Yardlink

It's still two factors. If someone has only your phone but not your password, they still can't log in. The problem here is that the phone number was also used as a password recovery option, which effectively means you only need the phone to log in. I suspect most gmail users with 2FA are doing this, which defeats the purpose of 2FA. It just becomes "different factor".

It's the password recovery by phone that's the weakness. But I think people getting locked out of their own account is probably a bigger problem for Google than people getting hacked, so they err on the side of saving your from getting locked out.

To those who don't like the use of this law, I think this is OK. Here's why: You live in a democracy where the popular opinion decides who's in power. You agree that's a good idea because you aren't moving to an authoritarian or libertarian country or voting to change the system. The popular opinion allowed this law, so you should accept that it's the right one according to the system. Of course there will always be a minority which doesn't like each law, and you happen to be a member of that minority in this case.

If it does become a bigger problem that affects the majority, they'll eventually decide to vote it out. Until then, it's nothing to worry about. This is the self-stabilizing effect of democracy. There can be small problems, but not big Syria-scale problems.

It's just part of the cost of sharing your country with people who think differently from you. If you really strongly believe the law is being used for "bad" purposes, the bad people are the voters who first allowed it, and after seeing it happen, continued to re-elect the same politicians that passed this law. Those are the people you should be complaining about - the two wolves voting on what's for dinner.

You might say those majority voters are ignorant and it's not their fault. No, they are taking action which you believe is wrong, so they are doing something wrong. If they aren't competent to decide who to vote for, they're being negligent by doing it recklessly.

PS I live in an authoritarian country where imagining the police have some restrictions on their power is only a fantasy. Your police at least do still have some restrictions, and they always will as long as you have a democracy.

Pedophile behavior in online communities doesn't harm anyone, and doesn't need professional help any more than homosexual behavior needs professional help. It's the illegal production of the product that causes the harm.

Blaming the customers is what we do with pedophiles. It seems to work even though it's immoral.

I wonder if these suspended states they talk about later in the article would actually extend your life for the duration of the suspended state. I presume the aging processes also slow down or stop. Perhaps this is a more realistic option for near-death people wanting to come back to life in the future than cryogenics.

Users don't fix bugs in open source software. For evidence, look at OpenOffice and LibreOffice, both riddled with some horrifying bugs that have been repeatedly documented for years. There's even a guy complaining about one well-known bug in a TED talk. Yet somehow none of their millions of users have fixed them.

These two programs are a prime example of how open source is just as inaccessible as closed source. It's simply too difficult to learn a large complex codebase. People have their own jobs to get on with.

It struck me as odd that they avoided floating point numbers because of impreciseness, then used some other type of number without evaluating how precise it was. They're certainly not using typical integers with values like 10^9000. I wouldn't be surprised if those numbers are internally divided by 10^n and stored in doubles anyway - bringing them back to the same problem they're trying to avoid.

"the determinant of bigMatrix is, approximately, 1.95124219131987·10^9762."

Approximately? How many significant digits in the exact answer? If Mathematica promises arbitrary precision, even to 10,000 digits, they have a case. If not, it shouldn't be any surprise.

As for getting different results on each run, I've seen this with iterative algorithms that use random starting values. For numerically unstable problems, that can lead to different results each time because it converges to rounding error.

That doesn't mean Mathematica is wrong any more than getting wrong results from doubles means its wrong. It just means it's poorly designed so the user doesn't know about this limitation.

Great news. I guess efficiency is following a similar rapid growth to power.

He makes some dubious efficiency claims. It's true the colored LEDs have always been pretty efficient, but that's no use lighting your home. White LEDs have surpassed incandescent bulbs but still have a way to go to reach flourescent tubes and the grand-daddy of efficiency - gas discharge lamps.

One (the?) reason for low power levels is they generate so much heat and are difficult to cool. LEDs are still primarily heaters - useful in the winter.

I think expert witnesses serve that purpose. There have been complicated technical details in jury trials before the internet and this seems to be an adequate way to solve the problem.

Ronald Pelton was an NSA spy who's been in prison longer for participating in war. Except he's being held in the US and is still locked up today. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Pelton

It is a China-bashing lens. The article also complains about:

"the location of a person’s “hukou,” or residency permit"

Employers in every country do this and we don't call it "just wrong" (though it is). They use the more international form of a hukou known as a passport.

Western companies also have hiring discrimination based on social abilities and who your friends are, even when it's of only minor relevance to the job. A person's personality is considered worth discriminating against (even for jobs working alone) but that isn't automatically more acceptable than physical characteristics.

There's an obvious bias here. The piece ends with "localisation may keep small languages alive". Isn't that adding to the problem? We don't try to keep small programming languages alive (except a few diehards). Many small languages are the problem itself. They're not something to aim for.

