Definitely. If Anonymous had stolen 77 million PSN accounts, you'd see 77 million PSN accounts available for torrent at The Pirate Bay. Someone would be claiming the hack, and they'd be offering proof, and they'd be bragging about how easy it was. Anonymous is generally in it to ruin Sony's day; credit card fraud is a couple of steps beyond "doin' it for the lulz."
I don't mean to sound harsh, but has SETI produced any results that might justify further funding it? I understand the "it's cool!" factor, and I understand that we don't really expect to find alien civilizations every day, and I understand how important of a discovery it would be if we did discover intelligent extraterrestrial life... however, I also think that, given $5 million, we'll see far greater returns on investing that money in Summer of Code than we would supporting SETI. The expected results from SoC are clearly expressed for every one of the thousand programmers. What would investing in SETI get us, beyond, "Well, we'll keep looking, I guess."
Isn't avoiding difficulty always attributable to laziness?
You're right, though. They can get the make/model/year easily enough through a licence-plate lookup. The office now just has to measure the pixel-length of the car in each photo, as well as the displacement of the car between photos, and then plug those numbers into a calculator. This could take... I don't know, maybe five minutes, where the current system of "make sure it's the same car in each photo, make sure it's stamped with a speed over some threshold", probably takes closer to ten seconds. That's what, 30 times slower?
This is only really a big deal if it takes up a significant portion of somebody's time. Can you imagine hiring 30 additional officers to replace the current one who's full time job is to review traffic cameras? The city would have to raise a couple hundred thousand dollars, probably via taxes. This seems sort of undesirable when compared to periodically calibrating a sensor specifically manufactured to measure the speed of a moving object.
It proves that your particular car was on the road at a given place and time. The radar sensor proves that there was a car-sized object on the road going faster than the speed limit. Together, the two prove that your car was going faster than the speed limit.
The machines aren't supposed to be taking his picture unless they measure a speed greater than 10 MPH over the limit; this is surely to ensure that they only catch people speeding, not to ensure that they only catch people going at least 10 MPH over the limit. The manufacturers (and police) know that those guns can be off by about +/- 5 MPH; that's why they set the camera threshold to double that. It seems to me that the system worked exactly as intended in this case.
It becomes much more difficult for the officers to detect the speed of the vehicle if they do not have an accurate length of the vehicle. Mr. Foreman was able to go out and measure his vans in order to do the calculations - in order for the officers reviewing the traffic camera footage to visually determine the vehicles' speeds, they would have to have some other visual reference.
Not that any of this should be necessary. The radar guns in the speed traps can be calibrated to within 5 or so MPH. They just weren't in this case, and that seems to be the problem, especially if all of the tickets are along the same stretch of road.
Because a democracy means that Anonymous gets most of the votes.
Google tends to treat its customers fairly well. They deliver high-quality products. They've earned a fair bit of trust, especially compared with Microsoft and Yahoo.
Nope, monopolies are perfectly legal. It's the "Sherman Antitrust Act", and it prohibits anti-competitive practices. Monopolies are fine, so long as they don't act in a way to prevent competition from forming. This usually is handled by requiring monopolies to license their services at fair market rates to their competitors.
The only possible way that such an acquisition could go through is if Google agreed to license its content out at fair market value to its competitors. Remember, monopolies aren't illegal; antitrusts are.
They already own large corporations that successfully sell copyrighted intellectual property, and manage to have a business model which doesn't revolve around suing their own customers.
To make them go away. Google is incredibly frustrated with the terms that the big labels are insisting on if google wants to do cloud distribution of music, and the labels have the power to set whatever arcane rules they feel like. If google bought that power out from underneath them, they would instantly get what they want, and be in a position to market those same rights to their competitors for a fair market value.
A system like this could work out, but by introducing Facebook employees, you make the system non-scalable. Instead of an employee reviewing 1000 abuse reports per day, he reviews 1000 moderations per day, and that's only meta-moderating 1 out of every <jury size> moderations.
I like the system I saw posted earlier, where instead of asking "Is there abuse?", you ask "Which kind of abuse is there?" and give them a list. People who choose incorrectly are given a lower confidence rating. However, this still doesn't account for hot-button issues - say I'm perfectly reasonable, except that I think that anyone who's had an abortion deserves death by firing squad, so I'm going to mark any Planned Parenthood groups as grossly offensive. I suppose that those are likely edge cases, and you let the large jury size dilute their biases...
