And they are a moral hazard directed at police chiefs: they tempt the cheifs to push for convictions, which are measurable, instead of prevention, which isn't.

ABSTRACT
This article argues that our current laws on the topic are counterproductive, because they protect child molesters instead of bringing them to justice, they criminalize a generation of normally-behaving teenagers which diverts valuable police resources from the criminals we should be going after, and they lead to censorship and electronic book burning as well as unacceptable collateral damage to innocent families. Child abuse as such is not condoned by anybody, and this article argues that current laws are counterproductive in preventing and prosecuting it.

In http://falkvinge.net/2012/09/0... The abstract is there because the title of the article will enrage the folks doing the prosecution...

"Do one thing well" is how Unix kernel functions are written, and it's just plain a good idea. Systemd probably follows the first principle internally, many programs do.

Creating production systems[1] out of single-purpose commands connected by pipelines is a different principle, and only works if you keep them pretty simple. It's not a prionciple, but it is how a lot of Unix scripts are written, NOT including the shell that glues the parts together, and not including all the more complex programs, like ed or mail. Systemd doesn't follow the second, because it's more like ed than a text transformation like spell.

A more useful question is whether systemd as a whole does one thing, and does it well. About that, one might usefully discuss whether the Unix principle applies.

--dave
[Pipelines were patterned after a subset of "production systems" in early AI, which applied transforms to "produce" new things. They're not the kind of production systems you put on a raised floor]

You can have 99.999 accuracy, and if the number of comparisons is (N choose 2), then the probability is (N chose 2) * 0.00001, which will be (really huge number * 0.00001) which is (merely huge number).

I don't care how good or bad the implementation is, it has to have more 9's to the right of the decimal than I have zeroes to the left in the number of people, N. That's a known hard problem in computer science (;-))

--dave
[And yes, Siemens was getting crappy even then, but that isn't the problem that the FBI has to solve]

Fortunately my android already has apps for all the things I own which have "smarts". I plan to keep it that way by buying small apps from small developers.

We do this in Canada too, and it works where the number of people you're trying to recognize is small. The "birthday paradox"* says that if you're comparing 23 people, you have a 50% chance of a match. You have to multiply this by the error rate (usually much less than 2%) of a facial match program to get the false-positive rate, but it's still huge.

The German federal security service tried out Siemen's facial matcher years ago, found it had a low error rate... and was completely useless!

When you had hundreds of criminals to look for in thousands of airport passengers a day, it was directing insane numbers of people to the "capture the terrorist" queue (;-))

--dave
[*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem]

Ok, done!

A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Engage a lawyer familiar with class actions *before* speaking to the police. You're an individual engaging in trial by battle with a huge company, and you need someone with the same degree of hitting power on your side before you start. They can advise on what's most effective in your jurisdiction. In Canada, the fraud squad is effective against enemies of moderate size. I don't see case law from them going after companies the size of a small country (;-))

The whole country is a secret: the government of the day suffered a hostile takeover by space aliens masquerading a toupees. Just have a look at any picture of the PM (;-))

Yes: it's a problem that needs to be attacked from several directions at once, including psycological: what drives people to read and buy products from spammers?

The only thing mainframes have that Unix/Linux Resource Managers lack is "goal mode". I can't set a TPS target and have resources automatically allocated to stay at or above the target. I *can* create minimum guarantees for CPU, memory and I/O bandwidth on Linux, BSD and the Unixes. I just have to manage the performance myself, by changing the minimums.

The criteria is "the company that has the power to demand the data, has to do so if ordered by their country's courts". This probably dates back to the 16th century or earlier. Some time around the Hanseatic League...

A Canadian company with data in Outer Mongolia has to produce the data if it can. If the Outer Mongols prohibit the Canadian company from demanding it normally, the Canadians can't be ordered to produce it, because the data isn't in the Canadian company's control. If they allow it to be demanded normally, a Canadian court can get it. They have to do it via the Mongolian branch, they can't just issue court orders in Mongolia.

Your suspicion is correct: a Canadian company that controls data in the U.S. can indeed be ordered by a Canadian court to produce it .

--dave

Canada's government of the day is using it as a money-sink. Our requirements are for a twin-engine, long-range, non-stealthy aircraft with a moderate ground-support capability, such as the F-18 Hornet we now use. They rejected the newer super hornet, and so I fear the entire programme exists only to soak up money they don't want to spend on the priorities of the other parties...