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Bitcoin NEVER afforded real anonymity. It only afforded slight obfuscation. See: http://anonymity-in-bitcoin.blogspot.com/2011/07/bitcoin-is-not-anonymous.html

Nobody's asked the tortoises how they feel about it."

I imagine they're feeling rather flat. How does Google take these 'street view' pics again?

"OK, we choose to cut weather forecasting for the northeast, rather than ... that $200 million supercomputer to beat out the EU (despite the EU supercomputer being less than half as powerful as our current system while still being more accurate)."

That's odd. Cliff Mass, a well-respected climatologist at University of Washington, expressed concern about deficiencies in the NWS computing resources here and here. He was very positive on the NWS computer upgrades.

But, I guess that you know more about this than he does, right?

"OK, we choose to cut weather forecasting for the northeast, rather than ... that $200 million supercomputer to beat out the EU (despite the EU supercomputer being less than half as powerful as our current system while still being more accurate)."

That's odd. Cliff Mass, a well-respected climatologist at University of Washington, expressed concern about deficiencies in the NWS computing resources here and here. He was very positive on the NWS computer upgrades.

But, I guess that you know more about this than he does, right?

"OK, we choose to cut weather forecasting for the northeast, rather than ... that $200 million supercomputer to beat out the EU (despite the EU supercomputer being less than half as powerful as our current system while still being more accurate)."

That's odd. Cliff Mass, a well-respected climatologist at University of Washington, expressed concern about deficiencies in the NWS computing resources here and here. He was very positive on the NWS computer upgrades.

But, I guess that you know more about this than he does, right?

Please, please do NOT use "person-first" language.

I'm autistic. Most of my friends are autistic. I know dozens to hundreds of autistic people.

Guess how many people I have ever met who are autistic, and prefer to be called a "person with autism"? Hint: The number is slightly lower than one, and it's an integer.

Try going around referring, not to women, but to "persons with femaleness", and see how that works out for you.

A randomly selected blog article on the topic.

Basically, person-first language marks you as aligned with the Autism Speaks folks and their anti-autistic-people propaganda machine. Avoid it.

Actually Steve Jobs and Eric Schmidt lobbied for a one-time tax holiday so they could repatriate their income

And that is *exactly* why Apple is hoarding to its cash. They want to wait for another tax holiday to bring their cash hoard into US without paying a cent in taxes. They are even issuing 17 BILLION is debt so they can wait out longer.

This is NOT a ONE-TIME thing. It happened before. They are banking that it will happen again.

http://taxjustice.blogspot.com/2009/06/new-evidence-on-bushs-tax-amnesty.html

This was a measure enacted by the administration of former U.S. President George W. Bush in 2004 that gave a tax amnesty to multinationals who had been keeping money, tax-free, offshore: it allowed them to bring back that money, and pay a tax rate of 5.25%, instead of the normal 35% corporate tax rate.

No amnesty! Robbing taxpayers to pay shareholders is a travesty.

English is used worldwide when conducting business between two people with otherwise dissimilar language, but Chinese is still mostly limited to conducting business with China.

This. Before, people were mostly concerned with learning the language of the bordering countries because that's what was most useful. Today people have the Internet and want/need a global language of communication. While this graphic is also in many ways biased, English in the World shows most of the world has English as their first foreign language. That trend is only going to grow stronger because there are huge network effects at play here. While the US may be seeing a big influx of Spanish, here in Europe the trend is opposite - few people learn Spanish and the Spaniards learn more and more English. And I don't think it has any traction in Africa, Asia or Oceania.

It will be open: http://juberti.blogspot.com/2011/07/hangouts-mailbag.html

Relax, folks. Yes, XMPP may be dropped. But not to go completely closed-specs. According to a Google engineer, Hangout specifications for interoperability will come back, so third party apps can fully support it. XMPP needs to go because it is not extensible enough for the features needed. Besides, Hangout is nased partially on XMPP. More details here: http://juberti.blogspot.com/2011/07/hangouts-mailbag.html

Google's dropping support for CalDAV which I think was the primary supported way of syncing with iCal.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2013/03/a-second-spring-of-cleaning.html

Dont forget second order effects:

http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2010/11/great-scott-over-35-hours-of-video.html

Unfortunately (?) d^3/dt^3 showing acceleration in upload rate videos is flat

All went down the drain when they changed the name from mystical "Mandrake" to "Mandriva", which sounds like the name of a night club for french gay vampires.

