I've worked on gait-analysis, along with facial recognition and other computer vision techniques. Gait-analysis is done by training an algorithm to identify a person's gait using a large amount of video as training data. You can't just snap a single picture of a terrorist and recognize their gate, or train an algorithm using 10 seconds of video that you have. You have to have sufficient training data if you want any meaningful recognition rate. As it is, gait-recognition has a much lower recognition rate than other vision techniques.
Making the training data useful for recognition is challenging enough. If you have footage of a person walking against a white wall at a controlled distance, it is easy to gather this data. However, if your training data is from a video of a person walking through city streets, much less a market place, there is an awful lot of human processing that needs to be done in order for the data to be useful for training. Also, as with facial recognition and other visual recognition techniques, gait-recognition is highly susceptible to changes in camera angle. If you train a gait-recognition algorithm on images of someone walking towards the camera, that doesn't mean that you can identify them with any reasonable success from the side or above. In essence, in order for this to work, you would need an ample amount of training data on a terrorist in a controlled environment. That probably isn't very likely. As you'll notice in from the article, these experiments were conducted in a specific controlled environment.
This story strikes me as someone doing some interesting research, but I'd be curious if we get any meaningful results from this work, even 10 years down the road.
As was mentioned by another poster, a mainframe can run thousands of instances of Linux at a single time, with no possibility that one instance can muck with another. Furthermore, mainframes can work in seamless concert with other mainframes, even ones located half-way across the world. With this set up, you can literally blow one of the mainframes up, along with it's corresponding storage array, and the applications that are running will never even blink. For a company such as a bank, this is very advantageous. You can lose your primary data center in a fire and not miss a single transaction.
How many kids have any clue whatsoever on how to do this? I'd wager most CIS and IS students don't even know how to do it
True, but I bet that most CIS and IS students know that you CAN do it. Then it becomes a simple matter of googling. The key here is that anyone who has taken a bAIX networking course has enough knowledge to dispute evidence crucial to the RIAA's case. The fact the RIAA is able to continually present this evidence in a court room tells me that
1. Judges and juries do not know enough about the technology that they are ruling on.
2. The RIAA's experts are deliberately misleading the judges and juries. This is not ethical and should have consequence.
This is true, but unfortunately too many people nowadays, especially the higher up you go on the administrative ladder, will not know or correctly distinguish/remember the difference. The parent was simply to serve as a reminder.
Too many times have I had the misfortune to come into contact with someone who thinks that they are infallible and can walk on water simply because they have a degree.
But aren't you guilty of this as well? Someone publishes a paper implying a correlation between two things, and you immediately refute the findings by whipping out a phrase which most people learn in high school statistics. Then, several posters point out that no where in the article does it imply causation, and you continue to argue the point. Is everyone with a degree always wrong in your point of view?
Given that many filesystems are designed specifically with the spinning magnetic disk in mind, what open source filesystems are out there that will work to the advantages of solid state storage? Has anyone started thinking about that one as something to address before the major switches start taking place?
No, no one has even considered that yet. I'll alert the academic world while you clue in the industry.
It is now illegal to discuss religion in Britain. If you are British and you post a comment in this thread, your government can throw you in jail.
But we in the US don't have a lot of room to talk. As I wrote [kuro5hin.org] two years ago,
But our own freedom to speak carries such heavy limitations that to think we are better than the Chinese is laughable. You can be arrested for "hate speech." If you badmouth the wrong corporation (and face it, the corporations are the government here, the politicians only being figureheads who do the corporations' bidding) you will be slapped down with a S.L.A.P.P. suit. You won't go to jail, but you will be financially ruined.
How do you mod someone Bushy-bearded nut job on the street corner?
Image search this and that, sure, but why the hell is it still next to impossible to find product reviews using Google? Every time I try I only get product pages in online shops and not a single "real" review.
The firm is apparently trying to get 0.5% of all revenues from services that supposedly infringe on the patents. The targeted companies include ABC, CBS, Fox, NBC, Comcast, Time Warner, Cox, Charter and Cablevision. According to MultiChannel News, Rembrandt's assault is especially aggressive, even for a patent troll: 'It is attacking two key technology standards used by the cable and broadcast industries, CableLabs' DOCSIS and the Advanced Television Systems Committee's digital-TV spec. "If they're successful, this could affect everything from the cost of cable service to the price of TVs."
