With the gp's quoted figure of 200,000 people traveling through O'Hare every day, that means potentially 46,000 people a day incorrectly tagged as terrorists. Not one of them actually a terrorist, just someone caught as a false positive.
One airport. One day. 46,000 people whose lives have just been screwed over in some manner. And no guarantee that the one terrorist that might show up once every billion of people is going to be caught by the machine.
Right, and since it's obviously impossible to do a truly thorough security screening (interview, background check, etc not that it's likely to even show anything) on 46,000 people a day, the "second-tier" check will be cursory at best, and thus even if you did pick the terrorist out of the line, they are still more than likely going to be considered to be one of the other 45,999 false positives and allowed to go on their merry way.
The reason this works with medical tests is because the person receiving the tests is not taking them under duress, they want to get diagnosed, and the thing they are looking for is physical and not nearly as nebulous as "the intent to do harm". The tests are just a method of initial screening. E.g. they can use a cheap and simple blood test to rule out some kinds of cancer, but if it gives a positive result they will do a biopsy and know for sure. It's having a "gold standard" diagnosis that makes screens for rare diseases possible and false positives a minor problem.
There is no "gold standard" for suspected terrorist. Hell we've held people for years outside the reach of the law and still not been able to come to solid conclusions about some people. This idea can never work.
Actually, better yet, don't tell them it's a dry run ahead of time. Have them go through security to be inside by a specific time. Then call them, and say "It's a go" or "Nevermind, enjoy your trip." After a couple of "Nevermind" runs and not getting pulled over, you should know who to send...
As people continue to ditch their CRTs, which should accelerate once analog broadcasts are dropped next year, Blu-ray adoption will continue to grow.
Wait, so you think that people who won't even spring for basic cable are going to replace their old TVs with HD screens just so they can continue to get over-the-air digital (not even HD) broadcasts? Naw, they'll just buy the converter box (for the cost of ~1-2 months of cable and a tiny fraction of a new HD TV) and be done with it.
HD penetration will only rise when the cost comes down to where it's comparable to an SD TV, and will be held back by people's old TVs continuing to work just fine.
The real problem with this is that the number of wrongdoers is small while the pool for false positives is high. If 5% of people have some intent that should be picked up by this, then 4% of all people with ill intent will be picked up. At the rate, then they'd have to have less than a 5% rate of false positives just to reach the point where half the people it says have ill intent actually do. What are the chances that it's going to have a false positive rate less than 5%?
And that's assuming that 1/20 people have some intent that would need to be picked up by this, while the actual rate is almost certainly smaller. Millions of people fly on airplanes every year, yet every year only a handful try something stupid. This is security theater at its finest.
You've hit that on the head. About 200,000 people go through Chicago O'Hare, just that single (though large) airport, every day. And so far, zero terrorist attacks launched out of O'Hare. The odds that a person this machine flagged being an innocent is ridiculously high, even if it is has high specificity.
Also, aside from the raw statistics of the thing, there's another compounding factor that makes this even more useless*, which is it's rather simple for terrorists to game the system with dry runs.
Terrorist organizations already tend to use people not on our radar for attacks, so if they get pulled out of line on a dry-run, we won't have anything on them and it'll look like yet another false positive. Our young jihadi goes through the line with a bunch of his buddies, and everyone who gets pulled out of line doesn't go through the next time. Once you've discovered the group of people who aren't detected by the terrorist detector/profilers/crystal ball, the hot run can proceed with little fear of getting caught.
* For the stated goal, of course, not the goal of Security Theater for which a magical terrorist detector is great.
Just an fyi, the accuracy number doesn't directly tell you the ratio of false negatives. It's a measure not just of how many true positives it gets (that's the sensitivity), but also of true negatives(that's the specificity), in that it should both identify the "suspicious" correctly and correctly identify the non-"suspicious".
You can't go from the accuracy directly to the specificity and sensitivity, since it's a combination of several measurements. The result, though, will be highly dependent on the prevalence of "suspicious" people in their test, which is the ratio of how often what you're trying to detect actually occurs.
