Well, unless you're a felon. Lots of states permanently disenfranchise felons. This is a good way to disenfranchise the lower class, by the way - rich people get to plea down to a lesser charge, people without the political and financial clout to get good representation lose thier right to vote forever.
The form designer (of course) runs in.NET. This is one reason for the nasty icky delay when you turn it on and why it's so slow compared to other parts of the IDE. As far as I know, the rest of it is C++ code, although it's mostly interconnected COM components rather than a single application - VS.NET is highly modular, which is kinda cool since you can download an SDK that allows you very low level control over it.
Use wxPython instead, which is REALLY cross-platform (ie, it actually works correctly on non-linux platforms). There's even wxWindows bindings for.NET, so you can still use C# if you want;)
Walking through an airport is hardly suspicious activity. As for research, I'm all for funding of that. Rolling out a program into actual use, on the other hand, is not "research". It's pork.
It's the difference between facial detection and facial recognition. Computers are pretty good at the first - not as good as humans, but certainly good enough for most purposes. My employer is in the process of testing such a system to count the number of people who ride trains - it's certainly good enough for that, but it's useless for facial recognition.
You'll find that MOST investigations actually start with a crime and then proceed from there. It's vanishingly rare to start with a suspect and then look for a crime. Doing so is one of the signs of a corrupt system. This is that whole presumption of innocence thing that you don't seem to understand. Think about having a 50% chance of being detained every time you left the house for a comparison.
Consider some numbers from LaGuardia, where about 5 million people a day fly through. With a 10% false positive rate, thats about 180 million false positives a year, to match against however many terrorists are both in the database and who attempted to hijack a plane that year. You'de have many, many, many times more exceptions than you would faces. This would make it almost trivial for an actual terrorist to pass himself off as an exception - and thats assuming that he even had to, and the guards wouldn't just pass him on assumption, as they did the other half a million people who tripped a false positive that day.
Simply put - without a false positive rate thousands of times better than current systems, there is no point in relying upon facial scanning to detect terrorists. Your odds get a bit better if you're just going to detect anyone who's a wanted criminal, since there's alot more of those, but only a little bit. If systems did improve by several orders of magnitude, there'd still be privacy and civil rights issues, but in thier current state there's hardly even any room for argument. Facial recognition is just a new type of government pork - it's a meaningless deadend, but it costs a whole lot of money, which makes it perfect for your typical amoral government contractor.
1) They aren't any more effective than human personal, and unless they have an unrealistically low false-postive rate, they actually generate more work than they're worth
2) As anyone who's been to (or worked in) a DMV knows, there's basically 2 human reponses to computerized systems like this: a) you ignore the computer whenever it disagrees with you or b) you always obey the computer, no matter what. Unless you've got fantastically high sucess rates, b is exactly what the tinfoil croud is worried about (because this is even more important than getting the right address on your drivers license). A means that the computer system is a waste of time and money, which is the most common result if the system has low accuracy.
You say that like you have the slightest idea what you're talking about.
Let me summarize your train of thought here:
a) An automated system with a success rate barely better than flipping a coin is sufficent cause to arrest someone and force them to undergo a trial or investigation
b) A "terrorist face" database would contain "exception data" to indicate people that're commonly misidentified as terrorists. Somehow this would both not reduce the security of the system but also prevent the detainment of people who happen to look like the terrorists.
c) There exists a class of unforgable documents that are never incorrect or issued incorrectly that can be used to 100% identify someone who trips a false positive.
The fact that it's not new doesn't mean we can't bitch about it, either. You're also misrepresenting what the parent posted said, which is that he was held without being charged, which is true.
You're also assuming that the burden is on me or others to prove that he was held in bad faith, whereas a person who understood our legal system would think the burden of proof would be to prove that he was being held in GOOD faith.
His case also doesn't say anything about the constitutionality of the whole material witness concept, which is arguable at best.
I'd imagine that after the first 3 or 4 civil suits airports would cease using the systems, thus throwing away both all the money they spent on an immature technology being used incorrectly, as well as all the money they spend on the civil cases, as well the general hassle caused by all the false positives.
On a side note, I'd be interested to know what you think would be neccesary for someone who consistently trips a false positive to prove his innoncence, and how hard it would be for someone who SHOULD be flagged to get ahold of or forge this documentation.
They'd have been cleared and let on the flight, dumbass. They used thier real names and IDs. This technology wouldn't have prevented the Sept. 11th attacks, but may, with another 5 years or so of improvement, be of use in preventing other attacks with different methodology.
