To me, capturing and processing
gigabyte after gigabyte of data per second appears more like a
game played by children. They do it because they can. You do not
expect children to be more that that, but what about politicians
and their dependants, security services?
Once captured, what do you do with the data? To make them
available to humans, you have to reduce the data rate to mere
bytes per second, as that is all a human decision maker can
handle. And during that process, the data get distorted inevitably
to such a degree that they are useless anyway . . .
Examples:
1. take a 10MByte photo and jpeg-compress it to 10 byte. How
recognizable is that photo after compression? . . .
2. weather report: to make a reasonable forecast, how big a
computer do you need, and how accurate is the forecast going to
be? Even with the biggest machines available currently, localized
storm cells get overlooked, and nothing can be done to alert
emergency services beforehand.
3. Did data processing prevent the Boston Bombings or the London
attack on a serviceman? The culprits were known to the security
services beforehand and under surveillance . . .
As long as the data processing rate inside a human brain is way
higher than what the same human acquires through his / her senses
(=10 billion neurons times 300 firings per second = 3.1011
bit per second) than its data acquisition rate (<3
MegaBit/second for the visual system (optical nerve constraint), a
few kilobit/second for the auditory system and a few byte/second
for spoken communications), humans can, and will be, unpredictable
to other humans. If you restrict input to a (smallish) finite
number and consider the consequences of rounding associated with
it, Gödel's Decidability
Theorem restricts the conclusions
you can draw so severely that at the huge data compression rates,
which these "Security Service Children" play with, make the data
themselves useless - to humans, because of the limited input rate
a human has and the huge effect error propagation builds up to
Wolfgang Vogelbein.
On 13/07/13 20:05, Ronnie Collinson wrote:
If they did, it would be unlikely to work well,
given any one can inspect the code, and they would be more
likely to compel companies that contribute.
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