Credit cards definitely have check digits, pretty sure bank accounts don't, though I'm not certain.
Common enough that there's been a fair bit in the media[0] regularly, ever since instant transfers took off, and warnings from the Financial Ombudsman[1].
There's also been stories of people randomly discovering a few thousand appearing in their account and stupidly going out to spend it that day.
Maybe internationally, but usually domestically within the country IBANs aren't used, at least in Australia, UK, and United States. Hell, my bank here in the UK doesn't even give me an IBAN.
With SEPA I've been required to use the IBAN even for transfers within Germany. Which isn't all that different, as you only need to remember the two check digits and the order in which the old numbers appear within the IBAN. The UK and other countries that continue to use their own currency are a bit special regarding domestic payments, though:
SEPA does not cover payments in other currencies than the euro. This means that domestic payments in SEPA countries not using euro will continue to use local schemes, but cross border payments will use SEPA and euro against eurozone countries.
But you wouldn't see such a distinction in countries that use the Euro.
You can use IBAN domestically in the SEPA area for EUR account numbers. The banks usually allow the use of bank account numbers too and they then translate them to IBAN, so you don't have to.
What's more, account numbers in some countries themselves contain check digits.
1) It clearly does not work (as opposed to "it has a low accuracy" which just means they will have to filter manually) and
2) They are pursuing a goal of policing with fewer police officers and
3) Having a working solution would mean they could police with fewer police officers (cameras can't detain suspects or intervene when problems arise, AND police officers don't carry a mental database of all suspects like a computer could have, so having cameras does not replace having police officers).
Scooter crime is exploding in London and police numbers have been falling for a decade.
Personally I've had 3 scooter thefts on the past year, including a bike jacking at a red light - more a robbery than theft.
All these criminals wear balaclavas even if they're not wearing helmets, and they're used to using countermeasures against CCTV, so facial recognition isn't likely to make a big difference to them.
False positives vs false negatives. Most crimes are committed by young men, but most young men aren’t criminals. Same thing happened with medical tests for rare conditions — if you have rates of 5% false positive (0% false negative) and 1% criminality rate, then ~84% of those you shake up are innocent.
Scooter crime seems to be committed by men under 30, are you talking age-related profiling? So shake-down a couple of million people and you will probably find the evidence you want?
How is attacking the demographics of crime working for America, and the other countries that do that? As far as I understand, the efficacy of profiling is extremely poor
Thankfully, racial-profiling is against the law in the US. Unfortunately, some involved in law enforcement do it anyway (sometimes unintentionally), and when they are caught they are disciplined.
Under Trump and Attorney General Sessions, the Department of Justice said they were shutting down investigations of police departments for civil rights issues. (I don't remember the exact details.)
It's cheap and efficient to wear a mask, where it is the taxpayer's money being wasted on facial recognition systems, and on top of that: cameras don't prevent, and are not even being used to prosecute criminals, there are not enough resources to do that, as someone else already pointed it out:
> You only have to look at the widespread increase in CCTV use in Britain. Now when you get mugged in London the police can get you a little video of your hooded attackers for posterity. Except they only have time to go through the recordings if you got murdered, otherwise you will just get a crime number.
But hey, have fun with illusion of safety, deprived freedom and a complete waste of money.
As a resident of the UK, I perceive a strong political incentive to persue more laws and stronger enforcement of and punishment for violating those laws.
The UK has until recently been trying to follow a policy of reduced public spending and reduced government borrowing. It is natural to assume that any new technology is only being used on this basis.
That doesn’t mean this perception is correct, and the current state of the UK looks to me like they’re trying to promise all things to all people, failing to do almost anything, and increasing annoying everyone as a result — so there isn’t any reason to assume logical coherence either.
Your link just explains that they’re trying to reduce the gap between tax income and expenditure, but the absolute level of expenditure (my link) has gone up every year (in real terms too)!
As a citizen of the UK I can tell you that until Brexit became along the political narrative since Cameron became PM had been all about 'The Cuts'. The fact that, despite widespread cuts to the civil service and the police, spending has increased just goes to show that ideology has become more important than sense in 2018.
Talking about the specifics however, the number of police officers in the UK have been reduced by around 19 thousand. Since that only leaves 126k I hope you will find that significant. I find the continued expenditure on unproven gadgets rather distasteful against this backdrop.
> 1) It clearly does not work (as opposed to "it has a low accuracy" which just means they will have to filter manually)
When you point accuracy that poor at a sample so large the number of false positives is so colossally large that the resources to 'filter manually' are large, meanwhile a free- country is branding huge numbers of innocent people as possible suspects. So no it doesn't work. For it to work in a free-country we should be looking at five-nine accuracy at least.
> 3) Having a working solution would mean they could police with fewer police officers
Say you have 10,000 people attending a football match. Your intelligence suggests a known hooligan is amongst the crowd. How do you search for him and why wouldn't facial recognition be helpful?
As long as you have the resources to sort through 145 people to see if they are your man[0].
The really worrying thing for me is they use the excuse that they are looking for
> "potential terrorist targets"
and then say
> "poor quality images" supplied by agencies including Uefa
UEFA is the governing body of the European football championship, now obviously famed for fighting terrorism. Terrorism is the excuse they love to use to take away civil liberties.
It continues to worry me
> over 450 arrests
and then discusses 2 convictions. It is a very worrying world we are slipping into where getting lots of arrests counts as a result
> no-one had been arrested after an incorrect match
This is not for the police to decide, it is for the courts. Hi-five 450 and 2 convictions of note
> The technology has also helped identify vulnerable people in times of crisis.
So it's already being used more generally than arresting terrorists, and football hooligans! It crept up on us over the course of one article!
