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Comment Re:UK police false positives on facial recognition (Score 2) 86

Thanks, that is very interesting. But something smells fishy.

1. 1 false positive from "over 641,533 faces" seems too good to be true. Very few systems of any kind are that good, and facial recognition? I don't buy it. And that's an oddly specific number to be "over". It does not pass the smell test.

2. "Shows no bias" is similarly too good to be true and doesn't pass the smell test. Didn't Apple have some problem in the last year or two with trying to spiff up faces, where black skin didn't work as well? "No bias" is not credible.

3. "Zero unlawful arrests" is weasel words. Just because an arrest has conformed to various legal standards, such as having a warrant, being cautioned, not beaten up, etc, does not make it a proper arrest. Lots of people are acquitted at trial after having been lawfully arrested.

4. The rate has not changed. Well, yes, it must have, if this is the false positive rate, since it presumably once upon a time had 0 false positives and now has 1, and the denominator has been increasing all this time unless the first 641,533 faces were all recognized in the first day.

5. The only credible answer. There may well be no national false positive rate.

But it's an interesting response. Thanks.

Comment Re:Yeah what you want is irrelevant (Score 1) 86

I don't know what she's been doing. But from the fact that it took 40 years to track her down, and that only because a non-cop found her, I'd say the evidence is strong I know what she *hasn't* been doing -- terrorism, or training terrorists.

Seriously, if she's been living for 40 years training terrorists who haven't done anything to draw attention to themselves or her, she's either been running a false flag terrorist school with the government's connivance, or she hasn't been running a terrorism school.

If society wants to punish her for what she did 40 years ago, fine. But stop pretending the police took a dangerous terrorist off the streets.

Comment Re:A 67 year old woman living in hiding (Score 1) 86

Might DOES make right; that's how government works. One definition is a monopoly on "legal" violence within their territory, although they aren't very good at it, considering how many riots there were in 2020 and the two autonomous zones where city governments surrendered their monopoly for a spell.

Comment Insufficient and misleading data (Score 3, Insightful) 86

If you want to make the case that government should use facial recognition, you'll need some real data.

* One success ... how many false positives -- how many people were wrongly tagged? How many false negatives -- how many times was this woman seen but not tagged? Was she a hermit and this was her first public appearance in 40 years?

* How recent were the pictures of her which were the basis of her being tagged? Do you really want us to believe the only success story you have is based on artificially aging her photograph by 40 years?

Space

Blue Origin Rocket Exploded Thursday Night During Hot-Fire Test (cbsnews.com) 73

Spaceflight Now shared their video of the explosion, which the Orlando Sentinel describes as showing Blue Origin's rocket "become engulfed in flames. The fireball expands out and covers the entire launch pad as the fuselage of the rocket can be seen crumbling into the flames."

Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos said on X.com "It's too early to know the root cause but we're already working to find it. Very rough day, but we'll rebuild whatever needs rebuilding and get back to flying. It's worth it." (SpaceX founder Elon Musk posted "Sorry to see this, I hope you recover quickly.")

It's unclear how this will impact future launches. "The rocket was destroyed," reports CBS News, "and as the smoke cleared, there was no sign of the erector-gantry used to move the New Glenn from its hangar to the pad and to raise it from horizontal to vertical. Likewise, one of two tall lightning towers was no longer visible." It was the first such on-pad explosion at the Cape since a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket blew up on nearby pad 40 on Sept. 1, 2016... Blue Origin only has one New Glenn pad, the one that was damaged in the Thursday test. The New Glenn, which has launched three times, is a heavy lift rocket designed to compete head-to-head with SpaceX Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets. During New Glenn's most recent flight in April, an upper stage malfunction prevented a commercial internet satellite from reaching its planned orbit...

The New Glenn destroyed Thursday was to send 48 Leo internet satellites owned by Amazon into space [which were not on board for the hot-fire test]

Blue Origin posted on X.com that "Debris from our recent hotfire anomaly may wash ashore in the coming days/weeks. If you encounter any debris, do not touch or approach it for your safety."

"Spaceflight is unforgiving, and developing new heavy-lift launch capability is extraordinarily difficult..." NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman posted on X.com. "âWe will provide information on any impacts to the Artemis and Moon Base programs as it becomes available."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader symbolset for sharing the news.

Comment Re:Hybrids are kinda "ick" .... (Score 1, Informative) 157

Ultimately, it was just a car lugging around all the things required for an internal combustion engine AND electric vehicle parts at the same time. Double the complexity and a rolling compromise.

That was my experience owning a hybrid. Ultimately, the controller part that mated the EV and ICE vehicle parts was what failed, and the cost of trying to fix that negated pretty much any fuel savings we'd ever get out of the vehicle.

A plug-in hybrid with a proper battery that can run as an EV for short trips and use ICE for backup makes a lot more sense. The range extender hybrids are just extra complexity for what's just a hack to reduce fuel consumption. But to maximize that fuel consumption, you kinda need to tweak your driving patterns to optimize for EV behaviour, which is also a technique that can get significant fuel savings on an ICE car.

Comment Re:Wildfires in outer space? (Score 1) 77

Got me curioser, so I googled it. One source said what I thought:

https://www.scientificamerican...

"Because gravity is necessary for density differences to arise, neither buoyancy nor convection occur in a zero-gravity environment such as space. Consequently, the combustion products accumulate around the flame, preventing sufficient oxygen from reaching it and sustaining the combustion reaction. Ultimately the flame goes out."

and

"Researchers learned that flames extinguish themselves."

and

"Oxygen could still reach a flame in a gravity-free environment if someone blew the gas into the flame or let it "diffuse" in. It is the diffusion process that spreads the scent of a perfume in a room without air circulation: the perfume slowly mixes with the air to try to achieve a uniform distribution. This process, however, is too slow to sustain a flame."

Other sites don't directly contradict this, but say fires in the ISS are dangerous because smoke doesn't rise and set off smoke detectors on ceilings like in homes, so they install smoke detectors in the ventilation ducts. Also that fires on the ISS can survive on lower levels of oxygen than humans, and thus are much more dangerous if they linger on. That's confusing; if the smoke doesn't rise, then wouldn't it smother the fire like the first site says? But if the ISS has moving air from ventilation ducts, maybe that is what feeds oxygen to the fires.

Thanks for tricking me into not being so lazy :-) But all I learned is that I don't know.

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