A certificate of airworthiness for a six-inch quadcopter?
A Certificate of Authorization for an unmanned aircraft used for commercial purposes. Is your six-inch quad going to be used for commercial purposes?
Yeah, I can imagine your next argument too. "I mean the six-foot hexapod copters carrying three cameras and FPV downlinks."
Well, yeah, I think that size of drone is going to be used for commercial purposes more often than the six-inch quad. Don't you think so, too?
If you really want to discuss COA and licenses, then be specific about what class of air vehicles you are talking about.
I think it is sufficient to talk about the commercial vs. non-commercial use, and that will have a practical effect of differentiating tiny toys from work-capable equipment.
But a 12-inch, two pound toy with a pin-hole camera making videos for Facebook and YouTube worries me about as much as a badly thrown Frisbee.
By the time you get to that size, you do have potential for commercial use, and they probably don't use pin-hole cameras, either. Mine doesn't (but it's a bit larger than 12", I think.) Commercial users have monetary interests in doing more risky things than people who aren't. We already have different licensing for commercial vs non-commercial pilots, why is there a problem here?
There are already classes of manned aircraft that do not require the operator to have a pilot's license to operate.
There are. So?
There are rules and the operators are required to follow those rules, but without a licensing requirement I expect that enforcement could be challenging sometimes.
You must be kidding. You don't think the FAA would take any action against an ultralight pilot who violated the rules just because no formal license is involved?
Operators need to not fly over property that they have not sought and received explicit permission to fly over.
That would not be first on my list of rules that need to be created. As you point out, there are other pilots already operating, and none of them need permission to fly over property they don't own. That's part of the national airspace concept -- to prevent a patchwork of local regulations and limitations that would make flying nearly impossible.
Imagine if a private pilot trying to make a cross-country flight of just 100 miles had to get permission from every property owner whose property he might fly over before doing so. What a nightmare. And when one says no?
Operators need to not fly in heavily populated areas.
That would be higher on my list, along with proximity to persons and building limits. (Which there already are.)
That's not particularly interesting by itself; although it does hint at valid question -- is fewer faster cores better or worse than more slower cores a better strategy in a smart phone?
Real world use will answer that... benchmarks not really.
My first question was, is the phone software rigged to identify benchmark code and execute it faster? (E.g., lower precision math, pre-configured answers, etc.) Like the VWs...? Will the iPhone 6s emit scads of nitrogen oxides in your face while you use it, unless you're running a benchmark on it?
Many years ago, I recall hearing about the GNU C compiler, I think it was, that recognized when it was compiling one of the standard benchmark packages and highly optimized the output because it knew what it was supposed to be.
I have a private office with real walls and a door. Nobody sits next to me.
There's a guy down the hall with a private office with real walls and a door. We can all tell when he's on a call using his speakerphone because we hear him all the way down the hall.
It would bother me less if they just put it on speaker.
And it would bother more people even less if they heard neither side of the call.
It's not faulty logic... it's a reformulation of the classic halting problem, a well known paradox in computer science, and founded entirely on very solid reasoning.
The halting problem does not include the concept of "I predict it will not halt. I have, however, chosen to manually reset the computer, thus halting the program artificially, and therefore the prediction that it would not halt has been proven incorrect." That's what you are doing if you chose to detain or prevent the murder you have predicted will occur. You have not proven the prediction to be wrong, you have acted outside the system to force an outcome that the original prediction system did not consider.
The prediction of the likelyhood of someone committing a crime does not consider "unless we stop him before it happens", it deals with the chance with no other outside influences. Ergo, if you predict that someone has a high chance of committing a crime but he's run over by a bus the day before he would have done so, the prediction is not invalidated. Nor if you arrest him the day before on a conspiracy charge, the prediction is not invalidated.
The very nature of a statistical prediction means that there will be times when the highest probability outcome will not happen. All-in betters sometimes hit a two-outer. That doesn't mean the odds weren't very much against them (about 20:1), or disprove the statistics involved. And if the dealer manages to stack the deck to rig the outcome, that doesn't make the statistics behind the odds calculations wrong, you've changed the system underlying the odds.
all I am showing is that there when it comes to matters of human decision or action, there will invariably be a factor involved that can change absolutely any possible so-called predictable outcome.
Of course if you change the basis of the prediction you change the prediction. You've changed the assumptions based on the predicted outcome. "There is a 50% chance of Joe Smith re-offending before the end of the year" is a prediction based on allowing Joe Smith to do what he's going to do on his own. If you stop him you have not dissproven or invalidated that prediction, you made a deliberate change to the system to prevent the action because of the prediction. As soon as you act, the system you are predicting is different.
It's like opening the box on Schroedinger's Cat. You don't change the prediction of cat survival, you collapse the quantum field into a determinant state, and by doing so change the state of the system.
Of course it would be great to prevent a murder from happening in the first place, but that still doesn't mean you can charge them with attempted murder if they haven't actually already tried to do it.
The program being discussed does not charge people with crimes they have not committed. Nobody says "we're predicting you have a high likelyhood of re-offending so we're going to arrest you now."