Depending on how this is used, 61% is almost certainly far too low to be of any use - if it's used to back up passport identification, as the article suggests, then you're talking about a customs official knowing that theres only a (roughly) 50-50 chance that the computer is correct, and they'll correctly ignore it in favor of thier own judgement. No point in having it in that circumstance.
For picking faces out of a crowd, the 61% success figure is totally meaningless without the false positive rate, so we can't make any sort of judgment based on the facts presented.
"I Agree" certainly is NOT agreement, in the legal sense. There's substantial requirements for digital signatures and this meets none of them.
The EULA is clearly NOT a part of the sale - this is part of number 3. The EULA is only presented AFTER money has changed hands. For the EULA to be part of the sale, the EULA would have to be presented and signed at the time of purchase. Software companies don't want the hassle and lost sales that actually presenting them as contract agreements would entail, so they treat them like sales but claim they're contracts. Fuck that.
This is untrue. Copyright law specifically grants the right to make copies to the hard drive, temporary copies to RAM, and any other copying neccesary for functionality under fair use rights. This is something that people writing EULAs really don't want more people to know.
Interestingly, this is exactly how laws tend to get overturned. Civil rights is the most obvious example. Corporate and tax law is another. In fact, it's the most reliable and common way of getting a law you don't agree with overturned - break it, get arrested, and challenge it in court.
a) There's no opportunity for argeement with an EULA, which is a commonly accepted characteristic of a contract
b) There is no consideration involved in an EULA, and consideration is a defining attribute of a contract.
c) Software purchases are presented as sales and have all the characteristics of a sale, thus they cannot be contractual obligations.
Maybe those should be the people who're fielding phone calls, instead of the ones who weren't informed, then.
What you're saying makes some sense. But think about it for a second - you're saying that Dell doesn't, and shouldn't have to, support customers who care about the legal issues with thier products. If they don't care about it, it has NO FUCKING REASON to be on the machine at all. The fact that it's unlikely in the extreme to ever be an issue for this person notwithstanding.
If they're going to put EULAs on products, they need to take responsibility for it. Period. You don't get to have it both ways.
Note that the Dell people didn't have any way of knowing if he was a reviewer or not - the EULAs he would have had to review were not provided, and were not made available, even after exreme effort on the customers part. The guy in the article obviously DID give a rats ass about the EULA.
Not using the software doesn't mean the EULA doesn't apply to you - for example, if you've legally installed any MS software, including security patches, in the last year or so, you no longer have the right to run or publish benchmarks of the.NET framework. Period. Or for Media Player 9, too. This is even if you don't use the software in question anymore, or even if you didn't use it at all. The idea that they're unenforcable is open to debate - they're certainly enough of a legal wedge to make life difficult for you. If they _are_ unenforcable, then it should be a violation of fair trade laws to even show the damn things at all. It's a fucked up part of a fucked up industry and hassling people over it is about all you can do. The fact that a manager at Dell told him that he should just click through and that it didn't matter is grossly irresponsible - meaningless or not, the correct answer is that he'll have a copy of the EULAs in the mail to him the next buisness day. This was newsworthy as much for how shittily Dell support handles it (and for what it reveals about how important they consider EULAs) as much as for the existence of the screen.
People would get pissed because it's a state right to sell the names & addresses of the people who live in it. There's several states who'll happilly sell you CDs with DMV records on them.
You've heard of criminal negligence? Allowing a crime (such as murder) to ocurr when you have the ability and the responsibility to prevent it is criminal. The burden of proof and the requirements are much higher than for a civil case, such as the negligence being willfull.
Not 100% correct - if you saw it happen, and didn't do anything, for example, you didn't call the police, you could be liable in a number of ways. Especially if you were, for example, a security guard in charge of the area. You aren't required to put your own life at risk by physically protecting the stranger but you'd be in danger of criminal prosecution for negligence and certainly civil liability if you were in a position of authority with the ability to prevent a crime and you didn't do so.
.NET, while similar in concept to Java is very different under the hood. It's true that it's broadly similiar in that it's a VM based language. Even if it wasn't, that doesn't mean they couldn't hold patents on it, thanks to the wide wonderful world of the USPTO.
CORBA, RMI, and RPC are not VMs - I'm assuming you're comparing them with SOAP, and of course SOAP is implemented very differently although it address the same kind of problem. This isn't a hard concept, folks -.NET is NOT Java. It's like Java. It borrows alot of concepts from Java. But it ain't Java. It's got things Java will never have, like true language independence, and the remotest chance at being sucessful as a desktop application development environment.
