I was more referring to the kind that lack external antennas actually. I don't know what Comcast's gear looks like, but at my house i have a cablemodem that's a block-shape with no protrusions and also with no wifi. It hands off to my NAT router.
Did it occur to you that it's possible to forgive but to not forget? Recidivisim is a real problem, and one of the biggest indicators that one is going to break the law is that they already have a history of breaking the law. It would be stupid to not keep a functional, searchable list of those that have been convicted of a crime to compare against when crimes by persons unknown have been committed.
I'm all in favor giving people opportunity to change their behavior for the better, but I'm not going to ignore the distinct possibility that they won't use that opportunity in the way it is intended. And I do not feel that it is wrong for society to function in a similar way, epecially when transgressions that make victims out of people have occurred.
I very much doubt that the victim was even told that computer-driven facial recognition software played a role, and if the victim was told that, then I doubt that an individual suspect was identified by police without being part of a greater lineup.
Besides, based on the TV "police procedurals" that have been on for the last fifteen years, I expect that a statistically significant portion of the population already believe that this sort of facial recognition was already going on. Given that I remember actually seeing a demo of some real face recognition stuff in the late nineties I'm not even immune to that assumption. This is one place where those that have ended up on the list (ie, convicted felons) do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy, and mining that particular database for comparison is not an unreasonable intrusion, especially if the database is comprised of convicts. They didn't mine the drivers' license database, or the food handlers' database, or trades registration database, etc. They mined one that they have a legitimate case to go through.
Any remotely competent lawyer would get that kind of identification thrown out of court. Any lineup, even a photo lineup, without multiple options is inadmissible in court.
Sounds to me like this was used as an investigative lead that helped them find other evidence, rather than as the principal evidence presented in court. This really isn't different than a police officer viewing the recording to see the offender's face, then going through books of mugshots to find the face, then investigating those people that the officer thinks might be the offender. This is simply the computer taking the image that the police officer identified and searching those "books" for close matches, then the police looking at the MO of the crime as compared to the MO of the person previously arrested, and investigating ones that have the most commonality first.
In this case they identified a suspect, the suspect apparently had offended in this same way before, and the suspect was tried and convicted. This doesn't seem to violate any new privacy considerations- the recordings being collected themselves are nothing new, and the mugshot database isn't either. Simply making the comparison itself doesn't add any new fuel to the fire of personal liberty complaints or of violation of privacy.
Sorry, it's more like, "one nation's government wants to lock him up for what he did to them, another nation's government wants to lock him up for what he can do for them, and other nations don't want him at all, but will probably hand him over to one or the other in due course."
People like to prattle on about the tree of liberty and refreshing it with the blood of patriots and tyrants; they always forget the part about the consequences of getting the short end of the stick being rather severe. Mr. Snowden's only real mistake was thinking that he was individually smart enough to take on these world powers and personally win, when in reality he's never going to be free from the machine.
If he wanted to be free and to have done this, he'd have had to move some place isolated, remote, and where he could be somewhat anonymous, and to have released his documentation through several intermediaries. Some place like rural west-central Australia, for example. Unfortunately for him he chose to be known in his releases, and he'll end up paying for that choice for the rest of his life, and possibly with his life.
I'm somewhat surprised that the company named names.
I am surprised too. That could be a violation of labor law since it sounds like the disclosure was made voluntarily by the company, as opposed to being demanded in a court of law.
GM might have just opened itself up to lawsuits from those that were fired, and I don't mean old-GM, but the current incarnation. It depends on the laws of the state in which the people were employed. In my state this would be illegal.
Why didn't these people turn off the ignition of the car?
Two reasons that I've heard that make sense are first that it's difficult enough to try to control an out-of-control car with two hands, and second, that since many cars now don't have good old fashioned ignition keys, it may not be possible to turn off the car if the car won't cooperate.
Only road in HI that I encountered with that proscription was on Oahu, where part of the coastal ring-road had fallen into the sea but was still marked on some maps.
The path to Polihale is itself part of the park, and there were no prohibitions on going out there as far as I could tell.
