Flaky is the word. I got Skype (and have used Skype-In and Skype-Out for around a year) simply because I didn't have a land line and rinsed £30 on a mobile to mobile (cross network) call in 1 night to my girlfriend. Skype has saved me money on such calls but just tonight Skype crashed twice in a 1 hour call. This is totally unacceptable for a "phone" service. I do quite like the Skype-Pro in that it allows free calls to landlines (this is in the Uk by the way) but when the calls get dropped on such a frequent basis it's almost embarrassing to call people with it. I like voip but will be changing providers the second my current Skype-In number expires... Also, getting charged £1.50 for every £10 worth of Skype-Out credit because I'm in the Uk is painful. Worth Billions? You're fucking joking.
I agree that syncing to google is probably the most important feature but I was using the previous release of sunbird (0.2 I think) with all my google calendar data. This is still possible in 0.5 but it still doesn't seem possible to add an event to google via Sunbird. Does anyone know how to do this? Am I missing something?
I wonder whether these scientists lose any sleep over how their research advances will contribute to the future of our societies.
Believe me, I loose sleep about my research NOT advancing. As a student I don't have much time for worry about how such technology is used and in my opinion the advantages of recognition technology far outweigh the disadvantages.
I'm researching 3D Face Reconstruction and Recognition for my PhD (see my website). The structured light scanner I use to acquire my 3D data takes less then 0.2ms for the 2 phase capture of structured light / texture images and then about 30 seconds to produce a high resolution model from the 4 stereo images. This is sufficiently fast to capture a subject even if they are moving during the capture process. Using this technology a subject must be suitably close to the cameras for the reconstruction to work, however, plenty of other techniques (such as model based reconstruction) allow 3D face models to be reconstructed using a single camera located quite a distance from the subject. In short 3D recognition is becoming the norm in the face recognition field as current 2D algorithms begin to reach their limits.
"I have heard tales of malware that can grab a screen capture in the vicinity of the cursor at any mouse-click. Does anyone know if such a threat actually exists?"
I have seen such malware in the wild. I forget the exact name of the infection but a while back there was a virus/trojan which would begin taking screen captures when the user visited certain banking webpages, save them to a hidden directory and then attempt to email them to a remote location. The user whos machine I saw this on had a whole directory filled with screen captures of HSBC's login page. When you log into HSBC it requires that you enter only certain digits from you online password and which digits these are change randomly each time a user logs in. The screen capture enabled the attacker to see which digits from the password were being entered on each login attempt and in conjunction with a keylogger the attacker could determine the full password after a few login attempts. Needless to say the owner of the machine was scared enough to ensure that his virus definitions were up to date from that point onwards.
This secure authentication tag library could be defeated in exactly the same way.
Slashdot Mirror
Flaky is the word. I got Skype (and have used Skype-In and Skype-Out for around a year) simply because I didn't have a land line and rinsed £30 on a mobile to mobile (cross network) call in 1 night to my girlfriend. Skype has saved me money on such calls but just tonight Skype crashed twice in a 1 hour call. This is totally unacceptable for a "phone" service. I do quite like the Skype-Pro in that it allows free calls to landlines (this is in the Uk by the way) but when the calls get dropped on such a frequent basis it's almost embarrassing to call people with it. I like voip but will be changing providers the second my current Skype-In number expires... Also, getting charged £1.50 for every £10 worth of Skype-Out credit because I'm in the Uk is painful. Worth Billions? You're fucking joking.
What about twins?? The latest advances in face recognition are capable of distinguishing between twins [pdf].
Should have looked before I posted. Bidirectional access to Google Calendar from Sunbird is possible with the Provider for Google Calendar extension...
I agree that syncing to google is probably the most important feature but I was using the previous release of sunbird (0.2 I think) with all my google calendar data. This is still possible in 0.5 but it still doesn't seem possible to add an event to google via Sunbird. Does anyone know how to do this? Am I missing something?
I wonder whether these scientists lose any sleep over how their research advances will contribute to the future of our societies.
Believe me, I loose sleep about my research NOT advancing. As a student I don't have much time for worry about how such technology is used and in my opinion the advantages of recognition technology far outweigh the disadvantages.
I'm researching 3D Face Reconstruction and Recognition for my PhD (see my website). The structured light scanner I use to acquire my 3D data takes less then 0.2ms for the 2 phase capture of structured light / texture images and then about 30 seconds to produce a high resolution model from the 4 stereo images. This is sufficiently fast to capture a subject even if they are moving during the capture process. Using this technology a subject must be suitably close to the cameras for the reconstruction to work, however, plenty of other techniques (such as model based reconstruction) allow 3D face models to be reconstructed using a single camera located quite a distance from the subject. In short 3D recognition is becoming the norm in the face recognition field as current 2D algorithms begin to reach their limits.
"I can't actually think of any games off the top of my head that respect real-universe physics in a space environment"
Elite?
"I have heard tales of malware that can grab a screen capture in the vicinity of the cursor at any mouse-click. Does anyone know if such a threat actually exists?" I have seen such malware in the wild. I forget the exact name of the infection but a while back there was a virus/trojan which would begin taking screen captures when the user visited certain banking webpages, save them to a hidden directory and then attempt to email them to a remote location. The user whos machine I saw this on had a whole directory filled with screen captures of HSBC's login page. When you log into HSBC it requires that you enter only certain digits from you online password and which digits these are change randomly each time a user logs in. The screen capture enabled the attacker to see which digits from the password were being entered on each login attempt and in conjunction with a keylogger the attacker could determine the full password after a few login attempts. Needless to say the owner of the machine was scared enough to ensure that his virus definitions were up to date from that point onwards. This secure authentication tag library could be defeated in exactly the same way.
Hmm, the site seems to have been slashdotted to me...