And any system that allegedly predicted they would murder someone in the future would in fact be proven by said thwarting to have been inaccurate,
No. Stopping someone from murdering someone else before they did it does not mean they would not have committed the murder. The fact that the system DID stop them shows that it was accurate, otherwise it would not have stopped them. (You cannot "stop" someone from doing something they weren't going to do. If you were stopped, then yes, you were going to do it, and the prediction is accurate.)
but it demonstrates beyond a shadow of a doubt that such a system cannot be infallible.
No, sorry, it doesn't. But we don't need faulty logic to prove that such a system can be fallible, we already know that it is. That doesn't mean it shouldn't be used. "Hey, you are a known felon on probation who is associating with other known felons who committed the same crime, and we're predicting a high probability that you're going to re-offend. Just letting you know we're keeping an eye on you..." "Well, I've gone straight, I'm not gonna." "Ok." No harm, no foul.
Why should the would-be-murderer's actions be any more predetermined by the predictive power of the algorithm
The algorithm does not predetermine the action, the algorithm predicts the potential for the action taking place unless something is done to prevent it.
Yes, this is the "GPS receiver" that most people carry that the other poster was referring to. I carry two, typically, both not enabled.
It required a warrant to get the cellular tracking data, or a signed statement that the data is needed for emergency (safety of life) purposes. And the latter only gets you the current location, not a track.
You can't charge someone with attempted murder until after they've already attempted it...
Wouldn't it be great if you could prevent the murder in the first place, by maybe letting the potential murderer know ahead of time that he's being watched? You know, like what this system is doing.
And also let him know that other crimes will be dealt with harshly because, well, he's a multi-time offender and apparently needs more clues that he should stop than the first time offender needs? Some places have three-strikes laws. This is just letting people know they're getting close to the limit.
I don't know, I think a system where people who have already done bad things get warned that they are being more closely watched in case they think of doing more bad things is just fine. Nobody is getting arrested for no reason, or for "association" with the wrong people, or because of their race or gender identity or whatever. It's people with criminal records who are observed associating with other people with criminal records being told that they are being watched more closely than Aunt Martha or Sister Mary Francis.
He buys a gun and starts hanging out near the defendant (all realistically trackable by an algorithm collecting records & gps data), what is an appropriate response, if any?
I think it is perfectly reasonable for the police, in such a situation, to talk to the person who is stalking the killer of his wife to advise him that he is going to be suspect number one if the guy winds up dead from a gunshot wound. I also think it is perfectly reasonable for the police to drive through the neighborhood on a regular basis, keeping an eye out for the "clean record" man's car and to let him know that they're watching.
"Stalking" is a crime in many, if not most, places, and the threat is pretty clear from his actions. If he's carrying the gun in a concealed manner and doesn't have the appropriate permit, then he's committing a second crime. I'd hope that YOU would appreciate some response from the police were you the "drunk driver" and you noticed that the husband of the person you killed was hanging around a lot, whether you knew he bought a gun or not. I know that I would.
I'm not sure what algorithm would have access to "gps [sic] data" about the guy. If you're trying to claim that the cops are going to tie a GPS receiver to him, well, it's much simpler to just talk to him about the problem and prevent it from turning worse than to track him and convict him later. It's much better for the guy to keep his clean record than to have a murder conviction and wind up in prison, don't you think?
If they haven't committed any crime that we know of, they should be considered innocent and treated as such,
The fact you miss from reading just the summary is that the people involved as "targets" of the program are those who have criminal records. In other words, they have already committed crimes that we know of and have been convicted of committing them. Many of them are on probation for those crimes, and being "called-in" is a condition set by their PO.
The guy who is the focus of the article is a convicted drug dealer on probation, who is also a member of a gang. Let's see how hard it is to predict that he might have a tendency to commit more crimes. Hmmm. And his excuse for dealing drugs? He was a poor child with a crack-addict mother. Why yes, my life is so happy and crack has done so many wonderful things for my mother and me, I think I'll sell it to others so they can enjoy the benefits.
And the article also goes on to report that as a result of the program that is causing such paranoia and fear here, this guy has a job, is in a program to help him pay his delinquent child support, and is getting back on a path where he becomes a participant in society. He has stumbled a bit and has been accused of domestic violence, so as he says, it's a tough road to get out of that lifestyle.
You nailed that one right there. 5-30 days. It may get here sometime in the next month.
I've used Express PCB for about ten years or so now. Free schematic software, free board layout software, and they ship the next day. I've had boards in two days. It's $51 for three boards in a size similar to a BeagleBone or Pi.
I also have the chemicals etc to do homemade boards. I haven't used any of it for a very long time. It was fun to see the board you make etch, but it is more fun to show someone a project that looks professionally made.
Yeah, you get a fixed size board for that price, but you can build prototypes on that and then order the specific size you need when you finalize the design. And yes, I have a few drawers with breakouts and proto boards in them for quick tests.
You can't always, but this is one of the few cases where you could.
By "this" I assume you mean the subject of the story here, which was a pair of large metal boxes used to contain a bomb smuggled into a casino for extortion. But you're still wrong. I've seen large metal boxes with switches on them and they aren't bombs. And I've seen IEDs that didn't look anything like a bomb.
How do you know a high school kid doesn't have weaponized anthrax hidden in a.45 round?
