As far as I know, there are laws in many states prohibiting the photographing of children without the parent's permission.
Am I wrong?
In addition, there are regulations about how someone's photograph can be used without that person's consent?
Can I go around tape recording people in public places to try and pick out criminals? That's illegal, right?
But because pictures never had any inherent "automatic" value in terms of information, they've never been an issue. When you bring in a database, isn't it like recording all phone coversations and using voice-print identification to pick out who talks to who??
What's the difference except this case happens to have a bunch of people saying "this is for a good cause" standing behind it.
I knew a guy who stood in front of a jury and cried while they read "we find the defendant guilty"
Thank you for YOUR anicdote.
I have been arrested and falsely charged with a crime myself. Fortunately, I was able to hire a good lawyer or I would have likely been wrongly convicted myself.
I'm no fan of the justice system as it stands now.
Bayesian filters applied to hundreds of messages generally yeild a 99.7% accurate result. Applied to thousands, the results approach 99.99% for most people's mail.
my highschool had one of those. He sat in a chair by the office near the front entrance for the busiest part of the day. I think he also did work with parole officers for the trouble-kids and worked with DHS sometimes on cases involving kids at the school. He knew all the kids by name. I never talked to him, but he knew me. He must have studied yearbooks.
In all, I found him creepy. I would rather he wasn't there, but seeing how I lived fairly close to Columbine Highschool, I'm sure all the soccer moms couldn't sleep without knowing our school basically had a tax-payer provided armed guard.
The whole "no sex offenders within xx distance of school grounds" is a joke. Sure, maybe it's necessary and a good idea, but it's still a joke.
I've read more stories about guys being arrested for shopping at a store that happens to a lot behind a small daycare center getting arrested and thrown in jail for 5 years... I've never read about one wandering the halls of a school. Maybe there are some stupid enough to do that... but... sheesh. We need $10,000 machines to tell us there's a man wandering the halls who isnt' a teacher?
Oh... you know what just occurred to me... sex offenders ARE allowed to have kids, right? Are they not allowed to go talk to their kids' teachers? hmmm....
The reason civil libertarians are upset is not that a school wishes to protect it's kids, but that this can serve as a precedent for other such actions in more public places.
Read this and tell me if it doesn't turn your skin:
CNN reports that Phoenix City Hall is intstalling face recognition scanners to help prevent tax evasion and identify those misusing building permits.
Sure, it's well down the road in terms of "extreme privacy invasion"... just short of the face recognition cameras installed on city streets (wasn't that tried already somewhere?)
Since when were face recognition scanners accurate enough (and the databases complete enough) to expect to identify a stray sex-offender?
What is a sex offender anyway? A kid I knew in highschool was a registered sex offender because he kicked his little brother in the balls while they were wrestling and they decided to go tothe doctor to get him checked out. The Doctor said he was obligated to report it to social services or he could face charges himself. Social Services reported it to the police and they convicted the high school kid for Sexual Assault on a Child (because he DID exactly what the law defines - to intentionally touch a child's groin area). He's now a lifetime registered sex offender (as is mandatory under the law) and he's on probation for 10 years.
I can't wait until they put these things in the airport! *scoffs*
Roughly 30% of my incoming phone calls are from either the Legion of Disabled American Veterans, the Fire Fighters for Children charity or AT&T Long Distance.
Should we throw the fire fighters and disabled veterans in prison for being terrorosts?
Ahh yes, there are other areas that I have heard of doing this, including areas in Massachusets. I think the ticket only triggers if the average speed is greater than 15 over the limit, which means most speeders don't get tickets anyway...
A chipset can't just be "flashed" to a different frequency. RF transmission is tricky and different frequencies require different designs. The RC characteristics of the circuits have to be carefully designed to match the frequency they will be providing and the antennas and carriers should be tuned and impedance-matched for optimum performance.
Changing from channel 1 to Channel 13 can be done in software because it's a matter of 5% difference in frequency, but the 2.4GHz frequency spectrum is 5100% higher than the VHF spectrum.
As for the licensing issue in inner cities. Keep in mind that there are only a few VHF channels available and EACH one only gets 250Kbps. This means that in your inner city, there is only half a dozen (or so) customers who could each get 250Kbps... or a bunch of people could share that connection and get slower speeds... Either way, it's more suited to "open space" where distance is the concern and population density is neglegable.
