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mithaleron Flame Malware Makers Send 'Suicide' Code

Actually, other Middle Eastern nations are nearly as worried about a nuclear-armed Iran as Israel is. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/sep/23/nuclear-iran-un-...

mithaleron Dragon has successfully achieved splashdown

Makes me wonder: what system was in place in the time of the Apollo missions for determining the exact location of a reentering spacecraft? Was it just, "here's the probable drop zone, commence search-and-rescue"? I imagine GPS would make that a lot easier.

mithaleron Please don't learn to code

A good friend of mine recently tweeted[0]: "Those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it; those who do not study mathematics or programming are doomed to repeat themselves."

[0]: https://twitter.com/#!/Sniffnoy/status/201187266197065729

mithaleron NASA cannot make a simple DNS change

I don't get it. Am I supposed to be mad at them for not removing www from their domain? Aren't there more important things to be mad about?

mithaleron "Lighten up"

I have sympathy for the outcast with poor social skills because of mistreatment by society.

But such an outcast ceases to be sympathetic the instant s/he makes someone else's life unpleasant. This isn't about "man hate"; this is about someone who made an offensive comment that made someone else uncomfortable. That's not OK, and we reasonably expect better socialization in our peers than this. If the person who made this remark is not a "happy, mentally-healthy, well-adjusted human being", then no matter how much compassion his condition might reasonably engender, he should get help.

Furthermore, by equating a lack of compassion for a man who is "not healthy" with "man hate", you implicitly claim that "men are naturally unhealthy". To me, this comes across as a greater denigration of men than any harsh reaction leveled at the oppressor.

mithaleron Notifications are Evil

In that sense, notifications are actually a good deal better than phone calls, which demand immediate attention (or frustrate the caller by making them think "you never pick up the phone!").

mithaleron Show HN: Gmelius, Towards a Better Gmail

I doubt they will, seeing as how they've never blocked this: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/gighmmpiobklfepjoc...

mithaleron Roger Boisjoly dies at 73; engineer tried to halt Challenger launch

For more background on the engineer-manager disconnect that led to the Challenger disaster, it's worth reading about Richard Feynman's famous appendix to the Rogers report (even Wikipedia's summary is a fascinating read):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogers_Commission_Report#Role_o...

mithaleron DHS Monitors Social Media For 'Political Dissent'

The government is listening to its people to find out when they disagree with it? It's almost like they're a democracy!

Folks, this is GOOD news. I know it's fashionable to complain about squashed civil liberties, but seriously, I'd be a lot more concerned if the government weren't making efforts to discover public sentiment against it from social media.

mithaleron Roboto: Android font explained By Glenn Fleishman

Intuitively, I think similarly--and then I put two pieces of the same text next to each other, one in Helvetica and one in Roboto, and I immediately sense a subtle difference in personality that I can't put my finger on but I know is there.

mithaleron Trolls (2008)

There was one discussion that I participated where I predicted that Apple would see declining profit margins due to increased competition. Remarkably this completely benign, seemingly obvious observation saw me declared a troll, and shortly thereafter yet another account was hellbanned from HN.

I'm curious--can you paste the text of that comment here if you still have it? It's possible that, for example, it was your tone that got you downvoted, not your message. Or it could have been the community perceiving you to be ignoring evidence, or any number of other things. In any case, this claim here isn't sufficient for us to judge the fairness of the response.

mithaleron Prof. of Constitutional Law at Harvard says that SOPA violates First Amendment

What would a "SOPA-like law that only applies to corporate websites" be? SOPA gives rights holders a process for removing content from websites that they own rights to. What would the equivalent be for a corporate website?

mithaleron WikiLeaks: The Spy Files

So if that is the way the world works, what of note have they accomplished, aside from drawing the ire of the US government and getting a leader martyred, their finances blockaded, and a barrage of at-best ambivalent media attention?

The nail that sticks up gets hammered down. Change doesn't happen because a few activists angrily demand it; it happens because of huge cultural shifts in the minds of millions.