Barking Sands itself is now closed to anyone but military personnel and to local residents that have applied for and received advance permission to use it from the base commander. Island visitors cannot go there as visitors to the base are only allowed into specific authorized areas and are escorted while there. One can still visit Polihale to the north, but the road getting there is very hard on rental cars.
The only automotive service job that an IT guy might be able to do with no prior experience would be as the service manager. And that job usually goes to someone that worked their way up through being a mechanic, not a computer expert.
Computers were my hobby until I made them my profession and then started disliking them. I spent a decade learning how to work on cars for my hobby, and it took a lot of effort to get to where I was any good, and that's with platforms that are fairly simple to work on, ie, large RWD cars with simple control systems.
Sure, a computer geek can figure out how to use a CANBUS scanner, but will a computer geek be happy with busted knuckles, grease-filled lacerations, no cooling in the summer, no heat in the winter, caustic chemicals, etc? Probably not your average computer geek, we got into this profession with the intention to not get that dirty, and the worst we normally have to face is dustbunnies.
An IT professional could probably transition into industrial control systems, but would have to spend some time getting acquainted with the mechanical side and all the sweat and strain that it entails.
Kauai is very pretty, the weather on the South and East sides of the island is gorgeous. Unfortunately PMRF is on the West side at the extreme end of the road, pretty far away from the populated side. There's a cool bar in Port Allen though, so it's not so bad even away from everyone and in the relative heat.
This isn't caused by bias in the hiring process, it's caused by bias in those applying. The problem really comes in when the profession being seen as a white male 30 year old's job causes itself to become a self fulfilling profesy.
The problem is from the earliest levels of education, students from some minority groups are not achieving the same levels as their peers, so on average those groups are less prepared for the challenges of higher education and then the workplace. Google et al. aren't basing their hiring choices on bias, they're hiring who's available to be hired.
To fix this requires a paradigm shift for families and for school systems. Affirmative action at higher education levels might serve to present opportunities that were previously lost through issues in lower levels of education, but it would be much more effective to try to solve these kinds of problems when students are still small children rather than waiting until approaching college age.
Unfortunately this will require society to change. Society will need to accept fairly radical changes in how birth control is emphasized, and how parental responsibility is handled, and even how our criminal justice system deals with some offenders and their parental responsibilities. Changing the schools and the teachers doesn't really address the problem, family responsibility and parental self-discipline will. But, that is really hard to fix.
Actually changing that might make for more racial diversity in the workplace in technical companies. Otherwise I don't see much difference on the horizon.
These regulations, regardless of how useful for their intended purpose, are there to allow the government to get in the way of things. Follow the money and see who donates and who does not.
But in this case, it was very high profile, so it got approved lest some other nation take the lead.
Ah, but in the case of SpaceX, you're seeing a company that is achieving a real and actual goal that the government has, and success tends to beget latitude. To make a high school analogy, those kids that are at the top of the class academically tend to catch a lot of breaks or get a lot of leeway in the gray-area of the rules. Things like being able to mouth-off just a bit in class assuming that their contribution is topical and demonstrates understanding of the material. Things like upsetting a staff member but finding that the school administration lets it slide with no more than a verbal warning. Things like having occasional absenteeism ignored or excused, or being allowed to do things with school materials that might get kids that aren't performing well academically into trouble.
SpaceX is getting results, and they don't seem to be making a lot of enemies of large groups of people in the process. It's certainly possible that if they picked an area that was already kind of messed up (lack of wildlife, beaches that are already abused, etc) that any extra damage that they might cause is overridden by their likelihood of achieving more results compared to that damage.
Musk himself is a bit of a loudmouth, but again, he achieves results. He's got electric cars actually into production and on the roads. He's got spacecraft into orbit and successfully returned. He seems to play for the longer term, and that might even bring SolarCity into profitability as he's willing to absorb the losses for quite some time while the company establishes itself. He seems to have stepped into a bit of a Howard Hughes position, hopefully he'll continue to get good results.
You know, I can read Wikipedia too, and it looks like you simply counted their fourteen examples and have asked for one more, to attempt to make it harder to cite that list.
