This has been understood for some time. As others have mentioned, various military orgs have used teams with varied color vision as a way of "seeing through" camouflage. Biologists have suggested that the variety in human color vision is adaptive, giving our hunting ancestors' teams an improved chance of spotting spotting prey against various backgrounds, and the addition of dogs (with their very different color vision from ours) improved this teamwork. This is all hypothetical, though, since (as far as I know) it hasn't actually been tested scientifically.

Back in high school (in the 60s), I had a science teacher who did a good illustration of it all. He made the usual demo of a spectrum using a prism, on a sheet of white paper. Then he had students come up and mark the visible ends of the spectrum, covering up each student's marks with another sheet of paper before the next student made their marks. The result was two columns of dots that didn't line up at all; their variants was around 10% of the width of the spectrum. I'd made marks that I could identify, and saw that my UV mark was right at the average point, while my IR mark was one of the farthest out. This explained some things I'd already noticed about the ways that different people saw colors.

This has been known to the photography industry since color film was first produced. Different varieties of film (and now CCDs) have different sensitivities, and different photographers have different preferences for brands of film based on this.

One of my funny personal anecdotes on the topic was once (in Jr High, as I recall), I asked some visitors why the front-left panel of their car was a different color than the rest of the car. They gave me a funny look, then said the car was all black, which everyone else present agreed with. I objected that only that one panel was black; the rest of the car was a deep red. This got me more funny looks, and the fellow who owned the car said that the car had been in a minor accident that damaged the front-left panel, so it was replaced. After that, my family thought I had something called "black-red color blindness" (which is odd, because I was actually the only one without that defect ;-). I was taken to an optometrist, who verified the "condition", but assured my parents that it wasn't a significant problem, and didn't need treating. Actually, there was a simple treatment: glasses that block near-IR light, and I've accidentally got several sunglasses that do just that, making for oddly muted reds.

As I got more into photography, I eventually noticed that my eyes have slightly different color vision, with things looking slightly bluer in the left eye and slightly redder in the right eye. This seems to be extremely common, actually, though most people don't notice it until it's mentioned and they start trying to spot it in different lighting condition. (Hint: It's often easier to spot in lower-light conditions, and difficult in full sunlight.)

I don't understand the fascination that tech news sites have with pictures of upcoming smartphones. Pretty much every standard smartphone looks exactly like every other damn smartphone on the planet -- a touchscreen with a bezel around it. The "interesting" part of this announcements is the color of the back of the phone -- which is the part that you're never looking at anyway.

Nope, I'm still not buying it. You haven't presented any compelling reason why those in authority should lose their human rights. If you want to introduce ways to make it easier to obtain that proof, I'm all for it, but those in authority should have all the rights that anyone else has. Dehumanizing a group of people is not the answer.

Who watches the watchmen? It has to be us. That means that making sure that the guilt of those who abuse their power -- as well as the innocence of those who don't -- is partly our responsibility.

That's fine with me. Watch them. If you're watching them, then you can prove it when they abuse their power.

I vehemently disagree. Human rights, including the right to being presumed innocent until proven guilty, should not be waived because of someone's occupation.

The problem of guilt being difficult to prove is one that extends far beyond just police or politicians; it applies to anyone accused of committing a crime, and it means that we know that we allow some of those guilty of crimes, even heinous ones, to walk free. We have made a lot of progress in that area, and will continue to do so. It is appropriate to introduce new technology, procedures, or policies that can help make it more difficult for people to hide their guilt, but at the end of the day, a policeman is a man and deserves the same protections that you or I do.

Assuming a finite number of cop-citizen interactions, the ratio of good-to-bad interactions is relevant to the rate at which bad interactions happen.

No, it's nothing like that. In a discussion of whether something is "systemic and widespread," the rate at which it occurs is relevant.

You said:

While true, that says absolutely nothing about whether or not something is "systemic and widespread." That is the definition of "irrelevant."

It is completely relevant to the question of whether it is "systemic and widespread," which was the thread of conversation that you're replying to.

Nobody has said that cops are justified in brutality and murder. They are, however, entitled to be innocent until proven guilty.

This has nothing to do with corporations. if you, as a private citizen, hire somebody to do a job, and they then commit a crime using your property, you will not be held responsible for that crime unless it turns out that you were complicit or negligent. AT&T should be held to exactly the same standard.

It is a terrible idea to make an employer responsible for everything an employee does. It is the responsibility of the employer to have a level of diligence to protect their customers, through policies and actions, but that doesn't mean that they can predict and control everything that a human being will do.

The fact that a $25 million fine was imposed says that the government believed that the appropriate level of diligence was not taken, but I see nothing to suggest that the negligence was great enough to justify destroying the company like some people apparently want.

Car analogies suck, but if the producer of said component got those components into the car by deceiving the automaker, then you bet it's that producer's fault, not GM's.

GM might be responsible for restitution (fixing the problem parts -- which they'd ultimately get the money for through legal action against the supplier), but it would be utterly inappropriate to levy huge punitive fines against them just because their supplier provided faulty parts.

AT&T didn't sell the info (the title of the article is false.) It was some people that were employed by their call centers that were engaged in the crime. You don't punish a company for hiring somebody who turns out to be a criminal. All they can be punished for is if the policies that allowed their employees to get that information were negligent.

Unfortunately, my experience is that every single person who uses tabs does it wrong. If you're working on a project where half a dozen people are all using tabs, you're going to end up with six different types of broken formatting.

Re the Upton Sinclair quote: I'm pretty sure (don't have time to dig through the library at the moment) that earthquakes from well injection were known in California in the 1920s (when Sinclair had a small interest in the oil boom there, hence Oil! [later "There Will Be Blood"]).

sPh

So what do these demonstraters hope to accomplish? Are they going to protest hard enough to prevent the test from happening in 1945?

I really hope that the future contains more than the dubious benefits of owning a smartphone.