AC's right. The systems which are interested in such a moderation scheme (Facebook, etc.) are not terribly interested in championing free speech. They're looking to be a reasonably pleasant place to hold a conversation. And, as far as I'm concerned, that is a perfectly reasonable thing for them to do. If Facebook wants to lay down some TOS before I use their servers to communicate with my friends, that's their choice. If Facebook wants to permaban all users who post using the letter "K" on every third Friday, that's their choice. They're going to hemorrhage users, but it's totally within their rights to do that.
I think you'd be hard-pressed to find a group of people who would familiarize themselves with the Facebook TOS well enough to actually enforce it. I'm afraid that what you'd actually get is a group of people who vote Offensive/Inoffensive based on whether they agree with whatever controversial topic is at hand. This puts any minority group (LGBT, religious organizations, etc.), as well as any controversial groups (pro-Life/pro-Choice, political groups, etc.) at a much higher risk than they are now. You need some sort of incentive for people to vote according to the rules, rather than voting for what they think is right.
The only thing two cameras really nets you is more reliable depth perception; however, this requires regular calibration, as minute shifts in cameras (say, from being jostled around while moving) can translate to large errors if your focal points aren't exactly where you think they are. It's often easier to track movement using the change-in-size of your object, and have a separate specialized depth-sensor (sonar, laser, etc) to perform depth measurements when you need them to be exact.
I'm looking forward to looking at the GPL'd source code. There are a lot of ways to do object tracking, and they've all generally got problems, but I was rather impressed with this presentation. It was able to track the moving vehicle while it passed into and out of shadows (non-uniform saturation), as well as track that panda while it turned around (changing its shape), and it was able to distinguish a black-and-white version of the presenter's face (not based on color). It was able to recognize objects that moved off screen, which seems to indicate that it's not just drawing a snake around the moving object. Furthermore, it doesn't seem to need to be specifically programmed to track each object (as we saw the presenter just drag-and-drop a box around his hand/face.)
Cisco doesn't need to sell Flips in order for the purchase to be profitable. It's highly probably that they purchased Pure Digital in order to strengthen their patent portfolio. If the iPhone or Android devices make use of some inane portable-video technology that Pure Digital patented in designing the flip, it's possible for Cisco to make back their money in licensing agreements with other hardware manufacturers.
I don't necessarily see a problem with this. Certainly there are abuses; I'll grant you that. However, I don't have a subscription to Nature, and I don't have the experience necessary to interpret Biology that "Bob" does. If the article linked has a decent analysis of the subject matter, I'd say that it's often more valuable to me than just the source data.
There's a significant difference between the self-revisionism of science and the splintering of a religious organization. Science accepts different ideas, evaluates them, and assimilates them into itself. In each of the cases you referenced, a new idea came up, was violently rejected (with literal, physical violence against the believers) and a new, different religious body was formed. Science doesn't break in two every time a new idea is proposed; science thrives on such occasions.
Certainly there are religious scholars; however they're using Science in order to explore the history of their religious institutions, and the conclusions they come to don't always make it back into religious dogma. When's the last time you heard at Church that, in the first draft of the Gospel according to Mark, there in fact was no resurrection ; that it was edited in later, in order to agree with Matthew and Luke? How often does your priest speak of the Gospel according to the Q Source, or discuss at what point in history various articles of dogma come in to existence?
Church is to the work of Religious Scholars what New Scientist is to Science. Dumbed down, sensationalized, and often just plain wrong.
I will grant you that taking individual facts reported by science with no effort to independently verify them is something of an act of faith. However, I would also argue that there is a qualitative difference between the Scientific and Religious institutions at work here. One is publishing methods and data in a journal, literally asking the community at large to find fault with their conclusions, and to correct them if they can do so. The other speaks largely from a seat of authority, making highly subjective interpretations on a subject where other competing theories cannot be demonstrated to be any more or less valid.
Being personally familiar with both systems, I would say that it's far less likely that there is a massive conspiracy within the scientific community in an attempt to cover up evidence of "scientific truth", than it is possible that historical documents that are thousands of years old have been misinterpreted by religious scholars far removed from the context in which they were originally written.
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Definitely. If Anonymous had stolen 77 million PSN accounts, you'd see 77 million PSN accounts available for torrent at The Pirate Bay. Someone would be claiming the hack, and they'd be offering proof, and they'd be bragging about how easy it was. Anonymous is generally in it to ruin Sony's day; credit card fraud is a couple of steps beyond "doin' it for the lulz."