1) The P4 and A64 are RISC chips (wearing CISC clothes). They very first thing they do when they recieve an instruction is decode it from RISC to CISC. With the Trace Cache on a P4 this operation is "free" when the instructions fall into the trace cache. Besides, the primary advantage to RISC was less bus overhead (A64 beats G5 in this category) and better clock scaling (P4 beats G5 in this category).
2) A64 runs a bus speed at FULL processor clock speed. (Apple runs at 1/2 clock speed). The highest end G5 runs 1GHz bus, while the P4 runs 800Mhz. Seeing how the G5 is quite comparable to the P4 in terms of bus efficiency, the difference isn't that significant. In addition cache speed and size plays a huge roll in this. The A64 and P4EE (the highest end chips) both have arguably superior cache performance to the G5. While the G5 does have very good caches, it's definately not a point you can use to prove yourself right in this case.
3) Where do you figure that a multiply instruction takes 40 clock cycles? That was the case on the 8088 processor, but modern chips CAN (yes, in fact, they do) do an instruction every single clock cycle. this is why their pipeline is so deep, but they can do it. So can the G5. The biggest difference is the number of "parallel" execution units and how efficient their SIMD are.
All three cases, you don't seem to understand the root of your own argument, leading me to believe it is somewhat "canned" from the assemblage of someone else's information.
As far as I can find, $11 million exceeds the cost of construction of the entire Computer Science building at most Universities. Purdue just built a new one for $20 million. The really outlandish ones from bigger Universities go for more, but a state of the art datacenter can be constructed for less than $11 million.
I'm still astounded that this piece of software could ever cost so much money when it's build on well developed tools.
A corporation has to pay people to develop this. A lot of CMS is in the "hired brains" area. Do you think MIT is short on brains? Do you know how many MIT students would give their left ear to *voulenteer* to get a project like that on their resume?
Use OSS GPL software to back it and you get a fully functional, well designed system. When you figure that most Universities have excess hardware which is capable of running this type of application (at least mine did), they you're looking at a project where you may pay for a few IDE tools and perhaps a small license here or there, you get the project developed my MIT students (that's no shabby bunch of minds) and you do it on a budget that would make Bill Gates cry.
$1 million? Perhaps you want to hire an expert manager to oversee the project. Maybe even a few support personell to help the students. That's STILL not even close to $1 million.
What am I missing? I'd like to know. I went to school with folks who voulenteered their time to develop the most advanced virtual reality immersion environment in the world. They had a budget of a few million (for hardware) and they put together an entire datacenter capable of rendering massive virtual reality simulations in realtime and projecting them in a three dimensional 6-sided matrix, complete with custom programming and a host of virtual reality environments (including a development environment to allow others to easily create new simulations).
They finished early and under budget using a variety of creative approaches to maximize power and reduce development time.
So don't try to tell me that a CMS solution, even a revolutionary one, should require $11 million when developed at a University full of brilliant minds.
Stewey
Re:Maybe no security at all
on
Real Security?
·
· Score: 1
The interesting thing about this theory is that it prevents what some would call "true" hackers who do it for the challenge...
But the US culture today seems to be a breeding ground for people who just like the power they can weild without doing more than lifting a finger.
This country was found on hard work and discovery, but now it thrives on weilding extreme power with very little effort or conscience.
Many folks would have a heyday crashing that computer "because they can". They will sit back and chuckle as the admins pull their hair out just for the "power trip" of chuckling at someone else's distress.
Look at George Bush. He's a good example. He would be the one running that program two hours before term papers were due every semester.
Stewey
Re:I use good passwords, and here's how
on
Real Security?
·
· Score: 1
"ilcpskl"
I love climbing past some kid (with a 1 at the end)
Seriously, there are such a large combination of words you can stick together that the entropy of ANY set of letters that doesn't vary too much isn't that variable.
Now, if you had random letters, numbers, symbols, etc like a "true" random ASCII generation would come up with, it would be much more entropic, but unless this one is an anomoly, it looks like YOUR computer is coming up with purely lowercase letters with a number at the end.... which is the shape of 95% of bad passwords.:-)
Yeah, go and try to mentor a kid and you will go through so much paperwork and red tape, you'll think you just signed up to join the CIA.