You don't know what the fuck you're talking about. I've written COM components in C++ too, it's a pain in the ass. It's easier in VB, which is why there's a ton of VB ActiveX controls out there.
.NET doesn't have anything to do with COM, and is certainly not a wrapper on top of it. Your initial post claiming this is bullshit and trying to redirect the argument to whether or not.NET is a good idea is irrelevent.
The DMCA was used against DeCSS by claiming it was a copyright infringment tool, which is one of the things that the DMCA makes illegal. The DMCA doesn't apply to trade secrets, and while trade secret law may have been involved in the DeCSS case, I doubt it was, and it certainly wasn't used as part of the DMCA.
Neither copyright law nor the DMCA nor trade secret law can do a damn thing to the Mono project. It's in danger from patent law, if it's in danger from anything, because MS holds patents on most of the implementation of.NET.
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Well, unless you're a felon. Lots of states permanently disenfranchise felons. This is a good way to disenfranchise the lower class, by the way - rich people get to plea down to a lesser charge, people without the political and financial clout to get good representation lose thier right to vote forever.
The form designer (of course) runs in .NET. This is one reason for the nasty icky delay when you turn it on and why it's so slow compared to other parts of the IDE. As far as I know, the rest of it is C++ code, although it's mostly interconnected COM components rather than a single application - VS .NET is highly modular, which is kinda cool since you can download an SDK that allows you very low level control over it.
Use wxPython instead, which is REALLY cross-platform (ie, it actually works correctly on non-linux platforms). There's even wxWindows bindings for .NET, so you can still use C# if you want ;)
Walking through an airport is hardly suspicious activity. As for research, I'm all for funding of that. Rolling out a program into actual use, on the other hand, is not "research". It's pork.
It's the difference between facial detection and facial recognition. Computers are pretty good at the first - not as good as humans, but certainly good enough for most purposes. My employer is in the process of testing such a system to count the number of people who ride trains - it's certainly good enough for that, but it's useless for facial recognition.
Consider some numbers from LaGuardia, where about 5 million people a day fly through. With a 10% false positive rate, thats about 180 million false positives a year, to match against however many terrorists are both in the database and who attempted to hijack a plane that year. You'de have many, many, many times more exceptions than you would faces. This would make it almost trivial for an actual terrorist to pass himself off as an exception - and thats assuming that he even had to, and the guards wouldn't just pass him on assumption, as they did the other half a million people who tripped a false positive that day.
Simply put - without a false positive rate thousands of times better than current systems, there is no point in relying upon facial scanning to detect terrorists. Your odds get a bit better if you're just going to detect anyone who's a wanted criminal, since there's alot more of those, but only a little bit. If systems did improve by several orders of magnitude, there'd still be privacy and civil rights issues, but in thier current state there's hardly even any room for argument. Facial recognition is just a new type of government pork - it's a meaningless deadend, but it costs a whole lot of money, which makes it perfect for your typical amoral government contractor.
1) They aren't any more effective than human personal, and unless they have an unrealistically low false-postive rate, they actually generate more work than they're worth
2) As anyone who's been to (or worked in) a DMV knows, there's basically 2 human reponses to computerized systems like this: a) you ignore the computer whenever it disagrees with you or b) you always obey the computer, no matter what. Unless you've got fantastically high sucess rates, b is exactly what the tinfoil croud is worried about (because this is even more important than getting the right address on your drivers license). A means that the computer system is a waste of time and money, which is the most common result if the system has low accuracy.
Let me summarize your train of thought here:
a) An automated system with a success rate barely better than flipping a coin is sufficent cause to arrest someone and force them to undergo a trial or investigation
b) A "terrorist face" database would contain "exception data" to indicate people that're commonly misidentified as terrorists. Somehow this would both not reduce the security of the system but also prevent the detainment of people who happen to look like the terrorists.
c) There exists a class of unforgable documents that are never incorrect or issued incorrectly that can be used to 100% identify someone who trips a false positive.
You're also assuming that the burden is on me or others to prove that he was held in bad faith, whereas a person who understood our legal system would think the burden of proof would be to prove that he was being held in GOOD faith.
His case also doesn't say anything about the constitutionality of the whole material witness concept, which is arguable at best.
On a side note, I'd be interested to know what you think would be neccesary for someone who consistently trips a false positive to prove his innoncence, and how hard it would be for someone who SHOULD be flagged to get ahold of or forge this documentation.
Your link actually confirms what the parent said. His guilty plea doesn't change the facts of his imprisonment.
