One problem is that fingerprints change. You cut your finger or play a guitar or just tend to have dry skin*... and your fingerprint changes. One issue with biometrics is that they are not static. You fingerprints, your irises, your retinas - all of them change slightly over time. It's slight enough for "there's a high probability that this reading matches person X", but too much for "we'll take this reading as a digital key". You can try to downsample the readings to compensate for long-term change and short-term fluctuations, but that reduces the quality of the key and might allow in people with similar features.
Biometrics are hard for a number of reasons. One of them is that humans tend to look different over time.
* I don't know about you, but I constantly have small blemishes on my fingers. If I was relying on hi-res fingerprint scans for anything I'd have to reset them to match the state of my fingers every few weeks.
Yeah, I keep losing jobs like that. I'd go with consulting, but the last time I tried that they wanted to nail me to a wooden cross after seeing my rates...
As for the 214 pound TV: Wow. I mean, wow. That thing probably also doubles as safe cover in case of a firefight, ground war or nuclear strike.
Note that clinging to old tech can sometimes be unexpectedly helpful. Like the one case where the police couldn't properly investigate an alleged murderer because he did all his work on a C64 and they couldn't figure out how to read the disks. (Apparently using the C64 was not possible - maybe they couldn't find the disk containing the software.)
In Germany, you can occasionally hear the term; it's used to refer to the kind of cheap Chinese restaurants you tend to find around train stations and city centers. I don't know if they serve T-Shirts, but I can recommend the fried noodles.
And whether or not it is varies by person. For example, I wouldn't buy an HDTV compatible TV set right now because I perceive the technology as not yet mature enough - and because it's not that interesting to me.
I just spent two full days accompanying my brother on his quest to buy a new TV set. One day was spent finding a set that met his standards and didn't have egregious flaws, the other was spent returning it and buying a different one because apparently (Toshiba's best guess) TrueScan displays are incompatible with the XBox 360 when used in that mode. Of course, they didn't have any roughly equivalent 37" devices and so again hours were spent just trying to find a slightly bigger one that didn't have weird specs or an absurd price point. And he did start with a list of good devices he had compiled on the 'net beforehand.
Apart from that experience, I'm happy with my 28" 4:3 CRT PAL TV set. It's bulky, it's heavy and it sucks more juice than my computer three times over, but it does what it needs to do, so it's fine. Of course I don't get as many details as winth an HD set (the level of detail on those Full HD sets is pretty impressive), but as I'm watching from four meters away I'm not going to notice much of them anyways - the fact that my glasses don't exactly compensate my myopia might be related to that. A small Full HD set would make for a nice computer monitor, though.
I am a late adopter. Not usually for computer stuff (even though I'm happy being 1.5 generations behind the latest GPU), but very much vor AV hardware. HDTV is nice but I don't need it. I can still upgrade when my PAL set breaks. Likewise for BluRay - once MBPs contain BluRay drives by default or BluRay burners are in the 50 range I'll have it, but before that there's no reason for me to upgrade. (Also, of course, BD-RWs need to be in about the same price range as DL DVD-Rs before I actually start using the format.)
I think it would be easier if Palestine wasn't geographically fragmented. If it was one contiguous chunk I think there would be less clamor - nobody wold like their country being a bunch of islands surrounded by people who they share a mutual hatred with.
I think both sides keep having their pride get into their way. The Isrelis* can't admit that no matter what was millennia ago, the land did belong to the Palestinians for ages and thus they have a certain right to it. The Palestinians* can't admit that Israel is too determined and well-funded to disappear any time soon. If both admitted that they're fighting a pointless fight they could actually work on rebuilding things, but like with most territorial disputes both parties insist that the land in question is "mine, mine, mine!".
* I'm talking about those who carry on the fighting. As far as I know most people in both parties would be more than willing to make concessions if it would stop the fighting.
The question is whether a huge laser cannon is going to help much against portable rocket launchers. We're not talking ICBMs here; a small rocket launcher as used for a terror attack on a city isn't going to give you five minutes advance warning and a meter-wide target.
Generating huge amounts of toxic waste is a bad thing, so if the laser isn't very useful against small rockets it doesn't make much sense to use it against them. Especially since the attackers might get the bright idea of firing N+1 rockets at the laser, with N being the number of rockets the laser can feasibly intercept.
The question is whether they ask for an effective defense tool or for a hugely expensive placebo.
Actually, they were in the open beta. The community was pissed off when the devs increased the height of homo sapiens; the much larger hitbox was a pretty bad nerf. It was almost as bad as when they took away the venom fangs.