I'm sorry, I was responding to the statement that you can tell an explosive by looking because it has to be a "lump" that looks like explosive. There was no "high school kid" in the story referred to in the subject here.
The standard of proof is "Does it make sense for a high school kid to have a bomb that looks like this.
No, the "standard of proof" is could someone make a bomb that doesn't look like "explosive", because the only claim that was being discussed was the one that you can tell a bomb just by looking at it because it has "explosives". If you think the "standard of proof" of whether something COULD be a bomb is if a high school student would have one that looked like that, well, that's as absurd as claiming you can tell explosives just by looking at them.
You're so tied up in the one specific Texas instance that your missing the bigger picture and the more generic claims that are being made. You want to keep drawing it back to one kid in one classroom, but the story you read at the top of the page has nothing to do with one kid in one Texas classroom.
I'm sorry, where did I say that? I responded to your ridiculous claim that you can tell that something isn't a bomb because you don't see any "explosive". I pointed out that "explosive" can be made to look like just about anything I want it to: a can of Coke, a ream of paper, a soda straw, a pencil box, anything.
You seem to think there has to be some "lump" that you can identify as explosive material, and you are just ridiculously wrong about that.
But please, keep calling me a racist or a retard for knowing what explosives can actually look like.
I'm done arguing with racist cracker retards for the day.
Right. Whatever. Hope you never come across an IED and find out what explosives really are. But I'm sure you'll recognize them with one glance because you know what explosives have to look like.
Sorry you're wrong. Leaving a suspicious looking object unattended is a completely different situation from carrying something around in your bag and telling people it's a clock when asked.
The claim what that something was not a "hoax bomb" unless "you" (the person who made it?) said it was. That's what I replied to. There was no "carrying in a bag and saying it's a clock" in that claim. It was an open-ended statement, similar to the open-ended statement of the article that this started with -- "this is what a bomb looks like". You may still be discussing some specific previous article, but neither I nor the person I replied to was.
So, yes, I'm right. The object that I referred to is a hoax bomb without the builder having to claim it is.
Unless you make it to not look like a lump. That's the point. You can't tell just by looking.
It can be anything, but what it absolutely needs is physical mass.
Doesn't have to be much. A 22 round going off in your pocket is going to cause damage to you. A bit of explosive the size of a 45 will do a good job of dispersing a biological agent in a room, and the fleeing people will do a good job of dispersing it further.
The claim that you can see it isn't a bomb because you can see it doesn't have any explosive is just silly.
it's not a "hoax bomb" unless you tell people that it's a real bomb
So if I wrap a bunch of road flares up and string in a few wires and a little box of some kind, and leave it somewhere in the local sports stadium, and the security folks find it and think it could be a bomb, it's not a "hoax bomb" because I never said it was a bomb?
Sorry. You're wrong.
he never said it was a bomb
I didn't say he did. And I wasn't responding to whether what he had was a bomb or a hoax or whatever, I responded specifically to the statement that you could tell it wasn't a bomb because you could see it didn't have any explosive. Until you realize how many forms explosives can take, you don't realize how silly that statement is. I thought that would be clear because I quoted only that statement.
The kid's circuit had no explosive and was plain to see it wasn't a bomb as a result.
What, specifically, does "explosive" look like? Or more important, what would you LIKE it to look like?
I mean, with C4 (looks like putty) you can mold it to have any shape you want and then paint it, or stuff it into a container. You can make it into a pencil box and then paint over it with a stiff epoxy paint to make it hold its shape.
Or nitroglycerine. It's a liquid. Looks like water. Put it in a water bottle. Put a little caramel coloring in it and put it in a Coke bottle. Dye it green and it's Mountain Dew!
Tannerite looks like a grey powder. I'm guessing you could put a little resin in with it and press it into any shape you want to, and paint it so it's not gray.
Nitrocellulose looks like, well, cellulose but it has a bunch of nitrate groups bonded to it. I had a few bottles of it when I was young, it looked just like shredded coconut. But I could dissolve it and turn it into something that looked like paper. Nitrostarches look like flour. "That's not a bomb, it's a bag of flour."
This Hackaday article is stupid. It is showing us what one particular bomb looked like. It can't show us what every bomb looks like, because there is no defining visible property that you can say "that's what a bomb looks like". Even this "plain to see" it has no explosive statement is just ridiculous.
Do you know what a Campbell's Soup Can looks like? Doesn't look like a bomb, does it? Well, slip a hand grenade with the pin pulled in one and it makes a dandy bomb. Kick the can, the grenade pops out, the handle flies off, and in a few seconds, boom! Is that an electrolytic capacitor there on that circuit board, or is it a small amount of explosive in a metal can? (Or is it both!)
How about a soda straw? No explosive there, right? Plain to see. Well, when I was TEN I was making time delay fuses out of soda straws and nitrocellulose. Absolutely trivial. You couldn't tell by looking it wasn't just a soda straw anymore.
Everyone treated the thing as "not a bomb" but treated the kid like a terrorist anyway.
Being a terrorist doesn't require actually having a bomb, all it takes is pretending. That's why bomb HOAXES are illegal, too.