This is the model Wikileaks had at the beginning - and no one cared and things didn't change.

That just isn't true. Read through this list, up to 2010.[0] WL can get things done more subtly. It may not attract huge mainstream headlines that way, but that's fine. It should be amassing influence over years or decades, because that's the way real successful institutions start out. Not everyone is on Internet time--certainly not governments.

So: Either you editorialize and embargo stuff and work together with media organizations. Or you don't - and no whistleblower will ever give you stuff anymore, because it's just not going to change anything.

I believe there's a happy medium here, but if WL is your model of media cooperation, you may want to look elsewhere, since WL has not exactly been a good citizen from their perspectives.[1]

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_published_by_WikiLe...

[1] http://www.theatlanticwire.com/global/2011/12/wikileaks-stil...

mithaleron WikiLeaks: The Spy Files

Wikileaks should not be editorializing.

Feeding us a party line about a "mass surveillance industry" and "Orwell's World" and "Selling Surveillance to Dictators" is not going to bring people to their cause. All it does is make them look like someone with an agenda to push, and I'm not in the habit of going to people with an obvious agenda for a primary source about someone they don't like.

What I want is the old Wikileaks back. Anyone else remember the days when they were actually a wiki? Whistleblowers would approach them with documents from all manner of sources from governments to corporations to religious institutions, they would be subjected to source verification, and then they would be published and indexed for the world to see with minimum fanfare. Back then, I at least got the sense that they were devoted to aiding whistleblowers, not some silly and ineffectual crusade against the US government, no matter how right that cause may be. Can anyone really say that that's gotten us anywhere useful?

Let us see the documents and judge for ourselves what they mean.

mithaleron Find His Porn: Evil Website of the Week

I'm curious now: do you have citations for the "growing body of knowledge around porn-induced ED in 20-somethings"? I don't mean to undermine your point, I'm just interested in hearing more.

mithaleron ArchLinux, Not Just For The Elite

I use the Ubuntu patchset. The difference between that and stock fontconfig is night-and-day; installing it is a constant reminder that for all the controversial moves Canonical has made in recent months, making Linux fonts not look like ass was one thing they did about as well as they possibly could have.

mithaleron Android hardware fails more than iPhone, BlackBerry

You didn't respond to my point, which is that you're derailing the comment thread by accusing people of saying things they didn't say. That's a perfectly legitimate reason to downvote a comment, and it has nothing to do with being an "Android fanboy".

mithaleron Android hardware fails more than iPhone, BlackBerry

You seem to be trying to make some kind of wider point about "Android fanboys", and in so doing you're accusing people of making statements about Android sales that they haven't made, and are irrelevant to the OP.

In reality, all I pointed out was that a report about hardware failure should come with statistics broken down by hardware manufacturer. The other "Android fanboys" that you're similarly decrying said the same. Your point would be valid if we were also saying, at the same time, that good and crappy Android phones put together beat Apple. Which we aren't. This isn't about Android "winning" or "losing"; it's about failing hardware, which is highly relevant for anyone selecting a phone, regardless of whatever ideological position one might take WRT smartphone software.

mithaleron Android hardware fails more than iPhone, BlackBerry

I'd like to see this broken down by manufacturer and model. Without that, all this tells us is "some Android phones are cheaply made", which is to be expected for an OS designed to be cheap and easy to put on hardware.

mithaleron Sexism in IT - The JavaOne incident

Y'know, no one here is saying that you shouldn't receive the same accolades as Shifra for stopping a talk in the middle and calling out the speaker for making a sexist joke about men.

When that happens, post about it. But until then, this comment does nothing but derail the conversation.

mithaleron Shakespeare programming language

That sounds a little like steganography, or an IOCCC entry.

mithaleron Richard Stallman on Steve Jobs: correction

And this is my real beef with stallman's brand of free. His freedom is a narrow-minded ideology, abstracted from what freedom means in the real world. In the real world the only freedom I care about is the freedom to spend my time the way I want. From that perspective, jobs did a lot to make me free, because the switch from linux to apple "freed" more of my time than it cost me.