I'm willing to bet that the prevalence they used in their testing is way, way higher than it would be in real life (like 1/4 to 1/2 of the test subjects were "suspicious", while in real life the odds of a random person in an airport being a terrorist is more like 1/1e6 on a bad day). So this would skew the accuracy measurement towards detecting the suspicious and understate the importance of figuring out correctly that someone is not suspicious. The problem is that when you're dealing with something very rare, even if your specificity is very high, the odds that someone you pull out of line because the machine flagged them is in fact innocent is extremely high (it's going to be over 99% chance unless this machine is -very- specific), and if your test methodology doesn't worry as much about specificity, then it's going to be even worse.
I don't understand your logic. Using the in game transfer system to transfer gold you bought online is cheating. However, buying a strategy guide or a subscription to a website with tons of data is perfectly alright? The data you pay for in the strategy guide or map site is all composed by someone in the real world. Gold is composed by someone in the real world. Sharing it with someone for a fee or not is the same in both situations.
It's the difference between gaining knowledge to help you in the game, and bypassing the game itself. You could view the effort required to gain knowledge solely through game play as 'part of the game' but it's really the meta game, while earning gold is a literal part of the game itself and buying gold is bypassing that part of the game.
Think of it like this: You could try to learn all chess strategy for the first few moves simply by playing chess. Or you could acquire a book of opening moves. A book of opening moves isn't cheating. Moving all the pieces into your preferred opening configuration is.
That's so simple, I'm surprised you failed to see the answer. In every previous case, that clause's cons outweighed the rest of the bill's pros. This time, for the first time, the balance went the other way.
Well, to be more precise in this case, all the previous votes were about that one issue, and that issue is a clear negative so he voted no. When that no vote failed, so that issue was included in the larger bill, taken as a whole the pros outweighed cons so he voted yes.
1) The reason the moderates don't hold enough cards is because the extremists were empowered by a lack of negotiation. When your rallying cry is that the West wants to destroy you, having the Leader of the Free World talk about unilateral invasion plays right into their hands. And no matter what, you better believe that the Iranian people would rather have the Mullahs telling them what to do than the Americans, which is why they naturally close ranks when threatened. Opportunities for negotiation have been there, and will continue to be there. We just had a leader who refused to take them, and we need a leader who will.
2) He's done everything possible to look as close to Bush as he can. I was willing to accept it as political maneuvering until he actually voted to allow torture, and it wasn't some tiny rider on a huge budget bill. When push comes to shove, he's an "ends justify the means and the ends are whatever I say they are even if reality disagrees" man and we do not need another 4 years of that.
3) Thanks for reinforcing what I already said.
4) The "base" of the Republican party is not nearly as inherently sexist (or racist) as it used to be, so long as the woman/minority still adheres tightly to their values. See Condoleeza Rice. A rabidly pro-life woman in Palin is actually more appealing to the base than McCain is. The only woman in the running for Obama's running mate would have been Hillary, and is it worth discussing that disaster ticket?
the GOP chose a woman simply because they want to get the "we want a woman in the white house vote" there are a lot of pissed Hillary supporters and the GOP hopes to high hell they will get them over to their side.
I have an extremely hard time believing that Hillary supporters are going to switch to supporting McCain because of Palin. I mean at least McCain just says the required "Roe v Wade should be overturned" mantra that every Republican must say even if they don't care about it. Palin is a full-fledged die-hard Pro Lifer. Basically the opposite of Hillary, except for having a double-X chromosome.
Sure there may have been some Republican Pro-Life women who were wishy-washy about McCain and are excited to see a woman on his ticket. Again, I doubt these women were supporting Hillary before hand. Basically Palin is a move to strengthen McCain's base, and very little else.
1) Way to not understand anything about Iran. It's exactly this kind of fear-based "we can't possibly understand our enemies!" ignorance that an Obama presidency would avoid. Don't let the overall fairly weak President's ravings fool you, the government has plenty of moderates in it that are willing to seek change as is much of the population, and in fact it is exactly the kind of rhetoric you're using here coming from Bush's mouth along with all the other saber rattling that has empowered the extremists there and weakened the moderates in the last 7 years.
2) McCain was holding onto his "different than Bush" claim by a thread until he decided waterboarding was okay if the CIA though it was really important (and of course just take their word for it. oversight? never heard of it).