I am willing to save hundreds of dollars a year if the only downside is being minimally inconvenienced. The yearly savings for me is more than the cost of a new phone (~$720).
What convinced me the other carriers are crooks is how they advertise the prices for their plans and then tack on another $20 to actually use a phone with those plans. Huh? $60/month for 12Gb, but actually using a phone to get to that data adds $20/month? That's, I think, Verizon's current advertising for their "one plan" that actually four different plans with different amounts of data.
I almost signed up with AT&T at what I thought would be a good rate, and then was told "and add $40 if you want to use a phone on that plan". I told the guy I already had a phone, I didn't need a new one, and he told me it wasn't to GET a phone, it was to USE my own phone.
That's like selling a car for $100, but add on another $20,000 if you want it to actually be able to move.
T-Mobile is amazing given their prices and their perks, i.e. free unlimited data and text when traveling overseas
Except for those who don't get free text and data when traveling overseas. If I wanted to pay T-Mobile twice as much as I'm currently paying (for the same service) I could maybe get free text and data during the 5% of the time of the year I'm overseas. I say "maybe" because whatever T-Mobile says I don't believe until I've seen it happen.
Like a couple of months ago when I called customer service specifically to talk about text and data while I was overseas and was told I would get free texts and data while overseas, and I wound up being charged $2 for 147kB (that's right, kilobytes) of data, and being charged $11 for a call to customer service.
And then the next time I called about getting text and data overseas and was talked into a "data pass" -- $25 for a week -- and then found out that the data pass only buys me faster access, not free access. I only found that out by calling back to ask "what happens when my data pass data limit is reached? Do I get a text telling me, or does it just stop?" Answer: "you continue to get data." I could get 4G speeds at $15/Mb with the pass, but my phone only does 3G anyway so I'd still be paying $15/Mb with no speedup -- the pass is useless.
Like I said, pay twice what I'm paying for 50 weeks of the year to get "free data and texts", or buy a SIM for 10 euros to cover all my needs. Hmmm. And using the local SIM means I am not going to risk getting calls at the outrageous voice roaming rates you forgot to mention that T-Mobile has.
If you've never been hit with a $2.49/minute roaming charge for a call that you didn't know happened because your phone was off with another $1.49/minute charge for the call to be forwarded back to the US to your voicemail, which you never got, you've never known the true delight in dealing with T-Mobile.
If a website doesn't provide content valuable enough to generate revenue or to be supported by the crowd, perhaps it doesn't have a good argument for its own existence?
You do realize that this argument is what led to the current wasteland that we call "broadcast TV", don't you? It is what leads to good programs being cancelled after five episodes or less, as network execs study the Nielsen's and other viewer numbers.
Cable et.al TV was supposed to be the way to get around tyranny of the majority when it comes to television. The web certainly shouldn't be the next victim.
Why should they force me to subsidize Oprah's channel when I've no interest in watching it?
Because the people who watch OWN are, in turn, subsidizing the fixed costs of the channels YOU want to watch. No program source that charges only the incremental costs for their programs can survive; someone has to pay the fixed costs. The incremental cost is relatively constant per sub, but the fixed costs would make buying a channel prohibitive unless it was spread out over a large number of people. I.e., if the crowd doesn't participate, then the channel won't survive no matter how good you think the programming is.
It seems like you are arguing whether redistribution of income is fair.
No, I'm pretty sure I was pointing out that the idea that people who don't pay people to do things for them (because they've installed a robot welder on an assembly line, or clear their own gutters, for example) need to give money to the people they aren't paying to do those jobs because it is "fair" to "return some of the savings".
This is much more than just redistribution of income where income is taken from people who earn it to be given to everyone else who didn't. It's a targeted process of eliminating incentives to modernize and upgrade manufacturing (or even service industries) by "taxing" the money saved by those upgrades. And it has nothing to do with income, since I can be unemployed and have zero income but I'd be subject to the "fair pay to gutter cleaners tax" if I don't hire someone to do it for me.
It also puts the government workers who decide who gets welfare out of a job.
Actually, it does not. As someone else pointed out, what happens to people who need more than a "basic income" to survive? Someone who has a lot of medical bills won't get by on just $2k a month. You'll still have welfare, and you'll still have government employees who dole it out. You'll also have a massive amount of government employees just to determine who the "basic income" checks get sent to. People move, addresses change, new people get created, other get eliminated, some show up without documentation at all, some have been here forever without documentation...
Which is exactly what is happening now, since all of those transactions are subject to some kind of tax.
I don't know what kind of government you live under, but when I clean my gutters there is no tax attached to it. And I am not taxed for each use of my lawnmower. Do you really have someone who comes around and assigns taxes to you for performing simple lawn and house maintenance? Wow.
Slashdot Mirror
A certificate of airworthiness for a six-inch quadcopter?
A Certificate of Authorization for an unmanned aircraft used for commercial purposes. Is your six-inch quad going to be used for commercial purposes?
Yeah, I can imagine your next argument too. "I mean the six-foot hexapod copters carrying three cameras and FPV downlinks."
Well, yeah, I think that size of drone is going to be used for commercial purposes more often than the six-inch quad. Don't you think so, too?
If you really want to discuss COA and licenses, then be specific about what class of air vehicles you are talking about.
