joshzayin

FYI to the dev: There's an extra > on http://mygengo.com/translator/ : "Simply sign up here and take a test to get started. Your test will be reviewed within 30 days by a Senior Translator who is native in the language. If you pass the test, you can then browse and work on jobs.> "

True. Somewhere I thought I read that the installer ran without user interaction in this variant, but thinking about it, that doesn't make much sense.

Though, if you're concerned about having to give an admin password (as evidently some people are), running in a non-admin account would solve that. (Also, if you have write privileges to /Applications, it's possible to write a script overwriting the contents of a trusted executable with malicious code, but that isn't how this works so it's slightly irrelevant.)

Right, but the point of this article is that it no longer needs the admin password. If you're running in a non-admin account (like I am), it'll still need the password, and thus user interaction, so it'll be trivial to stop.

As I understand it, this relies on the admin account's ability to write to the /Applications folder without a password. So, if you just run in a non-admin account, you should be fine.

>Not even sending a token to the email address on file would work in all cases because the users might have lost their email accounts to the breach too (by reusing the same weak password).

Well, in that case, it'd be the user's fault for not having unique passwords, or at least for not changing an email password they knew was compromised, not Sony's fault. Sony can't do anything to ensure the users' email accounts are secure, so emailing a token would probably be the best solution.

If this goes through, I wonder what would happen to Skype's Linux and Mac support. I'd hope MS would still support it, but I don't think they have any Linux software currently (I'm not positive about that, so please correct me if I'm wrong) and the Mac version of Office is always delayed compared to the Windows version. I hope Skype doesn't similarly languish.

Am I missing something? Why not just use Google Voice?

I mean, Google tries to do everything too, and while they're certainly not always successful, they're certainly doing really well and turning huge profits.

You should really get that site copy-edited. "Favorate" on your homepage should be "Favorite".

As mentioned in the post GiraffeNecktie linked above:

  Regarding gender differences being in-born, poster cpt.sanity wrote: “It has been repeatedly shown and is accepted as fact in modern psychology from Rogers onwards, that while sex is a biological fact, gender roles are sociologically determined, largely by peer pressure in early years and mediated by advertising and media images.”

I think you are somewhat missing the point of the blog post. It's highlighting that, from a very young age, society's gender roles are being insinuated into people. This leads to gender disparities such as those in the STEM fields and only helps to perpetuate harmful stereotypes.

Zach Weiner (SMBC) did a comic that fairly eloquently expresses the problem: http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1883

The problem highlighted in the blog post is that children are conditioned by the toys they are bought, and those that they see their friends with, to perpetuate the gender roles and stereotypes that have been so omnipresent--and harmful--in our society.

I would tend to doubt that the changes will be that small, considering the massive negative media attention 'antennagate' got--I think it's likely that they'll at least move the antenna to eliminate that problem, which would seem to necessitate some appearance redesigns as well.

They might not, but it would somewhat surprise me.

As a bisexual man (who in no way claims to speak for anyone else), I'm torn on this.

Of course, I am fully supportive of freedom of expression and the phrase "I strongly disagree with your opinion but will defend to the death your right to voice it." But...can you imagine an app claiming to "cure" black people? That'd never be approved by Apple. "Curing" LGBT people is just as absurd as "curing" black people. Exposing children to such bigoted, offensive material is really awful. It should almost certainly not have the 4+ rating, and I'm really torn on whether Apple should even allow it into the App Store.

Stuff like this isn't just some abstract issue about 'gay rights' with two equally valid sides of an issue--this homophobia can ruin lives, and sometimes even result in death. It's really a very emotional issue that can't be easily dealt with or abstracted into some 'gay rights' issue.

I feel like I didn't express myself as well as I would've liked, so if anyone has questions, please feel free to ask them.

1Password is an incredibly valuable tool for me that I use all the time. Before I started using it, I had moderately weak passwords that were roughly the same on every website for which I had an account. But now I can have randomly generated passwords unique to each website and not have to worry about knowing them--I just need to know one password (a randomly generated, strong one) and that allows me to securely log in to any site.

And the Dropbox syncing is a killer feature--I have the iPhone app as well as the desktop version, so I can view the passwords anywhere if I need to log in on a computer at school (for example).