Granted, it was still nothing like when they removed tool use from the amoeba family.
What interests me is: Is solid state technology really far enough for flight voice recorders? From what I've heard SSDs have a tendency to fail in high-throughput applications (like constantly writing a voice recording to the disk) in a matter of months. Do you think it's wise to use SSDs exclusively?
Perhaps a safer approach would be to use both SSDs and tape. It's unlikely that both die at the same time, except if the box itself is destroyed - and then no storage technology on earth would help. Of course that means more complexity...
Only if you have many CPU-hungry processes. I have a dualcore CPU and dozens of running processes, but system load barely ever exceeds 1. With the load usually below 1, adding more cores won't do much because no processes are actually waiting.
P.S.: I know why this is impossible, so please don't flame me.
Of course it's impossible. Because the calculations would be faster than c in the real world, your CPUs would travel backwards through time and undo all work they've done so far.
I think a better way of solving such problems could be having a staff of "experts" (ie. people who can identify electronic gadgets) and a high-resolution camera phone. If you encounter a suspicious device and you can't identify it, you snap a photo, send it over to the central and they send you a reply like "HARMLESS; ultra-slim notebook, optical drive not included" or "CAUTION; device could not be identified"*.
Of course then you need people who are in the know about current gadgets, enough of them to guarantee short response times and a process that maintains some flexibility (so that people with unidentified devices aren't automatically assumed to be evul terrists).
* Or, of course, "EXPLOSION DANGER; this notebook model is known to use Sony batteries".
I think what you are missing here is the psychological aspect. They watch out for people who behave in a certain way. Someone with a bomb in his backpack that he wants to explode in a mass of people, taking himself to heaven in the process, behaves very much different from someone who has a fake bomb in their back trying to get one over the security guards. I don't want security to check for TSA agents sneaking in with fake bombs, I want them to look out for people with real bombs.
So if the terrorists spend some time preparing for the bombing and act differently from what the TSA thinks is a stereotypical terrorist, they can pass easily?
Acting is not exactly impossible to pull off. The TSA needs to get nearly all dangerous people under any circumstance without many false positives. That includes TSA agents who want to smuggle in fake bombs - because a real terrorist might behave just like those agents. Or like a regular tourist. Or like a stressed-out businessman who can't afford to miss his flight.
Deducing from behavior whether or not someone carries a dangerous device with him is non-trivial. The TSA has no means of knowing whether someone who tries to smuggle something in is a TSA agent or not, so they need to stop everyone who is suspicious while at the same time having effective, yet unobtrusive suspicion standards. If they can't pull that off they're pretty much useless.
See, it's this mentality that ticks some people (like me) off. I dont use Wikipedia as "a replacement to an encyclopedia". Why would I do that?
True. Wikipedia that is trimmed down to encyclopdeia equivalence would be pretty useless - Wikipedia won't be trusted like a traditional encyclopedia until it becomes a traditional encyclopedia (which would mean doing away with the public wiki concept that's the entire reason WP exists in the first place), so it would be like the Britannica, only useless because unquotable.
Wikipedia is not an encyclopedia. It doesn't work as one. It's a combination index/cache of human knowledge. The more knowledge it contains the more useful it gets - even though information without external references is less useful than information with ones. So any attempt to make it "more reputable" only end up lowering its usefulness.
If people want to make Wikipedia cleaner they should do so by moving large chunks of peripheral information into separate articles á la "The Grauman's Chinese Theatre In Popular Culture".
Sometimes adding a few sentences at the beginning and a background information section at the end as well as putting in "(Episode XYZ)" where appropriate would be enough to give the article in question everything it needs to be a good fictitional character article. You still need to know your stuff, but you don't have to rewrite everything.
Of course, then someone comes around and arbitrarily reverts/deletes your changes, but that's just how Wikipedia works.
After watching their promotion video, Piclens trikes me as offering only one real advantage over the regular sites - it allows you to determine how many items you want to have on-screen at a given time. However, it's still inflexible because apparently you can't adjust the height of the strip.
I think a simple XUL app could easily replicate that functionality. Of course without the snazzy 3D mode, but then again I prefer functional, consistent* interfaces over "hey look, our app looks completely dfferent from any other app an your computer".
* In that order. Time Machine isn't consistent with the rest of OS X, but its mode of presentation does work really well for what it's doing.
"New" doesn't always equate to "good". It doesn't always equate to "bad", either.