After two weeks of repeated background checks and asking me to send in paperwork to the government, they informed me that my application had been lost. I was trying to do the right thing, but by the way I was being treated you'd think I was under criminal investigation.
I think the rating on this post is odd. 0, Insightful
hmmmmmmmm
Personally, I wish people wouldn't rate this 'overrated" simply because they disagree with the post. That's childish.
While I can't say I agree, I think it should be moderated higher.
Actually, the concept of "fate" has been shown fairly convincingly by a number of theoretical physicists to be merely a function of what you are.
uhm...
To say... Every action that has had the possiblity of taking place HAS taken place. If we consider the String theory or the Brane theory as reasonable (which they are on the surface) then this assertion is not just a theory but a logical follow-on to those theories.
The argument goes like this: When the Universe was born, it was born in a nearly infinite number of different configurations. Only a very small number of these Universes ever did much other than collapse on themselves. In String theory, there are 10 or 11 dimensions. The existance of the higher order dimensions on any macro-atomic scale causes the matter/energy "matrix" of these dimensions to implode almost instantaneously.
As a consequence, only the Universes where some of the dimensions are sufficiently "curled up" to quantum sizes are suitable for the expansion of energy away from "implosion". Much fewer of these are suitable so that energy ever condenses to matter and even fewer so that they coalesce into "atoms" as we know it.
Even then, there are a very large number of these, in "human terms".
The great irony is that people ask "then what makes our Universe so special that it happened JUST right so that it supports Intelligent life?"
I think the simple answer is... There are likely many many many that support intelligent life. We are in one of them. (Perhaps in some other Universe, I'm a creationist. Maybe I'm insane in another).
The only reason we admire this Universe and question it (and not some other Universe where Intelligent life is not possible) is simply because this Universe has Intelligent life (if it did not, there would be nobody questioning it).
In fact, these overlapping "multi-dimensional" theories explain results of previously unexplained physical experiments reasonably well. They cannot be explained by any current theory beyond this. However, nobody has been able to measure them exactly enough to be sure if they explain it EXACTLY.
The tide of science is moving toward String theory and other multi-dimensional theories. This bodes poorly for "Intelligent Design" to be meaningful beyond the assertion that god poked the Universe with his finger and said "Bang" and thus was born all of the dimensions and realities at once...
But since time is not absolute (it is Relative) and nor is Space, the concept of a big bang itself implies that time (that we measure it) HAS a beginning.
Of course, if you wish to believe "on faith" that there is some force that can exist outside of all of our known and observable physical laws of time and space, I can't stop you. It's hardly scientific though.
According to Stephen Hawking in one of his books, the theory was not popular because it showed strong evidence against there being "absolutes" in the Universe, which implied that not only were things like absolute location and absolute speed nonsensical, it also implies that absolute time, and thus absolute existance are merely constructs for us to better wrap our minds around our Universe.
Hawking argues that the theory of Relativity itself does in fact fly in the face of the existance of "God" because it refutes even other absolutes like "all powerful" and "absolute morals" or "absolute truth" and other such constructs of religion.
just to point something out about my reply. I was addressing the comment "programming will no longer be for the scholars".
The truth is that there WILL be more capable programmers in the future as the technology increases, but that is simply because the breadth of "scholars" in the area will increase, not because "Joe Secretary" will learn to program in order to understand his email system better and start hacking Mozilla Mail as a result.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
As far as I know, there are laws in many states prohibiting the photographing of children without the parent's permission.
Am I wrong?
In addition, there are regulations about how someone's photograph can be used without that person's consent?
Can I go around tape recording people in public places to try and pick out criminals? That's illegal, right?
But because pictures never had any inherent "automatic" value in terms of information, they've never been an issue. When you bring in a database, isn't it like recording all phone coversations and using voice-print identification to pick out who talks to who??
What's the difference except this case happens to have a bunch of people saying "this is for a good cause" standing behind it.
Stewey
I knew a guy who stood in front of a jury and cried while they read "we find the defendant guilty"
Thank you for YOUR anicdote.
I have been arrested and falsely charged with a crime myself. Fortunately, I was able to hire a good lawyer or I would have likely been wrongly convicted myself.
I'm no fan of the justice system as it stands now.