PSO is a hill climbing algorithm that involves a population of climbers attempting to find the best outcome of an evaluation function. PSO differs from some other types of hill climbing algorithms in that after each iteration, the population converges upon the current highest ranked individual. The idea is that by moving through the search space towards the current best value, you may inadvertently stumble upon the optimal solution. In essence, the population is acting like a 'swarm', by constantly moving towards the best known solution.
They clearly show that Americans are significantly more prejudiced against Mormans than blacks or women when it comes to presidential Candidacy
Which is an odd sort of justice, seeing as up until 1978, blacks couldn't join the priesthood.
When President Spencer W. Kimball announced to the world on 9 June 1978 a revelation making Mormons of all races eligible for the priesthood, he ended a policy that for 130 years denied the priesthood to those having any black African ancestry. - The Fading of the Pharaohs' Curse:
The Decline and Fall of the Priesthood Ban Against Blacks in the Mormon Church, Armand L. Maus
Because facial recognition doesn't work very well on large populations of individuals. A facial recognition system operating on an entire nation's worth of people would not be very successful. This is in large part due to the way that many facial recognition systems work, relying on various distance measures between eigenfaces.
Further more, most facial recognition systems are trained using more than a single source image per individual.
There are also a surprising number of laws that regulate commercial entities from using government-collected face databases.
Good point. Check out one of the burning "errors" from the list:
This may be a bit nitpicky, but EB thinks there is hip hop music (which they problematically call rap) that is either not rhythmic or non-rhyming. I suppose there may be hip hop with no rhymes at all (I've never heard of it), but it's certainly always rhythmic. Also, hip hop as the backing music for rap, the musical style incorporating rhythmic and/or rhyming speech that became the movement's most lasting and influential art form is a bit odd, I think. They apparently use "hip hop" to refer to the beat/instrumentation behind the rapping, which is not normal, at least -- if "rap" is the "musical style", then the "backing music" is an integral part of it, and "rap" doesn't "incorporate" a kind of speech... it is a kind of speech, and is only a "musical style" when combined with "hip hop". Furthermore, "most lasting and influential art form" being applied to "rap" is silly -- graffiti, breakdancing and DJing have lasted just as long as rapping (early 70s to present); I suppose EB is allowed to be biased and call "rap" more influential than DJing, but I note that rapping is not widely used outside of hip hop, while DJing had a major influence on electronic music. Of course, if by "rap", they are referring to hip hop music, then that would make sense, but that would be inconsistent with the first part. So, it's at best confusingly written and misleading.
This looks more like a person posting an opinion, rather than an error in an EB article.
Look, this isn't meant as a troll. Linux is great. Much better than Vista. Offer me the choice between the two, and I'd take Linux hands down. However... nobody knows what Linux is.
Honestly.
Go ask 10 non-technical people if they would consider using Linux as an OS, and 9 will look at you like you just spoke Greek to them. No, it doesn't count if you ask your wife, who you constantly bore with tech-talk about how much better Linux is than Windows. No, it doesn't count if you go ask your parents, whom you've been trying to convince to make the switch for the past 5 years. Go ask people that don't work in the tech industry, and who you haven't badgered constantly about Linux.
As I mentioned above, 9 won't know what you're talking about. The 10th person will think that Linux is pure command prompt, with no UI. Why? Not because they are dumb, but because they have just never heard of it. Just like they haven't heard of Solaris, and just like they haven't heard of z/OS. They don't talk about Linux on CNN, they don't write about Linux in Cosmo or Maxim. Hell, how often do you see it mentioned in 'science' magazines, like Discover or Popular Science?
It doesn't matter if Ubuntu has a nice GUI and can load DVDs like any other OS. Most people just don't know that, and they probably don't care much. The idea of spending an hour replacing XP or Vista with Ubuntu would strike most people are boring and daunting. What reason do they have? Their computer works for the most part. Most wouldn't even know where to start. Not because they are dumb, but because:
1. They wouldn't know where to get Ubuntu.
2. They assume it would be as much of a chore to install as Windows. Oh, you don't think that is a chore? Well, that is probably because you're reading a technical website.
