It doesn't follow that because things like anthrax are restricted that there is a chilling effect on debate about anthrax

If possession of anything to do with the events was prohibited, yes, in fact it would provide a chilling effect.

But if you were to buy the lab coat, or a box of unused envelopes that said "from the desk of..." of some idiot who mixed up some anthrax and put such a thing on display with a plaque explaining what it was, that would be both interesting and provocative of conversation where reason could be brought into play. Nazi uniform, medal, helmet, sigil, patch, letterhead, enigma machine? Same thing. I'll get to firearms below.

surely you must advocate anyone being able to possess things like nuclear weapons [...] but you do accept that there is a line and it's somewhere between "Nazi memorabilia" and "WMD".

As to your first point, no -- but the real question here is, does this have anything to do with the line you posit? Does that line even exist? Let's look closely and see.

With memorabilia, we are talking about, at best, things like daggers, officer's swords and Lugers. Usually we're not even talking about those, but instead, flags, patches, uniforms, medals, a whole range of non-weapon artifacts and records.

These things add no notable destructive power to the individual that making them illegal eliminates. None at all. Take the Luger, for instance. Can't own a Nazi Luger? No, but you can own other pistols, rifles, and etc. Many of them far more destructive, longer range, etc. Hunting is legal (yes, even in Germany) and of course knives and rolling pins and pitchforks and poisons and so forth are in every home. So clearly, we're not talking about anything to do with adding destructive power not already easily available. I have a Luger, you have a Desert Eagle, You're going to make the bigger hole, believe me. You have a quality .222 scoped rifle, I have a Luger, you can shoot me dead before I can even see you in the distance.

So memorabilia and WMD do not exist on a continuum from one to the other. Which was my whole point. WMD are dangerous force-multipliers, hence deserve some special treatment. Memorabilia is not, and does not. But wait!

In the (rare, enormously expensive) case where a historical object actually might be a force multiplier -- say we were talking about a Messerschmidt fighter or a Tiger tank -- then there are other laws that reasonably control ownership, arming, firing and operation of such a thing -- Nazi or otherwise. That would exist on a continuum with WMD. Because it's pretty much that. The amount of damage you could do with a working Tiger (or fighter aircraft) before you could be stopped would be amazing (we've actually seen this happen in the US with older US tanks.) But note that the reason the working Tiger or fighter would be prohibited has nothing at all to do with the fact that is an historical object; it's because they can crush things, blow huge holes in things, drop bombs, all the while being basically unstoppable until very scarce resources are brought to bear upon the machine in question. And in turn, those remedies may create more of a mess. So no tanks or fighters without oversight (and usually, permanent neutering. Concrete down the tank barrel, removal of machine guns and bomb racks, etc.)

Now, WMD. Does that change what an individual can do, multiply their force as does the Tiger tank? Of course it does. More so. So you see, memorabilia do not exist along a continuum with Tiger tanks and WMD. Therefore, the rules applied to WMD should not be applied to memorabilia. Your posited "line" does not exist. It's apples and strudel. No comparison. Memorabilia does not provide force multiplication.

It's only banned in Germany, where it continues to have a very real and measurable effect. While a single flag may not re-start the mainstream Nazi movement, there are still strong far right groups who wish to go back to those ideas.

And you actually think that pointing special laws at these people, denying them the usage of the symbols and historical artifacts that represent the history of their outlook, will make them more tractable? You cannot possibly believe that if you have any sense of human nature at all.

Think about prohibition: what did it do (first time)? People continued to drink like crazy, and enormous levels of violence and resentment resulted. So, the problem was not addressed, but clearly, new problems arose as direct consequences.

Now, what did prohibition II do (the drug war)? People continued to drug like crazy, and then the market got even larger, and again, it fomented violence and resentment. Not to mention we've lost about a trillion dollars to it over 40 years, not even counting lost tax revenue. So, the problem was not addressed, but clearly, new problems arose as direct consequences. Again.

Now, prohibition of sex work. What happened? Universally, sex work continued -- everywhere. But sex workers get poor or no care, poor or no legal protection, disease rates are high, and the sex workers (quite rightfully) think society has dealt them a terrible, unjustified hand. So, the problem was not addressed, and clearly, additional problems resulted and continue to plague us. (***Just as a somewhat humorous aside, Germany is one of the few places that actually recognized that laws against prostitution are stupid and made at least some effort to correct the insane legal situation. Most countries, like the USA, are still in the grip of the insane proposition that denying women agency over their own bodies is a good thing. It'd be funny if it weren't so sad.)