Bayesian filters applied to hundreds of messages generally yeild a 99.7% accurate result. Applied to thousands, the results approach 99.99% for most people's mail.
You need to try a new SPAM filter.
Stewey
Hmmmmmm... so as long as they don't touch your stuff, they can spy on you all you want?
lol
neat.
*whips out some TEMPEST equipment*
Stewey
my highschool had one of those. He sat in a chair by the office near the front entrance for the busiest part of the day. I think he also did work with parole officers for the trouble-kids and worked with DHS sometimes on cases involving kids at the school. He knew all the kids by name. I never talked to him, but he knew me. He must have studied yearbooks.
In all, I found him creepy. I would rather he wasn't there, but seeing how I lived fairly close to Columbine Highschool, I'm sure all the soccer moms couldn't sleep without knowing our school basically had a tax-payer provided armed guard.
Stewey
sex offenders ARE usually allowed to have kids of their own...
ponder that...
The whole "no sex offenders within xx distance of school grounds" is a joke. Sure, maybe it's necessary and a good idea, but it's still a joke.
I've read more stories about guys being arrested for shopping at a store that happens to a lot behind a small daycare center getting arrested and thrown in jail for 5 years... I've never read about one wandering the halls of a school. Maybe there are some stupid enough to do that... but... sheesh. We need $10,000 machines to tell us there's a man wandering the halls who isnt' a teacher?
Oh... you know what just occurred to me... sex offenders ARE allowed to have kids, right? Are they not allowed to go talk to their kids' teachers? hmmm....
Stewey
The reason civil libertarians are upset is not that a school wishes to protect it's kids, but that this can serve as a precedent for other such actions in more public places.
Read this and tell me if it doesn't turn your skin:
CNN reports that Phoenix City Hall is intstalling face recognition scanners to help prevent tax evasion and identify those misusing building permits.
Sure, it's well down the road in terms of "extreme privacy invasion"... just short of the face recognition cameras installed on city streets (wasn't that tried already somewhere?)
Since when were face recognition scanners accurate enough (and the databases complete enough) to expect to identify a stray sex-offender?
What is a sex offender anyway? A kid I knew in highschool was a registered sex offender because he kicked his little brother in the balls while they were wrestling and they decided to go tothe doctor to get him checked out. The Doctor said he was obligated to report it to social services or he could face charges himself. Social Services reported it to the police and they convicted the high school kid for Sexual Assault on a Child (because he DID exactly what the law defines - to intentionally touch a child's groin area). He's now a lifetime registered sex offender (as is mandatory under the law) and he's on probation for 10 years.
I can't wait until they put these things in the airport! *scoffs*
Stewey
Unfortunately, I don't believe even the most robust enterprise class router could handle TCP-Intercept duties on a 50k/second SYN flood.
Prove me wrong.
Stewey
Roughly 30% of my incoming email is from SPAM.
Roughly 30% of my incoming phone calls are from either the Legion of Disabled American Veterans, the Fire Fighters for Children charity or AT&T Long Distance.
Should we throw the fire fighters and disabled veterans in prison for being terrorosts?
Sheesh, talk about over reacting.
Stewey
Ahh yes, there are other areas that I have heard of doing this, including areas in Massachusets. I think the ticket only triggers if the average speed is greater than 15 over the limit, which means most speeders don't get tickets anyway...
Stewey
A chipset can't just be "flashed" to a different frequency. RF transmission is tricky and different frequencies require different designs. The RC characteristics of the circuits have to be carefully designed to match the frequency they will be providing and the antennas and carriers should be tuned and impedance-matched for optimum performance.
Changing from channel 1 to Channel 13 can be done in software because it's a matter of 5% difference in frequency, but the 2.4GHz frequency spectrum is 5100% higher than the VHF spectrum.
As for the licensing issue in inner cities. Keep in mind that there are only a few VHF channels available and EACH one only gets 250Kbps. This means that in your inner city, there is only half a dozen (or so) customers who could each get 250Kbps... or a bunch of people could share that connection and get slower speeds... Either way, it's more suited to "open space" where distance is the concern and population density is neglegable.
Again, I can't see the economics being there...