I think it is sufficient to talk about the commercial vs. non-commercial use, and that will have a practical effect of differentiating tiny toys from work-capable equipment.
But a 12-inch, two pound toy with a pin-hole camera making videos for Facebook and YouTube worries me about as much as a badly thrown Frisbee.
By the time you get to that size, you do have potential for commercial use, and they probably don't use pin-hole cameras, either. Mine doesn't (but it's a bit larger than 12", I think.) Commercial users have monetary interests in doing more risky things than people who aren't. We already have different licensing for commercial vs non-commercial pilots, why is there a problem here?
I think that we're going to need a definition here... What exactly is a COA?
Already defined. And here.
There are already classes of manned aircraft that do not require the operator to have a pilot's license to operate.
There are. So?
There are rules and the operators are required to follow those rules, but without a licensing requirement I expect that enforcement could be challenging sometimes.
You must be kidding. You don't think the FAA would take any action against an ultralight pilot who violated the rules just because no formal license is involved?
Operators need to not fly over property that they have not sought and received explicit permission to fly over.
That would not be first on my list of rules that need to be created. As you point out, there are other pilots already operating, and none of them need permission to fly over property they don't own. That's part of the national airspace concept -- to prevent a patchwork of local regulations and limitations that would make flying nearly impossible.
Imagine if a private pilot trying to make a cross-country flight of just 100 miles had to get permission from every property owner whose property he might fly over before doing so. What a nightmare. And when one says no?
Operators need to not fly in heavily populated areas.
That would be higher on my list, along with proximity to persons and building limits. (Which there already are.)
Do not taunt Happy Fun iBall.
Because everyone knows if you cross Happy Fun iBall they may stay that way. Mom was right.
FYI, I know a former Lisa owner. She still raves about it.
I was a former Lisa owner. She was great. Not as good as the Marcia I owned prior to her, but almost as good as the Charon I owned afterwards.
A couple of Newton owners, and they still rave about it.
I owned one of them, too, but he was too uppity and sat around under apple trees all day. He was great at keeping the financial records, though.
And then the damn government stepped in and told me I had to let them all go. Curse you, Mr. Lincoln!
That's not particularly interesting by itself; although it does hint at valid question -- is fewer faster cores better or worse than more slower cores a better strategy in a smart phone? Real world use will answer that... benchmarks not really.
My first question was, is the phone software rigged to identify benchmark code and execute it faster? (E.g., lower precision math, pre-configured answers, etc.) Like the VWs ...? Will the iPhone 6s emit scads of nitrogen oxides in your face while you use it, unless you're running a benchmark on it?
Many years ago, I recall hearing about the GNU C compiler, I think it was, that recognized when it was compiling one of the standard benchmark packages and highly optimized the output because it knew what it was supposed to be.
http://techrights.org/2013/08/...
https://groups.google.com/foru...
I have a private office with real walls and a door. Nobody sits next to me.
There's a guy down the hall with a private office with real walls and a door. We can all tell when he's on a call using his speakerphone because we hear him all the way down the hall.
It would bother me less if they just put it on speaker.
And it would bother more people even less if they heard neither side of the call.
It's not faulty logic... it's a reformulation of the classic halting problem, a well known paradox in computer science, and founded entirely on very solid reasoning.
The halting problem does not include the concept of "I predict it will not halt. I have, however, chosen to manually reset the computer, thus halting the program artificially, and therefore the prediction that it would not halt has been proven incorrect." That's what you are doing if you chose to detain or prevent the murder you have predicted will occur. You have not proven the prediction to be wrong, you have acted outside the system to force an outcome that the original prediction system did not consider.
The prediction of the likelyhood of someone committing a crime does not consider "unless we stop him before it happens", it deals with the chance with no other outside influences. Ergo, if you predict that someone has a high chance of committing a crime but he's run over by a bus the day before he would have done so, the prediction is not invalidated. Nor if you arrest him the day before on a conspiracy charge, the prediction is not invalidated.
The very nature of a statistical prediction means that there will be times when the highest probability outcome will not happen. All-in betters sometimes hit a two-outer. That doesn't mean the odds weren't very much against them (about 20:1), or disprove the statistics involved. And if the dealer manages to stack the deck to rig the outcome, that doesn't make the statistics behind the odds calculations wrong, you've changed the system underlying the odds.
all I am showing is that there when it comes to matters of human decision or action, there will invariably be a factor involved that can change absolutely any possible so-called predictable outcome.
Of course if you change the basis of the prediction you change the prediction. You've changed the assumptions based on the predicted outcome. "There is a 50% chance of Joe Smith re-offending before the end of the year" is a prediction based on allowing Joe Smith to do what he's going to do on his own. If you stop him you have not dissproven or invalidated that prediction, you made a deliberate change to the system to prevent the action because of the prediction. As soon as you act, the system you are predicting is different.
It's like opening the box on Schroedinger's Cat. You don't change the prediction of cat survival, you collapse the quantum field into a determinant state, and by doing so change the state of the system.
Of course it would be great to prevent a murder from happening in the first place, but that still doesn't mean you can charge them with attempted murder if they haven't actually already tried to do it.