You're overloading the word free, a common rhetorical confusion that invariably appears in discussions of this nature. You're not really saying that Apple gave you more freedom; you're saying it gave you more time. That's a legitimate point, but you shouldn't pretend that that's the same thing as "freedom" in any sense remotely resembling what Stallman or foob care about. As such, you clearly don't "strongly agree" with what Stallman is trying to do; he wants software to be something anyone can tinker with, modify and redistribute. Apple wants to give you the "best possible computing experience", which it can only do for you as long as you're in total agreement with Apple over what that means.

By the way, Apple machines are a huge timesink for me whenever I try to use them, precisely because I can't customize the things in the UI that drive me batty (namely, the global menu and the dock, two elements of the OSX UI that Apple holds sacrosanct). I'm orders of magnitude more productive on a machine I've set up to work the way I want than one that I haven't. So of what use to me is Apple's brand of "freedom"? Contrast it to Stallman's, which allows me to tear open a piece of software to see what it's doing or modify its behavior. I know which one I'd rather have.

mithaleron Google+ is now available with Google Apps

Wait, what do you mean? Right now I have two Gmail tabs open at the same time, one personal, one work. I'm using the multiple accounts feature: https://accounts.google.com/b/0/MultipleSessions

You need to keep the accounts separate because enterprise apps have different privacy issues; your employer in enterprise settings is specifically given the ability to see all of your data. Would you really want them seeing your personal account the same way?

mithaleron Richard Stallman on Steve Jobs: correction

To provide some context on his aims, Stallman sees money as a malign influence; he lives his own life cheaply so he can concentrate on what's important to him, not what money tells him to do. See this transcript: http://www.gnu.org/events/rms-nyu-2001-transcript.txt

Another thing that Microsoft, well, not just Microsoft, people who don't support free software generally adopt a value system in which the only thing that matters is short-term practical benefits: How much money am I going to make this year? What job can I get done today? Short-term thinking and narrow thinking. Their assumption is that it's ridiculous to imagine that anybody ever might make a sacrifice for the sake of freedom.

Obviously, not everyone's priorities are aligned that way. I'm not sure to what extent he expects the same of other people. But I can at least see where he's coming from.

mithaleron WebGL X-Wing

Chrome just added an API for this in their dev builds, for Native Client at least. http://googlechromereleases.blogspot.com/2011/10/dev-channel...

mithaleron Metroid Source Code Expanded

Was this actually written in assembly by its original developers? I'm not familiar with the history--I get the sense the code explained here was originally disassembled from a ROM, and then systematically analyzed to gain an understanding of how it worked.[0] If so, couldn't it have been written in C or somesuch?

Not that that wouldn't make this presentation here an impressive feat.

[0] http://www.metroid-database.com/m1/sourcecode.php

mithaleron Poll: Facebook usage

I have a Facebook account. I never use it for communication; I only use it for keeping my Android contacts up to date, for which I have yet to discover a better tool. If not for that I'd have deleted my account and /etc/hosts blocked it months ago.

mithaleron Pagination with rel=“next” and rel=“prev”

Well, not just that. I imagine browsers implementing keyboard shortcuts that automatically go to the next or previous pages.

mithaleron Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot Beta 1, Released

Can someone explain to me exactly what the advantage is of hiding the menu bar contents behind mouseover?

mithaleron Reversing The Moral Decay Behind The London Riots

Social capital ... has not disappeared. It is alive and well and can be found in churches, synagogues and other places of worship. Religious people, he discovered, make better neighbors and citizens. They are more likely to give to charity, volunteer, assist a homeless person, donate blood, spend time with someone feeling depressed, offer a seat to a stranger, help someone find a job and take part in local civic life. Affiliation to a religious community is the best predictor of altruism and empathy: better than education, age, income, gender or race.

Struggling politically for more government action (and by extension, taxation) toward the same goals isn't altruistic?