Sad that from the title I initially thought this had to do with people surveillance.
The time is now that we need laws to protect privacy and prevent governments and private companies from mass surveillance using AI etc. without any safeguards. It should be forbidden to use face recognition in public.
> It should be forbidden to use face recognition in public
Why ? Not that I'm for more government surveillance, I'm just curious what's the argument about face recognition ? Is there something about it worse or is it a generic "let's stop any advance in gov surveillance" ?
It must be a special part of the curriculum at Journalist School.
I imagine the conversation goes something like this....
"No Mr Young Journalist, you cannot use the metric system, and no Mr Young Journalist, you cannot use the imperial system. You must ALWAYS refer to items in relative proportion to some random object of your choice be that swimming pools, football pitches, jumbo jets or bags of sugar ... whatever takes your fancy when you get out of bed that morning, but it must NEVER be metric or imperial measurements".
No, it’s just poor writing.
You pick a consistent measurement metric so the audience can judge, compare, and contrast between various items you’ve touched on.
They're not comparing things to each other, so they don't really have to be that consistent. "Less than five sachets of sugar" is a little more precise than saying "very lightweight", which is a useful level of precision as no one in the audience will know what a typical IR sensor should weigh, but greater precision is of no use to them since they will never handle one outside of a finished product, if at all. Also very low as well as very high weights are harder to relate to for most people, which is why elephants and sheets of paper are used so readily. If done well, this isn't bad style at all, though it is reliably off-putting to people used to read technical documents where precision levels carry a different kind of weight.
When it's put in the context of older generations weighing several killograms, surely stating the absolute amount would still bring enough context for the reader to understand the severity of change? Or what about referring to the weight both in grams and using a metaphor at the same time?
In a non-technical piece like this, it’s not the precision, it’s the consistency.
If you measure things in sweetener packets, everything is in sweetener packets.
As long as shrinkflation is keeping up with the decreasing sensor price over time, then this measure may hold true for longer than if metric or imperial measures were used
It’s good they specified sugar as sugar substitutes have wildly different densities. Imagine the confusion if they said “sweetener!” That’s the sort of stuff that makes space missions fail.
One wonders if the packets were US specification (a precise 2 - 4 grams) or the much looser Polish designation (5 - 10 grams). It's critical to get to the bottom of this: what is the SI standard for sugar sachet?
Weird thing is that I don't actually have a connection to five sachets of sugar. People might frequently handle one or two sachets at a time and can conceive of the idea that five isn't that much heavier but at that point we might as well write "... and weighs as little as 20 grams, or roughly five sachets of sugar"
Ah that's something I didn't even consider - and I guess a lot of people don't even consume things that we normally add individual sachets of sugar to. At least giving the weight in grams gives you something to go by.
Ultimately it's not a huge deal, it is still a little odd though!
War on the rocks has a good article about camouflage and the various different forms needed in the current environment. The training tanks that fold up for storage but can be remotely driven and generate appropriate thermal signatures are clever. But the manufacturer's website doesn't offer much to the public. https://warontherocks.com/2021/04/to-survive-deceive-decoys-...
> Gargoyles are no fun to talk to. They never finish a sentence. They are adrift in a laser-drawn world, scanning retinas in all directions, doing background checks on everyone within a thousand yards, seeing everything in visual light, infrared, millimeter-wave radar, and ultrasound all at once.
Peltier camouflage tiles to the rescue. You will be cold on outside AND you can keep warm on the inside. There were demos where a tank was camouflaged in infrared as a cow or a car.
Ah! Sounds like hesitation! If you are hesitating to ID a target that could mean you're about to die or you're lucky. Camouflage doesn't need to be perfect, it buys time. Those with better camouflage are more likely to have the advantage of seeing their target first.
It's also why stealth aircraft don't need to be perfect- they are more likely to see their enemy first.
Now you have to go around shooting every cow, terrorizing locals, and giving the enemy ammo for propaganda purposes. Shooting every cow also gives away your position.
They are already under development. The main issue is that modern anti missiles systems require a ton of power. So even going into a passive turret mode needs engines. There's a case to be made for having diesel engines so you can run the turret of a few cylinders and not have to have a all or nothing turbine.
It will always be a trade off between lower signature and protection/awareness.
Active protection systems have radars that will light you up like a Xmas tree, tanks also have a lot of EW gear on them that even before hardkill APS became common used a ton of power and increases their signature.
Silent/LowSig mode is just another tool in their toolkit. If they know that the threat landscape allows them to go into low signature mode safely and that it would improve their combat effectiveness they now will be able to do so.
> “Giorgio Licciardi, an expert on collecting hyperspectral data from orbit at the Italian Space Agency, in Rome, says the technology even detects buried anti-tank mines. (Soil on top of them is typically drier.)”
Maybe in a controlled setting they can detect mines, but there are plenty of other reasons for dry soil, i.e. hard to detect consistently without false positives. For tank camouflage that's all you need, something that blends in with false positives.
I'm already imaging the integrated helmet AR HUD, with a (remote-operated) switch that just appends "in the style of Pyro's hallucinations in Team Fortress 2" to the prompt for the transformer sitting between your eyes and the helmet cams...
> IIRC, the Bradley got armour because it looked too much like a tank and that made it a more valuable target.
They have meaningful armor because they're actually IFVs (Infantry Fighting Vehicles), not plain APCs, they're designed so the soldiers can fight from inside them, which is hard to do from inside Swiss cheese.
> Isn’t targeting APCs considered a faux pas in war, a little less bad than hitting an ambulance, but still not nice?
No, there's no military on Earth that's going to let the enemy peacefully transport their soldiers around in APCs if they can help it.
The time is now that we need laws to protect privacy and prevent governments and private companies from mass surveillance using AI etc. without any safeguards. It should be forbidden to use face recognition in public.
- [US] https://www.banfacialrecognition.com/
- [EU] https://reclaimyourface.eu/
- [CH] https://www.gesichtserkennung-stoppen.ch/