They'd have been cleared and let on the flight, dumbass. They used thier real names and IDs. This technology wouldn't have prevented the Sept. 11th attacks, but may, with another 5 years or so of improvement, be of use in preventing other attacks with different methodology.
For picking faces out of a crowd, the 61% success figure is totally meaningless without the false positive rate, so we can't make any sort of judgment based on the facts presented.
The EULA is clearly NOT a part of the sale - this is part of number 3. The EULA is only presented AFTER money has changed hands. For the EULA to be part of the sale, the EULA would have to be presented and signed at the time of purchase. Software companies don't want the hassle and lost sales that actually presenting them as contract agreements would entail, so they treat them like sales but claim they're contracts. Fuck that.
This is untrue. Copyright law specifically grants the right to make copies to the hard drive, temporary copies to RAM, and any other copying neccesary for functionality under fair use rights. This is something that people writing EULAs really don't want more people to know.
Interestingly, this is exactly how laws tend to get overturned. Civil rights is the most obvious example. Corporate and tax law is another. In fact, it's the most reliable and common way of getting a law you don't agree with overturned - break it, get arrested, and challenge it in court.
a) There's no opportunity for argeement with an EULA, which is a commonly accepted characteristic of a contract
b) There is no consideration involved in an EULA, and consideration is a defining attribute of a contract.
c) Software purchases are presented as sales and have all the characteristics of a sale, thus they cannot be contractual obligations.
What you're saying makes some sense. But think about it for a second - you're saying that Dell doesn't, and shouldn't have to, support customers who care about the legal issues with thier products. If they don't care about it, it has NO FUCKING REASON to be on the machine at all. The fact that it's unlikely in the extreme to ever be an issue for this person notwithstanding.
If they're going to put EULAs on products, they need to take responsibility for it. Period. You don't get to have it both ways.
Note that the Dell people didn't have any way of knowing if he was a reviewer or not - the EULAs he would have had to review were not provided, and were not made available, even after exreme effort on the customers part. The guy in the article obviously DID give a rats ass about the EULA.
Not using the software doesn't mean the EULA doesn't apply to you - for example, if you've legally installed any MS software, including security patches, in the last year or so, you no longer have the right to run or publish benchmarks of the .NET framework. Period. Or for Media Player 9, too. This is even if you don't use the software in question anymore, or even if you didn't use it at all. The idea that they're unenforcable is open to debate - they're certainly enough of a legal wedge to make life difficult for you. If they _are_ unenforcable, then it should be a violation of fair trade laws to even show the damn things at all. It's a fucked up part of a fucked up industry and hassling people over it is about all you can do. The fact that a manager at Dell told him that he should just click through and that it didn't matter is grossly irresponsible - meaningless or not, the correct answer is that he'll have a copy of the EULAs in the mail to him the next buisness day. This was newsworthy as much for how shittily Dell support handles it (and for what it reveals about how important they consider EULAs) as much as for the existence of the screen.
People would get pissed because it's a state right to sell the names & addresses of the people who live in it. There's several states who'll happilly sell you CDs with DMV records on them.
You've heard of criminal negligence? Allowing a crime (such as murder) to ocurr when you have the ability and the responsibility to prevent it is criminal. The burden of proof and the requirements are much higher than for a civil case, such as the negligence being willfull.
Interestingly, SCO is requesting a jury trial in it's case with IBM.
Not 100% correct - if you saw it happen, and didn't do anything, for example, you didn't call the police, you could be liable in a number of ways. Especially if you were, for example, a security guard in charge of the area. You aren't required to put your own life at risk by physically protecting the stranger but you'd be in danger of criminal prosecution for negligence and certainly civil liability if you were in a position of authority with the ability to prevent a crime and you didn't do so.
CORBA, RMI, and RPC are not VMs - I'm assuming you're comparing them with SOAP, and of course SOAP is implemented very differently although it address the same kind of problem. This isn't a hard concept, folks - .NET is NOT Java. It's like Java. It borrows alot of concepts from Java. But it ain't Java. It's got things Java will never have, like true language independence, and the remotest chance at being sucessful as a desktop application development environment.
The DMCA was used against DeCSS by claiming it was a copyright infringment tool, which is one of the things that the DMCA makes illegal. The DMCA doesn't apply to trade secrets, and while trade secret law may have been involved in the DeCSS case, I doubt it was, and it certainly wasn't used as part of the DMCA.
Neither copyright law nor the DMCA nor trade secret law can do a damn thing to the Mono project. It's in danger from patent law, if it's in danger from anything, because MS holds patents on most of the implementation of .NET.