I agree that touch interfaces, for example, are nice for small devices (even though they mean you get fingerprints all over your nice, shiny display), but they don't work too well for a 21" flatscreen display because the amount of arm movement would be tiring after a while. They also can't really replace a keyboard in terms of tactile response and typing speed (as many fast typists actually hit one key before releasing the last). Like every technology they work well in some cases and less well in others.
Likewise, voice commands are nice in a somewhat quiet room where you can afford to talk with a normal voice. They also work well if you're talking into a mobile phone right next to your mouth. But in a very noisy environment or a library they work less well, especially when you're using a notebook and the microphone is about one meter away from your mouth. They also lend themselves much better to issuing simple commands (where the recognition software has to classify them into a small set of classes) than to dictating sourcecode. Again, whether or not they make sense depends entirely on the circumstances.
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One problem is that fingerprints change. You cut your finger or play a guitar or just tend to have dry skin*... and your fingerprint changes. One issue with biometrics is that they are not static. You fingerprints, your irises, your retinas - all of them change slightly over time. It's slight enough for "there's a high probability that this reading matches person X", but too much for "we'll take this reading as a digital key". You can try to downsample the readings to compensate for long-term change and short-term fluctuations, but that reduces the quality of the key and might allow in people with similar features.
Biometrics are hard for a number of reasons. One of them is that humans tend to look different over time.
* I don't know about you, but I constantly have small blemishes on my fingers. If I was relying on hi-res fingerprint scans for anything I'd have to reset them to match the state of my fingers every few weeks.
Yeah, I keep losing jobs like that. I'd go with consulting, but the last time I tried that they wanted to nail me to a wooden cross after seeing my rates...
As for the 214 pound TV: Wow. I mean, wow. That thing probably also doubles as safe cover in case of a firefight, ground war or nuclear strike.
Note that clinging to old tech can sometimes be unexpectedly helpful. Like the one case where the police couldn't properly investigate an alleged murderer because he did all his work on a C64 and they couldn't figure out how to read the disks. (Apparently using the C64 was not possible - maybe they couldn't find the disk containing the software.)
I just spent two full days accompanying my brother on his quest to buy a new TV set. One day was spent finding a set that met his standards and didn't have egregious flaws, the other was spent returning it and buying a different one because apparently (Toshiba's best guess) TrueScan displays are incompatible with the XBox 360 when used in that mode. Of course, they didn't have any roughly equivalent 37" devices and so again hours were spent just trying to find a slightly bigger one that didn't have weird specs or an absurd price point. And he did start with a list of good devices he had compiled on the 'net beforehand.
Apart from that experience, I'm happy with my 28" 4:3 CRT PAL TV set. It's bulky, it's heavy and it sucks more juice than my computer three times over, but it does what it needs to do, so it's fine. Of course I don't get as many details as winth an HD set (the level of detail on those Full HD sets is pretty impressive), but as I'm watching from four meters away I'm not going to notice much of them anyways - the fact that my glasses don't exactly compensate my myopia might be related to that. A small Full HD set would make for a nice computer monitor, though.
I am a late adopter. Not usually for computer stuff (even though I'm happy being 1.5 generations behind the latest GPU), but very much vor AV hardware. HDTV is nice but I don't need it. I can still upgrade when my PAL set breaks. Likewise for BluRay - once MBPs contain BluRay drives by default or BluRay burners are in the 50 range I'll have it, but before that there's no reason for me to upgrade. (Also, of course, BD-RWs need to be in about the same price range as DL DVD-Rs before I actually start using the format.)
I have yet to see a country where the government doesn't fall somewhere between "a huge collection of asses" and "too nutty for an asylum".
I think it would be easier if Palestine wasn't geographically fragmented. If it was one contiguous chunk I think there would be less clamor - nobody wold like their country being a bunch of islands surrounded by people who they share a mutual hatred with.
I think both sides keep having their pride get into their way. The Isrelis* can't admit that no matter what was millennia ago, the land did belong to the Palestinians for ages and thus they have a certain right to it. The Palestinians* can't admit that Israel is too determined and well-funded to disappear any time soon. If both admitted that they're fighting a pointless fight they could actually work on rebuilding things, but like with most territorial disputes both parties insist that the land in question is "mine, mine, mine!".
* I'm talking about those who carry on the fighting. As far as I know most people in both parties would be more than willing to make concessions if it would stop the fighting.
The question is whether a huge laser cannon is going to help much against portable rocket launchers. We're not talking ICBMs here; a small rocket launcher as used for a terror attack on a city isn't going to give you five minutes advance warning and a meter-wide target.
Generating huge amounts of toxic waste is a bad thing, so if the laser isn't very useful against small rockets it doesn't make much sense to use it against them. Especially since the attackers might get the bright idea of firing N+1 rockets at the laser, with N being the number of rockets the laser can feasibly intercept.