The program being discussed does not charge people with crimes they have not committed. Nobody says "we're predicting you have a high likelyhood of re-offending so we're going to arrest you now."
And any system that allegedly predicted they would murder someone in the future would in fact be proven by said thwarting to have been inaccurate,
No. Stopping someone from murdering someone else before they did it does not mean they would not have committed the murder. The fact that the system DID stop them shows that it was accurate, otherwise it would not have stopped them. (You cannot "stop" someone from doing something they weren't going to do. If you were stopped, then yes, you were going to do it, and the prediction is accurate.)
but it demonstrates beyond a shadow of a doubt that such a system cannot be infallible.
No, sorry, it doesn't. But we don't need faulty logic to prove that such a system can be fallible, we already know that it is. That doesn't mean it shouldn't be used. "Hey, you are a known felon on probation who is associating with other known felons who committed the same crime, and we're predicting a high probability that you're going to re-offend. Just letting you know we're keeping an eye on you ..." "Well, I've gone straight, I'm not gonna." "Ok." No harm, no foul.
Why should the would-be-murderer's actions be any more predetermined by the predictive power of the algorithm
The algorithm does not predetermine the action, the algorithm predicts the potential for the action taking place unless something is done to prevent it.
Or just track their cell phones.
Yes, this is the "GPS receiver" that most people carry that the other poster was referring to. I carry two, typically, both not enabled.
It required a warrant to get the cellular tracking data, or a signed statement that the data is needed for emergency (safety of life) purposes. And the latter only gets you the current location, not a track.
You can't charge someone with attempted murder until after they've already attempted it...
Wouldn't it be great if you could prevent the murder in the first place, by maybe letting the potential murderer know ahead of time that he's being watched? You know, like what this system is doing.
And also let him know that other crimes will be dealt with harshly because, well, he's a multi-time offender and apparently needs more clues that he should stop than the first time offender needs? Some places have three-strikes laws. This is just letting people know they're getting close to the limit.
I don't know, I think a system where people who have already done bad things get warned that they are being more closely watched in case they think of doing more bad things is just fine. Nobody is getting arrested for no reason, or for "association" with the wrong people, or because of their race or gender identity or whatever. It's people with criminal records who are observed associating with other people with criminal records being told that they are being watched more closely than Aunt Martha or Sister Mary Francis.
He buys a gun and starts hanging out near the defendant (all realistically trackable by an algorithm collecting records & gps data), what is an appropriate response, if any?
I think it is perfectly reasonable for the police, in such a situation, to talk to the person who is stalking the killer of his wife to advise him that he is going to be suspect number one if the guy winds up dead from a gunshot wound. I also think it is perfectly reasonable for the police to drive through the neighborhood on a regular basis, keeping an eye out for the "clean record" man's car and to let him know that they're watching.
"Stalking" is a crime in many, if not most, places, and the threat is pretty clear from his actions. If he's carrying the gun in a concealed manner and doesn't have the appropriate permit, then he's committing a second crime. I'd hope that YOU would appreciate some response from the police were you the "drunk driver" and you noticed that the husband of the person you killed was hanging around a lot, whether you knew he bought a gun or not. I know that I would.
I'm not sure what algorithm would have access to "gps [sic] data" about the guy. If you're trying to claim that the cops are going to tie a GPS receiver to him, well, it's much simpler to just talk to him about the problem and prevent it from turning worse than to track him and convict him later. It's much better for the guy to keep his clean record than to have a murder conviction and wind up in prison, don't you think?
If they haven't committed any crime that we know of, they should be considered innocent and treated as such,
The fact you miss from reading just the summary is that the people involved as "targets" of the program are those who have criminal records. In other words, they have already committed crimes that we know of and have been convicted of committing them. Many of them are on probation for those crimes, and being "called-in" is a condition set by their PO.
The guy who is the focus of the article is a convicted drug dealer on probation, who is also a member of a gang. Let's see how hard it is to predict that he might have a tendency to commit more crimes. Hmmm. And his excuse for dealing drugs? He was a poor child with a crack-addict mother. Why yes, my life is so happy and crack has done so many wonderful things for my mother and me, I think I'll sell it to others so they can enjoy the benefits.
And the article also goes on to report that as a result of the program that is causing such paranoia and fear here, this guy has a job, is in a program to help him pay his delinquent child support, and is getting back on a path where he becomes a participant in society. He has stumbled a bit and has been accused of domestic violence, so as he says, it's a tough road to get out of that lifestyle.
You nailed that one right there. 5-30 days. It may get here sometime in the next month.
I've used Express PCB for about ten years or so now. Free schematic software, free board layout software, and they ship the next day. I've had boards in two days. It's $51 for three boards in a size similar to a BeagleBone or Pi.
I also have the chemicals etc to do homemade boards. I haven't used any of it for a very long time. It was fun to see the board you make etch, but it is more fun to show someone a project that looks professionally made.
Yeah, you get a fixed size board for that price, but you can build prototypes on that and then order the specific size you need when you finalize the design. And yes, I have a few drawers with breakouts and proto boards in them for quick tests.
You can't always, but this is one of the few cases where you could.
