It's not "eye contact" when one person is looking at another person without the other person looking back.
As far as I can tell, these glasses detect when someone looks at you, whether the wearer is looking back or not.
It's a good point; the original article confuses these definitions, and the answer to "Why bother?" then becomes that these glasses detect more than just two-way eye contact.
I am often able to sense eye contact without any sensors at all. Anyone else?
Yes, but that doesn't mean we sense all of them, or anywhere near that. I find I can easily sense eye contact when I'm looking back at them, or close to it, but otherwise I have no idea who might be looking at me.
Do people keep forgetting that the human race survived perfectly fine without this Government interference? It's not NEEDED to save lives. Being able to block the airwaves is a luxury, not a right.
I don't think this sort of argument is relevant on either side - what's important is to weigh up the possible benefits and consequences of such an action, and the consequences should not be overlooked.
It's all very well trying to make it look a balance between public safety and public convenience, but I can't help feeling that if you or I did this sort of thing, we wouldn't be charged with being a nuisance to "public convenience", but quite probably under some terrorism law?
It's very debateable whether the possible loss of life due to disruption to emergency services and the general terror and panic caused to the public is less than the possible lives saved (which requires both that there is a terrorist attack going to happen, and that they are reliant on mobile phones).
Of course, everyone bending over backwards to ensure Bush's safety is nothing new. When he visits the UK, it costs the British taxpayer $8.5 million for security (meanwhile, UK visitors to the US can look forward to such fun as photographing and fingerprinting, but that's another story).
Your passport now contains your photo, your date of birth, your citizenship, where you applied for it, and everywhere you've been. There is zero loss of privacy with this new system.
Currently, one guy takes a look at your photo and forgets about it afterwards. Now that photo, along with fingerprints and any other biometric information, can get copied and stored in a central database of every country you visit. That's no loss of privacy?
That's like saying "firewalls can't prevent all possible intrusions, so they don't work."
Well when the government passes a law saying that their firewalls (along with monitoring software and DRM controls) must be stalled on all computers, I'll be arguing against that too.
Perhaps you consider immigration and terrorism to be completely unrelated problems. You are mistaken, as September 11 proved.
Yeah, cos immigrants are terrorists, and citizens never do terrorism.
It seems to me that the only thing that changes with these new passports is that they get harder to fake. Don't forget that your current passport already has biometric data on it... a picture of your face. This is just supplementing the document with more data to identify someone as the rightful owner.
If this was true - that biometrics were used purely for authentication - then that would be fine. But that's not true.
The problem with digital biometrics stored on a card is that not only will they be used to check the card matches you, but any country you passed through will be doing comparisons against their database of "people they don't like", and more significantly, including them in their central databases for future reference.
This isn't tinfoil hat paranoia stuff, since the US government have openly stated that this is what they intend to do (I'll be curious to know what effect this will have on tourism - my own anecdotal evidence is that this is putting people off travelling to the US).
I find it interesting that on the one hand, governments are pushing us towards a globalised economy (because of course, that's good for the big corporations), but on the other other hand want a world where no one can easily travel anywhere else.
You miss the point - that one is totally reliant on trusting a faceless corporation. I'd rather not risk that at all, thanks. Personally I don't have much faith in a company that thinks you can "own" the look of a user interface.
BT waited 24 years before making their patent claim, so your 10-20 year claim of Apple doesn't show anything.
I'd say it's a lot more dangerous if a company doesn't actively defend there patents, as a result everyone uses them, and then later on there's the very real possibility of them trying to sue everyone in ten or twenty years. GIFs and hyperlinks, anyone?
Aside from the fact that rape is a little more than "taking a service without permission", I wouldn't call copying to be taking a service - that implies that the authors are still having to do some extra work in order to serve you.
If you want your analogies, it's analogous to fantasising about someone without their permission. You're gaining benefit as a result of someone else, but they aren't having to do any service as a result of that. At the very least, this should be allowed for personal use only!
But he fits the atheist description ("without belief in god").
He might fit the agnostic description too, though it depends whether we mean "don't know if there's a god" (that one applies to me, as well as being an atheist), or "don't know whether or not he believes" (that one certainly isn't me - I *know* that I don't have any belief).
Unfortunately the terms atheism, and especially agnosticsm have many different meanings, and in general they are certainly not mutually exclusive.
To be an athiest, I would have to believe that there is no God even in the face of evidence that there *is* a God. Athiests get off as easily as God-believers in the sense that God cannot be proven or disproven, but the only logical conclusion is to be agnostic.
If you don't believe in God, you're an atheist. That's all it means. Some atheists might be as you describe, but I'm not.