They had to change from Mandrake for copyright reasons. At the same time, they acquired a "-iva" named Brazian distro and combined the names. When the asshats running Mandriva were about to tank the distro, many developers jumped ship and named the new spinoff Mageia, carrying on the Mandrake-ish "magic" theme. None of them ever claimed to be marketing geniuses and histiory has validdated that. It's a shame for such a good, solid distro.

Here's some more background on what makes Mageia unique.
http://maximumhoyt.blogspot.com/2013/01/mageia3-beta-vs-fedora18.html

I heard that FreeRCT is in need for both programmers and graphic artists. Their goal is to create an open game in the spirit of Rollercoaster Tycoon 1 & 2.

I actually thought about contributing until I saw "C++" in their requirements. :)

Cliff Mass, University of Washington Atmospheric Sciences Professor, has been arguing for an upgrade for a long time. He sees great potential for this new system if used right. The reasons for the upgrade boil down to having "huge economic and safety benefits" with better forecasting, and he says these benefits are within our reach.

Cliff Mass, University of Washington Atmospheric Sciences Professor, has been arguing for an upgrade for a long time. He sees great potential for this new system if used right. The reasons for the upgrade boil down to having "huge economic and safety benefits" with better forecasting, and he says these benefits are within our reach.

Cliff Mass, University of Washington Atmospheric Sciences Professor, has been arguing for an upgrade for a long time. He sees great potential for this new system if used right. The reasons for the upgrade boil down to having "huge economic and safety benefits" with better forecasting, and he says these benefits are within our reach.

I heard that FreeRCT is in need for both programmers and graphic artists. Their goal is to create an open game in the spirit of Rollercoaster Tycoon 1 & 2.

Ants in Weird/Odd Places:

Bugs in the computer: Sun
Microsystems, Inc. knows why Brazil is known to its native inhabitants as the kingdom of the ants.

Ants in yer... Pants? NOT!
(Toshiba notebook/laptop); Ants
Invade Apple iBook; "Yep, those are ants in that laptop".

(Tele)phones: Panasonic Cordless Phone and Ants In My Nokia Mobile Phone (A Yahoo! account is required).

Ants in Omniview switchboxes: An e-mail story of ants invading a network
switchbox.

Argentine ants invade a network hub.

Computerworld on "Ants had taken up residence in a guy's external hard drive. Seen on /.).

A photograph showing ants nesting in a guy's phone box, affecting his
digital subscriber line (DSL) connection and phone system.

A 38 seconds YouTube video showing crazy ants in a computer mouse.

One minute and 19 seconds Break video, from VideoSift: "Creepy Surprise. -- Wife asked me to try to get the printer to work, since she was having some problems with it. Imagine my surprise when I looked inside..."

Help,
A Colony Of Ants Attacked My Enterprise Rental Car And Ruined My
Vacation!

Here's why that doesn't work. The attack is very, very, very simple, and once you see it explained, you'll never trust those sorts of services again. A basic attack looks like this:

Attacker compromises the device and waits for user to log into Google.
Attacker captures the response to the authentication request and forwards it to their own server.
Attacker's server connects to Google's system and obtains credentials.
Attacker displays a network error message to the user. The user logs in again to the real Google server, unaware that the first attempt was successful, just for

Here is how I know you haven't a clue what you are talking about, and why I hope you will just go away and stop pontificating:

Attacker compromises the device...
    Really? Really? Just like that, compromises my cell phone, which is never out of my possession?
    How is it you hand waive all that process away?
And waits for the user to log into google
    Again, Really? Do you even have a clue how Google authenticator works?
    You don't log into google with the authenticator. You log in with some other computer over a ssl connection.
      Then google asks you for a code from the authenticator app. Guess what: The app doesn't even talk to google
        except at install time. You can put your phone in airplane mode and still get a code from the authenticator.
        So even a compromised phone (something you seem to think is trivial, but never bother to explain) won't do you
        any good because it does not contact google.

        You then key this number into the computer talking to google over a ssl connection. It compares it to the
          number your authenticator would have rendered for that particular 30 second window. If its good you get in
          but again you are in a ssl pipe.

        So you capture nothing. NOTHING.

Attacker captures the response to the authentication request and forwards it to their own server
    No it doesn't, because you captured nothing. It was in an SSL pipe from some compute you don't even know about.
    Further the code has been USED, and its no good any more. Its a one time code.
    Further Google would see you trying to create your own connection and would immediately you to get a code off of your authenticator...
        but wait, you don't have an authenticator synced with that account, and the old number is no good..