Yeah, I'd love to see Linux blow up this year. It is doing great in server land, but it has a ways to go before it gets on the desktop of the general public.
The article doesn't specify, but I have to ask, are they talking about game sales plus console sales? How about peripherals? Many new systems were purchased in the past year, with the release of three new major platforms. Should music sales be taking into account iPod and CD player sales?
And who would you be to decide this? Who are you to call other people ignorant? Have you explored every universe, every dimension and every plane of existance, and found no Santa Claus? I think not.
I believe the point of his post, is that they, hybrid cars, are just as efficient with pollution because the electricity need probably comes from a Coal or Oil power plant, which does not solve the original problem.
Yes, but it is easier to capture CO2 from a central coal or oil plant than from a mobile car.
You are not taking the entire energy equation into account. You have to factor in the energy used in the mining, refining and maintenance of the batteries + charging system.
You should also take into account the energy used to drill for oil, extract it, refine it, and transport it.
the advanced tech we will have in 100-150 years will look like magic from our prospective. Almost every technology we have today would get you burned for witchcraft in 1857. Automated factories, mobile phones, television, airplanes, nukes... all the magic from a pre-industrial revolution viewpoint. Add to that the increaseing pace of progress (singularity or not) and I fully expect there will be some "magic wands" before the end of the century.
Well, let's take a look at the technologies brought up in the above post: Automated factories - About 30 years old Mobile phones - The base technology was invented 60 years ago, refined through the 60's and 70's, even though hand held devices didn't really appear until the early 1980's (almost 25 years old). Also, this isn't the biggest conceptual stretch from hand-held radios. Television - 75 years old. Airplanes - Almost 100 years old. Nukes - Almost 70 years old.
Sure, televisions have become incredibly small, and cell phones have revolutionized the world, but is this so far from the Dick Tracey wrist-watch television (from a comic book almost 80 years old)?
He adds that Apple might have the most advanced smartphone on the market unless President Bush or his trade representative overturn the ruling (which they have the power to do)."
Um, wouldn't it still be most advanced smartphone on the market, whether or not the ruling is overturned?
Well, if the police have confiscated your computer, couldn't an investigator simply create a series of text files with pre-selected data, and then use the result of the encryption to guess which encryption algorithm was used. Furthermore, if the computer in question has been confiscated, it should be trivial to analyze the actual machine instructions that are being executed during the encryption.
Slashdot Mirror
I've worked on gait-analysis, along with facial recognition and other computer vision techniques. Gait-analysis is done by training an algorithm to identify a person's gait using a large amount of video as training data. You can't just snap a single picture of a terrorist and recognize their gate, or train an algorithm using 10 seconds of video that you have. You have to have sufficient training data if you want any meaningful recognition rate. As it is, gait-recognition has a much lower recognition rate than other vision techniques.
Making the training data useful for recognition is challenging enough. If you have footage of a person walking against a white wall at a controlled distance, it is easy to gather this data. However, if your training data is from a video of a person walking through city streets, much less a market place, there is an awful lot of human processing that needs to be done in order for the data to be useful for training. Also, as with facial recognition and other visual recognition techniques, gait-recognition is highly susceptible to changes in camera angle. If you train a gait-recognition algorithm on images of someone walking towards the camera, that doesn't mean that you can identify them with any reasonable success from the side or above. In essence, in order for this to work, you would need an ample amount of training data on a terrorist in a controlled environment. That probably isn't very likely. As you'll notice in from the article, these experiments were conducted in a specific controlled environment.
This story strikes me as someone doing some interesting research, but I'd be curious if we get any meaningful results from this work, even 10 years down the road.
As was mentioned by another poster, a mainframe can run thousands of instances of Linux at a single time, with no possibility that one instance can muck with another. Furthermore, mainframes can work in seamless concert with other mainframes, even ones located half-way across the world. With this set up, you can literally blow one of the mainframes up, along with it's corresponding storage array, and the applications that are running will never even blink. For a company such as a bank, this is very advantageous. You can lose your primary data center in a fire and not miss a single transaction.