By "this" I assume you mean the subject of the story here, which was a pair of large metal boxes used to contain a bomb smuggled into a casino for extortion. But you're still wrong. I've seen large metal boxes with switches on them and they aren't bombs. And I've seen IEDs that didn't look anything like a bomb.
How do you know a high school kid doesn't have weaponized anthrax hidden in a .45 round?
I'm sorry, I was responding to the statement that you can tell an explosive by looking because it has to be a "lump" that looks like explosive. There was no "high school kid" in the story referred to in the subject here.
The standard of proof is "Does it make sense for a high school kid to have a bomb that looks like this.
No, the "standard of proof" is could someone make a bomb that doesn't look like "explosive", because the only claim that was being discussed was the one that you can tell a bomb just by looking at it because it has "explosives". If you think the "standard of proof" of whether something COULD be a bomb is if a high school student would have one that looked like that, well, that's as absurd as claiming you can tell explosives just by looking at them.
You're so tied up in the one specific Texas instance that your missing the bigger picture and the more generic claims that are being made. You want to keep drawing it back to one kid in one classroom, but the story you read at the top of the page has nothing to do with one kid in one Texas classroom.
I'm glad something in your house is. And when you keep calling people racist because they don't agree with you, you deserve that.
Right, a teenager built a biological weapon.
I'm sorry, where did I say that? I responded to your ridiculous claim that you can tell that something isn't a bomb because you don't see any "explosive". I pointed out that "explosive" can be made to look like just about anything I want it to: a can of Coke, a ream of paper, a soda straw, a pencil box, anything.
You seem to think there has to be some "lump" that you can identify as explosive material, and you are just ridiculously wrong about that.
But please, keep calling me a racist or a retard for knowing what explosives can actually look like.
I'm done arguing with racist cracker retards for the day.
Right. Whatever. Hope you never come across an IED and find out what explosives really are. But I'm sure you'll recognize them with one glance because you know what explosives have to look like.
I wish /pol/ would stay in its cage.
Uhh, yeah. Whatever.
Sorry you're wrong. Leaving a suspicious looking object unattended is a completely different situation from carrying something around in your bag and telling people it's a clock when asked.
The claim what that something was not a "hoax bomb" unless "you" (the person who made it?) said it was. That's what I replied to. There was no "carrying in a bag and saying it's a clock" in that claim. It was an open-ended statement, similar to the open-ended statement of the article that this started with -- "this is what a bomb looks like". You may still be discussing some specific previous article, but neither I nor the person I replied to was.
So, yes, I'm right. The object that I referred to is a hoax bomb without the builder having to claim it is.
It looks like a lump of "something"
Unless you make it to not look like a lump. That's the point. You can't tell just by looking.
It can be anything, but what it absolutely needs is physical mass.
Doesn't have to be much. A 22 round going off in your pocket is going to cause damage to you. A bit of explosive the size of a 45 will do a good job of dispersing a biological agent in a room, and the fleeing people will do a good job of dispersing it further.
The claim that you can see it isn't a bomb because you can see it doesn't have any explosive is just silly.
it's not a "hoax bomb" unless you tell people that it's a real bomb
So if I wrap a bunch of road flares up and string in a few wires and a little box of some kind, and leave it somewhere in the local sports stadium, and the security folks find it and think it could be a bomb, it's not a "hoax bomb" because I never said it was a bomb?
Sorry. You're wrong.
he never said it was a bomb
I didn't say he did. And I wasn't responding to whether what he had was a bomb or a hoax or whatever, I responded specifically to the statement that you could tell it wasn't a bomb because you could see it didn't have any explosive. Until you realize how many forms explosives can take, you don't realize how silly that statement is. I thought that would be clear because I quoted only that statement.
The kid's circuit had no explosive and was plain to see it wasn't a bomb as a result.
What, specifically, does "explosive" look like? Or more important, what would you LIKE it to look like?
I mean, with C4 (looks like putty) you can mold it to have any shape you want and then paint it, or stuff it into a container. You can make it into a pencil box and then paint over it with a stiff epoxy paint to make it hold its shape.
Or nitroglycerine. It's a liquid. Looks like water. Put it in a water bottle. Put a little caramel coloring in it and put it in a Coke bottle. Dye it green and it's Mountain Dew!
Tannerite looks like a grey powder. I'm guessing you could put a little resin in with it and press it into any shape you want to, and paint it so it's not gray.
Nitrocellulose looks like, well, cellulose but it has a bunch of nitrate groups bonded to it. I had a few bottles of it when I was young, it looked just like shredded coconut. But I could dissolve it and turn it into something that looked like paper. Nitrostarches look like flour. "That's not a bomb, it's a bag of flour."
This Hackaday article is stupid. It is showing us what one particular bomb looked like. It can't show us what every bomb looks like, because there is no defining visible property that you can say "that's what a bomb looks like". Even this "plain to see" it has no explosive statement is just ridiculous.
Do you know what a Campbell's Soup Can looks like? Doesn't look like a bomb, does it? Well, slip a hand grenade with the pin pulled in one and it makes a dandy bomb. Kick the can, the grenade pops out, the handle flies off, and in a few seconds, boom! Is that an electrolytic capacitor there on that circuit board, or is it a small amount of explosive in a metal can? (Or is it both!)