Judging by what you say, you are an agnostic, not an athiest.
Perhaps he's both? I certainly am.
Atheism and agnosticsm are not things of a different degree on some scale of belief - they're different things altogether, and not necessarily mutually exclusive. Agnostic seems to mean various things, but it is about *knowledge* (or lack of), rather than belief.
I don't believe in god, and I don't know if there's a god either, so generally it's reasonable to say I fall into both categories.
Don't go around saying that you're an athiest - people will assume you're illogical.
What's illogical is to tell people not to use a term, when that term can be interpreted in many different ways.
How many people do you know who have been excecuted, buried, and then a couple of days later ate a meal with friends? Not many I'll bet.
There are countless stories about people who have been supposedly seen after they have died, including by witnesses far more recent than 2,000 years ago.
Not that I believe much of that either - but I find it interesting that whilst people might claim the existence of ghosts, no one ever suggests it means that their dead friend was the son of God.
Perhaps they should stop patronising us by telling us why we would supposedly be better off to believe their religion, when we are just as likely to be people who do "unquestionable good".
That's my belief. I'm not evangelizing to you... your choice is yours to make. You can think I'm crazy if you want... for the sake of argument, suppose I am... crazy. There's no God, there's no after life. I die and turn to dust. So... I "wasted" my life trying to be a "good" person. Not so bad, really. But... what if you are wrong?
Pascal's Wager *yawn*
So what happens if you're wrong, and it turns out that it's Christians who end up suffering for eternity?
You do realise that you don't have to read a particular LiveJournal don't you? Nothing is forced down your throat. How on earth does this ruin things?
If you are using LiveJournal to read entries of random people from randomCity() ranting about randomSubject(), then you are completely missing the point. I read LiveJournals of my friends (or possibly, some random person if I've found them to be particularly interesting, but certainly not people I find to be boring) - if you have friends, you should read their LiveJournals;)
It would be like saying Slashdot is a load of crap, because who wants to read a load of boring (geek|nerd) "tossers" ranting on about random things.
Fortunately, the technology regarding journals is good
Yes, as you say yourself, the technology is good, and this is independant of what people use it for. When people use LiveJournal to document technical things (as some people do), how does that fit into your view of blogs and journals?
So please go learn a littl bit about Monty Python, or stop smoking pot before moderating.
Well, the moderation amused me, but I think it makes sense - the point being that the "logic" displayed by Blunkett et al (eg, claiming that the public are in favour of ID cards by ignoring the responses of those not in favour, or the fact that ID cards have been pushed forward as a result of the Madrid bombings, even though the Spanish have ID cards - compulsory, IIRC - and worse that they use the fact that Spain has an ID card as an argument in favour of us having one, when the logic suggests that there is no such argument) is about as logical as that displayed by idiotic medieval witch hunters as portrayed in that scene.
True, but the point is that as soon as you admit the system only makes a slight improvement, rather than combatting it significantly or entirely, then it becomes a lot harder to justify.
I can agree that ID cards could slightly reduce the level of illegal immigrants, but I do not consider this to be enough justification to spend billions (which may be more than the cost of the illegal immigrants - and at least when money is spent on immigrants, it is helping people which is surely some good even if they're here illegal, where as an ID card has no inherent value to humanity).
Nor do I consider it justification to turn this country in a police state where I have to produce my ID on demand, be arrested if forget to take it, and god knows what happens if I lose my card (thankfully they're currently not considering this, at first, but compulsory carrying ID is a necessity to have any real effect on spotting illegal immigrants).
Even if this has a small effect on terrorism - is say saving an average a few lives per year worth it, when a better result might be achieved by ploughing a few billions more into our underfunded health service?
As for software and locks, people choose to use those things. I'd be furious if my neighbour put a lock on my stuff without permission even if it was "for my own good".
One reason is local testing. If patches are applied to machines in a company immediately, there is a danger that this may cause troubles or incompatibilites.
Whether this will cost the company more than the possible virus outbreaks due to delayed patching is another matter, but it's not like it's just a case of incompetence.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not "eye contact" when one person is looking at another person without the other person looking back.
As far as I can tell, these glasses detect when someone looks at you, whether the wearer is looking back or not.
It's a good point; the original article confuses these definitions, and the answer to "Why bother?" then becomes that these glasses detect more than just two-way eye contact.
I am often able to sense eye contact without any sensors at all. Anyone else?
Yes, but that doesn't mean we sense all of them, or anywhere near that. I find I can easily sense eye contact when I'm looking back at them, or close to it, but otherwise I have no idea who might be looking at me.