3) It's pretty hilarious to me how many people have apparently never heard an actual Civil Rights-Era black preacher speak before.
Also, Palin is nothing but a method of strengthening his base. That's not gutsy, it's another step in his attempt to appeal to mainstream Republicans, first by pretending/actually changing his stance on everything that made Republicans not like him, to now picking a VP who explicitly and whole heartily supports all the core Republican values. Yeah, real gutsy.
Eh, I just don't see a line-item veto as anything more than a power grab by the Executive. Have the balls to veto the whole bill if the riders are that bad.
I agree. If the problem is bills which include everything and the kitchen sink (and any Congressman who is against kitchen sinks can't vote against the bill because part of "everything" in the bill is supporting the troops and fighting child abuse), then the solution is not to give the President the power to pick which bits and pieces he agrees with! That's effectively giving the President more power to define legislation than Congress itself. The solution is to force Congress to create bills that only cover one issue.
There is absolutely no reason telecom immunity needed to be in the FISA reform bill. While there is a relationship between them (telecom immunity was needed to protect the government from their flagrant disregard for the previous FISA law), it is not a legislative difference and they should not have been passed together. Had they been voted on separately and thus not been tied into the political wrangling of the FISA bill, it's likely that the immunity bill would not have passed.
Yeah well the difference is that they were trying to build their tower into heaven, as a way of saying that mankind was so great it needed not God to reach heaven.
This isn't nearly as narcissistic... We're just trying to attain cheap access to space! So I think God will give us a pass on this one.
If you bring net mass down from orbit, you can actually make an energy profit (just on the elevator, I'm not saying that it would offset the costs of hauling propellant, etc, for asteroid miners and such).
Yeah of course you can't win overall, but nevertheless wouldn't it be totally awesome to bring back a load of minerals from an asteroid and get a "free" lift of your next load of fuel and supplies?
They've made single nanotubes a meter long. Seems like a sufficient proof of principle for being able to make macro-scale structures. The end result will probably be a woven rope of nanotubes, not a single continuous strand.
Given that GEO is 42,000 km, and the cable would have to run past that point (in some proposals I've seen an equal distance past so the cable is naturally centered at GEO), getting within 7 orders of magnitude seems reasonable since why on earth would you make something closer unless you're really trying to build a space elevator?
Though I'll admit that I'd feel much better about the project if they accomplished something large but nevertheless more modest, like say a suspension bridge using nanotubes. Though since steel cable serves perfectly well for that and will presumably be cheaper even when we can make suspension-bridge length nano-cables, that would be nothing but a feel-good exercise for people like me rather than a practical application.
A Republic is a Representative Democracy, i.e. a form of Democracy. If you mean it's a Representative Democracy and not a Direct Democracy, then sure. But it is definitely a Democracy. Not all Democracies are the same, and few are Direct Democracies.
Maybe it's just me but I've found some especially those that refer to Microsoft's business practices and their methods of maintaining their monopoly to be devastatingly accurate.
So you're just disagreeing with the "drives people away" part. Sure, fine, I was saying it only did that to some people, wasn't really my point. My point was that it's a stupid way to create "challenge", and I think D2 especially exemplifies this because the game was so frickin easy (until you stood to close to a corpse in the Halls of Vaught or whatever it was called you know what I mean). I guess it kept you from completely falling asleep, which I suppose is "challenging" sometimes when grinding out level 98?
Anyway, yeah, I thought the exp penalties in nightmare and hell were stupid, and if you really wanted a penalty for death, you should play Hardcore.
I of course would never do that because of what a cheap game it was. But I love playing hardcore (the only option) in Nethack.:)
Slashdot Mirror
With the gp's quoted figure of 200,000 people traveling through O'Hare every day, that means potentially 46,000 people a day incorrectly tagged as terrorists. Not one of them actually a terrorist, just someone caught as a false positive.
One airport. One day. 46,000 people whose lives have just been screwed over in some manner. And no guarantee that the one terrorist that might show up once every billion of people is going to be caught by the machine.
Right, and since it's obviously impossible to do a truly thorough security screening (interview, background check, etc not that it's likely to even show anything) on 46,000 people a day, the "second-tier" check will be cursory at best, and thus even if you did pick the terrorist out of the line, they are still more than likely going to be considered to be one of the other 45,999 false positives and allowed to go on their merry way.