How about a soda straw? No explosive there, right? Plain to see. Well, when I was TEN I was making time delay fuses out of soda straws and nitrocellulose. Absolutely trivial. You couldn't tell by looking it wasn't just a soda straw anymore.
Everyone treated the thing as "not a bomb" but treated the kid like a terrorist anyway.
Being a terrorist doesn't require actually having a bomb, all it takes is pretending. That's why bomb HOAXES are illegal, too.
I am willing to save hundreds of dollars a year if the only downside is being minimally inconvenienced. The yearly savings for me is more than the cost of a new phone (~$720).
What convinced me the other carriers are crooks is how they advertise the prices for their plans and then tack on another $20 to actually use a phone with those plans. Huh? $60/month for 12Gb, but actually using a phone to get to that data adds $20/month? That's, I think, Verizon's current advertising for their "one plan" that actually four different plans with different amounts of data.
I almost signed up with AT&T at what I thought would be a good rate, and then was told "and add $40 if you want to use a phone on that plan". I told the guy I already had a phone, I didn't need a new one, and he told me it wasn't to GET a phone, it was to USE my own phone.
That's like selling a car for $100, but add on another $20,000 if you want it to actually be able to move.
T-Mobile is amazing given their prices and their perks, i.e. free unlimited data and text when traveling overseas
Except for those who don't get free text and data when traveling overseas. If I wanted to pay T-Mobile twice as much as I'm currently paying (for the same service) I could maybe get free text and data during the 5% of the time of the year I'm overseas. I say "maybe" because whatever T-Mobile says I don't believe until I've seen it happen.
Like a couple of months ago when I called customer service specifically to talk about text and data while I was overseas and was told I would get free texts and data while overseas, and I wound up being charged $2 for 147kB (that's right, kilobytes) of data, and being charged $11 for a call to customer service.
And then the next time I called about getting text and data overseas and was talked into a "data pass" -- $25 for a week -- and then found out that the data pass only buys me faster access, not free access. I only found that out by calling back to ask "what happens when my data pass data limit is reached? Do I get a text telling me, or does it just stop?" Answer: "you continue to get data." I could get 4G speeds at $15/Mb with the pass, but my phone only does 3G anyway so I'd still be paying $15/Mb with no speedup -- the pass is useless.
Like I said, pay twice what I'm paying for 50 weeks of the year to get "free data and texts", or buy a SIM for 10 euros to cover all my needs. Hmmm. And using the local SIM means I am not going to risk getting calls at the outrageous voice roaming rates you forgot to mention that T-Mobile has.
If you've never been hit with a $2.49/minute roaming charge for a call that you didn't know happened because your phone was off with another $1.49/minute charge for the call to be forwarded back to the US to your voicemail, which you never got, you've never known the true delight in dealing with T-Mobile.
If a website doesn't provide content valuable enough to generate revenue or to be supported by the crowd, perhaps it doesn't have a good argument for its own existence?
You do realize that this argument is what led to the current wasteland that we call "broadcast TV", don't you? It is what leads to good programs being cancelled after five episodes or less, as network execs study the Nielsen's and other viewer numbers.
Cable et.al TV was supposed to be the way to get around tyranny of the majority when it comes to television. The web certainly shouldn't be the next victim.
Why should they force me to subsidize Oprah's channel when I've no interest in watching it?
Because the people who watch OWN are, in turn, subsidizing the fixed costs of the channels YOU want to watch. No program source that charges only the incremental costs for their programs can survive; someone has to pay the fixed costs. The incremental cost is relatively constant per sub, but the fixed costs would make buying a channel prohibitive unless it was spread out over a large number of people. I.e., if the crowd doesn't participate, then the channel won't survive no matter how good you think the programming is.
It seems like you are arguing whether redistribution of income is fair.
No, I'm pretty sure I was pointing out that the idea that people who don't pay people to do things for them (because they've installed a robot welder on an assembly line, or clear their own gutters, for example) need to give money to the people they aren't paying to do those jobs because it is "fair" to "return some of the savings".
This is much more than just redistribution of income where income is taken from people who earn it to be given to everyone else who didn't. It's a targeted process of eliminating incentives to modernize and upgrade manufacturing (or even service industries) by "taxing" the money saved by those upgrades. And it has nothing to do with income, since I can be unemployed and have zero income but I'd be subject to the "fair pay to gutter cleaners tax" if I don't hire someone to do it for me.
It also puts the government workers who decide who gets welfare out of a job.
Actually, it does not. As someone else pointed out, what happens to people who need more than a "basic income" to survive? Someone who has a lot of medical bills won't get by on just $2k a month. You'll still have welfare, and you'll still have government employees who dole it out. You'll also have a massive amount of government employees just to determine who the "basic income" checks get sent to. People move, addresses change, new people get created, other get eliminated, some show up without documentation at all, some have been here forever without documentation ...
Which is exactly what is happening now, since all of those transactions are subject to some kind of tax.
I don't know what kind of government you live under, but when I clean my gutters there is no tax attached to it. And I am not taxed for each use of my lawnmower. Do you really have someone who comes around and assigns taxes to you for performing simple lawn and house maintenance? Wow.