Do people keep forgetting that the human race survived perfectly fine without this Government interference? It's not NEEDED to save lives. Being able to block the airwaves is a luxury, not a right.
I don't think this sort of argument is relevant on either side - what's important is to weigh up the possible benefits and consequences of such an action, and the consequences should not be overlooked.
It's all very well trying to make it look a balance between public safety and public convenience, but I can't help feeling that if you or I did this sort of thing, we wouldn't be charged with being a nuisance to "public convenience", but quite probably under some terrorism law?
It's very debateable whether the possible loss of life due to disruption to emergency services and the general terror and panic caused to the public is less than the possible lives saved (which requires both that there is a terrorist attack going to happen, and that they are reliant on mobile phones).
Of course, everyone bending over backwards to ensure Bush's safety is nothing new. When he visits the UK, it costs the British taxpayer $8.5 million for security (meanwhile, UK visitors to the US can look forward to such fun as photographing and fingerprinting, but that's another story).
Your passport now contains your photo, your date of birth, your citizenship, where you applied for it, and everywhere you've been. There is zero loss of privacy with this new system.
Currently, one guy takes a look at your photo and forgets about it afterwards. Now that photo, along with fingerprints and any other biometric information, can get copied and stored in a central database of every country you visit. That's no loss of privacy?
That's like saying "firewalls can't prevent all possible intrusions, so they don't work."
Well when the government passes a law saying that their firewalls (along with monitoring software and DRM controls) must be stalled on all computers, I'll be arguing against that too.
Perhaps you consider immigration and terrorism to be completely unrelated problems. You are mistaken, as September 11 proved.
Yeah, cos immigrants are terrorists, and citizens never do terrorism.
It seems to me that the only thing that changes with these new passports is that they get harder to fake. Don't forget that your current passport already has biometric data on it... a picture of your face. This is just supplementing the document with more data to identify someone as the rightful owner.
If this was true - that biometrics were used purely for authentication - then that would be fine. But that's not true.
The problem with digital biometrics stored on a card is that not only will they be used to check the card matches you, but any country you passed through will be doing comparisons against their database of "people they don't like", and more significantly, including them in their central databases for future reference.
This isn't tinfoil hat paranoia stuff, since the US government have openly stated that this is what they intend to do (I'll be curious to know what effect this will have on tourism - my own anecdotal evidence is that this is putting people off travelling to the US).
I find it interesting that on the one hand, governments are pushing us towards a globalised economy (because of course, that's good for the big corporations), but on the other other hand want a world where no one can easily travel anywhere else.
They can't have it both ways.
You miss the point - that one is totally reliant on trusting a faceless corporation. I'd rather not risk that at all, thanks. Personally I don't have much faith in a company that thinks you can "own" the look of a user interface.
BT waited 24 years before making their patent claim, so your 10-20 year claim of Apple doesn't show anything.
I'd say it's a lot more dangerous if a company doesn't actively defend there patents, as a result everyone uses them, and then later on there's the very real possibility of them trying to sue everyone in ten or twenty years. GIFs and hyperlinks, anyone?
The fact that you need to use a calculator for imperial shows the advantage of metric ;)
Aside from the fact that rape is a little more than "taking a service without permission", I wouldn't call copying to be taking a service - that implies that the authors are still having to do some extra work in order to serve you.
If you want your analogies, it's analogous to fantasising about someone without their permission. You're gaining benefit as a result of someone else, but they aren't having to do any service as a result of that. At the very least, this should be allowed for personal use only!
But he fits the atheist description ("without belief in god").
He might fit the agnostic description too, though it depends whether we mean "don't know if there's a god" (that one applies to me, as well as being an atheist), or "don't know whether or not he believes" (that one certainly isn't me - I *know* that I don't have any belief).
Unfortunately the terms atheism, and especially agnosticsm have many different meanings, and in general they are certainly not mutually exclusive.
Do you believe in Unicorns?
Just because he fits another definition doesn't imply he can't be an atheist. Adjectives aren't mutually exclusive!
Nope, he's an atheist. He might be an agnostic too, but that's a separate issue.
Atheism is about not having belief. Being "sure" doesn't come into it - *that's* what agnosticsm is about, knowledge (or lack of).
Have a read of this.
To be an athiest, I would have to believe that there is no God even in the face of evidence that there *is* a God. Athiests get off as easily as God-believers in the sense that God cannot be proven or disproven, but the only logical conclusion is to be agnostic.
If you don't believe in God, you're an atheist. That's all it means. Some atheists might be as you describe, but I'm not.
Judging by what you say, you are an agnostic, not an athiest.