The question is whether they ask for an effective defense tool or for a hugely expensive placebo.
I think it's Star Command-gate. Didn't think that SSI could still get involved in a scandal, though.
He's using a Toughbook?
Granted, it was still nothing like when they removed tool use from the amoeba family.
What interests me is: Is solid state technology really far enough for flight voice recorders? From what I've heard SSDs have a tendency to fail in high-throughput applications (like constantly writing a voice recording to the disk) in a matter of months. Do you think it's wise to use SSDs exclusively?
Perhaps a safer approach would be to use both SSDs and tape. It's unlikely that both die at the same time, except if the box itself is destroyed - and then no storage technology on earth would help. Of course that means more complexity...
Only if you have many CPU-hungry processes. I have a dualcore CPU and dozens of running processes, but system load barely ever exceeds 1. With the load usually below 1, adding more cores won't do much because no processes are actually waiting.
I can't wait for Creative to release their new "Sound Interface Device" line...
I want to see how they're going to get it into the court room.
But every CBO (Chief Bombing Officer) is going to want one!
I think a better way of solving such problems could be having a staff of "experts" (ie. people who can identify electronic gadgets) and a high-resolution camera phone. If you encounter a suspicious device and you can't identify it, you snap a photo, send it over to the central and they send you a reply like "HARMLESS; ultra-slim notebook, optical drive not included" or "CAUTION; device could not be identified"*.
Of course then you need people who are in the know about current gadgets, enough of them to guarantee short response times and a process that maintains some flexibility (so that people with unidentified devices aren't automatically assumed to be evul terrists).
* Or, of course, "EXPLOSION DANGER; this notebook model is known to use Sony batteries".
Acting is not exactly impossible to pull off. The TSA needs to get nearly all dangerous people under any circumstance without many false positives. That includes TSA agents who want to smuggle in fake bombs - because a real terrorist might behave just like those agents. Or like a regular tourist. Or like a stressed-out businessman who can't afford to miss his flight.
Deducing from behavior whether or not someone carries a dangerous device with him is non-trivial. The TSA has no means of knowing whether someone who tries to smuggle something in is a TSA agent or not, so they need to stop everyone who is suspicious while at the same time having effective, yet unobtrusive suspicion standards. If they can't pull that off they're pretty much useless.
Wikipedia is not an encyclopedia. It doesn't work as one. It's a combination index/cache of human knowledge. The more knowledge it contains the more useful it gets - even though information without external references is less useful than information with ones. So any attempt to make it "more reputable" only end up lowering its usefulness.
If people want to make Wikipedia cleaner they should do so by moving large chunks of peripheral information into separate articles á la "The Grauman's Chinese Theatre In Popular Culture".
Sometimes adding a few sentences at the beginning and a background information section at the end as well as putting in "(Episode XYZ)" where appropriate would be enough to give the article in question everything it needs to be a good fictitional character article. You still need to know your stuff, but you don't have to rewrite everything.
Of course, then someone comes around and arbitrarily reverts/deletes your changes, but that's just how Wikipedia works.
After watching their promotion video, Piclens trikes me as offering only one real advantage over the regular sites - it allows you to determine how many items you want to have on-screen at a given time. However, it's still inflexible because apparently you can't adjust the height of the strip.
I think a simple XUL app could easily replicate that functionality. Of course without the snazzy 3D mode, but then again I prefer functional, consistent* interfaces over "hey look, our app looks completely dfferent from any other app an your computer".
* In that order. Time Machine isn't consistent with the rest of OS X, but its mode of presentation does work really well for what it's doing.
"New" doesn't always equate to "good". It doesn't always equate to "bad", either.
I agree that touch interfaces, for example, are nice for small devices (even though they mean you get fingerprints all over your nice, shiny display), but they don't work too well for a 21" flatscreen display because the amount of arm movement would be tiring after a while. They also can't really replace a keyboard in terms of tactile response and typing speed (as many fast typists actually hit one key before releasing the last). Like every technology they work well in some cases and less well in others.
Likewise, voice commands are nice in a somewhat quiet room where you can afford to talk with a normal voice. They also work well if you're talking into a mobile phone right next to your mouth. But in a very noisy environment or a library they work less well, especially when you're using a notebook and the microphone is about one meter away from your mouth. They also lend themselves much better to issuing simple commands (where the recognition software has to classify them into a small set of classes) than to dictating sourcecode. Again, whether or not they make sense depends entirely on the circumstances.