I should add that I'm not complaining about making phones more accessible to more people. That's absolutely great. But why try to go further and use it as an excuse to drag out languages that the world would be better off without?

Is there are reason this language exists? They're solving a problem that's been solved many times over for at least 2 decades in the form of managed languages.

It's debatable that H.264 and MP3 patents are bad. These were non-trivial to invent and are worlds apart from slide to unlock or hold-the-shutter-button-to-record-video. They don't patent the general process of compressing video and audio.

Cooking too? Food safety has bigger risks if you're making 10000 donuts than 1. Restricting everyone equally would put an unreasonable burden on everyday life. Scale is a big reason why there's a difference. Unrestricted commercial drone flights would be much more common than hobby, and would therefore cause much more accidents.

I don't think titles are important legally. It's hard to believe his lawyer misunderstood that when it was apparently true according to the appeal judges. I know for instance, in copyright law, being an "employee" is important for deciding ownership, but you're not an employee just because you boss gives you that title, you have to be acting like one according to an odd set of rules.

Nobody seems to care about these laws until some high-profile company starts breaking them. 10 years ago where was the outrage that GM wasn't allowed to sell SUVs directly to customers? Where was the outrage that ordinary people (ie creeps) weren't allowed to put a "taxi" sign on their car and start picking up strangers at night for money?

Filtering doesn't work well enough at all. The fact that you can't be sure if your email was received is a problem. Many companies have over-aggressive spam filters and the recipients sometimes never even see the emails in their spam box - they're either bounced or black-holed. Often this is done by blacklisting IP addresses. When that IP happens to be the mail server of a service provider with many customers, when one of them sends spam, all of them get their emails blocked.

Unreliable delivery is perhaps on of the biggest problems with email. Largely due to faulty spam filtering.

Not just TOR but in China you have to use a VPN to access about half the internet, and many sites restrict your access because you're connecting to them from the VPN. Paypal threatened to ban me if I ever forgot to turn off the VPN or accidentally withdrew money while in the wrong country.

Maybe the solution is more people using TOR and VPNs so sites will have to face losing their audience if they don't accommodate them.

It opens doors for some people who wouldn't have been able to otherwise. But more importantly, I hope this type of cheating leads universities to change their selection processes so applicants don't have to play this second-guessing game.

I feel like the university staff are fools being deceived by this nonsense. That they actually give weigh to the application essay shows they're not making a fair decisions.

I used to work for a company writing application essays for Chinese students. I didn't write them myself but I have no moral objection. The requirements are bizarre - effectively "tell us what you know will make us like you but hide the fact that you know we want to hear it".

Should you tell the truth "I love CS and play it in all my spare time, I'm obsessed with it and usually don't get enough sleep for school because I'm so committed staying up late at night shooting people" or tell a story about an incident at the beach that makes it look like you have amazing management skills? Who knows!

University selection is ridiculous and I support any attempt to bring fairness to it like these services.

Don't confuse Fukishima with a nuclear disaster. Yes there was environmental contamination, but 10's of thousands of people were killed by a tsunami. Nuclear accidents aren't nearly that bad. What we need is more sea walls, not less nuclear plants.

Also it was of the type that melts down if the cooling water is lost. Other reactor designs (eg 3-mile island) need water to operate so they shut down automatically if there's any major breakdown.

Furthermore, coal is far more dangerous. We just don't care when thousands of Chinese coal miners die every year as much as we do when Japanese farmland is rendered unusable once in a lifetime.

He waited a day or two to be frozen after he died. Doesn't that mean his brain will have already suffered massive damage from oxygen deprivation and be unrecoverable? I thought you would have to freeze yourself before your brain begins to destroy itself. However, that may mean doing it before you die, which could be illegal (assisted suicide) in the US.

With a resolution that high you must be used to small fixed pixel width sites. Pity they can't all just be doubled or quadrupled in size.

Whenever there are ambitious plans for a poor country, people think of all kinds of reasons not to - the environment! the culture! the local economy! people's family homes! But they forget "these people are already screwed!". This canal is a risk with a bigger upside than doing nothing.

Is there actually any evidence that keeping a language alive does any good to anyone? I know people say "it gives us different ways of thinking" and "expressing different concepts" but I've yet to see an example of where that actually matters beyond the emotion of the people who feel it's important.

This could enable some very low development cost cloudwashing of legacy desktop software!

One of the major advantages of trucks over trains is precisely that - they're not trains. Making them trains would take away all the flexibility they currently have. If you're taking coal from the mine to the power station then you're probably already using a train. Anything less predictable needs individual trucks.

Researchers always think of ambitious applications for their work. Somehow the presentation didn't show how it's easier for the legitimate manufacturer to do than for the counterfeiter. If it's nothing more than an expensive process they might not be able to afford, then why not short circuit it and attach money directly to the drugs to prove they're real?