Perhaps he's both? I certainly am.
Atheism and agnosticsm are not things of a different degree on some scale of belief - they're different things altogether, and not necessarily mutually exclusive. Agnostic seems to mean various things, but it is about *knowledge* (or lack of), rather than belief.
I don't believe in god, and I don't know if there's a god either, so generally it's reasonable to say I fall into both categories.
Don't go around saying that you're an athiest - people will assume you're illogical.
What's illogical is to tell people not to use a term, when that term can be interpreted in many different ways.
How many people do you know who have been excecuted, buried, and then a couple of days later ate a meal with friends? Not many I'll bet.
There are countless stories about people who have been supposedly seen after they have died, including by witnesses far more recent than 2,000 years ago.
Not that I believe much of that either - but I find it interesting that whilst people might claim the existence of ghosts, no one ever suggests it means that their dead friend was the son of God.
..and "non-believers"?
No strings attached, no fine print, no conditions of any kind. Just an unconditional promise. Where's the threat in that?
That small matter of spending an eternity in hell, that the A.C. talked about?
Perhaps they should stop patronising us by telling us why we would supposedly be better off to believe their religion, when we are just as likely to be people who do "unquestionable good".
That's my belief. I'm not evangelizing to you ... your choice is yours to make. You can think I'm crazy if you want ... for the sake of argument, suppose I am ... crazy. There's no God, there's no after life. I die and turn to dust. So ... I "wasted" my life trying to be a "good" person. Not so bad, really. But ... what if you are wrong?
Pascal's Wager *yawn*
So what happens if you're wrong, and it turns out that it's Christians who end up suffering for eternity?
I like the qt widgets from Troll Tech.
:( (Well, there is a GPL Windows version, but it's an old version).
;)
One API, many platforms. What's not to like?
One problem is that the Windows version is rather expensive
Although that makes me wonder - their argument for releasing the GPL version on MacOS but not Windows is that Apple supports the open source community. With Microsoft releasing open source now, can we look forward to the latest version of QT being released for Windows under GPL?
You do realise that you don't have to read a particular LiveJournal don't you? Nothing is forced down your throat. How on earth does this ruin things?
;)
If you are using LiveJournal to read entries of random people from randomCity() ranting about randomSubject(), then you are completely missing the point. I read LiveJournals of my friends (or possibly, some random person if I've found them to be particularly interesting, but certainly not people I find to be boring) - if you have friends, you should read their LiveJournals
It would be like saying Slashdot is a load of crap, because who wants to read a load of boring (geek|nerd) "tossers" ranting on about random things.
Fortunately, the technology regarding journals is good
Yes, as you say yourself, the technology is good, and this is independant of what people use it for. When people use LiveJournal to document technical things (as some people do), how does that fit into your view of blogs and journals?
So please go learn a littl bit about Monty Python, or stop smoking pot before moderating.
Well, the moderation amused me, but I think it makes sense - the point being that the "logic" displayed by Blunkett et al (eg, claiming that the public are in favour of ID cards by ignoring the responses of those not in favour, or the fact that ID cards have been pushed forward as a result of the Madrid bombings, even though the Spanish have ID cards - compulsory, IIRC - and worse that they use the fact that Spain has an ID card as an argument in favour of us having one, when the logic suggests that there is no such argument) is about as logical as that displayed by idiotic medieval witch hunters as portrayed in that scene.
True, but the point is that as soon as you admit the system only makes a slight improvement, rather than combatting it significantly or entirely, then it becomes a lot harder to justify.
I can agree that ID cards could slightly reduce the level of illegal immigrants, but I do not consider this to be enough justification to spend billions (which may be more than the cost of the illegal immigrants - and at least when money is spent on immigrants, it is helping people which is surely some good even if they're here illegal, where as an ID card has no inherent value to humanity).
Nor do I consider it justification to turn this country in a police state where I have to produce my ID on demand, be arrested if forget to take it, and god knows what happens if I lose my card (thankfully they're currently not considering this, at first, but compulsory carrying ID is a necessity to have any real effect on spotting illegal immigrants).
Even if this has a small effect on terrorism - is say saving an average a few lives per year worth it, when a better result might be achieved by ploughing a few billions more into our underfunded health service?
As for software and locks, people choose to use those things. I'd be furious if my neighbour put a lock on my stuff without permission even if it was "for my own good".
One reason is local testing. If patches are applied to machines in a company immediately, there is a danger that this may cause troubles or incompatibilites.
Whether this will cost the company more than the possible virus outbreaks due to delayed patching is another matter, but it's not like it's just a case of incompetence.