You would have to already have an ssl compromised machine in place and lure a google user into signing on via that specific machine.
But wait, that wouldn't work either because
google already detects this. Even Schneier does believe this would work even with National authorities forcing bogus certificates.

Even if you had a pre-compromised computer and an elaborate SSL spoofing setup in place ahead of time, on a computer that you knew I would have to log in from, you can only compromise that single session, and when you attempted to change anything so that you could log in again in the future, I would be locked out of the account, and would therefore know the account had been compromised.

So just stop hand waiving into existence imaginary compromised devices, and thereby supposing into existence the hardest part of the whole operation.
If this was so easy, it would have already been done. Yet every attempt to bypass Two Factor has been done via apps that would not support Two Factor, and which required an application specific password, which in the end, is just another password.

Great Thanks dear for posting the story

I am completely shocked the post has been up this long and there is still no Nazi/Hitler/Godwin reference. If any story deserved it this would be it.

“Push combs the online footprint of our targets to determine everything we can about them,” said Yaroslava. “We use social networks, we use search histories, we use cell phone data, we use gaming protocols. All data is useful to us. Not only do we find out exactly what our target likes to consume, but we also find out how they like to consume it. We see how they browse to determine their specific attention spans and intelligence. We scan their pornography habits to learn about their libido, their obsessions, and their fears. We aggregate vast amounts of data about the way they use the internet to create a complete psychological profile of our targets, and then we use cognitive behavioral techniques to triangulate patterns in this profile. We make as robust a model of their operating intelligence as we possibly can. And then we make little movies meant only for our specific subjects. We make movies designed to steer them toward our products, whatever these products may be. These movies are designed to make each subject breathless, pliant, confused, over-stimulated, and highly amenable to suggestion.”

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As a another poster responded this is a very simple identity function. If you are looking for an example how a more complex software would be expressed here is an actual software patent that is expressed as mathematical formula: Patent 5,893,120 reduced to mathematical formulae

"What Are Little Girls Made Of?" has a blatant upskirt scene involving Majel Barrett. Then there's the whole stalactite-phallus later in the same episode.

Nutcase might not be the right word.
Osama Bin Laden got his terrorist training from CIA during the cold war when he was working for the U.S.
He did what he was trained to do, it's just that his loyalties shifted since then.

Even in Linux for desktops or servers if well there are several distributions there is no big effect of fragmentation, most programs run unchanged in all of them. You can run KDE apps in gnome desktops (provided that you have installed the libraries, and that the app is not specific for the desktop environment, like being a plasma extension), the difference between distributions (package formats? location of files? names of daemons?) is usually easy to fix or consider in your code, and as most is open source programs can be recompiled if is for another architecture.

If everything will be native linux, based on open libraries, probably won't be so hard to put a translation layer that makes easy to run the apps for one mobile OS into another (i.e. like Preenv for maemo). And apps probably will be HTML5 (that most should run in all platforms, no matter if is linux or not, have Firefox OS apps running in my N9 with Hydra WRT), or in QT/QML (that maybe could be able to run with minimal changes, or not too hard to port, in other QT/QML platforms, be BB10, Sailfish, Meego, desktop or even android, besides Ubuntu Touch).

This is what counts as evidence for you. Did you ever find some counter evidence? Almost certainly not, right?

For those who are interested, you can read about Beck 2008 here, here, and here.

For the full effect, make sure you actually read through Beck 2008.

Proof that you only need a few bits of junk our there, and that's enough for politics.

This is what counts as evidence for you. Did you ever find some counter evidence? Almost certainly not, right?

For those who are interested, you can read about Beck 2008 here, here, and here.

For the full effect, make sure you actually read through Beck 2008.

Proof that you only need a few bits of junk our there, and that's enough for politics.

For those who don't like to click shortened links, here are the real ones:

http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/1cswmm/enormous_methane_releases_from_the_arctic_shelf/
http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/1b6roo/the_most_influential_climate_science_paper_today/

The first one is directly responsive to the previous post (about northern permafrost areas becoming arable land). It argues that there are massive reserves of methane that may enter the atmosphere if the permafrost melts. This is important because methane is more of a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. The actual article is at http://enggpt.blogspot.com/2013/04/enormous-methane-releases-from-arctic.html

The second one is one of the uncontrollable warming arguments. For some reason (unexplained in the article at http://insideclimatenews.org/news/20140213/climate-change-science-carbon-budget-nature-global-warming-2-degrees-bill-mckibben-fossil-fuels-keystone-xl-oil ), if we run over a certain level of carbon dioxide in the air, the Earth will turn into Venus. This is despite the fact that the Earth used to have much more carbon dioxide in the air than it does now.

