Sorry but this is rather ignorant. Enough people have cars and the roads are definitely wide enough, just like anywhere else, for traffic accidents to occur regularly. Surveillance might be omnipresent, but it's not a CCTV state like the UK.
Does anybody else wonder how an external hard drive could be mistaken as a speaker ? Seems quite improbable to me that police would remove the laptop but not the external hard drive attached to it. Also, once the owner died, how could the laptop continued to make backup of the files inside, enough for them to know that there was an 'attacker' who accessed those files? This suggests that there's some form of automatic backup script running in the background AND the laptop had been turned on throughout AND connected to the external hard drive. Up to the moment of 'recovery' by the police, who stupidly failed to notice this ?
Whenever we watch Holywood hacking movies, we couldn't help but notice the hilarious 'techie' scene. However, there shouldn't be such consistencies in this article because this is supposed to be based on reality.
Ah I see. Yes it does resemble a speaker then. Was viewing the article from mobile, and all the images were stripped out. Still, several things in the article couls probably be attributed to the Singaporean police force's incompetence and not outright malice. Being corruption-free != being competent. The family didn't help either by withholding evidence. They should have created a mirror of the external drive, then handed the original to the police (instead of offering to do it the other way around).
The family didn't help either by withholding evidence. They should have created a mirror of the external drive, then handed the original to the police (instead of offering to do it the other way around).
This is ridiculous. The Todds lost their son. The police did a desultory job of investigating his death, and the family have the drive only because of how poorly the police secured the scene. On what planet do the Todds owe the police anything?
I'm not sure what powers the Singapore police may have, especially since the Todds may already be out of the country, but they certainly didn't have any problems persuading a filmmaker to turn over her phone, laptop and desktop for an investigation:
http://spuddings.net/2013/02/07/mha-investigates-ex-bus-driv...
Haha, I had just assumed it was one of the thousands of no-brand devices available cheap at Sim Lim Square. It wouldn't be odd not to recognize a drive in whatever cheap plastic case was available: it might actually be a case molded originally for a speaker!
Thanks for the Spuddings link; that is fascinating. I especially appreciated the complaint about non-uniformed vs uniformed police. Due to a quirk of technology adoption around the time I lived in Singapore (i.e. everyone else was already on mobile phones), you could be reasonably certain that every Chinese man in his 40s-50s with sensible shoes and a pager on his belt was plainclothes police. It was amusing to watch them watching, and I can confirm the complaint that they paid more attention to Asian residents on labor visas than to anyone else. You would never see a clutch of skinny Indian guys walking around, without one of the plainclothes guys trailing them by twenty yards.
I've got it in black, it came with the dock pictured, and it actually looks quite a bit like a speaker when standing, because the lights at its base that indicate activity look like grille holes when they're dark.
The alleged crime happened in a foreign and independent country, where they have no choice but to play by the rules of that country. That's why. Non-cooperation just makes it worse, ensuring that nothing at all gets done.
When in-country, Todd's followed the rules. They were in Singapore to collect their son's possessions, and they did that. This saved the Singapore police and/or the landlord from having to sell or throw away those possessions. If there were any way for them to do the police's job of investigating the incident, I'm sure they would have attempted that as well, since clearly the police abdicated that responsibility.
Now they're in the USA, and Singapore's rules no longer apply to them.
The police can do anything with a disk image they could have done with the original disk, except tamper with the evidence. If they still claim to require the original disk, that clearly demonstrates their intentions.
I do PhD research in metabolomics -- one of the latest omics in bioinfo-- with the CS department in my university. At the moment, we're working on alignment and identification of metabolite data. The data is not big in the sense of genomics data, but messy and complex due to the nature of the instruments (mass spectrometer), which will not get better THAT much in the foreseeable future.
Definitely a computationally difficult problem because while naive approaches work, they produce crappy results, wasting the result of tens of thousands of dollars of experiments. I see a big move towards applying statistical/machine learning methods, and graph theory stuffs in our field.
A lot of the rants in the original article are correct, with regards to prototyping and throwaway codes. That's because researchers are rushing to get an MVP out. The truly good ones got turned into (usually open-source) products, where the code quality hopefully improves a fair bit.
If you come here on the Tier 4 student visa (as what most people do), you'd face the following restriction:
A student from outside of the EEA must not:
• engage in business; or
• engage in self-employment; or
• provide services as a professional sportsperson or entertainer; or
• pursue a career by filling a permanent full-time vacancy.
There used to be a Post Study Visa that gave you the freedom for two years post-study to goof off/work/incorporate/whatnot but unfortunately that had been cancelled last year (just the moment when I enrolled .. sigh). However, there's an entrepreneur visa that an aspiring startup might try to aim for. However, my question specifically pertains to the cases where it would be good to incorporate (say, after the business proves to be feasible).
I was wondering about what the current policy was myself. I have been debating on studying in the UK and Europe, but ending up choosing to stay the U.S. for the startup resources. Thanks for explaining the new visa policy.
I talked with two guys from Germany and Australia, and both said incorporating in their respective countries was difficult. I'd research either Chile or Israel and see what their policies are.
For the entrepreneur visa, it looks like you must have 200,000 pounds in the bank, so for me that definitely takes the option off the table: http://www.visabureau.com/uk/entrepreneur-visa.aspx Feel free to let me know if you find other ways to do a startup in the UK or Europe. Good luck!
The 'multi-decade' bit was just meant to be tongue-in-cheek. I was just implying that it took sooo much longer to complete the PhD in the US, as opposed to Commonwealth countries (UK, and to some extent, Australia, New Zealand). Giving up 7 years of my life is just too much to ask.
Also, when I mention about visa requirement, I mean the restriction on freely moving into a country and expecting to be able to work right away. Studying anywhere in the world is not much of a problem for me, visa-wise.
