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rogeryu

645 karma · joined September 16, 2014

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rogeryu··on As Zika virus spreads, El Salvador asks women not to get pregnant until 2018
If they want this, they should give them the means to do that: birth control! For free!
rogeryu··on MRI Scans of a person's brain
I got one screenshot with three images in it. The (vertical) profile image is clearly me. The other two (vertical frontal and horizontal at eye level) that could be anyone.
rogeryu··on MRI Scans of a person's brain
Last year an MRI scan was made of my brain. This was part of a promotion research at the university. All I got back was a lousy screenshot of my brain. ;-)

No but seriously - it was a big shock to see my brain in a picture. It is a really weird experience, similar when I saw myself for the first time on film. Maybe this is a normal experience for the current generation, but I hadn't seen myself on film before age 15. You have an image how you move, what you look like, but then you see this on film, and it's a total shocker. All these small movements you make, typical for you, and everybody around you knows them, except for you. So everybody else sees nothing strange when viewing that movie, except you.

I've seen many MRI scans in films and tv series, although I can't remember one since then. From these I have a general picture of what a brain looks like. I've seen plastic 3D brain models. And then I see my brain and it's so different. It's clearly me, no doubt, but still... Totally weird!!!

rogeryu··on The EU Is on the Verge of Collapse–An Interview with George Soros
It's interesting that you say that the weaker states never should have agreed, while in the stronger states (I live in one), the opposite is the current opinion. Maybe everyone agrees on this point? I think that is the case: now (!) everybody agrees that this was a stupid scenario.

On the other hand, where would we have been without the euro? Would it have been any better? I am not so sure.

And in the EU the richer states do support the poorer ones, but since long especially the UK opposes this. They don't see the benefit. I think it's well worth the money, even with the Greek. We cannot abandon them, and it would be a major political stupidity to do so, with Turkey and Russia going the wrong way. I think - in the end - all political leaders of importance will agree with this.

In Greece, the problem is corruption. It will be an uggly fight to turn this around. I hope this is that fight, because otherwise it's all for nothing, or it's only for the EU. I sincerely hope they can get rid of corruption, because it will make their life in the end a lot better. For now it's lots of misery though.

rogeryu··on Server Retired After 18 Years Running on FreeBSD 2.2.1 and a Pentium 200MHZ
Yes, I thought about that too, but I guess that UPS will not survive 18 years - the battery for sure, the device probably neither. Can you replace one without shutting down the server?
rogeryu··on Why didn't France adopt the longbow like England did?
Last summer I did a workshop with the longbow. It's real fun, and has many links to meditation, finding your center etc. I had seen it before, never liked it, but it was great.

In the end I shot at a 1.5 meter target about 100 meters away. You could barely see it, as it was lying flat on a hill. At first I could not believe that I had the power to get that far, but it worked out. I missed it by about 12 meters, which was not bad looking at the competition that day.

rogeryu··on Server Retired After 18 Years Running on FreeBSD 2.2.1 and a Pentium 200MHZ
Almost as impressive is the fact that in 18 years, the electricity had no downtime.
rogeryu··on Posting successful SSH logins to Slack
What about logwatch? That can do the same and a lot more. You can set it to mail you daily, which gives you an overview who logged in and how often. With a weekly mail you don't get these details, but it might be good enough.
rogeryu··on The Chinese character system is a brake on development
"The Web standards are a brake on development, let's write every web page in Assembly."

This is how I see it: "Assembly is a brake on development, let's write every web page in Web standards."

(And to be clear: web standards are not the holy grail! They have their pitfalls. Sometimes assembly is better, etc...)

rogeryu··on The Chinese character system is a brake on development
I guess pinyin is more like the German tv synchronizing English series. I live in the Netherlands, where we have subtitles on English shows and films, because that is much cheaper. So we're used to English, we all speak English. We have German tv channels here as well, and especially back in the 70s and 80s, when there were only six channels on tv, that was annoying and kind of funny. Maybe Germans growing up with these German voices makes you ignorant about the fact that what you see and what you hear does not match, but for everybody else it's absolutely clear. I see this on Spanish tv as well.

But I disagree with you "comparable ridiculous English word". The thing is that any foreigner can read it, look it up, type it on a keyboard, and pronounce it, probably remember it with a little effort and then use it at parties or to impress people. But well, I guess I'm biased from my "roman" point of view, and maybe Asian people have the same "fun" with that strange Chinese character?

rogeryu··on Show HN: I made a site to catalogue 10,000 CC0-licensed stock photos
Even if there is no "diff", this is an extra backup. Any of those sites can go down I guess, then where are all those pictures?
rogeryu··on Show HN: Super Mail Forward, an HTML email that evolves as you forward it
Fun is a good enough "application" for me! ;-)
rogeryu··on 25 Most Common Passwords of 2015
Direct link to the relevant article on Gizmodo:

http://gizmodo.com/the-25-most-popular-passwords-of-2015-wer...

