Posts by Phil O'Sophical 7408 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Oct 2011
let's get you downtown so we can also roll you in ink and get an imprint. While you are there and looking the other way (also looking pretty silly all covered in ink) they'll get the chip implanted too. That will really speed your way through the gates since it will be easier to read the chip than do facial recognition via a government acquired 480p web cam provided by the lowest bidder.
I presume you're exaggerating for effect, but frankly that's a pretty stupid comment.
My face is on public display all the time, anyone can see it & decide if it is meaningful. There's no comparison to having an ID chip implanted, and few people would agree to that. For one thing, how would you prove you're who you claim to be for the data on the chip, via a fingerprint or facial scan? Turtles all the way down. As to the camera resolution, biometric passports have 32kB of EPROM available for the total data, so it doesn't store a high-res photo anyway. It concentrates more on storing key data elements.
The presumption has to be that you are who you say you are and nobody (official) wants you grabbed and locked up. Critically examining every blade of hay in a pile to find a small needle isn't very efficient, but that's what's being proposed.
And that's pretty much what happens when your face is scanned by a human agent, especially those referred to as "super recognizers".
I've just sorted through a whole bunch of resistors now that I have an organized bin system for them. I know that there are some resistors in wrong drawers, but putting each one under the magnifying glass and measuring ones with ambiguous colors is a waste of time. The vast majority ARE in the correct bins and I can also check them when I pull some out.
That is exactly what should happen when a particular face is red-flagged, whether by automated facial recognition, or manual scrutiny. A failure to do that is a failure in the system, not of the concept. The solution is to fix the system, not to reject the technology.
With it's failings in mind, what is the actual point? There are dozens of less intrusive and more accurate methods of verifying people's identities that actually work.
Dozens, really? Care to name them, other than having the passport officer hold the photo up and say "yeah, that's probably you"?
Personally I'd much rather use facial recognition in an e-gate than stand in line for two hours just to have a real person make the same check.
Images are not sent to storage anywhere, that is explicitly stated on the TSA website.
What these systems do is exactly what you suggest, they compare the photo on the passport with your face locally. They may also compare your face with a list of wanted people, but that facial image is not stored.
Facial recognition often makes mistakes
Do you think that having a person visually compare your face to your passport photo is likely to be more accurate? The officials doing those checks are also comparing you with a list of persons being sought, either from memory or against a "wanted" poster on their desk. They could make a mistake there as well.
20 times more likely for an ICE to catch fire than an EV.
I'd like to see the figures adjusted for age. Most car fires I've seen are in older cars which are poorly maintained, so you get turbo lubrication failures, electrical fires, or other worn-out components giving up the ghost. EVs are too new to show those sorts of failure modes.
The article refers to sales of "light duty EVs and hybrids", which isn't a useful measure of EV sales alone. It also includes the obvious sweet spot for EVs, the small second car for shopping, the school run, and local pottering. Not a meaningful indication of EV sales in general.
A friend's dad was red/green colour blind, he built power stations for a living!
I also know someone who got a job in BBC engineering despite being colour blind. He got hold of a set of the sight testing cards, had a friend tell him what numbers he should be able to see, and memorized the patterns as they appeared to him. That took determination.
A friend of mine had a similar experience. Wanting to stop a floor board from moving and squeaking before laying carpet (in a new build house) he gently tapped a nail into the board at the line of the joist. Then he heard a faint hissing. He'd hit a central heating pipe, installed in a notch right under the boards.
In a past life we found that if we wanted any technical books we had to request them as internal loans from the company library, we couldn't raise a purchase order for a book.
User manuals, however, could simply be bought. We bought a lot of user manuals, rightly assuming that the purchasing department wouldn't be able to tell the difference from the title.
the students were only interested in getting a bit of paper at the end; they were not actually interested in the subject, or in being educated.
The inevitable result of Tony Blair's insistence that 50% of people should go to university, whether they would benefit or not.
You're making the false assumption that because 90% of journeys are short, 90% of cars only need to be capable of short journeys.
That doesn't hold. Most of my daily journeys are short, but once a month or so I do need to fill the tank every day for a few days, and a couple of times a year I may need to fill it twice in a day. A pure EV just isn't worth the hassle and cost, and having two cars would be even worse. A PHEV is a good compromise, and I hope we see more range-extender ones such as those that Mazda is starting to produce.
Why should everyone upgrade their tech to the faster speeds?
Indeed. A statement like "obstacles remain in convincing consumers to fully transition to fiber services" really means "we think people are too stupid to know what they want", but in reality people are intelligent enough to know when they have what they need, at an appropriate cost for them. I have FTTP and pay for 100Mbit/s which is more than sufficient for my needs. I could have 900, but don't need it and don't see any reason to pay the extra.
I doubt it ever makes it to "someone high up in the government department". More likely someone in purchasing is told to "find a supplier", puts out a tender, and chooses the cheapest plausible-sounding response. They see that Seamus Bloggs has "qualified security consultant" on his website, and have no understanding of what that means, or what actual qualifications are needed.
