As documented here

https://projects.propublica.or...

A friend who is a coder reckons that whilst it was as bad as you describe, it's now pretty competent if used carefully. Let's not assume it's useless as that may well be the route to foolish complacency!

We want it so it must be feasible

OR

I'm sure AI can do it :)

"A teaser?"

"Yeah."

"Er, what is ..."

"A teaser? Teasers are usually rich kids with nothing to do. They cruise around looking for planets which haven't made interstellar contact yet and buzz them."

"Buzz them?" Arthur began to feel that Ford was enjoying making life difficult for him.

"Yeah", said Ford, "they buzz them. They find some isolated spot with very few people around, then land right by some poor soul whom no one's ever going to believe and then strut up and down in front of him wearing silly antennae on their heads and making beep beep noises. Rather childish really."

Douglas Adams 'Hitch hiker's guide to the galaxy'

We'll never know. The interesting question is whether the Russians will ever know...

I suspect the joker is the word 'confirmed' in 'false confirmed'. If the person stopped is immediately able to demonstrate they aren't who the system says they are, are they going to bother to make sure the false stop is recorded. Similarly if the person is able to prove they weren't the person when they get to the police station, they may just get released without it being recorded on the system as a false positive for the facial recognition system. I entirely agree the figure is miraculous; I'm merely reporting the response to give an idea what the cops believe about the situation.

Here's a response to an FOI

https://www.whatdotheyknow.com...

It claims '1 false confirmed from over 641,533 face'

Every firm only has so much money to spend on such things as maintance. That's regardless of whether the firm is owned by the stockholders or the people - i.e. the state. There will always be pressure to spend less - the alternative is to increase prices, which is even less popular if the state owns the utility rather than a private company. Unfortunately the only solution to inadequate expenditure on maintaince is micro-management by regulation; state ownership won't make a difference.

For a demonstration of what happens when the state fails to maintain a utility, look at the history of the railway lines of Africa after independence. It was politically impossible to increase fares or to get money out of the government - most of that was getting looted by the President and his cronies - so railways got less and less safe until services ended. That was a 'socialist' solution.

Of course if power companies are owned by the state in the West they are merely competing for money with welfare, defence and tax cuts, and not, usually, the President's cronies' Swiss bank accounts. But even so they will tend to lose out and expenditure will be insufficient...

If so, the person identified as the author deserves the prize. If it wasn't, who cares.

Thank you

'Clearance rates for murder were much higher in the 1960s, with no video cameras, than they are now.'

I think this may be because in the 60s there was far less violent crime, so the only murders out there were domestics which are trivial to solve. It would interesting to test the idea.

As other companies sell the same things and all of them compete the price down. Of course the software industry has done a great job of preventing this from happening; Microsoft and Apple ensure that operating systems haven't got cheaper etc. etc. By contrast the crippling of the US car industry by foreign companies demonstrates how even the most apparently secure can be humbled, and the fading of such past giants as IBM is similarly a warning.