The reason this works with medical tests is because the person receiving the tests is not taking them under duress, they want to get diagnosed, and the thing they are looking for is physical and not nearly as nebulous as "the intent to do harm". The tests are just a method of initial screening. E.g. they can use a cheap and simple blood test to rule out some kinds of cancer, but if it gives a positive result they will do a biopsy and know for sure. It's having a "gold standard" diagnosis that makes screens for rare diseases possible and false positives a minor problem.
There is no "gold standard" for suspected terrorist. Hell we've held people for years outside the reach of the law and still not been able to come to solid conclusions about some people. This idea can never work.
Actually, better yet, don't tell them it's a dry run ahead of time. Have them go through security to be inside by a specific time. Then call them, and say "It's a go" or "Nevermind, enjoy your trip." After a couple of "Nevermind" runs and not getting pulled over, you should know who to send...
Yeah, that's exactly how it'd be done.
Must....keep.....head.....from......exploding. (MKHFE).
YHA! (Your Head Asplode)
thats about as likely as a pig flying without a trebuchet....
And since 9/11 you can't take trebuchets onto air planes any more, which is why you don't see many flying pigs.
As people continue to ditch their CRTs, which should accelerate once analog broadcasts are dropped next year, Blu-ray adoption will continue to grow.
Wait, so you think that people who won't even spring for basic cable are going to replace their old TVs with HD screens just so they can continue to get over-the-air digital (not even HD) broadcasts? Naw, they'll just buy the converter box (for the cost of ~1-2 months of cable and a tiny fraction of a new HD TV) and be done with it.
HD penetration will only rise when the cost comes down to where it's comparable to an SD TV, and will be held back by people's old TVs continuing to work just fine.
The real problem with this is that the number of wrongdoers is small while the pool for false positives is high. If 5% of people have some intent that should be picked up by this, then 4% of all people with ill intent will be picked up. At the rate, then they'd have to have less than a 5% rate of false positives just to reach the point where half the people it says have ill intent actually do. What are the chances that it's going to have a false positive rate less than 5%?
And that's assuming that 1/20 people have some intent that would need to be picked up by this, while the actual rate is almost certainly smaller. Millions of people fly on airplanes every year, yet every year only a handful try something stupid. This is security theater at its finest.
You've hit that on the head. About 200,000 people go through Chicago O'Hare, just that single (though large) airport, every day. And so far, zero terrorist attacks launched out of O'Hare. The odds that a person this machine flagged being an innocent is ridiculously high, even if it is has high specificity.
Also, aside from the raw statistics of the thing, there's another compounding factor that makes this even more useless*, which is it's rather simple for terrorists to game the system with dry runs.
Terrorist organizations already tend to use people not on our radar for attacks, so if they get pulled out of line on a dry-run, we won't have anything on them and it'll look like yet another false positive. Our young jihadi goes through the line with a bunch of his buddies, and everyone who gets pulled out of line doesn't go through the next time. Once you've discovered the group of people who aren't detected by the terrorist detector/profilers/crystal ball, the hot run can proceed with little fear of getting caught.
* For the stated goal, of course, not the goal of Security Theater for which a magical terrorist detector is great.
Just an fyi, the accuracy number doesn't directly tell you the ratio of false negatives. It's a measure not just of how many true positives it gets (that's the sensitivity), but also of true negatives(that's the specificity), in that it should both identify the "suspicious" correctly and correctly identify the non-"suspicious".
You can't go from the accuracy directly to the specificity and sensitivity, since it's a combination of several measurements. The result, though, will be highly dependent on the prevalence of "suspicious" people in their test, which is the ratio of how often what you're trying to detect actually occurs.
I'm willing to bet that the prevalence they used in their testing is way, way higher than it would be in real life (like 1/4 to 1/2 of the test subjects were "suspicious", while in real life the odds of a random person in an airport being a terrorist is more like 1/1e6 on a bad day). So this would skew the accuracy measurement towards detecting the suspicious and understate the importance of figuring out correctly that someone is not suspicious. The problem is that when you're dealing with something very rare, even if your specificity is very high, the odds that someone you pull out of line because the machine flagged them is in fact innocent is extremely high (it's going to be over 99% chance unless this machine is -very- specific), and if your test methodology doesn't worry as much about specificity, then it's going to be even worse.