I don't mean to sound harsh, but has SETI produced any results that might justify further funding it? I understand the "it's cool!" factor, and I understand that we don't really expect to find alien civilizations every day, and I understand how important of a discovery it would be if we did discover intelligent extraterrestrial life... however, I also think that, given $5 million, we'll see far greater returns on investing that money in Summer of Code than we would supporting SETI. The expected results from SoC are clearly expressed for every one of the thousand programmers. What would investing in SETI get us, beyond, "Well, we'll keep looking, I guess."
1) no evidence location is tracked when you turn off location services (unlikely)
TFA clearly states that location is tracked when you turn off location services.
Isn't avoiding difficulty always attributable to laziness?
You're right, though. They can get the make/model/year easily enough through a licence-plate lookup. The office now just has to measure the pixel-length of the car in each photo, as well as the displacement of the car between photos, and then plug those numbers into a calculator. This could take... I don't know, maybe five minutes, where the current system of "make sure it's the same car in each photo, make sure it's stamped with a speed over some threshold", probably takes closer to ten seconds. That's what, 30 times slower?
This is only really a big deal if it takes up a significant portion of somebody's time. Can you imagine hiring 30 additional officers to replace the current one who's full time job is to review traffic cameras? The city would have to raise a couple hundred thousand dollars, probably via taxes. This seems sort of undesirable when compared to periodically calibrating a sensor specifically manufactured to measure the speed of a moving object.
It proves that your particular car was on the road at a given place and time. The radar sensor proves that there was a car-sized object on the road going faster than the speed limit. Together, the two prove that your car was going faster than the speed limit.
The machines aren't supposed to be taking his picture unless they measure a speed greater than 10 MPH over the limit; this is surely to ensure that they only catch people speeding, not to ensure that they only catch people going at least 10 MPH over the limit. The manufacturers (and police) know that those guns can be off by about +/- 5 MPH; that's why they set the camera threshold to double that. It seems to me that the system worked exactly as intended in this case.
It becomes much more difficult for the officers to detect the speed of the vehicle if they do not have an accurate length of the vehicle. Mr. Foreman was able to go out and measure his vans in order to do the calculations - in order for the officers reviewing the traffic camera footage to visually determine the vehicles' speeds, they would have to have some other visual reference.
Not that any of this should be necessary. The radar guns in the speed traps can be calibrated to within 5 or so MPH. They just weren't in this case, and that seems to be the problem, especially if all of the tickets are along the same stretch of road.
Because a democracy means that Anonymous gets most of the votes.
Google tends to treat its customers fairly well. They deliver high-quality products. They've earned a fair bit of trust, especially compared with Microsoft and Yahoo.
Nope, monopolies are perfectly legal. It's the "Sherman Antitrust Act", and it prohibits anti-competitive practices. Monopolies are fine, so long as they don't act in a way to prevent competition from forming. This usually is handled by requiring monopolies to license their services at fair market rates to their competitors.
The only possible way that such an acquisition could go through is if Google agreed to license its content out at fair market value to its competitors. Remember, monopolies aren't illegal; antitrusts are.
They already own large corporations that successfully sell copyrighted intellectual property, and manage to have a business model which doesn't revolve around suing their own customers.
To make them go away. Google is incredibly frustrated with the terms that the big labels are insisting on if google wants to do cloud distribution of music, and the labels have the power to set whatever arcane rules they feel like. If google bought that power out from underneath them, they would instantly get what they want, and be in a position to market those same rights to their competitors for a fair market value.
#!/usr/local/bin/perl
print 'I see your point. Perl is just too unwieldy in this case.';
A system like this could work out, but by introducing Facebook employees, you make the system non-scalable. Instead of an employee reviewing 1000 abuse reports per day, he reviews 1000 moderations per day, and that's only meta-moderating 1 out of every <jury size> moderations.
I like the system I saw posted earlier, where instead of asking "Is there abuse?", you ask "Which kind of abuse is there?" and give them a list. People who choose incorrectly are given a lower confidence rating. However, this still doesn't account for hot-button issues - say I'm perfectly reasonable, except that I think that anyone who's had an abortion deserves death by firing squad, so I'm going to mark any Planned Parenthood groups as grossly offensive. I suppose that those are likely edge cases, and you let the large jury size dilute their biases...