And be honest with yourself, the united states doesn't have its gaze on you. It simply vacuums up everything that it can and stores it, so that if it feels that it needs to put its gaze on you, it could. Mind you, I still think that it's wrong, but there's no Orwellian pyramid structure that's actively committing personnel to looking at what you're doing or staging clandestine interventions or acting as an agent provocateur. It's not right that they collect so much "metadata", but they're not sitting there waiting for you to do something wrong so they can drop the hammer on you either. There's no sword of Damocles hanging over your head in your daily life, at least not from them.
The only time, other than filing my taxes, that I really interact with agents of the federal government is when I fly. Yes, it's annoying, and it used to be very invasive. Last couple of times I've flown though, they've actually made it easier to go through security. No shoes off. No belt off unless the buckle is huge. No jacket off unless the metal clasps are too big. No pulling the laptop out of the carry-on. No pulling the liquids in the quart bag out of the carry-on. It's like someone finally decided that the open-everything-up security that they'd been doing wasn't really accomplishing anything other than making a lot of people pissed off, so they rolled it back to close to pre-9/11 levels.
I wish that people that are very, very smart on one particular subject or discipline would be a little more careful before they speak on matters outside of their area of expertise, especially on stuff as outlandish as what this particular individual has suggested.
I had an interesting conversation with a man that develops re-entry systems and the test-beds used to develop and test them. He was very down-to-earth on the costs associated with launching materiel; basically in his mind it was not practical at this point to enact the scenario that Kim Stanley Robinson created in his Mars trilogy. We don't have the launch payload capacity. We don't have the landing zone accuracy. Even the concept of the kind of machinery needed to create habitable environments on Mars is too great to budget for and the machinery itself is too hard to maintain without a support structure for that maintenance. We won't be operating D9 bulldozers on other planets.
It also came up that our country spent 4% of GDP in getting to the Moon six times. 4% of GDP let twelve men walk on the surface of another body for a few days. Without a nemesis country like the Soviet Union provided for us, there's no interest in committing any real money to getting us even back to the Moon, let alone to other planets.
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I was more referring to the kind that lack external antennas actually. I don't know what Comcast's gear looks like, but at my house i have a cablemodem that's a block-shape with no protrusions and also with no wifi. It hands off to my NAT router.
...with this rapid release schedule. Firefox is trying to update more often than Java nowadays.
Run an unstable branch like everyone else, and run a testing/beta branch to become the next stable. It will make life a lot easier.
"Blame Obama" has been popular for a long time, all the way back to about 2001 or so, so far as I can tell...
And if not, that's what chicken wire or aluminum foil is for.
Did it occur to you that it's possible to forgive but to not forget? Recidivisim is a real problem, and one of the biggest indicators that one is going to break the law is that they already have a history of breaking the law. It would be stupid to not keep a functional, searchable list of those that have been convicted of a crime to compare against when crimes by persons unknown have been committed.
I'm all in favor giving people opportunity to change their behavior for the better, but I'm not going to ignore the distinct possibility that they won't use that opportunity in the way it is intended. And I do not feel that it is wrong for society to function in a similar way, epecially when transgressions that make victims out of people have occurred.
I very much doubt that the victim was even told that computer-driven facial recognition software played a role, and if the victim was told that, then I doubt that an individual suspect was identified by police without being part of a greater lineup.
Besides, based on the TV "police procedurals" that have been on for the last fifteen years, I expect that a statistically significant portion of the population already believe that this sort of facial recognition was already going on. Given that I remember actually seeing a demo of some real face recognition stuff in the late nineties I'm not even immune to that assumption. This is one place where those that have ended up on the list (ie, convicted felons) do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy, and mining that particular database for comparison is not an unreasonable intrusion, especially if the database is comprised of convicts. They didn't mine the drivers' license database, or the food handlers' database, or trades registration database, etc. They mined one that they have a legitimate case to go through.
Sounds to me like this was used as an investigative lead that helped them find other evidence, rather than as the principal evidence presented in court. This really isn't different than a police officer viewing the recording to see the offender's face, then going through books of mugshots to find the face, then investigating those people that the officer thinks might be the offender. This is simply the computer taking the image that the police officer identified and searching those "books" for close matches, then the police looking at the MO of the crime as compared to the MO of the person previously arrested, and investigating ones that have the most commonality first.
