1) National biometric database. If you were just being asked to tootle down the police station for fingerprinting, would you be so unconcerned? Because that is what is necessary for this scheme.
2) Production on demand. You can be stopped in the street and have your ID demanded of you. If you do not produce it within X days at a police station, you are breaking the law.
There are many more differences, but these are the enormous ones. As Blunkett himself says, the difference is not the card, it is that the legislation means the police will have the power to make you prove that you're not "up to no good". Of course, it doesn't even do this; it just proves you have a card, but never mind. When did it become incumbent upon me to prove my good nature?
Ask yourself this: if there were truly no significant difference between a driving licence and an ID card, why are we spending billions of pounds on the latter? This is a licence not to drive, but simply to live in our own country. IMHO, the government should exist at our convenience, and not vice versa.
I don't think "all it takes" is the appropriate term, to be honest. What you describe requires the system to read a barcode, and from its database return the name and face of one person but the iris code of another. This cannot be done by modifying the passport, but requires the central database to be fundamentally hacked. While it's best not to assume that the database is entirely impregnable, its a certainty that hacking it will be a far from trivial undertaking.
This isn't quite right - while the passport is scanned, this isn't for iris data, merely to ascertain who you claim to be. The iris code corresponding to this identity is then retrieved from a central database and compared with the results obtained by the security terminal. From the press release:
"First, passport data is captured by a passport scanner and checked against a database. The iris recognition system then identifies the individual's iris to verify a match between the individual and the legal passport holder."
Once you've got a decent image of the iris, these systems are really rather good. This one in particular uses algorithms developed by John Daugman from the Computing Lab at Cambridge, who claims all-but-perfect results for his algorithms. While he's chosen to commercially exploit his work rather than make it widely available (as well he might), his basic techniques have been re-implemented by other researchers who've obtained similarly astounding results. The list of results from his webpage is really quite spooky - technology shouldn't rightly work this well.
As I understand it, the main challenge now is to ensure the genuine nature of the image obtained. You can do this by simply watching people using the checker, thus preventing them from holding up detailed iris photos, or you can check more subtly. Some systems shine lights through your pupil to check for a live retina, but this is also avoidable if you cut a little hole in the iris photo and look through it. It's an interesting topic...
Goodness me, we've found outliers? My gosh, they must represent the entire body of P2P users! To the phones, brothers!
Incidentally, my CD collection includes a whole bunch of German lieder (my German is rubbish), cuban jazz (my Spanish is non-existent), Malian music (I couldn't even tell you what language it's in) and some Beefheart (which is technically English but makes no sense). I don't think I'm all that unusual, either.
Spacefaring is one of the few instances where socialism has shown a clear advantage over capitalism. That and OSS, but don't tell Microsoft.
Pardon? To show this statement to be true, you'd have to a) show that the Russian space program has achieved significantly more than the USA's, and b) demonstrate that the socialist system in the USSR prior to its breakup was the main contributing factor to this difference. It's hard to see how you're going to conclusively achieve either, to be honest. If I were to identify one "advantage" the Russians have had over the USA, it's a greater willingness to take risks, but when one has a country in which vast bugger-ups can be effectively hushed up, such risk-taking comes at considerably lower consequence.
Personally, I don't see how either space program is indicative of anything to do with the economic systems that created them. Both involve spending vast amounts of state money on an economically unproductive enterprise that doesn't really benefit the wider populace in the short term*. This can't really be described as socialist or capitalist behaviour.
* Don't take this to mean I think space programs shouldn't exist, by the way...
Oh, come now, don't you think you're being just a little demanding? This is a technology in its infancy, and you're standing around like a spectator at the Wright brothers' first flight asking "what about in-flight entertainment, eh?" You're damn right it is a huge improvement - could you bend any commercial display technology at all, prior to this? No*. So we've gone from an infinite tube diameter to 1.57 inches. Not bad, in my book. I'm sure it'll play ogg vorbis presently, too.;-)
*Well, you could, but I think you'd void the warranty...
The very link I gave you says that WMP9 for OSX does indeed support version 1 DRM licences, a fact of which the music stores are well aware. If they don't offer these, this is their problem.
You're still ignoring the actual point of this thread, which was choice of portables - iTunes AACs play on one player, and one player only. This is not choice; something that remains true even if it's Microsoft saying it, hypocritical though it may be. Continued bickering about OS choice is surely beside the point - the number of people who base their choice of OS on the format of their potential music purchases is not large, one suspects. Why is behaviour that would be decried as despicable, were it exhibited by Microsoft, widely lauded when it comes from Apple?
