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User: mmelson

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Comments · 15

  1. Re:It will never be reliable enough... on RSA: An Unusual Approach to User Authentication: Behavorial Biometrics (Video) · · Score: 1

    Except that it's less about keeping the wrong people out and more about making it easier for the right people to get in. The masses don't like multi-factor authentication because, frankly, it's way more of a pain than just typing in a password. This sort of technology encourages adoption of more secure methods because, assuming it works well, Mr. Bank get more security, and, because it is much more user friendly, they won't get a ton of calls from their users bitching about how much of a pain it is to log into their online banking site.

  2. Re:It will never be reliable enough... on RSA: An Unusual Approach to User Authentication: Behavorial Biometrics (Video) · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I posted this before, but I'll summarize here:

    If this matches, it's likely that you are who you say you are. If this doesn't match, it just asks for additional factors of authentication (security questions, smartcards, etc). It is not a replacement for any other form of authentication.

  3. Re:Smells like an academic spinoff on RSA: An Unusual Approach to User Authentication: Behavorial Biometrics (Video) · · Score: 5, Interesting

    This is not so much an authentication method as a heuristic used to decide whether or not to ask for additional credentials. It's exactly analogous to the way security questions work for online banking. If it recognizes you, there's a good chance you are who you say you are and your password is considered sufficient. But, if it doesn't recognize you, that isn't necessarily indicative of an impostor, just that it needs to ask for more information (in the form of a token, smartcard, security question, etc) before it can be confident you are who you say you are.

    A "yes' from this this is acceptance, but a "no" is not a complete rejection. It just makes you jump through an extra hoop or two.

  4. Re:100 IQ is relative to average on Are We Getting Smarter? Rising IQ Scores In the Twenty-First Century · · Score: 1

    You've got to be careful with the term "average". In the text you quoted, it says that the *median* is defined as 100 IQ points, but that doesn't mean the *mean* isn't increasing. If the bottom half of the population is not getting dumber but the top half is getting smarter, you could have a situation where the median is still 100 but the mean is going up.

  5. Re:Hire two more astronomers. on NASA Ponders What To Do With a Pair of Free Space Telescopes · · Score: 1

    According to the WSJ, Astronomy and Astrophysics had a 0% unemployment rate as of the 2010 census.

  6. Re:Facebook is a public place on Facebook Scans Chats and Posts For Criminal Activity · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Not "should", but "could"... except that doing so was explicitly made illegal, so that's not a fair analogy.

  7. Re:No way on Interrupted Sleep Might Be the Best Kind · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I've got a new puppy waking me up...

    The difference is that you're being woken up forcefully, and not waking up naturally. If you wake up during the wrong part of sleep, you often feel worse off than you were when you went to bed.

  8. Re:...and we are surprised because...? on How the GOP (and the Tea Party) Helped Kill SOPA · · Score: 1

    .. (and the two sets are not even disjoint).

    We call that BI-PARTISANSHIP.

  9. Re:My only question is... on Warner Brothers Hiring Undercover Anti-Pirates · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Where are all the anti-anti-pirates?

    On 4chan. May as well give them something productive to do.

  10. Re:If only we could harness this in RL on Baffled By the Obsession With Pretend-Business Games · · Score: 1

    It's not the risk or the legal burden. It's that people are lazy. It only takes a few minutes of relatively mindless clicking each day to be successful on a Facebook game. If a real business only took a half an hour a day, everyone would have one.

  11. Re:Tell it to the plastic clown on Uniforms For the Help Desk? · · Score: 1

    There are plenty of highly respectable professions that wear uniforms. Police, professional athletes, pretty much anyone in the medical field, and the military to name a few.

  12. Re:information smuggling? on High-Tech Gadgets Can Pose Problems At Mexican Border · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Bake it IN the cake? That seems a bit extreme. Why not just bake the cake, let it cool, insert the microSD, then frost. If they start defrosting cakes while searching people, they deserve to find it.

  13. Re:Paperwork on How To Create More Jobs · · Score: 2, Informative

    Hire a payroll company to deal with that stuff. Your time is almost certainly more important than the extra $20 per pay period that someone like Paychex charges. Right out of college I started a business with a friend and we ended up with 5 other people working for us full and part time. We used Paychex (just one of many), and we didn't have to deal with anything more complicated that a few forms we were provided with. They handled all the HR stuff for us, actually. It was quite nice to not have to worry about any of that stuff.

  14. Re:Those must have been BIG birds.... on Ancestors of Homo Sapiens Hunted by Birds · · Score: 1

    It might not have been so much a matter of the birds being BIG but us being SMALL. The skull in the picture in the article is tiny; barely big enough to fill a person's hand. Maybe the birds only preyed on children?

  15. Re:OpenOffice on Office 12 to Include Native PDF Support · · Score: 3, Informative

    Even DirectX wasn't started by Microsoft. It began as Reality Lab by RenderMorphics who were bought by Microsoft, who then turned it into DirectX.