It's worth noting that the uncontrollable warming folks are the left's equivalent of the right wingers who argue that there is no global warming. It's easy enough to find older papers saying that the tip off point was a time that was in the future then but is now in the past. There are plenty of bad effects that can occur without uncontrollable warming. Especially for people who live close to sea level. Matching the right's hyperbole with bigger hyperbole makes the right look more sane as a result.

Nah. Neither Al Quaeda nor the Muslim Brotherhood is so coherent an organization that it could pull off deceit on this scale.

They have already done it in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Libya. They were so successful that it can hurt the careers of college professors, politicians, and government analysts to question the Muslim Brotherhood's party line. "Progressive" websites routinely delete comments for merely mentioning that the Muslim Brotherhood exists; The Guardian's Comment Is Free is notorious for this, and Democratic websites in the US consider knowledge of the Muslim Brotherhood to be a sign of Republican Party membership and therefore "trollish behaviour".

They not only could do it. They have done it. They are still doing it. Have you noticed who the "rebels" in Syria are? And they control the levers of power to such a degree that anybody who questions their doctrine is ostracised by society.

The blog pretty much describes what we expected, but it provides interesting details (like gossip junkies, we always like details). Especially since Microsoft has become almost as walled off from outsiders as North Korea - or maybe IBM in its heyday in the '70s and '80s - and this guy (possibly one of Sinofsky's inner circle?) seems to have quit his blog.

In short, nice catch.

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It's pretty funny how many uninformed people like to spout off on this site. I see several people telling me how my source is wrong. I thought that perhaps it is and did a quick Google check. According to Wikipedia, you get 1mg of absorbed nicotine from smoking a cigarette. Well, we aren't talking about smoking them, so you are wrong on that fact. This site talks about extracting the nicotine for use in e-cigarettes. Starting with 4g of tobacco they get 15ml of liquid at a concentration of 2.5mg/ml. That is 37.5mg of nicotine. This site has a couple of guys that used 40g of tobacco to roll 51 cigarettes. So that's 0.79g/cig. Ten cigarettes would be 7.9g of tobacco which would yield almost 75mg of nicotine. That is at the high end of the range for toxic levels of nicotine for mammals on the Wikipedia link above (30-60mg).

Thanks for getting me inspired to do a little research on these numbers, it was a good exercise. And all you dumb asses that think you know better -- Suck It!!!

*grabs a straw*

Bah. Any true thief makes bill-trailing getaway in a Fiat 500.

Nevermind. THOSE are gone now, too. Pity the State Department doesn't realize NOTHING goes away on the net. . .

So. . .

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I've given out a homework problem to candidates for several years now and I really like the insight it gives me. the problem is based on this: http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/10/universal-design-pattern.html - just design a class that implements the prototype/property pattern. Amazing the stuff people come up with

This site explains a lot of the issues many people have with xkcd as well as a well-reasoned response to a lot of the people who seem to get upset by what I think is pretty fair criticism.

Explains? It's a bunch of crap explanations along the lines of "I think this sucks". Oh wow, that's just a fantastic.

I don't get the XKCD hate. If you don't like it, DON'T READ IT. People that loudly proclaim how much they don't like XKCD come off as either butthurt douchebags suffering from some kind of "hey notice me I'm awesome too" syndrome, or they are somehow going for the "I'm über trendy because I disdain that which many other like", so they're angling for the hipster's hipster.

Figures you'd post anonymous; too chicken shit to even attach a pseudonym to your post. You're probably the guy behind xkcdsucks.blogspot.com. And that guy, whoever he is, must have an even emptier existence to bother.

Even if you don't like every XKCD comic (I don't) you have to admit (well, unless you're some entrenched opinionated asshole) that his infographics are pretty awesome. Stuff like the gravity well, oceans, money, radiation, movie plotlines, etc.

Yes, there are people who don't consider any of xkcd art. Myself included. For every good xkcd comic, there are at usually a few dozen that fall flat. That includes this. It's not funny and I certainly don't find it insightful in any way. It obviously wants to be insightful, it's just not, though to be fair it's not "finished" yet.

This site explains a lot of the issues many people have with xkcd as well as a well-reasoned response to a lot of the people who seem to get upset by what I think is pretty fair criticism.