Unless you download the perfectly free Windows Media Player 9 for Mac OSX, of course, but why let the facts get in the way of a good M$ bash, eh? Oh yeah, Mplayer supports wma in Linux, too.
No matter how you try and spin it, it is undeniably possible to play WMA files on far more portable players than iTunes AACs. Like it or not, for WMA to present even an equivalently bad choice to iTunes AACs, MS would have to be running a music store and supplying a portable and ensuring that you could only use WMAs on their own portable. Are they? No.
Thanks, that's interesting. I don't suppose your algorithms (or just rough descriptions) are published publically just yet, are they? We're going over the paper I mentioned at my department's seminar meeting soonish, and it'd be nifty to know of alternatives. No worries if it's all a trade secret, though;-).
If you're up for some maths and some fairly dry reading, check out the paper "Authoritative Sources in a Hyperlinked Environment" by Jon Kleinberg. He describes a search method which takes regular text-based search results and then examines the link structure around those pages. The idea is that pages of comparable content exhibit heavy interlinking. Clusters of such pages can be identified with a recursive algorithm a little like Google's PageRank, and then distinguished with some nifty eigenvector mathematics. This gives you your basic categories, based solely on the link structure.
While the paper doesn't detail how one might label the categories identified, I don't imagine that it's all that difficult to do with some simple correlation algorithms, which wouldn't be language-dependent.
Disclaimer: since vivisimo is down and I've not used it, I could well be talking out of my arse here; this is just one categorisation method with which I'm familiar, and would produce the results mentioned. It may not be how vivisimo actually do it.
I RTFA and I think you're buying into Jobs' assertion that subscription has "failed" a little too quickly. It is Jobs' job (har har) to plug his store. However as Jobs himself acknowledges, both subscription and pay-per-download are business models in their absolute infancy. iTMS represents 0.16% of the US music market by Jobs' numbers. This is not success, nor is it failure; it's a start, and that's all.
Apart from anything else, I see absolutely no reason why the two models are incompatible, and indeed on most other services they are combined to some degree. After all, what's one of the most common arguments for file-sharing in the first place? That music needs to be previewed before purchase. Offering subscription + download looks like the commercial equivalent, to me at least.
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Differences:
1) National biometric database. If you were just being asked to tootle down the police station for fingerprinting, would you be so unconcerned? Because that is what is necessary for this scheme.
2) Production on demand. You can be stopped in the street and have your ID demanded of you. If you do not produce it within X days at a police station, you are breaking the law.
There are many more differences, but these are the enormous ones. As Blunkett himself says, the difference is not the card, it is that the legislation means the police will have the power to make you prove that you're not "up to no good". Of course, it doesn't even do this; it just proves you have a card, but never mind. When did it become incumbent upon me to prove my good nature?
Ask yourself this: if there were truly no significant difference between a driving licence and an ID card, why are we spending billions of pounds on the latter? This is a licence not to drive, but simply to live in our own country. IMHO, the government should exist at our convenience, and not vice versa.
I'm not that thrilled about it either, to be perfectly honest. I'm more of a BSD badger.
I don't think "all it takes" is the appropriate term, to be honest. What you describe requires the system to read a barcode, and from its database return the name and face of one person but the iris code of another. This cannot be done by modifying the passport, but requires the central database to be fundamentally hacked. While it's best not to assume that the database is entirely impregnable, its a certainty that hacking it will be a far from trivial undertaking.
Bugger - I could have sworn I put links in that post. John Daugman's website, and the list of results from a variety of sources.
This isn't quite right - while the passport is scanned, this isn't for iris data, merely to ascertain who you claim to be. The iris code corresponding to this identity is then retrieved from a central database and compared with the results obtained by the security terminal. From the press release:
"First, passport data is captured by a passport scanner and checked against a database. The iris recognition system then identifies the individual's iris to verify a match between the individual and the legal passport holder."
Once you've got a decent image of the iris, these systems are really rather good. This one in particular uses algorithms developed by John Daugman from the Computing Lab at Cambridge, who claims all-but-perfect results for his algorithms. While he's chosen to commercially exploit his work rather than make it widely available (as well he might), his basic techniques have been re-implemented by other researchers who've obtained similarly astounding results. The list of results from his webpage is really quite spooky - technology shouldn't rightly work this well.
As I understand it, the main challenge now is to ensure the genuine nature of the image obtained. You can do this by simply watching people using the checker, thus preventing them from holding up detailed iris photos, or you can check more subtly. Some systems shine lights through your pupil to check for a live retina, but this is also avoidable if you cut a little hole in the iris photo and look through it. It's an interesting topic...
Goodness me, we've found outliers? My gosh, they must represent the entire body of P2P users! To the phones, brothers!