True, but I bet that most CIS and IS students know that you CAN do it. Then it becomes a simple matter of googling. The key here is that anyone who has taken a bAIX networking course has enough knowledge to dispute evidence crucial to the RIAA's case. The fact the RIAA is able to continually present this evidence in a court room tells me that
1. Judges and juries do not know enough about the technology that they are ruling on.
2. The RIAA's experts are deliberately misleading the judges and juries. This is not ethical and should have consequence.
Yeah, I'm worried for them too. If you read about a mysterious plague sweeping through one of the three dozen species...
PSO is a hill climbing algorithm that involves a population of climbers attempting to find the best outcome of an evaluation function. PSO differs from some other types of hill climbing algorithms in that after each iteration, the population converges upon the current highest ranked individual. The idea is that by moving through the search space towards the current best value, you may inadvertently stumble upon the optimal solution. In essence, the population is acting like a 'swarm', by constantly moving towards the best known solution.
Because facial recognition doesn't work very well on large populations of individuals. A facial recognition system operating on an entire nation's worth of people would not be very successful. This is in large part due to the way that many facial recognition systems work, relying on various distance measures between eigenfaces.
Further more, most facial recognition systems are trained using more than a single source image per individual.
There are also a surprising number of laws that regulate commercial entities from using government-collected face databases.
This looks more like a person posting an opinion, rather than an error in an EB article.
Look, this isn't meant as a troll. Linux is great. Much better than Vista. Offer me the choice between the two, and I'd take Linux hands down. However... nobody knows what Linux is.
Honestly.
Go ask 10 non-technical people if they would consider using Linux as an OS, and 9 will look at you like you just spoke Greek to them. No, it doesn't count if you ask your wife, who you constantly bore with tech-talk about how much better Linux is than Windows. No, it doesn't count if you go ask your parents, whom you've been trying to convince to make the switch for the past 5 years. Go ask people that don't work in the tech industry, and who you haven't badgered constantly about Linux.
As I mentioned above, 9 won't know what you're talking about. The 10th person will think that Linux is pure command prompt, with no UI. Why? Not because they are dumb, but because they have just never heard of it. Just like they haven't heard of Solaris, and just like they haven't heard of z/OS. They don't talk about Linux on CNN, they don't write about Linux in Cosmo or Maxim. Hell, how often do you see it mentioned in 'science' magazines, like Discover or Popular Science? It doesn't matter if Ubuntu has a nice GUI and can load DVDs like any other OS. Most people just don't know that, and they probably don't care much. The idea of spending an hour replacing XP or Vista with Ubuntu would strike most people are boring and daunting. What reason do they have? Their computer works for the most part. Most wouldn't even know where to start. Not because they are dumb, but because:
1. They wouldn't know where to get Ubuntu.
2. They assume it would be as much of a chore to install as Windows. Oh, you don't think that is a chore? Well, that is probably because you're reading a technical website.
Yeah, I'd love to see Linux blow up this year. It is doing great in server land, but it has a ways to go before it gets on the desktop of the general public.
The article doesn't specify, but I have to ask, are they talking about game sales plus console sales? How about peripherals? Many new systems were purchased in the past year, with the release of three new major platforms. Should music sales be taking into account iPod and CD player sales?
I already have a brown piece of crap car that squirts oil.
Automated factories - About 30 years old
Mobile phones - The base technology was invented 60 years ago, refined through the 60's and 70's, even though hand held devices didn't really appear until the early 1980's (almost 25 years old). Also, this isn't the biggest conceptual stretch from hand-held radios.
Television - 75 years old.
Airplanes - Almost 100 years old.
Nukes - Almost 70 years old.
Sure, televisions have become incredibly small, and cell phones have revolutionized the world, but is this so far from the Dick Tracey wrist-watch television (from a comic book almost 80 years old)?
Well, if the police have confiscated your computer, couldn't an investigator simply create a series of text files with pre-selected data, and then use the result of the encryption to guess which encryption algorithm was used. Furthermore, if the computer in question has been confiscated, it should be trivial to analyze the actual machine instructions that are being executed during the encryption.