Here in the US, we don't have democracy now. We have a two party, democratic REPUBLIC. The politicians can pretty much do whatever they want after they have been elected because the media has conditioned us to believe that we have only two parties from which to choose (i.e. - "bipartisan").
The two party system in the states has its beginnings in the divide between mercantile Hamilton and the agrarian Jefferson in Washington's first Administration.
"Party discipline" doesn't exist in the states as any European or Canadian would understand it.
The major parties are loosely bound coalitions based on issues, geography, personalities and so on. But a loosely bound coalition can be remarkably enduring and effective.
The third party in the states forms around a single issue or set of issues and a lone charismatic leader - when one or the other are extinguished, the party dies as well.
In American culture, three is the unlucky number. The also-ran.
This is going to be interesting to see how this ends up playing out. My guess is that eventually they will just the firewall between permanently, or maybe not. I'm just glad I don't live in china.
nothing says "i've been shot" like having a vibrator strapped to your chest.
I bought a mac mini just to run Plex, it's just that nice.
Everyone abuses their power, that's the point in acquiring power in the first place.
If we block them they block us and soon we'll be traveling to Alaska via Russia (which I've heard you can see via some of the houses on the coast)
The problem is lazy engineers who just changed the bulbs used instead of taking into consideration what that change would do to the total design of the traffic light. A good engineer would understand that without the extra heat produced by the old incandescent bulbs the design of the traffic light would need to be changed to prevent snow buildup.
The team drew inspiration from screening techniques in molecular biology, where a multitude of candidate organisms or compounds are screened in parallel to find those that have a particular property of interest. Rather than building a single model and seeing how well it could recognize visual objects, the team constructed thousands of candidate models, and screened for those that performed best on an object recognition task.
Without reading the article, because that would be silly, this sounds a lot like using genetic algorithms. Not actually a new technique.
Go ahead. The stalkers of the world will always have the upper hand as long as we try and keep this genie in the bottle. We need to make the technology a two-way street and get rid of the myth of privacy. I don't have a problem giving away my personal infomation as long as I know who has access to it and I'm able to get the same back in kind. Point a camera at my house, if you wish.... just as so long as I get to watch the live feed from yours.
Imagine if this catches on and everyone starts wearing one and uploading their "lives" online. If people freaked about Google Streetview invading their "privacy" that will be nothing compared to what will happen when this tsunami hits. If each photo or video stream is encoded with the date, time and GPS coordinates and you combine it with some good facial recognition software we can finally bring back the ancestral "village" where everyone knows what everyone else is doing, all the time, everywhere. Sunlight is the best disinfectant and these little devices can help shine it everywhere.
What's better than having a program on your desktop that can search through your files, how about an online database of your files that you can access from any internet connected computer in the world (www.refbase.net).
Happiness is twin floppies.