Now, prohibit Nazi memorabilia to those who really want it and already harbor resentment to the society around them and what will happen? I leave it as an exercise for you, but of course the answer is blatantly obvious.

All of that bodes poorly enough for any form of prohibition based on "we think you can't handle your own choices." But it gets worse. By requiring people who make those choices anyway (and they will, as all attempts at personal choice prohibition demonstrate without any question) to hide them in an underground community, you lose the ability for society in general to monitor what is going on. Bad enough that the violence and criminality arise from this, but now, if we accept your argument that these right-wing groups are dangerous by their very nature, you have caused them to submerge and operate in secret, simply by outlawing trappings and historical objects. When something really bad is cooking, will you get any warning? It's a lot less likely. And of course, there's the immediate problem created as a consequence of declaring these people criminals for a mere personal choice: you have now put them on the wrong side of the law with their full knowledge of the fact, and so other criminal acts by them won't change that status... so resistance to committing other crime drops, among a group where you have done something to really make them angry at the system. Could it be any more unwise?

Prohibition of personal choice is a bad idea. Period. Laws that make these things illegal have huge failure rates in addition to the broad swath of violent and antisocial unintended consequences.

Listen, thanks for engaging me on these things. Wonderful to have such a conversation. :)

Well, that difference would make it patentable...

You call it pedantry, but I'm proud as fuck about things that my ancestors did without any input whatsoever from me personally. You go, ancient awesome guys!

The Kinect 2 and Realsense devices use time-of-flight cameras to produce a depth image (albeit low-res) along with the RGB image.

The image is not 3D. Were it rendered back using all the data captured, and given that the data was of adequate resolution to be useful in image reproduction, you would not see a 3D result. You would see a result strictly silhouetted from the shooting POV. All information is acquired from a single perspective.

If you're at all familiar with graphics programming, think of it as a Z-buffer camera for your phone, drone or living room.

Even that is going too far. The information that is used to prepare a z-buffer is a full set of 3D data. The z-buffer is generated relative to the user's POV, and can change at any time along with the user's POV, thus being able to reconstruct a scene from every/any angle. That is not true of data from a TOF camera, which cannot be used to reconstruct the scene at all beyond a fixed POV.

The difference comes about because with a classic z-buffer in the output path of a 3D rendering system, the data is 3D on input and the z-buffer serves to filter for any desired POV, taking any arbitrary and variable viewing angle into account. It is a mechanism that is used to produce either mono or stereo data in order to convert any portion of the scene to a human-eye compatible view, either mono or stereo, and when coded for stereo, produces image pairs complete with parallax information as well. When data is supplied from one POV that includes z-depth, that information cannot be used to reproduce the scene in 3D because it contains very little information about it -- it's not actually 3D. It might be more accurately described as stereovision+LIDAR. Basically what it boils down to is, if you have 3D data, a z-buffer can be (and is) used to get you a view from any angle. If you capture the data through a virtual z-buffer (only Z data from one POV), then the scene cannot be used to get you a view from any angle. They do not provide the same functionality, and it is misleading to imply they do.

Acquisition of real-world 3D scene data requires capture from all angles simultaneously. Just as generation of a z-buffer requires full 3D data on every object in the scene in order to produce a result. You could not, for instance, produce a 3D hologram from what you have acquired as a result of stereo+LIDAR. You could from the data that is going into a Z-buffer, though.

Still, selfies of boobs. I think you made a couple of good points. Roundly.

the article doesn't mention stereo 3D at all

I didn't say it did. TFA (and TFS) title is: " 3D cameras are about to go mainstream. "

3D (X, Y and Z; or width, height, and depth) data is not acquired by these cameras. Therefore, these are not 3D cameras. Therefore 3D cameras are not "about to go mainstream."

It mentions Realsense and Kinect sensors, but it fails to mention how they work.

They work by acquiring stereo 2D data from a fixed viewing angle. That's two acquisitions from almost the same vantage point, which provides a static illusion of depth via capture of parallax. It does not actually contain depth information on a per-frame basis. They are not 3D cameras.

So naturally those depth cameras can't sense the depth of surfaces that are visually obscured, and no, they can't see the back of your cube

Yes, that's exactly what I said. :)

but couple them with accelerometers (for dead reckoning of position & orientation), colour[sic] cameras and machine vision algorithms (for refining that reckoning), and walk around the cube

You can do this with one 2D camera. However, in order to do this, the reconstructed frame rate goes from acceptable to pitiful -- No one is going to be interested in a playback of the Bar Mitzvah that proceeds at one frame per walk-around. A "3D camera" would capture 3D information. Just as an infrared camera captures infrared, a 2D camera captures 2D information, and an ultraviolet camera captures ultraviolet information. It is absurd to characterize a stereo camera pair as a "3D camera", even without considering the bewilderment that will ensue when they actually arrive due to the dimwitted hijacking of the term "3D" by marketing buffoons.