The linked article does nothing more than link to that article and include a link to a "convenient" text file with the top 25:

123456, password, 12345678, qwerty, 12345, 123456789, football, 1234, 1234567, baseball, welcome, 1234567890, abc123, 111111, 1qaz2wsx, dragon, master, monkey, letmein, login, princess, qwertyuiop, solo, password, starwars.

rogeryu··on Time is an illusion – challenges in distributed computing synchronization
Few programmers have read the most important paper in this area, Leslie Lamport's "Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System" (1978)

If you want to be one of the few:

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/lamport/pubs/t...

rogeryu··on Private messages at work can be read by EU employers
All real personal stuff is done on my smartphone. I use 4G only at work, no work wifi. I do not open personal mail at the work computer. No Facebook, except sometimes on the phone. The only thing I do is reading and posting here and at several other websites.

I have no idea if my employer knows about this, but I haven't had any remarks about it and I do this for years now. Reading articles on this website and elsewhere (like Slashdot) is a distraction I need on a regular basis. And we don't have a policy like this, so I guess this doesn't apply to me.

rogeryu··on The Dying Art of Mental Math Tricks
Thanks!
rogeryu··on David Bowie Has Died
His remains should be sent to Mars. If there's not Life on Mars, at least he is the first to be Dead on Mars.
rogeryu··on Societies with Little Coercion Have Little Mental Illness (2013)
A while ago I read that societies around the equator have almost no schizophrenia. This was linked to vitamin D or UV-B, which we lack in the western world.
rogeryu··on How Mickey Mouse Evades the Public Domain
Copyright law changes should not apply to work already created.
rogeryu··on Google translated Russia to 'Mordor' in 'automated' error
The quotation for 'automated' made me think this was an intentional error made by Google.
rogeryu··on Microsoft Solitaire was developed by a summer intern
With AWS it's easy. You stop the machine, resize it to a bigger one with more CPU and/or RAM, then fire it up. This can be done in minutes.
rogeryu··on Dutch government says no to backdoors, grants $540k to OpenSSL
A data leak is not the same as a security vulnerability. The data leaks refer to organisations having customer data which is hacked. They have to report this. This doesn't cover finding a leak in Flash.
rogeryu··on Working fewer hours would make us more productive
This is nonsense, although it may depend on the kind of job you have. For most of us, we don't need to be there five days a week. You can plan around that.

Of course if you have five people in a team and everybody has a different day off, you can never get together, and that may be a problem. This is the same if you and your colleagues work many days/hours out of the office or at home.

rogeryu··on Android Full Disk Encryption Cold Boot Attack (2012)
It appears to me that RAM content is not cleared completely when you power down the device. Encryption keys may still be present in memory So powered down, you freeze the phone, which keeps the RAM at its current state, and then with some magic tricks you can read that memory. So powering down is not enough. In the future I guess powering down needs an extra action, wiping memory first.
rogeryu··on Close the Book. Recall. Write It Down (2009)
In university I learnt about the PQRST method:

1) Preview - browse through the text or chapter quickly. 2) Question - think about what this text is about. 3) Read. 4) Summary - make a summary. 6) Test.

This method actually was promoted in a psychology book about memory and memorizing. So not only did they teach about how memory works, but they gave tips how to memorize that, and on top of that they set up the complete book (which was about more than memory) that way. So the chapters in the book had some kind of "preview", a short intro about what the chapter was about, a summary and some test questions, with many pictures and side notes that kept you going.

rogeryu··on Springer Textbooks More Than 10 Years Old Available for Free Legal Download
What is the status of that speed reading app? It would display each word in the middle of the screen if I remember correctly, and by that way you could speed up reading a lot. I don't remember the name. Maybe not recommended for a good novel, and I don't know if it would really help in reading a book with difficult content, but still.
rogeryu··on Faker.js – generate fake data in the browser and Node
Why would I want to use this? Is this for test data or for obfuscation?
rogeryu··on FreedomBox 0.7 released
I've looked at what this is, but it's not clear to me. Is this an alternative to Tor? How can it enable users in China to surf the internet for free? Is it some kind of VPN? A short intro is welcome! :-)
rogeryu··on What Wittgenstein Learned from Teaching Elementary School
> A lot of education isn't really about what you study or where you learn. It's about training your brain to think about things in a certain way.

In university I followed courses in Computing, Psychology, Law and Theology. All had different ways of learning, approaching the subject. Psychology was (for me) all about questioning: you can never be 100% sure and should always be aware of another possible explanation. This has stuck with me, and I'm champion finding alternative explanations.

One of my fellow students changed to medicine, and he told me that it was the complete opposite. If you questioned a method or theory (as first year student), you were completely out of line. These methods were tested thousands of times, and no stupid first year student could think of a better way, so don't even try. I guess this changes over time because you have to change methods to make progress, but it makes clear how different cultures can be.

rogeryu··on Juniper screenOS authentication backdoor - master ssh password posted
> nortel networks. no bugs in the last few years.

One week ago we could say this of Juniper as well.

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