celticjames

I agree that style of Picasso is cubism and this process isn't able to replicate that. But I assume it's an early experiment to show what's possible now.

Roads are subject to wear and tear. Higher traffic means more wear and thus more repairs. Repairs for most roads come out of municipal budgets. Municipal budgets are paid for by property taxes. The homeowners bought that road. So who's got an entitlement problem here?

I couldn't get it to work because my region is Canada but my speech language was set to English (US). I had to install the speech recognition pack for English (Canada). In a way I sort of flattered that Cortana recognizes my distinct cultural identity.

Good point. According to wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_diaspora) there are 6.3 million Americans living abroad or ~2% of Americans. So perhaps ~0.04% of Americans abroad renounced citizenship annually. To put it in context, though, you'd need to know how that rate change over time and the size of the American diaspora over time.

So it's hard to judge how big or meaningful this story is. But anecdotally, I too am in Canada and I have definitely been hearing a lot recently from American friends who are finding US citizenship to be a PITA because of taxes.

Nice emulator, but I'd love to have the real thing, a genuine old-school monochrome monitor, the kind that you used with a Hercules graphics card. Those monitors were so easy on the eyes. You could stare at Pascal all day. Figuring out the details of making it work is one of my 'someday' projects.

In google's case, you can print out a set of auth codes for times when you don't have your phone.

"It should be noted that no ethically-trained software engineer would ever consent to write a DestroyBaghdad procedure. Basic professional ethics would instead require him to write a DestroyCity procedure, to which Baghdad could be given as a parameter. " -- Nathaniel Borenstein

Gmail has a feature that lets you see what IP addresses you have logged on from. (Look for the little link at the bottom right.) Would LinkedIn's IP show up there if they are using your google password? Has anyone ever seen this behaviour?

I used to teach English to non-native speakers. All of them wanted to learn English with an American accent. I think they are actually doing themselves a disservice because they fail to understand the subtle differences of class status an accent signals. A more British inflected accent is an easy way to signal higher education and status to an American. They go a bit gaga for British accents. It's also easier to fake a British accent.

Shocked to learn that Brian Dunning has done this. I've been listening to his Skeptoid podcast for years. I always pictured someone of modest or middle class means because he solicits donations to help keep the podcast going. I didn't think he was also making millions from fraud. Ironically, 'consumer frauds' is one of things he has listed on his website as a target of his skeptical inquiry.

Found this blog post with court documents and background: http://www.skepticalabyss.com/?p=291

EDIT: Found this old blog post by Brian Dunning: http://skeptoid.com/blog/2011/10/05/a-partial-explanation/

"Cookie stuffing refers to a web site writing a cookie to your browser without your knowledge or permission. ... It’s a scary-sounding term, but it’s fundamental to the way Internet advertising works. ... Cookie stuffing is more than just a standard practice; it’s an essential component of the mechanics of serving ads effectively."

After reading your comment, I did some googling to find something that could convert an existing spreadsheet into code. I found a few commercial solutions that turn Excel into C++ or Java. I think the idea is that Excel becomes the prototyping tool for non-coders. That seems like a better idea than treating Excel as the final product. I feel like there's a new paradigm for both spreadsheets and programming in there somewhere but I need a bigger brain to see it.

The stories in the post all have repeatable bug conditions. If you read bugs submitted for something like Chrome or Firefox (or any big complex program) you see a lot of trying to figure out what state triggers a bug. There's a lot of, "I can't repeat it. Works fine for me." It's almost impossible to deduce what causes a bug because so many possible states can exists at any given moment.

The way a lot of bugs are eventually solved is not by asking what caused them, but when they started. It's often the regression testers who find the source. You keep going back through the nightly releases until you find one that doesn't exhibit the bug. At that point you go to the commit logs and there is your problem.

It does seem like an odd oversight that Chrome allows you to block plugins per site but not extensions. If you click the green lock in your address bar now, you can see the option to block all plugins. It stops java and flash, but allows extensions like adblock, etc to keep running on the page.

How do other people keep databases in sync between multiple developers and the production server? Source code is easy. Source control and code merging are mostly straightforward.

But in something like wordpress, a lot of what gets displayed to the end user is in a database. Aside from page content, widgets and other configuration often ends up in a database. It's not unusual for themes to keep css, javascript or php in the database. (Every time I use a theme that allows me to put PHP into a database I feel like I've failed as a programmer and the gods of MVC will smite me.)

So developer X adds content to his dev copy. Developer Y adds content to his copy. Meanwhile, the client or end users are adding content to the production copy. Using a shared development/staging server somewhat mitigates this, but not totally. You can't just git merge the sql together. (Can you? I mean, sure you can merge two sql files. But is the end product actually usable?) Is this a solved problem?

