Can you imagine if they actually did make it available for through-wall baby monitors? How long until parents accidentally swing the camera a bit wide and realize they can see inside their neighbor's home? How many will buy it just for that use? "Baby Monitors Used by Voyeurs" is nearly as bad a headline as what we saw with that Harry Potter vibrating broom toy that was allegedly popular with mothers a few years back.

...the words coming out of these politician's mouths were what they were putting onto paper with their pens, the world would be a much better place. Instead, we have them insisting one thing publicly, while working against that idea in every way possible behind closed doors.

Hah, yeah, we do have our share of stuff like that. Texans love their pickups, to be sure. I even use one as my primary vehicle, despite not actually liking them in particular (no gun rack in the rear window of mine though :P).

For us non-UK folks, can you explain the distinction? I mean, obviously they are different domains, but what about org.uk suggests it should be used instead of co.uk?

This post by alostpacket accurately sums up what I was getting at. I never claimed that fingerprinting techniques produce more false positives than eyewitness identification (in fact, I believe the opposite to be true). Rather, I was pointing out that DNA/fingerprints are independent of how an eyewitness identifies someone, so we can rely on eyewitness identification as an independent factor by which we can verify those earlier tests and hopefully root out any false positives. Not so with facial recognition, since the identification is being made on the same factor, meaning that a false positive from this particular form of fingerprinting technology is likely to cause a false positive from an eyewitness identification.

Or, phrased differently, I wasn't saying that they're more error-prone (far from it, in fact); I was saying that this specific test is simply more dangerous when it fails, since it gives the illusion of independent verification along two factors without actually providing it.

Not really.

In a traditional lineup, the police will have identified the suspect using an independent factor (e.g. seen at the time and place, crime fits their M.O., DNA evidence, they were later heard bragging about the crime, etc.), and the eyewitness is demonstrating their reliability by picking out the suspect from among people that look roughly similar. When the eyewitness identifies the suspect in the lineup, the police have now identified the suspect based on two (or more), independent factors that reinforce the credibility of their case: visual recognition and whatever other technique they used to get him in the first place. This works, because a false positive from the first test (i.e. how the police caught the suspect) is likely to be identified as such by the second test (e.g. "none of those are the guy").

Not so with facial recognition software, however, since when the eyewitness successfully identifies the person who has been pegged as a suspect, the police have effectively only identified the suspect using a single factor, given that they're relying on visual recognition in both tests. The danger is that it presents the illusion of independent verification, when in reality a false positive from the first test (i.e. facial recognition) is likely to cause a failure of the second test (i.e. the lineup) without anyone being any the wiser.

Spell it out for me then, because I'm clearly not getting it.

Near as I can tell, they need to be able to demonstrate in court that they have a way of linking the guy in the train footage to the person they've apprehended. There may be a few links in the chain tying the person to the crime. If the police claim it's via facial recognition from the train footage, they'll need to be able to demonstrate that they can make that identification from the train footage. If CCTV footage gets involved, we've added an extra link to the chain, so they'll need to demonstrate that they can tie the person from the train footage to the CCTV footage (e.g. the person is seen heading in the same direction wearing the same clothes at the same time and location) and then can tie the CCTV footage to the mugshot, otherwise it'll do them no good. And if they're doing that, I don't see why anyone should have any issues with it, since it's no different than going to neighboring stores after a robbery to see if any of them have cameras that got a better view of the suspect's face. That's old-fashioned detective work, not something to fear.

On the other hand, if all they're doing is matching CCTV footage against mugshots, without linking it back to the train footage, then they've failed to tie anyone to anything at all. All they can get from that is "previously arrested person X is currently at location Y", which wouldn't do them much good in court, and it wouldn't be useful to them in the least in getting a conviction since they wouldn't be able to demonstrate the link back to the suspect from the train footage.

And that's before we even begin to address your claims about the NSA stuff, which I find highly unlikely, even with the revelations we've had (everyone knows it's the FBI that keeps the database on US citizens, not the NSA :P).

Your own source seems to disagree with you. According to it, about half of the states blacklist specific, prohibited activities, but otherwise allow masks for anything else, while the other half whitelist a broad set of permitted activities that hit most of the common cases, but otherwise disallow masks.

Among those that blacklist activities, the lists are pretty much all the same: no wearing masks to conceal your identity while engaging in crime (i.e. it's one more charge they can add on top), no wearing masks to intimidate or harass people entitled to equal protection under the law (i.e. an anti-KKK clause that keeps them from wearing their hoods in public), and don't obstruct police officers. Among those that whitelist activities, they almost all carve out permitted exceptions for holidays, theatrical productions, Mardi gras, and the like, in addition to masks worn for work, health, weather, or religious reasons.