"3D" is short for "three dimensions." That's what it means; that's what it's always meant; that's what it should mean. Suppose I sold you a "3D rendering system" that turned out to only let you specify X and Y co-ordinates for your objects. And when you complained, as you surely would, I tried to feed you a line about how "look, if you simply build, and then render, 2D models of the same object as it would appear from every possible viewing angle, and then display them one at a time, it's almost the same!" your next phone call would probably be to the better business bureau.

chances are you'll actually own (and find a few uses for) such a device yourself in the next few years.

I have owned a Kinect since just about day one. And I am well aware of its nature -- which is not 3D.

The degree of disingenuous wool-pulling over the eyes here is on a level with someone selling you an RGB camera that only captures red and green channels. There's no possible justification for it. None. The resistance to the facts brought about by personal investment in the marketing claptrap is an amazing thing to see -- something that is essentially a particularly rabid form of confirmation bias, where victims of misinformation deny reality because they are unable to admit they've been hoodwinked -- it is one of the things to look for any time propaganda has been drilled into gullible consumers:

o "Hey, bought a new car audio amp, I see!"
x "Yes, it's a Pyle. It's 4000 watts!"
o "No. Dude. It isn't 4000 watts. Someone at Pyle is laughing their head off at you right now."
x "bitch, it says RIGHT HERE that it's 4000 watts!"
o "Sigh."

Essentially the same conversation:

o "Hey, bought a new game motion controller accessory, I see!"
x "Yes, it's a Kinect. It's a 3D motion controller!"
o "No. Dude. It's not a 3D motion controller. someone at Microsoft is laughing at you right now."
x "bitch, it says RIGHT HERE that it's 3D!"
o "Sigh."

In a consumer video context, when actual 3D imaging becomes available, there is going to be considerable confusion due to this arbitrary and fundamentally inaccurate usage of the term "3D."

I thought any geek would understand this by now. Stereo is not 3D. It isn't even "2 and 1/2 D" as some like to call it. It's stereo. No more, no less.

Positive and negative freedom

I went a-googling and found the source; some work by Isaiah Berlin. I can't say I'm impressed with his choice of terminology, but I get it now. Positive liberty is supposed to be understood as self-mastery, particularly in choosing who runs one's society, and is degraded when elites force behaviors upon the citizenry (which would include all of the examples I gave above, btw.) Berlin's own explanations of what positive liberty is: He says "when positive liberty is misconstrued as goals imposed from the third-person that the individual is told they "should" rationally desire, and the justifications for political totalitarianism" -- precisely what suppression of historical artifacts and speech embodies. He goes on to warn that when misconstrued positive freedom impinges upon negative freedom, there's a problem; and that appears to be exactly what's happening with controls on your speech and ownership of historical artifacts. It's very interesting that you got the definitions so tangled up -- because he warns against precisely that, and suggests the likely cause is entitled third parties conflating the two types of freedom inaccurately. Berlin was clearly not advocating what you are advocating; he described such things as anathema to liberty.

To address your specific points, the restrictions on Nazi memorabilia are to protect the majority [...] as history demonstrates the rise of Nazism can have equally devastating consequences

They do not "protect the majority." From a practical viewpoint, Nazi memorabilia are perfectly legal in the US, this has been uniformly the case for the last 75 years, and the majority has suffered not one whit from this. Furthermore, the concepts behind these laws are no better than witch hunting (and likely descended from it): the idea that should you hold an object that was associated with an evil idea, that you would become evil. The entire idea is superstitious claptrap, and furthermore, does nothing to stop people from thinking about Nazi concepts free of their history, while chilling speech about the artifacts and the history of the artifacts, the very thing that would paint our experience with Nazism accurately as the nightmare it actually was. These laws are, bluntly, anti-liberty of all kinds, and dangerous as well. The precedent is horrific.

As to the second point, history does not show that ideas arise from artifacts. Ideas gain traction when they gain acceptance; and one does not acquire acceptance of such ideas by handling, observing, buying, or selling an artifact. Were it so, then my ownership of a Luger from WWII would have me citing Mein Kampf at you. Even Erwin Rommel, a high general in the Nazi war machine, completely surrounded by. and even clothed in Nazi paraphernalia, recipient of many additional benefits if he did accept Nazism (and recipient of threats against his family because he did not), rejected the whole thing, lock, stock and barrel -- and lost his life as a direct result. It's clearly not about artifacts, and it never was. It's about ideas, how they apply to the current situation, who is pushing them, and how charismatic they are. Frankly, without Hitler or similar, and a society of the mindset of 1930's Germany, you will almost certainly never see a Nazi nation again. You absolutely won't see it because dealers can sell objects to collectors.