DDG is super super bad. I don't know why people recommend it at all. Now that you mentioned !g I remembered all my DDG experiments... 1) change my default search engine to DDG, 2) use it for some time, 3) use !g in half of my searches, 4) use !g in all of my searches, 5) say "fuck it" and switch back to google
I find it better than Google for code / technical searches, and all things work related
I find it better than Google for historic or old content as Google barely acknowledges such content is possible any more. Admittedly DDG is "least worst" in this respect but it hasn't entirely thrown the results out with the obsession with recency and update frequency (I consider this to have essentially ruined Google). Google were better at this and dated searches in their first 2 years than now.
Google then ruined themselves further by feeling it can overrule my keywording attempts and gives a page of results featuring no result with the must have term. Adding insult to injury they proceed to heavily promote brands over small companies and blogs, or anything really.
Once a week I'll try !sp and not find what I need on Google either. The rare times I want video search Bing is orders of magnitude better than Google.
Interesting.. since most of my searches are code or tech related, how exactly does DDG compare positively to Google? What difference do you notice that makes you prefer it?
Right now I end up on SO or a handful of other forums depending on the subject.
Might be worth a shot if you say you get better results faster!
When I know I'm asking an SO sort of question I can !so directly. The whole ! system transforms ease of use - I miss them elsewhere!
TL;DR I mostly find what I need quicker with least faffing around changing terms to try and fight them "knowing best".
Google shot themselves in the foot when they removed code search, and "improved" results by constantly knowing better with synonyms and other semantically linked results. It rather broke code searches and led to more of the wrong language turning up instead. Language reference and standard library type searches they do just fine at.
Google spoiled it for the obscure and code when even + and - modifiers and advanced searches became optional. They felt able to give a page of results with only one result having my must-have term. Makes searching for a specific release hellish - not everyone integrates latest and greatest v9 the week of its release. No, I really do want v7. I never fathomed the rationale of that change for anyone.
DDG do the least additional messing with my search terms with helpful expansion, pluralisation and so on. DDG got a little worse at obscure error searches when they started on some "oh you also meant" games fairly recently. They still do the least of this. There's still occasional cases where the content simply isn't there - but they're far better than say a year or two ago.
When I first tried DDG a few years ago I was !g or !sp all the time and it was barely worth the effort. Now I very rarely go near Google and don't feel I'm losing out.
I've had DDG set as default for maybe a year now, across desktop and mobile. As time passes, I find myself using !g less and less, probably less than 10% of the time now. Most of my queries are technical or for common-ish topics, and it's been great.
I switched very early on and had the same issue however it has improved a lot for me lately. I use Google for maybe 1 out of 100 searches I do now, a lot of those 1 in 100 are maps related.
I'd recommend giving it another try if you haven't recently.
If you view the business model of Elsevier as a scam perpetrated on the taxpayers who funded the research, there is no logical contradiction between the term "scam site" and the fact that under current legislation in most countries, they are recognized as the copyright owners of the content in question.
So change the law or whatever, but as it is, they own the copyright, whether you like it or not. Saying otherwise is at the same level of discourse as using the word "Micro$oft" and similar puerile rubbish.
> Do we really care about the kind of people who care about "cultural appropriation"?
Yes, because not disagreeing is considered assent. Telling people with stupid ideologies that their ideologies are stupid is not something you want to avoid entirely, at the very least to remind folks that they haven't found the One True Ideology.
Whether the ideology in question is SJWs/ctrl-left or alt-right... doesn't really matter. Neither of those should dominate the public or wield governmental powers. And to avoid precisely that from happening, you speak out against it.
Coordinating "not feeding trolls" on a large scale is very difficult.
Also, it is difficult to ignore people who can attack you offline. I think these fanatical students (seems to me they are usually students; students are most susceptible to recruitment in all kinds of cults) constitute pretty much zero danger to me... but they can be quite dangerous to their classmates, so if I had children in university age, I would probably worry a lot.
If you told me that when I eat pizza that it is a cultural appropriation, I would just tell you to f.off. But when a student is surrounded by militant classmates, this can lead to bullying. And even worse, when a teacher is a part of some social justice cult. So... not feeding the trolls is sometimes not an option, unless you want to give up on your diploma, and the time and work spent so far studying.
Not feeding trolls also assumes that people are mature enough to recognize who is a troll. But there is a continuum between people who sincerely believe that political correctness is simply the usual politeness applied to politically sensitive topics... and people who throw a hissy fit whenever someone disagrees with their latest pseudoscience. Try to make a line somewhere, and people who are under the line but quite close to it are going to object.
People who aggressively support segregation should always be fought, no matter how relatively small their numbers.
If the cultural appropriation people win, they end up promoting an expanded racial and ethnic segregation as a consequence. The mixing, remixing, touching, learning from by experience and adoption of culture is a critical element that works against physical segregation.
It's just HTML, you could use any color you want. I'm curious why you specifically call out university professors as people of average design skill, though.
Hmm, should've specified better. It reminds me of those webpages professors have in the website of the university, for which they write the HTML themselves, and they always use Times New Roman with some horrible colour scheme, heh
In their company, sure. Try being a liberal at a Trump rally.
Things may have gotten worse, but there was never a time when you could freely say without consequences whatever you thought in whichever social group.
It may have felt like that if you were part of a privileged group and did not stray too far.
My question was normative, I suppose another way to rephrase it is "Do you want to live in a world where only people with the correct opinions can make jokes and enjoy the benefit of the doubt? If not, why are you enforcing social norms you don't endorse?"
The choice isn't automatic: abritinthebay apparently does endorse a hostile interpretation of any speech by people who "hold opinions that have been demonstratably wrong for 40+ years" and "made a concious choice to be a bigot", which I believe makes both comedy and nuance impossible, but at least they're honest about it.
