Some years ago (I've long lost the reference) a PhD student in Rhode Island digitized human faces with 256 points and then projected these points through the same points on an androngenous composite of hundreds of faces next to the sample; an "average" face.
At some point in a plane beyond the reference face, the points at the ends of the projectors were then re-plotted and joined to form a caracature of the amplified differences between the sample face and the sexless "norm".
She showed that her subjects were much more likely to recognize the characature than they were the actual face, and postulated that facial recognition therefore depended on a similar process. One of her samples was Ronald Reagan, but that's the only basis in time I can remember.
I dropped my cell phone into a glass of beer next to my laptop, and the beer glass (full) tipped onto the laptop keyboard. I immediately flipped the laptop keyboard down on a carpet, removed everything that could be removed from the back and towelled it out, then flipped it over to vacuum any remaining beer from under the keys. The vacuum sucked the keys right off into a full dust bag. Sliced open the dustbag and spread it all out. Found all but one key, never to be seen again.
But.... The laptop lived, and amazingly, so did the cell phone! Now getting the keys back on was not a picnic.
No one in this long multi-thread has viewed this issue from the other direction, namely that many countries, including Canada, do not want you to buy anything from away. They are the authors of most of the complicating factors to international trade being discussed here, not the US government or the web vendors. The Web is a wide open place, but countries still have solid borders.
Slashdot Mirror
Some years ago (I've long lost the reference) a PhD student in Rhode Island digitized human faces with 256 points and then projected these points through the same points on an androngenous composite of hundreds of faces next to the sample; an "average" face. At some point in a plane beyond the reference face, the points at the ends of the projectors were then re-plotted and joined to form a caracature of the amplified differences between the sample face and the sexless "norm". She showed that her subjects were much more likely to recognize the characature than they were the actual face, and postulated that facial recognition therefore depended on a similar process. One of her samples was Ronald Reagan, but that's the only basis in time I can remember.
I dropped my cell phone into a glass of beer next to my laptop, and the beer glass (full) tipped onto the laptop keyboard. I immediately flipped the laptop keyboard down on a carpet, removed everything that could be removed from the back and towelled it out, then flipped it over to vacuum any remaining beer from under the keys. The vacuum sucked the keys right off into a full dust bag. Sliced open the dustbag and spread it all out. Found all but one key, never to be seen again. But.... The laptop lived, and amazingly, so did the cell phone! Now getting the keys back on was not a picnic.
No one in this long multi-thread has viewed this issue from the other direction, namely that many countries, including Canada, do not want you to buy anything from away. They are the authors of most of the complicating factors to international trade being discussed here, not the US government or the web vendors. The Web is a wide open place, but countries still have solid borders.