It's too much hassle, and there's plenty of other bits of world to go to.
... to the functioning of a democracy, surely to goodness, would be to complain about the broken and/or crooked and/or non-auditable election process?
If you've got clean elections you've got some chance to fix the other stuff. If you don't have clean elections you're stuffed whatever you do.
... kids who want to be tracked.
Any kid who doesn't want to be tracked has a number of options including:
(1) Turn the phone off.
(2) Leave the phone at home (one of my kids does this regularly when he's out of credit).
(3) Leave the phone somewhere harmless, eg at an approved-of friend's house, whilst off doing something less harmless.
Now, all these involve not having the phone with you, so the kid might also wish to:
(4) Get another phone for real-life use, which you don't tell your parents about.
Or, sometimes even cheaper, don't get a whole new phone:
(5) Get another SIM for real-life use, which you don't tell your parents about.
OK, so none of these work if the parent is phoning the child every five minutes and expecting them to actually answer - there's a limit to how often the child can "not hear" the ringtone, or claim that "I don't answer the phone whilst sitting on the loo", or whatever. But, as ever, such a family has people-issues to which a technological solution ain't gonna work anyway.
If you have used Windows 2000 until now, you have used it for several years now. It's not like your initial investment in the OS hasn't delivered it's return by now.
I've recently done a new install of Win2k, so have had only a few months' use.
(The box was previously running NT Server, and has been retired from that role. It doesn't have the hardware to run XP, so Win2k was the obvious choice. Win2k will be fine for that particular user, until such time, perhaps, as they start getting PDF files that need a new version of the reader that won't run on Win2k, or something like that. It was the inability of modern third party software to run on NT that essentially forced the upgrade, not anything that Microsoft have done.)
For now, if you really need to keep your PC on all day and all night, stick to XP, Linux, Mac OS X, or SkyOS!
Global Warning Denial USA Rules OK!!
A very high proportion of aircraft don't have transponders, so won't be seen by the TCAS in an UAV.
... and so on up to 1970s spamcans, some of which do admittedly have transponders fitted, but whether they work at all is one thing and whether the altitude encoder is also working is another.
Most gliders don't, most hot air balloons don't, most Permit aircraft don't, most microlights don't, most paragliders don't, and so on.
Then when you move on to "real" aircraft, most 1940s cloth-and-stick taildraggers don't
Plus, depending on where you are and what you're doing, you might not turn the thing on anyway (it's quite common to be asked not to in the circuit), and there are plenty of people who don't turn on mode C even though they've got it and it works. (Quite why they don't I've never understood, but it's a fact of life.)
No thanks, I don't want anything flying around up there that will fly into me quite happily because its TCAS hasn't seen me.
Yeah, I've got one of those.
As 100% of emails to that address were spam it now silently deletes anything sent to it.
... reading the Times of India.
You understand quite a lot of the individual words, but once they're put together into sentences you (or, more precisely I, as a native English speaker, YMMV of course) end up without the remotest clue what the overal paragraph means.
Stop this stupid willy-waving "my box stays up longer than yours" game.
When you're not using it, turn the ****ing thing off.
(With an exemption for Americans, of course, because they don't believe in global warming, so they're allowed to do whatever they like.)
... the parent is "insightful". I'd have thought "ignorant" was more to the point.
... maybe I won't bother, I've got to go to work in the morning so it'd better be bedtime.
There's just so much wrong with this analysis of CCTV in Britain that I don't know where to begin
On one issue (a policy matter before Cambridge City Council) I did have an opinion but reckoned that it wasn't worth as much as others who had studied the matter more than I had. So I asked for my vote to be recorded as half a vote.
... but as the side I was supporting lost handsomely it didn't matter in the end.
Surprisingly enough there was no mechanism to record this
"Because it's in the Torygraph" is surely to goodness an adequate answer.
Apart from its political failings, it panders to a most bizarre class of pornography consumers. Just take a look at page two - several times a week there will be a story about a dead child. Now, children do die, and this does from time to time make the news, and from time to time is legitimately newsworth, but the Torygraph seems to find far more of these stories "newsworthy" than anyone else, and they always put the stories in the same place in the newspaper where any sickos who are into dead-children-porn know where to look.
(For American readers: the Torygraph would probably seem a bit Euro-communist to you if you actually read it, but to us it's towards the right of the political spectrum. Not that that means as much as it used to, with Tony Bliar's "Labour" party even further to the right.)