And, of course, supporting and augmenting that is Dropbox: it lets me easily sync not only my passwords but also my files--I've stopped carrying around a flash drive now--if I'm working on a file at school, I can just upload it to my Dropbox (in the correct folder) and then it's there when I get home, without me having to think about it at all. It's very convenient and I've become somewhat dependent on it.

They say they're upgrading their database server, and should be up again shortly: http://twitter.com/DropboxOps

EDIT: And now it seems to be back up.

> backups of your torrented music are obviously not fair use

Obviously, but how can Dropbox tell if the files are torrented or were purchased legally without DRM? Or legally ripped from a CD for a backup?

Something I found interesting from the comments on that article was the claim that Dropbox remotely deletes mp3 files that infringe copyright.

Can anyone else confirm that they do this? It's surprising to hear that--I would have expected that if something's in your private Dropbox, there couldn't be any copyright infringement at all. Aren't backups generally considered fair use?

The implementation of the algorithm didn't rely on it, but they did test it using that data.

>However, we did compare the Blocklist data we gathered with the sites identified by our algorithm, and we were very pleased that the preferences our users expressed by using the extension are well represented. If you take the top several dozen or so most-blocked domains from the Chrome extension, then this algorithmic change addresses 84% of them, which is strong independent confirmation of the user benefits.

There's no way to force it to interpret the bits logically, rather than as a floating point number?

I'll admit I'm not familiar with JS, but assuming that it conforms to the IEEE standard for floating point and you can do bitwise logical operations, can't you just AND it with a 1 in the sign bit place and 0s in all other places, then do a logical right shift of it and see if it's 1? (In the IEEE floating point standard, negative numbers have a 1 in the most significant bit.)

The source poem the embedded song references (by Edwin Arlington Robinson): (\ns for stanza breaks)

Richard Cory

Whenever Richard Cory went down town,

We people on the pavement looked at him:

He was a gentleman from sole to crown,

Clean-favoured and imperially slim.

(\n)

And he was always quietly arrayed,

And he was always human when he talked;

But still he fluttered pulses when he said,

"Good Morning!" and he glittered when he walked.

(\n)

And he was rich, yes, richer than a king,

And admirably schooled in every grace:

In fine -- we thought that he was everything

To make us wish that we were in his place.

(\n)

So on we worked and waited for the light,

And went without the meat and cursed the bread,

And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,

Went home and put a bullet in his head.

Does anyone have a mirror of the site? It's unexpectedly dropping the connection for me.

> Don't buy her geek toys/gadgets as gifts

...unless she's a geek, presumably?

I mean, there certainly exist men who would love to have a geek toy/gadget as a gift, so why shouldn't at least some women want that as well?

For the curious: http://www.who.int/gender/whatisgender/en/index.html

Essentially, sex is biological while gender is social. Transsexuality is a disparity between what someone was born biologically as (sex) and what they identify as (gender).

See also: http://www.docstyles.com/apacrib.htm#AppA

Yes, I made that post before I saw what smokinn said about QQ. (And what others said about other Chinese social networking companies, and American companies in China, in general.)

Oh, huh. That's weird.

I wonder if Chinese Internet users for some reason think they'd be caught evading the filter if they put their actual city in their profile?

Or maybe his sampling method was just abysmal? ;)

I'd suspect it's because people in China use proxies to evade the filter, and hence have non-Chinese IPs.

That'd be the ideal, yes, but I highly doubt the court'll change what they're doing without something on the scale of a constitutional amendment.

RE: the 9th, I think more precision is needed-it's still too easy for a court to reject certain things as "not rights."

I think there should be an amendment that in essence makes it unconstitutional to ban any action which does not negatively affect another human being, with maybe a bit more specificity on what "negatively affect" means. But the anti-drug lobby will never let that pass, and the RIAA/MPAA might have problems with it too. (And it should be clear that it only refers to people, NOT corporations or organizations. They should have rights, but not the same rights as individuals-look at what the S.C. did to campaign financing.)

The problem with the 9th amendment is that it's far too vague. Without specific regulation, the court will always move in the direction of taking away rights.

Yes, but that doesn't stop the government from taking away rights (See: Plessy v. Ferguson/Brown v. Board of Education, Loving v. Virginia [was needed to stop abridgment of rights], DADT and DOMA, for example.)