It's not just returning a matched image, though. It's also returning a confidence level, and in the cases they've discovered, it's returning 100% confidence. That's clearly wrong.

Well, there was a point (and I am talking DOS here) where some PCs did.

Because I used to own the little punch thingy and did it. I did not own an Apple.

I honestly don't recall the disk sizes, so I could be wrong about that.

But, since I had a PC in around 1984/1985 which did this, I can tell you that some of them did use single sided floppies. Granted, it was a crappy Tandy PC, so it was extra useless and special. I had a whole 256K of RAM, so 640K seemed like so much. :-P

On a machine running DOS, I most definitely punched floppies to get extra capacity. That I can guarantee you.

So, you remember what you remember, and I'll remember what I do.

At the time, owning one of those punches was kind of a geek badge of honor when it wasn't cool at all to be a geek. :-P

For example, DNNs look at TV static and declare with 99.99% confidence it is a school bus.

Unless it's static of an image of a school bus, these things sound utterly useless.

According to TFS, Charlie Brown is a schoolbus.

It's OK, if AI is this stupid, we need not worry about it taking over any time soon.

Cuba's failures have nothing to do with Cuba seizing and redistributing the property of its people.

The property which was seized was mostly owned by foreign countries, and benefited the existing dictatorship of Bautista -- who was a brutal bastard, but friendly to the US so America was fine with it. America only objects to dictators who dislike them.

When Baustista was in power, the average Cuban worker was pretty much a serf, and all of the economy benefited only a few.

I'm glad you are keeping up with the DNC memo's and talking points.

You're a drooling idiot.

I'm not an American, and I have no idea of what the DNCs talking points are on this. But your childish little hamster brain apparently needs to make this a Republican v Democrat issue, so you're only capable of seeing thatg.

I've been to Cuba a bunch of times. I've read books my Castro and Che, as well as the history of how the Platt Amendment came to be foisted on Cuba despite their not wanting it. I've also read about the history from non-Cuban sources so try to see the whole picture.

The vast majority of Americans really have no clue about Cuban history. They boil it down to about a 10 year period, and then haven't bothered to learn anything which happened before or since. Cuba and Casto are just the bogeymen to get yourselves worked up about.

So, it's tragic you're so ill informed and are tied to whatever idiotic talking points you're repeating.

Because clearly don't know a damned thing about it you haven't been spoon fed.

"First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, and then you win."

-- Ghandi

So what your saying is that if we took all the illegal -- uh "undocumented" immigrants from third-world countries that Obama lets in and dump them into the socialist paradise of Cuba that America's healthcare statistics will look massively better than Cuba's.

No, America would probably still rank lower than most third world countries on that front.

In the U.S. they bend over backwards to save babies but since they aren't always successful, the statistics get skewed.

Yes, they bend over backwards to ensure they don't get aborted, and then they decide that the raising of them is someone else's problem. As soon as it's born, doing anything to take care of it would be socialism.

'Cuz that works well in the long run. Mostly it lets the church ladies moralize, and then they can move on to ignoring poverty and crime and focusing on prisons for all the poor people.

What do you mean? The country was then conquered within months by us. Saddam Hussein himself was then captured, tried publicly, and executed deservingly.

My god, are you that delusional?

You toppled a government, but you sure as hell didn't "conquer" them.

You barely got out of there with your asses intact, and every single justification for going in there in the first place was provably false before anybody got sent in. Oh, and your inept fumbling about led to the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians -- far far more than were killed in 9/11.

The entire reason for being in Iraq the second time was a colossal lie perpetuated by a chimpanzee of a president trying to finish what daddy started.

You were in the wrong fucking country, because Iraq had nothing at all to do with 9/11. And now you've left a giant power vacuum which has destabilized the entire region.

Being in Iraq was such an epic failure that only people who can call it a success were the private companies who made huge profits, and the lying bastards who got you in there in the first place.

If you think that's a template for how to fix the worlds problems ... the world doesn't want any more of your "help".

Why the heck not, exactly? The evil needs to be destroyed â" both to end it, and to discourage future evil.

I'm sorry, but increasingly it's hard not to see the US as evil.

Because they've decided it's their right to spy on everyone else on the planet, bomb civilians as collateral damage, and engage in some pretty nasty crap. America has become the enemy of the freedom and rights of everyone else on the planet, but you keep acting like you're the fucking saviors of man kind, and the Champions of Liberty and Justice. That's completely delusional.

This moronic "Yarg, teh communists are teh evil and god said we must kill them" is getting tired.

Are you seriously saying "hey, let's destroy the lives of all Cubans so we can get regime change"? because if that's the case, suddenly I think America needs a regime change

The hysteria of the 60s is 5 decades behind you. Why don't you learn a little about the facts instead of just spouting gibberish?

No, it's the Platt Amendment (the one which allows Guantanamo) and the American embargo which has made Cuba a failed state.

You seem to know nothing at all about Cuba.

America has been fucking with Cuba for over 100 years, and seldom to the benefit of the Cubans.

Cuban cigars are desired because they're good.

I used to smoke cigars, and I live in a country where you can readily buy Cuban ones. They're not illegal for me, but they were damned fine cigars ... much much better than some of the other countries.

And, real Cuban rum ... also tasty stuff, and something they're quite good at making. In Cuba, it's affectionately called "Vitamin R".

Maybe to Americans they're better because they're illegal. But to the rest of the world they're better because they're better.

Cuba has pretty much an awesome climate for growing both tobacco and sugar cane.

Nah, focus groups will say that the logo for the surveillance state should look all happy and stuff. They want the public to see it as a benevolent force, become accustomed to it, and feel scared when they can't see it because the bad men could get them.

The eye of Sauron would work against that.

I'm beginning to think Reg the Blank from Max Headroom was a very prophetic character.

I hope someone figures out how to take one of these down.

What has to be remembered here is whatever they publicly tell us it does, secretly it does a shit load more, and will be used in ways they claim it won't be.

Mark my words, before long it will come out that they can track your car from the moment you leave your house. And it will be able to simultaneously do it with a lot of cars. And this information will abused by spy agencies. And some government lawyer in front of a secret court will argue that they need this and that it needs to remain a secret.

What they'll be able to tell about you incidentally and with just "the metadata" will scare the shit out of you. What they can do when they're specifically looking for you will make Enemy of the State look like amateur hour.

There is simply no way they wouldn't at this point, because this stuff has developed its own intertia.

Now, where the hell did I put my Guy Fawkes mask?

Soon Big Brother will have these everywhere.

This will get abused. This will get expanded in scope. This will be used by the spy agencies to do massive, warrantless surveillance. The government will claim they're allowed to monitor everything because terrorists, kiddie fiddlers, and copyright. Despite what they say, I assume this has as much capability as they can cram into it.

This is just more crap in the ever growing ubiquitous surveillance state, and yet more ways they'll find to make sure Big Brother has his boot firmly on our necks.

*sigh* There isn't enough tinfoil in the world for this to be spun in a way that isn't terrifying.

Of course, you would be perfectly insane to try to play chicken with it, no matter what you are piloting.

Unless of course it's a lighthouse. ;-)

I remember punching the side of 360K floppies to get another 360K on the other side.

Now you can buy a couple of gigs of USB drive next to the gum in the express lane at Wal Mart.

This stuff is awesome and all, but sometimes it's hard to really wrap my head around that pretty much everything about computers (except for physical size) is a billion times bigger than when I started using computers.

It really is hard to explain to people that at one point your entire digital life was about 20 floppy disks in a plastic case, and that what was once a completely hypothetical amount of storage is commonplace.