AC's right. The systems which are interested in such a moderation scheme (Facebook, etc.) are not terribly interested in championing free speech. They're looking to be a reasonably pleasant place to hold a conversation. And, as far as I'm concerned, that is a perfectly reasonable thing for them to do. If Facebook wants to lay down some TOS before I use their servers to communicate with my friends, that's their choice. If Facebook wants to permaban all users who post using the letter "K" on every third Friday, that's their choice. They're going to hemorrhage users, but it's totally within their rights to do that.
And hey, if the botters manage to build a bot which can execute good judgement in moderating other users, mission fucking accomplished.
I think you'd be hard-pressed to find a group of people who would familiarize themselves with the Facebook TOS well enough to actually enforce it. I'm afraid that what you'd actually get is a group of people who vote Offensive/Inoffensive based on whether they agree with whatever controversial topic is at hand. This puts any minority group (LGBT, religious organizations, etc.), as well as any controversial groups (pro-Life/pro-Choice, political groups, etc.) at a much higher risk than they are now. You need some sort of incentive for people to vote according to the rules, rather than voting for what they think is right.
The only thing two cameras really nets you is more reliable depth perception; however, this requires regular calibration, as minute shifts in cameras (say, from being jostled around while moving) can translate to large errors if your focal points aren't exactly where you think they are. It's often easier to track movement using the change-in-size of your object, and have a separate specialized depth-sensor (sonar, laser, etc) to perform depth measurements when you need them to be exact.
I'm looking forward to looking at the GPL'd source code. There are a lot of ways to do object tracking, and they've all generally got problems, but I was rather impressed with this presentation. It was able to track the moving vehicle while it passed into and out of shadows (non-uniform saturation), as well as track that panda while it turned around (changing its shape), and it was able to distinguish a black-and-white version of the presenter's face (not based on color). It was able to recognize objects that moved off screen, which seems to indicate that it's not just drawing a snake around the moving object. Furthermore, it doesn't seem to need to be specifically programmed to track each object (as we saw the presenter just drag-and-drop a box around his hand/face.)
Cisco doesn't need to sell Flips in order for the purchase to be profitable. It's highly probably that they purchased Pure Digital in order to strengthen their patent portfolio. If the iPhone or Android devices make use of some inane portable-video technology that Pure Digital patented in designing the flip, it's possible for Cisco to make back their money in licensing agreements with other hardware manufacturers.
I don't necessarily see a problem with this. Certainly there are abuses; I'll grant you that. However, I don't have a subscription to Nature, and I don't have the experience necessary to interpret Biology that "Bob" does. If the article linked has a decent analysis of the subject matter, I'd say that it's often more valuable to me than just the source data.
Because I'm going to crash my submarine into a cargo transport every chance I get.
There's a significant difference between the self-revisionism of science and the splintering of a religious organization. Science accepts different ideas, evaluates them, and assimilates them into itself. In each of the cases you referenced, a new idea came up, was violently rejected (with literal, physical violence against the believers) and a new, different religious body was formed. Science doesn't break in two every time a new idea is proposed; science thrives on such occasions.
Certainly there are religious scholars; however they're using Science in order to explore the history of their religious institutions, and the conclusions they come to don't always make it back into religious dogma. When's the last time you heard at Church that, in the first draft of the Gospel according to Mark, there in fact was no resurrection ; that it was edited in later, in order to agree with Matthew and Luke? How often does your priest speak of the Gospel according to the Q Source, or discuss at what point in history various articles of dogma come in to existence?
Church is to the work of Religious Scholars what New Scientist is to Science. Dumbed down, sensationalized, and often just plain wrong.
I will grant you that taking individual facts reported by science with no effort to independently verify them is something of an act of faith. However, I would also argue that there is a qualitative difference between the Scientific and Religious institutions at work here. One is publishing methods and data in a journal, literally asking the community at large to find fault with their conclusions, and to correct them if they can do so. The other speaks largely from a seat of authority, making highly subjective interpretations on a subject where other competing theories cannot be demonstrated to be any more or less valid.
Being personally familiar with both systems, I would say that it's far less likely that there is a massive conspiracy within the scientific community in an attempt to cover up evidence of "scientific truth", than it is possible that historical documents that are thousands of years old have been misinterpreted by religious scholars far removed from the context in which they were originally written.