It's the same as the restrictions on WMD in the US

No. What are the consequences if someone drops a Nazi flag on London, or Reginald sells a Nazi uniform to Smythe over there? Nothing whatsoever of note. Smythe might be moved so far as to say "Mm, yes, Hitler's minions. Nasty bugger, he was." Now what are the consequences if someone drops a 10kT nuke on old Smythe? They don't bear much thinking about, do they? Comparing the two is an exercise in absurdity. Restricting WMD does protect people (ours, and yours), while restricting memorabilia does nothing good, and some fairly serious bad.

I'd point out that the US has no-fly lists which seem to be far worse.

Exactly correct. As I pointed out in my previous post, we are not what we should be. The TSA and everything associated with it is a consequence of a power grab predicated upon a systematically manufactured hysteria. There are even worse examples; massive invasions of privacy; repression of speech; arbitrary confiscation of property; ex post facto laws; shaming; warrentless searches; torture; acts of international aggression whose only benefits are to spin certain portions of our economy up; the creation and the locking down of a permanent lower class; the imprisonment of about 3 million citizens, at least 2/3rds of who were taken consequent to the drug war, an entirely anti-liberty undertaking pursued and propagandized by those who refused to learn from history (prohibition) and who never understood the concept of liberty in the first place. And more.

I'm interested in the principles, and so am trying (and perhaps not doing so well) within the context of your responses to look into the fundamentals actually called for by the various approaches to governance, as you brought the idea of different concepts of freedom to the table. Perhaps that's just so I don't have to think about how badly my country has been wounded by the ruling oligarchy. Believe me, I know that the USA of today is no shining example to anyone, quite the contrary, it mostly stands as a cautionary tale for anyone who really looks beneath the surface jingoism pushed by our government and the media. But I remain confident that our constitution was, and remains, the document clearly describing what has been thus far the most advanced form of government on the face of the planet. It's just that we pay so little attention to it!

Passports

I was wholly mistaken WRT passport handling in the EU. I looked into it, and it seems to be a mostly eastern European and Asian practice. My apologies. I don't know how it got associated with the EU in mind.

The automakers would dearly love to ditch the dealership model of sales and go for direct sales.

Why did GM not do this in its recent bankruptcy in every state that allows direct sales?

Or you mean an industry wanting a new entrant in to that industry to be subject to the same regulations the rest of the industry is forced to follow, right?

You fail at reading comprehension. In this case, it is the car dealers who are trying to introduce new regulations that would disadvantage Tesla.

Even if legally in the clear, just dealing with an LEA when someone uses your machine as a child porn host is going to be unpleasant.

Imagine this in the UK:

Police:"We think you have kiddy porn on your computer, what are the contents of these encrypted files?"
You: "I don't know"
Police: "Tell us the password"
You: "I don't know it"
Judge: "Go to jail until you tell us the password!"

TFA accurately describes using multiple 2D scene acquisitions in order to build a 3D model by trading time and resolution for position.

TFA does not in any way describe "3D cameras."

3D cameras would acquire a 3D representation of subject matter directly. Such cameras do exist; but they are not about to "go mainstream" in any meaningful or accurate sense of the term.

Imagine a 12" cube with numbers on every face. Place a stereo (likely dual sensor / dual lens) camera in front of it, collinear with any one of the six axis. Acquire image. Now, tell me what number is on the face of the cube furthest from the camera.

You can't? Of course you can't. Because you didn't acquire anything even close to 3D data on the object.

Now place the same cube in front of a system that looks at it from, say, 32 directions on a plane parallel to the floor and acquire. Now you can tell me what is on the far side of the cube, because in this case, something somewhat closer to 3D data acquisition was actually performed (and can be used to immediately give you views at angles and distances of much finer granularity than 32.) It's still not actually 3D (what's on the bottom of the cube? The top? For that matter, what's inside it?) but even with the fairly reasonable limits of opacity, at least a system of this kind would be able to present you with the appropriate representation if it was informed that you had moved your viewpoint horizontally or circularly relative to the data's representation on the display device and on essentially the same viewing plane as the camera set.

In the EU we have more positive freedom [...] The US has extreme negative freedom

I find your characterization to be inaccurate. Freedom means the ability to do something, as opposed to the ability to not do something. Every time people are restricted from some action, their freedom diminishes, which would be going in a negative direction.