Were the 'positive' participants in the test told to "act suspicious" by carrying a radio transponder on their person?
I don't understand your logic. Using the in game transfer system to transfer gold you bought online is cheating. However, buying a strategy guide or a subscription to a website with tons of data is perfectly alright? The data you pay for in the strategy guide or map site is all composed by someone in the real world. Gold is composed by someone in the real world. Sharing it with someone for a fee or not is the same in both situations.
It's the difference between gaining knowledge to help you in the game, and bypassing the game itself. You could view the effort required to gain knowledge solely through game play as 'part of the game' but it's really the meta game, while earning gold is a literal part of the game itself and buying gold is bypassing that part of the game.
Think of it like this: You could try to learn all chess strategy for the first few moves simply by playing chess. Or you could acquire a book of opening moves. A book of opening moves isn't cheating. Moving all the pieces into your preferred opening configuration is.
That's the difference.
That's so simple, I'm surprised you failed to see the answer. In every previous case, that clause's cons outweighed the rest of the bill's pros. This time, for the first time, the balance went the other way.
Well, to be more precise in this case, all the previous votes were about that one issue, and that issue is a clear negative so he voted no. When that no vote failed, so that issue was included in the larger bill, taken as a whole the pros outweighed cons so he voted yes.
1) The reason the moderates don't hold enough cards is because the extremists were empowered by a lack of negotiation. When your rallying cry is that the West wants to destroy you, having the Leader of the Free World talk about unilateral invasion plays right into their hands. And no matter what, you better believe that the Iranian people would rather have the Mullahs telling them what to do than the Americans, which is why they naturally close ranks when threatened. Opportunities for negotiation have been there, and will continue to be there. We just had a leader who refused to take them, and we need a leader who will.
2) He's done everything possible to look as close to Bush as he can. I was willing to accept it as political maneuvering until he actually voted to allow torture, and it wasn't some tiny rider on a huge budget bill. When push comes to shove, he's an "ends justify the means and the ends are whatever I say they are even if reality disagrees" man and we do not need another 4 years of that.
3) Thanks for reinforcing what I already said.
4) The "base" of the Republican party is not nearly as inherently sexist (or racist) as it used to be, so long as the woman/minority still adheres tightly to their values. See Condoleeza Rice. A rabidly pro-life woman in Palin is actually more appealing to the base than McCain is. The only woman in the running for Obama's running mate would have been Hillary, and is it worth discussing that disaster ticket?
I couldn't muster more than a single "Arr!" on Talk Like A Pirate Day.
Damn! And I wondered why we didn't see the expected drop in global temperatures after TLAPD. It was your fault!
Well you're in luck! I know where you can get plenty of Skyhooks.
the GOP chose a woman simply because they want to get the "we want a woman in the white house vote" there are a lot of pissed Hillary supporters and the GOP hopes to high hell they will get them over to their side.
I have an extremely hard time believing that Hillary supporters are going to switch to supporting McCain because of Palin. I mean at least McCain just says the required "Roe v Wade should be overturned" mantra that every Republican must say even if they don't care about it. Palin is a full-fledged die-hard Pro Lifer. Basically the opposite of Hillary, except for having a double-X chromosome.
Sure there may have been some Republican Pro-Life women who were wishy-washy about McCain and are excited to see a woman on his ticket. Again, I doubt these women were supporting Hillary before hand. Basically Palin is a move to strengthen McCain's base, and very little else.
1) Way to not understand anything about Iran. It's exactly this kind of fear-based "we can't possibly understand our enemies!" ignorance that an Obama presidency would avoid. Don't let the overall fairly weak President's ravings fool you, the government has plenty of moderates in it that are willing to seek change as is much of the population, and in fact it is exactly the kind of rhetoric you're using here coming from Bush's mouth along with all the other saber rattling that has empowered the extremists there and weakened the moderates in the last 7 years.