In this case they identified a suspect, the suspect apparently had offended in this same way before, and the suspect was tried and convicted. This doesn't seem to violate any new privacy considerations- the recordings being collected themselves are nothing new, and the mugshot database isn't either. Simply making the comparison itself doesn't add any new fuel to the fire of personal liberty complaints or of violation of privacy.
Sorry, it's more like, "one nation's government wants to lock him up for what he did to them, another nation's government wants to lock him up for what he can do for them, and other nations don't want him at all, but will probably hand him over to one or the other in due course."
People like to prattle on about the tree of liberty and refreshing it with the blood of patriots and tyrants; they always forget the part about the consequences of getting the short end of the stick being rather severe. Mr. Snowden's only real mistake was thinking that he was individually smart enough to take on these world powers and personally win, when in reality he's never going to be free from the machine.
If he wanted to be free and to have done this, he'd have had to move some place isolated, remote, and where he could be somewhat anonymous, and to have released his documentation through several intermediaries. Some place like rural west-central Australia, for example. Unfortunately for him he chose to be known in his releases, and he'll end up paying for that choice for the rest of his life, and possibly with his life.
The likes of me? I'm an American.
I am surprised too. That could be a violation of labor law since it sounds like the disclosure was made voluntarily by the company, as opposed to being demanded in a court of law.
GM might have just opened itself up to lawsuits from those that were fired, and I don't mean old-GM, but the current incarnation. It depends on the laws of the state in which the people were employed. In my state this would be illegal.
Two reasons that I've heard that make sense are first that it's difficult enough to try to control an out-of-control car with two hands, and second, that since many cars now don't have good old fashioned ignition keys, it may not be possible to turn off the car if the car won't cooperate.
I don't think that the Internet will be terribly useful with no one on it...
You mean that SSD that I bought from the scruffy-looking fellow in the parking lot might not be legit?
Only road in HI that I encountered with that proscription was on Oahu, where part of the coastal ring-road had fallen into the sea but was still marked on some maps.
The path to Polihale is itself part of the park, and there were no prohibitions on going out there as far as I could tell.
It would almost be worthwhile to work helpdesk again, if I could answer Patrick Stewart when he calls because his broadband is down...
"Mr. Stewart, if you look at the front of your cablemodem, you'll see five lights..."
Barking Sands itself is now closed to anyone but military personnel and to local residents that have applied for and received advance permission to use it from the base commander. Island visitors cannot go there as visitors to the base are only allowed into specific authorized areas and are escorted while there. One can still visit Polihale to the north, but the road getting there is very hard on rental cars.
The only automotive service job that an IT guy might be able to do with no prior experience would be as the service manager. And that job usually goes to someone that worked their way up through being a mechanic, not a computer expert.
Computers were my hobby until I made them my profession and then started disliking them. I spent a decade learning how to work on cars for my hobby, and it took a lot of effort to get to where I was any good, and that's with platforms that are fairly simple to work on, ie, large RWD cars with simple control systems.
Sure, a computer geek can figure out how to use a CANBUS scanner, but will a computer geek be happy with busted knuckles, grease-filled lacerations, no cooling in the summer, no heat in the winter, caustic chemicals, etc? Probably not your average computer geek, we got into this profession with the intention to not get that dirty, and the worst we normally have to face is dustbunnies.
An IT professional could probably transition into industrial control systems, but would have to spend some time getting acquainted with the mechanical side and all the sweat and strain that it entails.
Kauai is very pretty, the weather on the South and East sides of the island is gorgeous. Unfortunately PMRF is on the West side at the extreme end of the road, pretty far away from the populated side. There's a cool bar in Port Allen though, so it's not so bad even away from everyone and in the relative heat.
I'd go back in a heartbeat.
No, just that particular region. Can a brain region be measured in negative area?
The problem is from the earliest levels of education, students from some minority groups are not achieving the same levels as their peers, so on average those groups are less prepared for the challenges of higher education and then the workplace. Google et al. aren't basing their hiring choices on bias, they're hiring who's available to be hired.