Stewey
1) The P4 and A64 are RISC chips (wearing CISC clothes). They very first thing they do when they recieve an instruction is decode it from RISC to CISC. With the Trace Cache on a P4 this operation is "free" when the instructions fall into the trace cache. Besides, the primary advantage to RISC was less bus overhead (A64 beats G5 in this category) and better clock scaling (P4 beats G5 in this category).
2) A64 runs a bus speed at FULL processor clock speed. (Apple runs at 1/2 clock speed). The highest end G5 runs 1GHz bus, while the P4 runs 800Mhz. Seeing how the G5 is quite comparable to the P4 in terms of bus efficiency, the difference isn't that significant. In addition cache speed and size plays a huge roll in this. The A64 and P4EE (the highest end chips) both have arguably superior cache performance to the G5. While the G5 does have very good caches, it's definately not a point you can use to prove yourself right in this case.
3) Where do you figure that a multiply instruction takes 40 clock cycles? That was the case on the 8088 processor, but modern chips CAN (yes, in fact, they do) do an instruction every single clock cycle. this is why their pipeline is so deep, but they can do it. So can the G5. The biggest difference is the number of "parallel" execution units and how efficient their SIMD are.
All three cases, you don't seem to understand the root of your own argument, leading me to believe it is somewhat "canned" from the assemblage of someone else's information.
Eric
I just did a little digging.
As far as I can find, $11 million exceeds the cost of construction of the entire Computer Science building at most Universities. Purdue just built a new one for $20 million. The really outlandish ones from bigger Universities go for more, but a state of the art datacenter can be constructed for less than $11 million.
I'm still astounded that this piece of software could ever cost so much money when it's build on well developed tools.
Stewey
You missed the point entirely.
A corporation has to pay people to develop this. A lot of CMS is in the "hired brains" area. Do you think MIT is short on brains? Do you know how many MIT students would give their left ear to *voulenteer* to get a project like that on their resume?
Use OSS GPL software to back it and you get a fully functional, well designed system. When you figure that most Universities have excess hardware which is capable of running this type of application (at least mine did), they you're looking at a project where you may pay for a few IDE tools and perhaps a small license here or there, you get the project developed my MIT students (that's no shabby bunch of minds) and you do it on a budget that would make Bill Gates cry.
$1 million? Perhaps you want to hire an expert manager to oversee the project. Maybe even a few support personell to help the students. That's STILL not even close to $1 million.
What am I missing? I'd like to know. I went to school with folks who voulenteered their time to develop the most advanced virtual reality immersion environment in the world. They had a budget of a few million (for hardware) and they put together an entire datacenter capable of rendering massive virtual reality simulations in realtime and projecting them in a three dimensional 6-sided matrix, complete with custom programming and a host of virtual reality environments (including a development environment to allow others to easily create new simulations).
They finished early and under budget using a variety of creative approaches to maximize power and reduce development time.
So don't try to tell me that a CMS solution, even a revolutionary one, should require $11 million when developed at a University full of brilliant minds.
Stewey
The interesting thing about this theory is that it prevents what some would call "true" hackers who do it for the challenge...
But the US culture today seems to be a breeding ground for people who just like the power they can weild without doing more than lifting a finger.
This country was found on hard work and discovery, but now it thrives on weilding extreme power with very little effort or conscience.
Many folks would have a heyday crashing that computer "because they can". They will sit back and chuckle as the admins pull their hair out just for the "power trip" of chuckling at someone else's distress.
Look at George Bush. He's a good example. He would be the one running that program two hours before term papers were due every semester.
Stewey
"ilcpskl"
:-)
I love climbing past some kid (with a 1 at the end)
Seriously, there are such a large combination of words you can stick together that the entropy of ANY set of letters that doesn't vary too much isn't that variable.
Now, if you had random letters, numbers, symbols, etc like a "true" random ASCII generation would come up with, it would be much more entropic, but unless this one is an anomoly, it looks like YOUR computer is coming up with purely lowercase letters with a number at the end.... which is the shape of 95% of bad passwords.
Stewey
If it really is a static content system with a very basic CMS framework....
Where did $11 million go to?
That's a $400 project you just described... assuming students would voulenteer to help set it up (which they would and probably do it well)
Sad example of spending money "because we have it" if you ask me.
Stewey
Yeah, go and try to mentor a kid and you will go through so much paperwork and red tape, you'll think you just signed up to join the CIA.
