lordlicorice

In high school I had to write a long apology essay in part because my computer teacher testified to the principal that the Windows command line is "a high-security area of the computer that students have no business accessing."

I tried to explain that she was wrong, but you can guess how well that went.

> Although each of these counts bordered on the preposterous, Ortiz and Heymann clearly reckoned that at least one or two would stick during the jury-room bargaining process. ... Prosecutors were also revealed to have offered a reduced sentence, but only if Swartz pleaded guilty to every charge

This is what really hit home for me. They weren't just filing court documents in a legal strategy to get a conviction. They were telling a man to his face that they expected him to plead guilty to patently insane trumped-up charges.

For me, external documentation is the absolute worst scenario. It takes me at least 4 times longer to read through and understand code without comments explaining in English what's going on. Here's a real-life example:

  // Toggle between Dropdown and Text
  if(_protected.fields[field].fieldType() === "Dropdown") {
  _protected.fields[field].set("fieldType", "Text");
    } else {
  _protected.fields[field].set("fieldType", "Dropdown");
  }

I think it would take me about 4 seconds to figure out that this code "toggles between Dropdown and Text" if the comment weren't there. Since the comment is there, I can just glance at the code and understand immediately what it does.

Unless the shared object file also includes an override for the function that expands environment variables to lie about the true value of LD_PRELOAD.

I think it has more to do with bureaucracy than with fear of litigation. In an ecosystem as complicated as medical care, lots of policies and procedures accumulate over time and there's nobody with the authority to cut through the bullshit and redesign the system.

I imagine that these policies come about not from lawyers' memos, but from the physicians themselves.

The screenshot at the bottom is one of the coolest things I've ever seen.

The "Dear Sir" and "Mr." built into the form letter on page 7 caught my eye. That's not something you see anymore.

The difference isn't just replacing {} with <>. Notice that the tag name is only specified once. The end tag is only an end } not a </tag>. This is more satisfying to programmers because the SGML style allows mixups like <a><b>text</a></b>.

`pass` is uncracked?

> Books need to be written, edited, typeset, 'printed' / 'put into ebook format', distributed, etc.

The author writes the book. Typesetting and "putting into ebook format" are a copy-and-paste affair, taking at most a day. Pirated books don't need to be printed or distributed.

There's nothing stopping people from uploading the files to bittorrent. It's only the hackers' anonymity that matters.

"What struck me most about the entry was Van Riesen's philosophical approach to the matter, which is remarkably prescient of the challenges we, as the human race, face with how to deal with the computer"

His opinion wasn't at all prescient. Computing gave unprecedented power to the people. It has absolutely never been a source of oppression.

Then again, maybe AI-based surveillance could eliminate crime without embarrassment from other people violating your privacy.

I typically take the classic step of choosing "What is my password?" as a custom security question.

> We calculated these times from the report's "Inventory Turn" metric, which estimates the number of times a company's inventory is sold in a given time period. Apple's number is 74, according to Gartner (or 76, according to Forbes). From there, it's a common practice to divide by 365 to "estimate the number of days [of] sales sitting in inventory."

Shouldn't it be 365 divided by the number of times per year they sell their average inventory?

They're going to have the reciprocal of the actual answer. Like, if it takes an entire year to sell off their inventory then their formula will give you 1 day turnover.

Amnesia was creepy, but I wouldn't call it excellent. Psychonauts is the 3D game that really shines in this pack. It's extremely memorable and utterly original. Fun fact: the Metacritic user score for Psychonauts is 9.4 compared to Amnesia's 8.8.

"Take the most significant part, rip off the constants, and that's its growth rate."

Well, it's an upper bound on its growth rate. And only after some possibly-gigantic n.

Academics are notorious for their code, but I suspect the parent was talking about people in industry with a CS background.

> Is it possible – just possible – that Edison honestly believed that AC was dangerous and honestly did not think it should be use?

This strikes me as pretty naive. Edison had the patents that effectively controlled the market for DC electricity. He would have been a Carnegie or a Rockefeller had DC been adopted. He had such an extreme conflict of interest that it's unreasonable to assume good faith.

The families of solutions are described by the puzzle's author here:

http://apps.topcoder.com/forums/?module=Thread&threadID=...

Are there supposed to be instructions to this somewhere?

At research universities most of the budget comes from research, and most of the work in research gets done by grad students. Undergrad programs are an afterthought.

I know!

People get so attached to the idea of free will. What free will? You do what you want, but you have no control over what you want.

Great book, but I don't think the treatment of virtual hells was very convincing. First of all, the characters in hell would have gone insane with agony, but they just kind of wince it off and keep chatting. It reminded me of Niven and Pournelle's awful 1976 adaptation of Dante's Inferno, in which, for example, the macho protagonist grits his teeth and swims across a boiling lake.

Anyway, secondly I don't understand where all the devil-with-pitchfork stuff comes from in Banks's hells. Why not just have everyone floating in blackness and experiencing the maximum possible amount of pain at all times? To prevent them from becoming catatonic you just keep resetting their brain state to the moment of their death, so they're always feeling the first shock of agony. And it scales fantastically; just copy that small simulation a billion times and run them concurrently.

Of course, there will be some philosophical problems (are two identical concurrent brain simulations really two distinct subjective consciousnesses? If so, what are the implications of error-correcting server memory that store everything twice? And does resetting someone's memory so that the same simulation plays out repeatedly actually cause the person to experience things multiple times, or is it immaterial how many times you replay it?) but that will be of no comfort to you when you wake up in the pain box hell.

The "rate limited" option in the video reminds me of slow clubs from that book.

For people who haven't read it, in the novel there are virtual parties called slow clubs where poor consciousnesses go to meet. Everyone agrees to limit themselves to the processing speed of the slowest (poorest) person there, so that people who can only afford the occasional spare clock cycle can have meaningful human contact.

It's hard to overstate the value of a university education... Why are you so vehement? Never went to college?

Certificates are fine for IT work, but they can't replace degrees for programmers. A degree at a good school shows that you're smart, not just knowledgeable.

He's not suggesting that you subpixel antialias manually. He's pointing out a benefit of leaving your images as vectors: the browser knows the subpixel order of the display, and can make the image prettier than you can without that information.

Would a sphere of water that size be massive enough to hold a gaseous atmosphere heavy enough to allow liquid water far enough down?

This reads like a thinly-veiled advocacy for CISPA.