rodh

I may be wrong, but the impression I'm getting is that people are offended that facebook have used the photos that have people tagged them in as data for training their facial recognition software without them agreeing to it.

It's the fact that they now have the power to determine whether you're in a photo, any photo, or even any video, anywhere in the world, that has people worried. What might facebook end up doing with that?

Of course there was nothing stopping them doing this without it being obvious to anyone.

Meet the world's first 3D monocle: http://us.toshiba.com/spectacle

My trick for remembering names: When I meet someone new, I try and think of someone else I know with the same name (a friend, famous person, etc.), and picture the two standing next to each-other.

With unique and foreign names I try and thing of an object or animal that sounds like that name. Sometimes I've had to get a bit more creative, like associating my Nepalese acquaintance Badu with Fred Flinstone (yabba dabba doo), but it always works.

Given the included JAR files, I'd be interested to know if the author measured only his performance in coding Java against his students.

Although I usually code in a basic text editor, Java is one of those languages in which I personally found setting up and getting familiar with a good IDE makes a huge difference. Back at University, my pure CS professors initially discouraged us from using Eclipse, Netbeans, etc. They certainly didn't want to teach us how to use them.

Yes. Sorry, that's what I meant by disappear.

Would have preferred it if they found another way of presenting that list to me.

This might just be me, but when I scan over a map, my automatic action is to hover my mouse over the countries I'm looking at (I do the same with my finger when I look at a physical map). If I do that here though, the map disappears.

I can't stop myself from doing it. It's driving me nuts.

Maybe that logo is used elsewhere, and there's a high likelihood for that logo to be in the user's cache.

My suggestion: Make it a link, in the WTF area and call it something like: "These pictures were cool before everyone else liked them".

Are you having server issues. All I can see is a pair of empty iframes.

I joke. Does the "ironically popular" use the input field's data in any way? If not, I'd say: don't put that button there. I typed a search request and couldn't decide what button to press. Until I read the explanation. Even know I don't know if I need to type something in to click on the "ironically popular" button.

The only point at which an address can be used to prevent fraud, is between the credit card charging process and your bank. If it's paypal charging your credit card, they're the only ones who need your address.

Yell is the company that publishes the UK Yellow Pages. I'm sure Bret Taylor meant Yelp. However: http://www.yell.com/reviews/ "The places to go, by the locals in the know". Or so they say.

Maybe not a homegrown tape format... but how about Teletext, FM Radio, Freeview, HD on Freeview, iPlayer?

Yet the rate of growth seems to be more or less linear. At least within this time frame.

Two words: Shark flu

Another one to add to the list, when working in the shell, is ctrl-u. This sort of does the opposite of ctrl-k and clears everything from your cursor to the start of the line. I use it when I recursive-search then change my mind, or when I screw up a password when ssh'ing.

On a related note, when you want to insert something at the start of a line in a shell, rather than hitting home, I find ctrl-a to be very useful. Especially on a macbook, where cmd-left doesn't work in a shell (for some reason) and there is no home key.

This often works in unexpected places. For example: testing it right now, I can click the address bar on google chrome, hit ctrl-a (not cmd-a) and the caret is at the start of the url.

My guess would be that the high resolution is required to interpret the IR pattern at the maximum distance supported by the kinect (tens of feet). I'm wondering if the 30Hz is a limitation of the camera sensor or the pattern matching.

Isn't the latency experienced with the games arising in software (the algorithms running on the xbox, not the Kinect itself)?

Woops, missed that. Good article though.

An interesting question I'm starting to ask myself is whether giving the ISPs this option might finally give them the incentive to make multicasting a paid-for service for broadcasters, potentially driving down the net cost to broadcasters. Hmmm...

(Disclaimer: these views are my own, etc.)

I'm really disappointed in the next generation of remotes. What I really want to know is why, when we have touchscreen phones and devices like the iPad, our remotes are still hunks of plastic with dozens of tiny rubber buttons?

Forget remotes, I want the whole UI for my TV to be on a dedicated touchscreen device. I want to read about what's on next, preview what's on other channels and schedule recordings without disrupting what's on the display screen.

The rest of the time, show me two big volume buttons.

And in case the user does end up triggering it, perhaps also replace the "You have been banned" page with a captcha challenge to get yourself removed from the blacklist.

I've gone a couple of times to Social Innovation camps, here in the UK (http://www.sicamp.org/). For those who don't know, it's a get-together where hackers gather with social problem experts, such as youth offending teams (YOTs) and people who work for charities, etc.

It felt good to work on projects like that. Everyone was so excited about making change. As an example, a few months back I worked on one trying to reduce youth offending by providing a really usable sms gateway for young offenders to get in touch with local experts on certain problems.

The problem I've seen, is that it's not always easy to get people to follow up on them after the excitement of collaborative change has passed. Once people are working from their desks again, personal success seems to be once again the key motivator.

I don't know how to solve this.

Instead of "If you aren’t being challenged in your job – leave". I would say: find a way to challenge yourself. Take some initiative. It might be your job that's stopping you from reaching greater things, but I bet it's not your place of employment.

Talk to some experts. Come up with new ideas. Be disruptive. You've got the knowledge, the contacts, and the credibility to do so. Leaving now without trying that first seems like giving up to easily to me.

I have been recommending to self-employed people here in the UK to set up a limited company if they can, as taxes on dividends in this country are much lower than those on pay.

If you reduce your salary to a small (but not unreasonable) amount and withdraw extra money form the company in dividends, is a legal and perfectly reasonable way of saving on your taxes. However I do not know if this strategy would provide any benefit in the US tax system. I guess it depends on the state you live in.

You could just take the code snapshot when they choose to run it. Warn them of this, so they only end up showing the recruiter code they think will either work or is suitable for iterative development.

It would be fantastic if the candidate could just click a "run" button at any time, and (provided with some input string), see the output.

Of course this would make the pass rate a lot higher... but, assuming you tracked each iteration, would give the recruiter a chance to look at how the candidate goes about identifying their mistakes.