Reading the link, it appears that they're not identifying criminals qua criminals—this isn't a Minority Report method, which the blurb suggested.

It seems they're identifying individuals by their gait, so that they can extract that info from CCTV recordings of crimes, and looking for that person elsewhere. The gait info appears to be easier to extract from fuzzy videos than, say, faces.

Unfortunately, they throw around a “99% accuracy” statistic without giving enough info for it to be meaningful. Is that 1% false positive? false negative? For all they say, it could mean in a crowd of 1000, 10 will be flagged.

Of course, some bright person will now suggest we analyze all public camera recordings to find putative criminals. There's no problem if you've done nothing wrong....

I read TFA, and nowhere does it mention the subjects of the patents in question. What are they claiming? What's the prior art? Without that info this is just a “The trolls are coming! The trolls are coming!” piece of hysteria. Anyone know what it's about? I'm certainly not going to try to figure it out from the patents themselves. My sanity's worth more than that.

So by the time that you've spent months writing a spec, 50% of what you specified will not be what is actually required.

It's worse than that. In all too many cases, users don't know what they want (though they'll describe it in detail). During the time spent in specification, the users will continue to agree with what they've already said. It's only when they get their hands on the widget that the shoe starts to pinch, and they start changing their tune. Therefore, in those cases it makes a lot of sense to get a dummy UI out fast for them to dirty their hands on: only then will the truth come out.

Sounds like an autonomous drone with the wings taken off....

Now they don't have to confine themselves to 2-D naked women.

I clicked on the Silent Circle URL, and was immediately offered a cookie. (Which I declined—thanks Firefox.)

What good will it do to have a medium in 2015 that

is highly heat and water resistant, capable of holding data for hundreds of millions of years,

if by 2023 you're only able to buy the readers on Ebay, used?

Sure, they'll let it through: £ :-)

Choose ``HTML Formatted'' in the menu below the text-entry box, and type in ``£''.

Alternatively, just cut and paste the character, and ignore the A-ring that /. sticks in front: £

I, too, came here to mention IHNMaIMS. It's one of two works I've read only once because I'm too scared to go back.

The other is Dracula. I started it one evening and finished early the next morning because I was literally too scared to put it down unfinished. I'm thinking that after ~40 years, maybe it's worth a re-read. I Have No Mouth..., never.