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Comment Why should we care? (Score 0) 30

Its always been a careful balance between patriotism and remembering the human cost of war.

I have no interest in remembering the Brutish Empire and will never forgive their raping and looting of other nations and non-white people. And the history remembered is mostly a white history on the Empire side.

China

Facial Recognition Algorithms -- Plus 1.8 Billion Photos -- Leads to 567 Arrests in China (scmp.com) 168

"Our machines can very easily recognise you among at least 2 billion people in a matter of seconds," says the chief executive and co-founder of Yitu. The South China Morning Post reports: Yitu's Dragonfly Eye generic portrait platform already has 1.8 billion photographs to work with: those logged in the national database and you, if you have visited China recently... 320 million of the photos have come from China's borders, including ports and airports, where pictures are taken of everyone who enters and leaves the country. According to Yitu, its platform is also in service with more than 20 provincial public security departments, and is used as part of more than 150 municipal public security systems across the country, and Dragonfly Eye has already proved its worth. On its very first day of operation on the Shanghai Metro, in January, the system identified a wanted man when he entered a station. After matching his face against the database, Dragonfly Eye sent his photo to a policeman, who made an arrest. In the following three months, 567 suspected lawbreakers were caught on the city's underground network. The system has also been hooked up to security cameras at various events; at the Qingdao International Beer Festival, for example, 22 wanted people were apprehended.

Whole cities in which the algorithms are working say they have seen a decrease in crime. According to Yitu, which says it gets its figures directly from the local authorities, since the system has been implemented, pickpocketing on Xiamen's city buses has fallen by 30 per cent; 500 criminal cases have been resolved by AI in Suzhou since June 2015; and police arrested nine suspects identified by algorithms during the 2016 G20 summit in Hangzhou. Dragonfly Eye has even identified the skull of a victim five years after his murder, in Zhejiang province.

The company's CEO says it's impossible for police to patrol large cities like Shanghai (population: 24,000,000) without using technology.

And one Chinese bank is already testing facial-recognition algorithms hoping to develop ATMs that let customers withdraw money just by showing their faces.

Comment Re:The problem is that there is no 'Test' in DevOp (Score 1) 116

Unit and integration level tests are not enough by themselves as the gap between the systems these tests run on and the actually production system is too great, and with the complexity cloud deployments allow this gap is growing. Yes, you can run a set of smoke tests in production but that doesn't hide the fact that most of the testing is not performed in a realistic environment.

Comment The problem is that there is no 'Test' in DevOps (Score 2) 116

I've always felt that integrating and keeping up to date test automation processes as the greatest challange in the CI/CD space. As business cycles get shorter, creating and maintaining the required set of test automation processes that can give you confidence in the final production release can be an immense challange. This together with the increasing complexity of cloud based systems has made the testing challange a really hard nut to crack.

Comment Alternate 'real world' experience (Score 1) 453

Recently for the first time I had experienced working with software developers from India. They were all recent migrants working with a consulting company. In my project team we had about 20 of these engineers that I had to manage and for the most part they were pretty good. On the plus side, they were hard working and keen to learn and best of all they were able to LISTEN and take responsibility on what was sometimes quite a stressful project. The negative side would be perhaps having the courage to take initiative and move the team in a new and better direction, but maybe that will come as experience grows.

Overall a pretty good experience. I would definitely work with some of them again.

Comment Re:Chinese buying the property, selling all resour (Score 1) 115

No. The Chinese alone are not responsible for exorbitant Australian property prices. They are just one of many factors. Larger factors include generous tax concessions (negative gearing and capital gains discounts) and the role of property investors (mostly mum's and dad's) buying their second (or more) property. Possibly the biggest factor is that everyone want's to buy in the inner-city areas of Melbourne and Sydney due to poor infrastructure and jobs growth outside these areas. House prices in other Australian capital cities are much lower in general and rarely in boom conditions.

Look at this article from the Murdoch press (aka. right side of politics) chinese property investment in Australia its a more balanced view of the effect of Chinese property investments.

Comment Blake's 7 (Score 1) 363

Oh you funny people are yet to mention Blake's 7. Which if nothing else had the depressing (very British in fact) yet utterly redeeming feature to kill off all the good guys after a few seasons. Unlike Star Wars/Trek in which the goodies survive to make it into even worse story lines and ruin our memories of when the show was good.

Plus no good guy ever did being a bastard quite like Avon.

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