To fix this requires a paradigm shift for families and for school systems. Affirmative action at higher education levels might serve to present opportunities that were previously lost through issues in lower levels of education, but it would be much more effective to try to solve these kinds of problems when students are still small children rather than waiting until approaching college age.
Unfortunately this will require society to change. Society will need to accept fairly radical changes in how birth control is emphasized, and how parental responsibility is handled, and even how our criminal justice system deals with some offenders and their parental responsibilities. Changing the schools and the teachers doesn't really address the problem, family responsibility and parental self-discipline will. But, that is really hard to fix.
Actually changing that might make for more racial diversity in the workplace in technical companies. Otherwise I don't see much difference on the horizon.
Ah, but in the case of SpaceX, you're seeing a company that is achieving a real and actual goal that the government has, and success tends to beget latitude. To make a high school analogy, those kids that are at the top of the class academically tend to catch a lot of breaks or get a lot of leeway in the gray-area of the rules. Things like being able to mouth-off just a bit in class assuming that their contribution is topical and demonstrates understanding of the material. Things like upsetting a staff member but finding that the school administration lets it slide with no more than a verbal warning. Things like having occasional absenteeism ignored or excused, or being allowed to do things with school materials that might get kids that aren't performing well academically into trouble.
SpaceX is getting results, and they don't seem to be making a lot of enemies of large groups of people in the process. It's certainly possible that if they picked an area that was already kind of messed up (lack of wildlife, beaches that are already abused, etc) that any extra damage that they might cause is overridden by their likelihood of achieving more results compared to that damage.
Musk himself is a bit of a loudmouth, but again, he achieves results. He's got electric cars actually into production and on the roads. He's got spacecraft into orbit and successfully returned. He seems to play for the longer term, and that might even bring SolarCity into profitability as he's willing to absorb the losses for quite some time while the company establishes itself. He seems to have stepped into a bit of a Howard Hughes position, hopefully he'll continue to get good results.
I found your reference to wildlife and airports juxtaposed against the animal referenced in your signature to be particularly amusing...
You know, I can read Wikipedia too, and it looks like you simply counted their fourteen examples and have asked for one more, to attempt to make it harder to cite that list.
And be honest with yourself, the united states doesn't have its gaze on you. It simply vacuums up everything that it can and stores it, so that if it feels that it needs to put its gaze on you, it could. Mind you, I still think that it's wrong, but there's no Orwellian pyramid structure that's actively committing personnel to looking at what you're doing or staging clandestine interventions or acting as an agent provocateur. It's not right that they collect so much "metadata", but they're not sitting there waiting for you to do something wrong so they can drop the hammer on you either. There's no sword of Damocles hanging over your head in your daily life, at least not from them.
The only time, other than filing my taxes, that I really interact with agents of the federal government is when I fly. Yes, it's annoying, and it used to be very invasive. Last couple of times I've flown though, they've actually made it easier to go through security. No shoes off. No belt off unless the buckle is huge. No jacket off unless the metal clasps are too big. No pulling the laptop out of the carry-on. No pulling the liquids in the quart bag out of the carry-on. It's like someone finally decided that the open-everything-up security that they'd been doing wasn't really accomplishing anything other than making a lot of people pissed off, so they rolled it back to close to pre-9/11 levels.
Some people like a man in uniform...
I wish that people that are very, very smart on one particular subject or discipline would be a little more careful before they speak on matters outside of their area of expertise, especially on stuff as outlandish as what this particular individual has suggested.
I had an interesting conversation with a man that develops re-entry systems and the test-beds used to develop and test them. He was very down-to-earth on the costs associated with launching materiel; basically in his mind it was not practical at this point to enact the scenario that Kim Stanley Robinson created in his Mars trilogy. We don't have the launch payload capacity. We don't have the landing zone accuracy. Even the concept of the kind of machinery needed to create habitable environments on Mars is too great to budget for and the machinery itself is too hard to maintain without a support structure for that maintenance. We won't be operating D9 bulldozers on other planets.
It also came up that our country spent 4% of GDP in getting to the Moon six times. 4% of GDP let twelve men walk on the surface of another body for a few days. Without a nemesis country like the Soviet Union provided for us, there's no interest in committing any real money to getting us even back to the Moon, let alone to other planets.