If you wanted to do something like have everyone wear Guy Fawkes masks at a protest or demonstration, the only place you probably wouldn't be allowed to do it would be Washington D.C., since they specifically prohibit wearing masks at a demonstration (which seems like a First Amendment issue to me, but the Bill of Rights hasn't gotten in the way of D.C. enacting all sorts of draconian laws :-/).

The OP's concern was that they would be matching the face of the criminal from the train footage against faces of innocent people out in public, rather than against mug shots from when criminals were booked. I.e. They'd be doing a dragnet over every face in public, rather than against a collection of faces of known criminals. How does what you're talking about relate to that in any way? I can't imagine a scenario where they'd get any sort of benefit out of doing what you're talking about.

I agree, but I think there's another concern here as well: false positives are significantly more dangerous than with other fingerprinting techniques. If DNA samples or fingerprints provide false positives, we have (admittedly error-prone) eyewitnesses as a final layer of defense, and since people who look entirely different can have similar fingerprints or DNA signatures, it's likely that the people look nothing alike. Not so with facial recognition, since a false positive is likely to be close enough to a true positive that it will be incorrectly affirmed by eyewitnesses, even if the authorities don't bias them by telling them that the guy was a match.

None of which is to say that I think we should stop using it, since it is a valuable tool. I merely think that it needs to be used with an understanding of its faults and taken with the grain of salt it deserves.

Have we removed NASA from Texas, or is it included as well? ;)

Disclaimer: I'm a Texan (not native-born; been here about 15 years), and my first reaction was to get a good chuckle at your post, given the sorts of folks who are famously associated with the state currently. But the state does get a bad rap, considering all of the great stuff here, whether it's the engineering in Houston (and elsewhere in the state, to be fair), the music in Austin, the great prices for homes, or the fact that they're keeping Southern hospitality alive (I still am sometimes surprised at how nice they are compared to the folks in south Florida, where I lived previously for about a decade).

They already do that. For users with crappy connections, Netflix will, at an additional expense, deliver fully-buffered, full-resolution videos to your mailbox in the form of a disc, strange as that may sound. ;)

"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway."

Joking aside, "stupid" in what sense? Honest question. Did you mean technologically? As a use case? In some other way? I'm genuinely interested, since to me, it seems that it makes a good deal of sense.

As a business, Netflix wants its service on as many devices as possible. Instant streaming means that the device only needs to be able to store a few seconds or minutes of footage, rather than an entire file, thus opening the service up to cheaper devices that have less in the way of storage. It means people only need to buy something like a Roku or Chromecast, rather than something resembling a Tivo.

And for the user, it makes sense as well, since the same sorts of reasons I don't like cooking at home (e.g. I have to decide what to eat in advance, I have to take more time to get it ready, if I grab a lot so I have more variety to choose from it ends up being wasteful since much of it will expire before I get to it) apply to why instant streaming makes a good deal of sense for a user. It lets them choose what to watch at the time that they feel like watching, and it also ensures that nothing that was cached has expired already, which decreases the total amount of bandwidth consumed. Let people download in advance and they will, even if they never end up watching it.

I agree that it's wholly unnecessary to provide instant streaming, since we can (and have) gotten by with far less, but the options it opens up seem to provide a lot of benefits as an alternative to effectively just downloading the file in advance.

There's also an education issue at play. Calling it the "Wii U" is nice and all, but their primary customers are kinda clueless about gaming and don't understand that it's a new console.

I was talking with someone yesterday who continues to be an avid Wii user, and she was talking about possibly buying the new MarioKart game for herself and some other friends who she used to live with. I asked if they had a Wii U or not, to which I got a "Wii U? Isn't that just a Wii?" response. I explained that it was an entirely new piece of hardware that would also need to be purchased in order to play the new games. It was the first she had heard of it.

Of course, she also thought she'd need to borrow ("steal", to use her word) the game disc from her friends in order to get her save data for MarioKart Wii from their console to hers, so this is not exactly a technically savvy person, but that's par for the course with the majority of Wii customers. Nintendo needs to do a better job of educating their customers. In previous generations, they went for the sorts of customers that educated themselves on the topic. When they made something with mass market appeal, they attracted buyers who don't keep up to date, and many of them have no clue about this Wii U thing or why they need to spend hundreds of dollars to play new "Wii" games.

That we own stock doesn't mean we're really playing the game in the way he suggested, any more than picking up a stick and hitting a ball with it means that you're a professional athlete.

Pretty amazing when you look at the number of comments.

The Open Internet topic had 45,193 comments. To put that in perspective, in the last 30 days, the five closest topics open for discussion had 95, 111, 113, 203, and 1678 comments (those two bigs ones were for ensuring compatibility with changes to 911 calling and the TWC-Comcast merger, respectively).