Incidentally, my CD collection includes a whole bunch of German lieder (my German is rubbish), cuban jazz (my Spanish is non-existent), Malian music (I couldn't even tell you what language it's in) and some Beefheart (which is technically English but makes no sense). I don't think I'm all that unusual, either.
Spacefaring is one of the few instances where socialism has shown a clear advantage over capitalism. That and OSS, but don't tell Microsoft.
Pardon? To show this statement to be true, you'd have to a) show that the Russian space program has achieved significantly more than the USA's, and b) demonstrate that the socialist system in the USSR prior to its breakup was the main contributing factor to this difference. It's hard to see how you're going to conclusively achieve either, to be honest. If I were to identify one "advantage" the Russians have had over the USA, it's a greater willingness to take risks, but when one has a country in which vast bugger-ups can be effectively hushed up, such risk-taking comes at considerably lower consequence.
Personally, I don't see how either space program is indicative of anything to do with the economic systems that created them. Both involve spending vast amounts of state money on an economically unproductive enterprise that doesn't really benefit the wider populace in the short term*. This can't really be described as socialist or capitalist behaviour.
* Don't take this to mean I think space programs shouldn't exist, by the way...
Oh, come now, don't you think you're being just a little demanding? This is a technology in its infancy, and you're standing around like a spectator at the Wright brothers' first flight asking "what about in-flight entertainment, eh?" You're damn right it is a huge improvement - could you bend any commercial display technology at all, prior to this? No*. So we've gone from an infinite tube diameter to 1.57 inches. Not bad, in my book. I'm sure it'll play ogg vorbis presently, too. ;-)
*Well, you could, but I think you'd void the warranty...
The very link I gave you says that WMP9 for OSX does indeed support version 1 DRM licences, a fact of which the music stores are well aware. If they don't offer these, this is their problem.
You're still ignoring the actual point of this thread, which was choice of portables - iTunes AACs play on one player, and one player only. This is not choice; something that remains true even if it's Microsoft saying it, hypocritical though it may be. Continued bickering about OS choice is surely beside the point - the number of people who base their choice of OS on the format of their potential music purchases is not large, one suspects. Why is behaviour that would be decried as despicable, were it exhibited by Microsoft, widely lauded when it comes from Apple?
Unless you download the perfectly free Windows Media Player 9 for Mac OSX, of course, but why let the facts get in the way of a good M$ bash, eh? Oh yeah, Mplayer supports wma in Linux, too.
No matter how you try and spin it, it is undeniably possible to play WMA files on far more portable players than iTunes AACs. Like it or not, for WMA to present even an equivalently bad choice to iTunes AACs, MS would have to be running a music store and supplying a portable and ensuring that you could only use WMAs on their own portable. Are they? No.
Thanks, that's interesting. I don't suppose your algorithms (or just rough descriptions) are published publically just yet, are they? We're going over the paper I mentioned at my department's seminar meeting soonish, and it'd be nifty to know of alternatives. No worries if it's all a trade secret, though ;-).
If you're up for some maths and some fairly dry reading, check out the paper "Authoritative Sources in a Hyperlinked Environment" by Jon Kleinberg. He describes a search method which takes regular text-based search results and then examines the link structure around those pages. The idea is that pages of comparable content exhibit heavy interlinking. Clusters of such pages can be identified with a recursive algorithm a little like Google's PageRank, and then distinguished with some nifty eigenvector mathematics. This gives you your basic categories, based solely on the link structure.
While the paper doesn't detail how one might label the categories identified, I don't imagine that it's all that difficult to do with some simple correlation algorithms, which wouldn't be language-dependent.
Disclaimer: since vivisimo is down and I've not used it, I could well be talking out of my arse here; this is just one categorisation method with which I'm familiar, and would produce the results mentioned. It may not be how vivisimo actually do it.
So basically, what we're looking at is the business equivalent of the jdbmgr.exe hoax :-). Next up:
"Dear Linux user,
Darl McBride has cancer of the spleen, and Bill Gates will give him a penny for each time we forward this legal letter in triplicate..."
I RTFA and I think you're buying into Jobs' assertion that subscription has "failed" a little too quickly. It is Jobs' job (har har) to plug his store. However as Jobs himself acknowledges, both subscription and pay-per-download are business models in their absolute infancy. iTMS represents 0.16% of the US music market by Jobs' numbers. This is not success, nor is it failure; it's a start, and that's all.
Apart from anything else, I see absolutely no reason why the two models are incompatible, and indeed on most other services they are combined to some degree. After all, what's one of the most common arguments for file-sharing in the first place? That music needs to be previewed before purchase. Offering subscription + download looks like the commercial equivalent, to me at least.