2) McCain was holding onto his "different than Bush" claim by a thread until he decided waterboarding was okay if the CIA though it was really important (and of course just take their word for it. oversight? never heard of it).
3) It's pretty hilarious to me how many people have apparently never heard an actual Civil Rights-Era black preacher speak before.
Also, Palin is nothing but a method of strengthening his base. That's not gutsy, it's another step in his attempt to appeal to mainstream Republicans, first by pretending/actually changing his stance on everything that made Republicans not like him, to now picking a VP who explicitly and whole heartily supports all the core Republican values. Yeah, real gutsy.
Eh, I just don't see a line-item veto as anything more than a power grab by the Executive. Have the balls to veto the whole bill if the riders are that bad.
I agree. If the problem is bills which include everything and the kitchen sink (and any Congressman who is against kitchen sinks can't vote against the bill because part of "everything" in the bill is supporting the troops and fighting child abuse), then the solution is not to give the President the power to pick which bits and pieces he agrees with! That's effectively giving the President more power to define legislation than Congress itself. The solution is to force Congress to create bills that only cover one issue.
There is absolutely no reason telecom immunity needed to be in the FISA reform bill. While there is a relationship between them (telecom immunity was needed to protect the government from their flagrant disregard for the previous FISA law), it is not a legislative difference and they should not have been passed together. Had they been voted on separately and thus not been tied into the political wrangling of the FISA bill, it's likely that the immunity bill would not have passed.
Yeah well the difference is that they were trying to build their tower into heaven, as a way of saying that mankind was so great it needed not God to reach heaven.
This isn't nearly as narcissistic... We're just trying to attain cheap access to space! So I think God will give us a pass on this one.
If you bring net mass down from orbit, you can actually make an energy profit (just on the elevator, I'm not saying that it would offset the costs of hauling propellant, etc, for asteroid miners and such).
Yeah of course you can't win overall, but nevertheless wouldn't it be totally awesome to bring back a load of minerals from an asteroid and get a "free" lift of your next load of fuel and supplies?
They've made single nanotubes a meter long. Seems like a sufficient proof of principle for being able to make macro-scale structures. The end result will probably be a woven rope of nanotubes, not a single continuous strand.
Given that GEO is 42,000 km, and the cable would have to run past that point (in some proposals I've seen an equal distance past so the cable is naturally centered at GEO), getting within 7 orders of magnitude seems reasonable since why on earth would you make something closer unless you're really trying to build a space elevator?
Though I'll admit that I'd feel much better about the project if they accomplished something large but nevertheless more modest, like say a suspension bridge using nanotubes. Though since steel cable serves perfectly well for that and will presumably be cheaper even when we can make suspension-bridge length nano-cables, that would be nothing but a feel-good exercise for people like me rather than a practical application.
A Republic is a Representative Democracy, i.e. a form of Democracy. If you mean it's a Representative Democracy and not a Direct Democracy, then sure. But it is definitely a Democracy. Not all Democracies are the same, and few are Direct Democracies.
And the superior rescue vehicle they're going to use is...?
I mean what do you think they did when a Huey went down in Vietnam?
Maybe it's just me but I've found some especially those that refer to Microsoft's business practices and their methods of maintaining their monopoly to be devastatingly accurate.
I still never stopped playing because of that.
So you're just disagreeing with the "drives people away" part. Sure, fine, I was saying it only did that to some people, wasn't really my point. My point was that it's a stupid way to create "challenge", and I think D2 especially exemplifies this because the game was so frickin easy (until you stood to close to a corpse in the Halls of Vaught or whatever it was called you know what I mean). I guess it kept you from completely falling asleep, which I suppose is "challenging" sometimes when grinding out level 98?
Anyway, yeah, I thought the exp penalties in nightmare and hell were stupid, and if you really wanted a penalty for death, you should play Hardcore.
I of course would never do that because of what a cheap game it was. But I love playing hardcore (the only option) in Nethack. :)
Hmm that only leaves the million dollar question: Does it work in Wine?
And a quick trip to wine's appdb says... yes, except for player/npc models don't render. :(
Well that's not bad, seems they're close and I don't mind waiting for it to get fixed before I try the game.
What be a pirate's favorite heavy metal band?
GWARRRRR!