I would not argue with the contention that in many ways, freedom in the US is diminishing; but I would insist that this is not a condition that is justified by our constitution. We never really were able to meet the standards of our own constitution, and today, we are presently being subjected to unauthorized government action that is eroding our constitutionally guaranteed freedoms quite severely in a number of areas. Ideally, something would arrest this process, but it doesn't look like there's much hope for it. So I'll be primarily discussing our constitution and our ideals here; please understand that I am well aware that the reality is often "other."

In the EU and within member countries of the EU, restrictions on what you may do as an individual, harming no one, extend beyond matters of speech. Nazi memorabilia -- sale, purchase, collection -- serves to demonstrate how individual freedoms are repressed by state actors to the detriment of the citizens (and which also provides a rather sobering mechanism to suppress history.) Collecting people's passports at their hotel demonstrates another way individual freedom is restricted, in this case, the freedom to travel and the freedom to control one's own data. Being forbidden to keep arms limits the ability to defend home, family, business and employees from criminal elements, and that's a very significant negative.

I honestly do not see how these kinds of things can be described as "positive freedoms"; they directly reduce freedom without providing a gain in freedom elsewhere, and so seem to me to be inherently negative with regard to freedom overall. You would have to present an excellent defense of your contention in these contexts to change my outlook on this.

Most rights generate limits when colliding with other rights, whether they be the same right, or another. A classic go-to is "your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins." The key to making this idea work as best it can is a very careful determination of where the nose is; in the case of speech, if the "nose" consists of simply hearing something as it does in some places outside the USA, I would assert that the limit is set incorrectly. When government uses coercion backed by force to limit one's ability to express an opinion in a public venue, characterizing that as a positive seems more than wrong; it seems ridiculous.

When speech does more than communicate words -- for instance, should it fall into liable or slander -- then limits arise, because we're no longer dealing only with communication. We're dealing with harmful aggression in a very real and concrete sense. In the USA, as elsewhere, reputation is something of value, and attempts to damage it unjustly are viewed quite dimly by most of our body of law. Other examples include coercive speech, other threats, harmful volume levels, and various types of concrete incitement to action. So there's no perfect freedom of speech here, nor do I think there should be, but in the matter of expressing one's opinion and the communication of ideas, we're definitely quite free, and a good deal more so than those in the EU are in some of the member states.

The US has extreme negative freedom, that is freedom to do what you like without interference.

Although I think your characterization of "negative" is inaccurate, I'd be very interested to see what you have to say in regard to the bad things you think we are free to do without interference. Again I am speaking of our constitution and our ideals, not the current state of unauthorized law, which restrict us as much, and in some ways more, than laws in some of the EU members states do.

One of the cornerstones of democracy is is that no-one has too much power, and the interests and rights of individuals are balanced against each other.

Well, one thing to keep in mind is that the USA was not designed as a democracy. It is a constitutional republic with a (very) few nods to democratic procedures in the selection of a small group of extremely powerful rulers who run things however they so choose. Although it is fair to say that overall our governmental mechanisms draw from many systems of government, we are much closer to a republic than we are to a democracy by design. Our comparatively recent fall into oligarchy notwithstanding. Underlying it all was the intent to balance rights just as you describe. Unfortunately, that didn't work out due to a critical flaw in our system -- the failure to establish any means of penalizing the legislatures or the courts when they exceed the limits of constitutional authorization.

For myself, I try to live and act within the bounds that I understand the constitution to have informed me of to the extent that it does not bring me into conflict with the law. But when I discuss rights and liberty, you're running into something more -- not my actions as constrained by coercion, but my thoughts, that is, my understanding of how it is our citizens and government actors were intended to behave in the context of what our government was actually authorized to do by our constitution.

People's right to know about abuses of the law with

..with not being sued for contributory copyright infringement (or whatever it is called). Probably.

Quite a few US states have outlawed the death penalty. Of those that do allow it, most execute single-digit numbers of prisoners annually. Some don't even tally 1 execution per year. TBH, if the choice is between life in the prison system (30 years? 50, 60?) or a painless death, I'd take door #2. Unfortunately anti-death-penalty advocates have been taking away the "painless" part. It's similar to how the "war on drugs" has actually exacerbated drug-related problems.
Recently, states have had to experiment with untested, and not wholly effective, lethal injection drugs due to the suppliers worrying about death penalty-related PR. That's caused several needlessly painful executions. Perhaps the most completely painless option is nitrogen asphyxiation under heavy sedation - but whenever that gets suggested people come out with "OMG they want to gas prisoners like Nazis!" Never mind the fact Nazis used a completely different gas (Zyklon B) that kills by a very painful mode of action...