After two weeks of repeated background checks and asking me to send in paperwork to the government, they informed me that my application had been lost. I was trying to do the right thing, but by the way I was being treated you'd think I was under criminal investigation.
Bleh. Call me lazy, I never went back.
Stewey
I think the rating on this post is odd. 0, Insightful
hmmmmmmmm
Personally, I wish people wouldn't rate this 'overrated" simply because they disagree with the post. That's childish.
While I can't say I agree, I think it should be moderated higher.
Actually, the concept of "fate" has been shown fairly convincingly by a number of theoretical physicists to be merely a function of what you are.
uhm...
To say... Every action that has had the possiblity of taking place HAS taken place. If we consider the String theory or the Brane theory as reasonable (which they are on the surface) then this assertion is not just a theory but a logical follow-on to those theories.
The argument goes like this: When the Universe was born, it was born in a nearly infinite number of different configurations. Only a very small number of these Universes ever did much other than collapse on themselves. In String theory, there are 10 or 11 dimensions. The existance of the higher order dimensions on any macro-atomic scale causes the matter/energy "matrix" of these dimensions to implode almost instantaneously.
As a consequence, only the Universes where some of the dimensions are sufficiently "curled up" to quantum sizes are suitable for the expansion of energy away from "implosion". Much fewer of these are suitable so that energy ever condenses to matter and even fewer so that they coalesce into "atoms" as we know it.
Even then, there are a very large number of these, in "human terms".
The great irony is that people ask "then what makes our Universe so special that it happened JUST right so that it supports Intelligent life?"
I think the simple answer is... There are likely many many many that support intelligent life. We are in one of them. (Perhaps in some other Universe, I'm a creationist. Maybe I'm insane in another).
The only reason we admire this Universe and question it (and not some other Universe where Intelligent life is not possible) is simply because this Universe has Intelligent life (if it did not, there would be nobody questioning it).
In fact, these overlapping "multi-dimensional" theories explain results of previously unexplained physical experiments reasonably well. They cannot be explained by any current theory beyond this. However, nobody has been able to measure them exactly enough to be sure if they explain it EXACTLY.
The tide of science is moving toward String theory and other multi-dimensional theories. This bodes poorly for "Intelligent Design" to be meaningful beyond the assertion that god poked the Universe with his finger and said "Bang" and thus was born all of the dimensions and realities at once...
But since time is not absolute (it is Relative) and nor is Space, the concept of a big bang itself implies that time (that we measure it) HAS a beginning.
Of course, if you wish to believe "on faith" that there is some force that can exist outside of all of our known and observable physical laws of time and space, I can't stop you. It's hardly scientific though.
Stewey
According to Stephen Hawking in one of his books, the theory was not popular because it showed strong evidence against there being "absolutes" in the Universe, which implied that not only were things like absolute location and absolute speed nonsensical, it also implies that absolute time, and thus absolute existance are merely constructs for us to better wrap our minds around our Universe.
Hawking argues that the theory of Relativity itself does in fact fly in the face of the existance of "God" because it refutes even other absolutes like "all powerful" and "absolute morals" or "absolute truth" and other such constructs of religion.
Stewey
Generally, rising anger is the result of a lack of reason.
Lacking the reasonable backing to support your argument, you resort to name calling.
If you were a representative of the "US of A" then I would move tomorrow.
Thankfully, people like you aren't that common.
Stewey
With Dubya re-opening research on low-yeild anti-personell nukes, I would say that a "tank" is unlikely.
More like a long range, GPS guided cruise missle.
Try to shoot that with a handgun.
Stewey
Bush passes laws that make it LEGAL for them to do such things with no consequences, nor any oversight what so ever.
If they claim "duhhh, well I thought he was being terror-ror-ristic" the government pats them on the back and says "good job, run along now"
If a police officer does that, he should be subject to investigation and possible action, such as a refresher in our constitutional rights.
Stewey
just to point something out about my reply. I was addressing the comment "programming will no longer be for the scholars".
:-)
The truth is that there WILL be more capable programmers in the future as the technology increases, but that is simply because the breadth of "scholars" in the area will increase, not because "Joe Secretary" will learn to program in order to understand his email system better and start hacking Mozilla Mail as a result.
Stewey