There's a great sci-fi novel, The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi, set in a post-oil world where tightly wound springs are used to store energy, as we do now with clocks. One of the subplots deals with a character trying to develop a material that can be wound tighter and more compactly without breaking. Or explosively unwinding. I'm not an engineer or physicist, so I've wondered, what is the theoretical limit for storing energy in a spring. Sci-fi stories usually do a bit of handwaving with nano/bio/quantum-tech to make magic materials, but what is the real science? Cars and laptops powered by springs sounds plausible (and awesomely steam punk) to me.

So this is hardware manufactured and sold under the Microsoft brand? Wow. That's a big re-alignment. I think you are right about this being the endgame for third-party builders.

Anyone know anything about this side of Microsoft? I assume the actual fab is done by anonymous Asian companies. How much of the design (nuts and bolts engineering, I mean) is done in-house and how much is contracted to established hardware manufacturers. (i.e. Does Samsung or the like have a piece of this pie?)

Between slide 4 and 5 there's one tiny bubble that blows up into a big giant bubble and a small one on the left that sinks a little. They are Yahoo, up 3,590%, and Apple, down 25%. They should do a follow up to see how they are doing today.

Retailers and consumers love Linux! It has has 61% market share. (Source: http://tinyurl.com/ce6t8dk).

Maybe people just don't like Gnome. (viz. http://tinyurl.com/834bn2j)

It's weird. When I was a kid, it took hours to make a trans-atlantic call to my grandmother. Now I feel like a man lost in the desert if I'm momentarily disconnected from globally available near-lightspeed communication.

For those looking for a distraction while email is temporarily gone, why not contemplate the lighter side of the singularity: http://www.cracked.com/video_18400_why-scariest-sci-fi-robot...

I think older programmers will side with Crockford and for good reason.

The bootstrap code makes assumptions about the future of the js spec and browser implementations that aren't safe. Young people don't remember the dark days of people writing js to leverage IE/Netscape specific bugs which then had to be turned into features because so much code existed in the wild that could be broken.

Crockford is a scarred veteran of the spec wars. I'm sure that when he sees young people trying to game spec/implementation ambiguities, he thinks, "Never again! Not on my watch!"

I think best practice is explicit, future-proofed code that doesn't tie the hands of spec authors or browser vendors. I know that Crockford's tool doesn't accept the current spec or browser behaviour, but his choice is informed by past experience and concern for the future. It's not just some random bug that he's too stupid or stubborn to fix.

I don't know that I would want an implant, but I'd like to try a haptic compass. You strap it on and it gives you a physical sensation of where north is, as if you were a bird with magnetoception.

Wire article on haptic compasses: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/15.04/esp.html

U.S. soldiers have been tried in foreign courts for breaking local laws. From a Stars and Stripes article regarding a soldier tried for rape in Korea:

"The U.S.-South Korea status of forces agreement allows servicemembers to be turned over to South Korean custody if servicemembers are suspected of heinous crimes and law enforcement officials request it" (http://1.usa.gov/yrzicW)

I don't know what status of forces agreement exists in Afghanistan.

It's almost 100 years since Scott died on his expedition to the South Pole (29 March 1912). We live in a science fiction future.

FTA: "If one’s hacked or the list of tokens leaked, everyone who ever used that service risks exposing his complete Gmail archive."

Is that even true? The advantage of Oauth over the "password anti-pattern" is that you can grant limited rights. i.e. sharing my address book with Facebook. That's personal information, but it's not my entire email archive.

I believe this list is the scope of possible Oauth permissions: http://code.google.com/apis/gdata/faq.html#AuthScopes

It looks like granting access the Gmail Atom feed allows access to new Inbox emails (but not the entire email body, I think.) But if you haven't granted that permission, your emails should be safe. (I think. Any expert opinions?)

Food for thought: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negligible_senescence

Not all animals are pre-programmed for an early death. I wonder if curve for these animals looks like the lightening bolt curve?

Firefox uses VS2005 for builds in order to support XP pre-SP3.

"Obviously the immediate benefit is owning your own content from the top of the page to the bottom." - I guess. I keep a copy of my G+ posts locally (even though Blogger posts from ten years haven't gone away). Posting it on a blog or G+ doesn't affect the copyright. I still own the content.

I accidentally fireproofed myself against this attack. I have the Web Developer extension installed and I forgot I had the Disable Cache option on.(The script works as advertised with it off.) Not really practical solution if you want pages to load fast.

I'm not sure I understand the strategy of targeting the everyday mobile pad user. Linux is already killing with Android. For Ubuntu to succeed, they would either need a hardware vendor to choose Ubuntu over Android (unlikely) or expect users to buy hardware that already has an OS but can be rooted and loaded with Ubuntu. I don't doubt there are power users salivating at the chance to do that, but that's basically replicating the uphill battle Linux faces on the desktop. And after the war has already been won. (Edit: missing word).

Readers may also enjoy this discussion of how many moves a chess player has to make before he is playing a game unique in human history:

http://www.radiolab.org/2011/aug/23/rules-set-you-free/