Well, since a lot of manual bars were and are lowered when we go from manual matching to computerized search you have to be a bit more careful with that argument. (It's close to being an antique if nothing else).

It's akin to the difference between going out fishing with a pole or two, to scouring the ocean with a fleet of trawlers. In essence it's the same activity, but the effects can be vastly different.

It's for example not at all improbable that the quality of match will decrease significantly when computers are involved for the single simple fact that a search doesn't "cost" nearly as much as with the manual system, and therefore it will be used much less judiciously. It goes from "Won't do that until there's a clear chance it will succeed", to "Well, it doesn't hurt to try." If people (e.g. courts) are still used to the evidentiary value of the old process, which wasn't typically used unless police thought it worthwhile, then the risk of falsely accusing someone just went up. (Perhaps even significantly). And that's just one risk off the top of my head.

So it's often not that computers allow a significantly different behaviour in theory (in fact we're crap at coming up with fundamentally new and exciting ways of using computers), we're masters at automating the old "manual" ways of doing things. It's that automating something tends to lead to difference use cases in practice, as it enables usage that would previously have been prohibitively expensive, and that we're usually crap at predicting what those effects would be.

(Compare mass surveillance. Hitler and East Germany did it, but they were about the only ones as the cost were staggering when all you had were manual methods of collection and analysis of the collecte data (the latter typically dominated cost). It was cost prohibitive for everybody but the most hard core of tyrants. Today the methods are so cheap that it happens almost by "accident" when it comes to the private sector, and even well run democracies fall into the "mass surveillance" trap, since it's it's so cheap and keeping it secret is much easier due to lower number of people who have to be involved. And the latter is one of those secondary effects that we're crap at foreseeing. It used to be that you couldn't keep that level of surveillance secret, there were just too many people involved. Everybody had to know they were oppressed, which meant that some organisations wouldn't dream of using it, lest they be tarred with that brush. Today it's relatively much easier and that's much of the outrage (what little there is, unfortunately), that people have come to the realisation that the US can, in a sence, be East Germany, without having to look like it. (Well, that likeness is of course not to be taken too far, obviously there are clear differences, but you get my drift.)

That's a very good point, and well worth considering, especially given the now known fallibility of eyewitness accounts. (Not that courts want to really consider that, since that would make convicting someone much, much harder.

On the flip side. This match is one which humans are well equipped to reason about. We know instinctively what "likeness" means and it's easy for (almost) everybody involved to judge the similarity between i.e. a mugshot and a grainy surveillance video. In fact the quality of the evidence (graininess or lack thereof) is easily grasped by police, prosecution, defence and jury alike.

This is very far from the case when it comes to even fingerprints, or horror of horrors DNA, where the quality of evidence and what risk factors are involved is "voodo" for 99.99% of society. Not even statisticians seem to be able to agree on a single definition of what a DNA match (esp. the kind we're talking about here, i.e. a fishing expedition match) actually means. So facial recognition has some redeeming feature from that perspective.

Sure, the warning should really be against "Security only though obscurity." But that doesn't scan. Or something.

Then again, there are times when obscurity will hinder your security. I.e. it's a better trade-off to publish your new crypto algorithm to try and attract the experts to tell you where you got it wrong, rather than relying on your own expertise. Unless you'er a government signals intelligence organisation you probably don't have it.

Also. Keeping a well defined secret, is not "obscurity". So having a crypto key, or (in this case) a password, is not a problem per se. That's not "obscurity" as such. Thinking that having it printed in a manual that "the wrong people won't ever get to look at" without making sure of that is putting too much trust in "obscurity" though.

That experiment was also done. Doing it in hardware turned out to give a lot of unexpected side effects, such as not being able to remove a "dead" circuit, as it's effect on capacitance and cross talk having a real effect after all.

So in order to address this they instead tried simulation of passive analogue filters (obvious fitness function and you can control which building blocks that "nature" gets to play with) and matched against the patent data base. It turns out that you indeed end up with a lot of different filters that work very well, but can be difficult to analyze, being messy evolved creatures. And also that you find the ones that made it into the patent data base.

So, even that particular version of "we do it by design so therefore nature must have" is a bust. We've done it both ways, and both ways demonstrably work. This was hot stuff in academia in the nineties so it's not exactly brand new...

Like I said below. We have the same design in Sweden as well, and it's no problem here. If the street is clear enough of snow that the fire engine can get to the site, then it's clear enough that the fire hydrant is accessible. (And they are marked with a "flag" on a pole that shows direction and distance).

In fact when it comes to heavy snow and emergency clearing, putting the fire hydrant on the side of the street would be a liability, as that's where the snow ends up when you run the plow. Especially if there isn't a side walk, then that area would likely never be cleared as long as there's snow for the plows. That fire hydrant would thaw out in spring along with the rest of the muck.

Well, thing is we have the same kind of fire hydrant in Sweden as well. So the snow argument doesn't "hold water"... They're not difficult to find since being in the street there's not much snow on top of it (we clear our streets, if the fire engine can get there, then the fire hydrant can be used) and there's a sign on a post marking the direction and distance to the fire hydrant.

It bugs me though that I haven't ever gotten the "why are manhole covers round" when interviewing in the US. My first answer would be, "They're not. Fire hydrants are rectangular for instance. Next question please..." :-)

Nope, men are on average much harder to beat to death than women. A wimpy keyboard may be sturdy enough to still beat a woman to death with, but a good keyboard is sturdy enough to beat a man to death with.

But your right that while gender does play a role, ethnicity or sexual orientation doesn't. Well usually at least. Some races of people are smaller and lighter on average, so let's exclude those. Don't come bragging that your keyboard held up to beating a pygmy to death!

I know the reasons. Living in Europe and having worked several years in the telecoms industry. (And son, if you think that was a flame, you weren't around when the internet was young...)

I was just interested in what you thought the reasons were, since your explanation for why it might be cheaper in Romania (which BTH aren't exactly watertight) doesn't even begin to explain why the rest of Europe (barring a few dark corners) have so much better connectivity, at drastically lower cost than the US. That is to say, the part of Europe where cost and regulations are much higher and stricter than in the US.

Sure, I might have come of as a bit snarky right off the bat, but I am really interested in what your arguments are, or rather, your reasons for thinking the way you do about this issue.

That's been studied at length. And the solution is "simple", i.e. easy to state but harder to accomplish.

Terrorist organisations (from a military standpoint) rely exclusively on the civilian society for support. It's their logistics, intelligence, funding, base of operations etc. etc. So, what you need to do it distance the organisation from its support for long enough that it starves and dies. This can be done the "nice" way, like the British in Burma, whereby they armed the local population and worked with education and propaganda to isolate the communist guerilla. But you don't have to be nice as demonstrated in Kenya with the Mau Mau where strategic villages (aka "concentration camps") effectively isolated the guerilla from their support. The organisation that ultimately won was the same in name only, and it was mostly political pressure from abroad on the government that made them abandon their largely successful approach.

The other thing you have to remember is that to win takes stamina (something the US has always lacked abroad). The guerilla only have to not lose to win. As long as they exist and can perform operations they're in business. The other side on the other hand has to actually win, i.e. defeat the guerilla in detail, so that they virtually cease to exist, in order to claim victory.

Given this, there's little to support a campaign of drone strikes. It's very difficult to see what such a campaign would ultimately achieve other than as a small part of a larger strategy.

There was an article in Parameters, Scholarly quarterly journal of the US Army War College a few years back on this very topic. So it's not exactly new knowledge. If you leaf through that they often have papers on irregular warfare (not surprisingly). It's available for free online.

Well, not really. Matematically it may have several equal maxima, so it doesn't have to have a global maxima.

But that's mathematically. In this case there will probably be one global maxima (more or less). We probably won't see wild swings up and down that aren't part of a general trend of increase or decline. Several "trend" tops are unlikely.

But that's exactly what we do to airline pilots. The more automated the planes become, the more requirements we put on the pilots (to understand all the automation). And we still require them to take charge and solve the situation when the automation fails, even though they are now well and truly "lulled".

Why would/should cars be any different?

Let's try it on an airliner: "Either the airliner is autnomous, or it isn't. If it isn't autonomous I'll drive it myself and be in control the whole time."

Doesn't really work out. The pilot-in-command is always responsible for the safe operation of the aircraft, even when the aircraft is "flying itself". Now of course there are limits to this responsibility, if an engine falls off due to shoddy maintenance that's usually not considered a pilot error. But complex computer malfunctions are more often than not blamed on the pilot (too much so to my mind, but that's another question).

I foresee that we'll see the same development with "autonomous" cars (i.e. cars with advanced auto pilots). They'll do better on average than a human, but when the malfunction you (the "driver in command") will be left to pick up the pieces, if there are any pieces left to be picked up. As with piloting, you're average workload will decrease substantially, but when things to wrong, you now have a much more complex situation to deal with, and no time to do it. The maximum requirements on your performance actually increased even though the average decreased. If the NTSB can still say "pilot error" 99% of the time, then it'll be "driver error" 99% of the time with autonomous cars.

And like with aircraft you'll like it, since the average is long and dreary and malfunctions will be so few and far between that you can functionally ignore them.

"Sleeping in the back seat" will be just as much frowned upon as it would be in an airliner. Leaning back and having a cup of coffee would be about as far as you could stretch it.

So make one. Or is your argument that a) there might (big "might") be differences between regulatory structure and cost between Romania and the US that would make internet infrastructure in Romania cheaper to build, b) when observing that the rest of regulated high cost Europe also has much better and cheaper access to same, that "I'm right about Romania and I don't know about the rest"?

That's not an argument at all. Not even about the Romanian situation. Especially about the Romanian situation.

So what is your argument about the Swedish situation then? As you agree the supposed argument about the Romanian situation doesn't work to explain the differences between the US and most European countries when it comes to differences in internet adoption/cost/speed/caps etc.

No, that's something I've also only heard about as a cautionary US tale. If that's happening in Europe as well, I'd also like to know.