seandougall

No, I believe the point was exactly the opposite: that the new logo feels too immediately familiar, because it's so reminiscent of countless other red-amber-green-blue tech logos from Windows 3.0 on.

I dunno, it seems a lot safer to let them finish the trip and then sue to recover the full cost of airfare and hotel, rather than risk being sued just for a partial refund on a single leg of the flight.

I agree; nobody should be considering cryptocurrencies an investment. That’s not the message coming from most Bitcoin enthusiasts, though.

From a normal investor’s standpoint, the hash power is an implementation detail. Trust has to be in the integrity of the blockchain.

My brand new (just arrived today!) stove has these capacitive buttons, and in terms of visual style it does indeed function perfectly; it's entirely clear which parts of the interface are buttons, even though most of them have only unadorned text.

But I think that analogy falls short in one major way, which is that these buttons are logically grouped and evenly spaced across a surface that consists of _nothing but_ buttons. If there's silkscreened text there, you can press it and do something. The visual display of information happens in an LED display set aside in a well-defined area, so things to look at and things to press are 100% clearly delineated. In a desktop/mobile/web app, where content and interactive elements are interspersed, you lose that obvious context clue. That inevitably adds cognitive load, even if the interface is still technically usable.

For me it’s my Windows 98 CD key (25 digits alphanumeric). I had to wipe and reinstall so many times that it saved a lot of trouble to commit it to memory. And now here I am 20 years later...

That's a very apt quote. The way I look at things like this is: Do recording studios go to the same lengths? After all, if the effect is real, and the studio didn't do something to mitigate it, then it's going to be on the track regardless of what you do in playback at home. Much more so, even, because of the gain stages involved when recording a microphone signal.

(Spoiler alert: Recording studios do not install their own power poles. What they do, though, is install isolated ground circuits.)

Far more complex, I would argue. The “compiler” (or perhaps the “linker”?) consists of laws of physics and chemistry that govern intra- and intermolecular bonding and protein folding with such complexity that it has been the subject of one of the largest distributed computing networks ever: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folding@home

I dunno, it got my kids to fall asleep last night. I'm feeling pretty good about it right now.

Seems unlikely. Almost all of those examples are things you can do without Internet access at all, using phone or snail mail. (The one exception is running an online business, but AFAIK that is not specifically constitutionally protected.)

You can also get Internet access through other means, even if it's less convenient and/or more expensive. There might be a government-sanctioned monopoly on cable, but at least around here, there's also DSL, satellite, cellular data, dial-up, and even third-party fiber. Granted, not every place has all those options, but you'd be hard-pressed to find a place in the US where you can't access at least one.

Biological sex is most often male or female, but not always. People can be born intersex (with genitalia that are neither clearly male nor female, which is often “corrected” surgically at birth, and/or with genitalia that don’t match what’s expected from their chromosomes, and/or with chromosome combinations other than XX or XY). Chimerism can result in different parts of the body having different sex chromosomes. It’s not strictly monolithic or binary.

That aside, yes, “sex” broadly refers to biology in some way, though often oversimplified, while “gender” refers to identity and expression (which also don’t necessarily go hand in hand).

Plus, even Beanie Babies have some intrinsic value as toys. Housing far more, as shelter. Cryptocurrencies’ value is entirely extrinsic, as far as I can tell; it doesn’t have a nonzero lower bound built in.

[2016]

I certainly hope it was a joke. I don't personally want to see a Web where every HTTP request has to be manually reviewed by a human, let alone a whole legal department, before a response can be issued.

Depends on how badly the company needs your individual business, and/or how much you want their services, since they're under no obligation to accept or even review your proposed amendments. I suspect very few companies would have an incentive to take them seriously.

We get fairly routine requests from state universities and similar institutions who want us to fill out various forms, agree to supplemental terms, or alter our EULA for their special cases. Labor and legal costs would mean we'd lose money on lots of those sales, so we just respond with a blanket "sorry, we can't do that, good luck to ya" type message. The customer is then free to go about their lives without our software, or (more often) find some way to agree to the EULA as-is after all.

[raises hand] If it can avoid a >100 MB hello world, I’m on board. That makes it worth learning a language I would never have heard otherwise.

Does it share the cost, or does it duplicate the cost?

There’s a long history of fingerprint identification in law enforcement. That’s a far bigger sample size than any academic study could hope for.

On the other hand, the issue here seems to be less about how unique fingerprints are, and more about how unique the machine’s reading of a fingerprint is. That has more to do with the machine than the biology.

It happens a fair amount here in the hills of Southern California, although at a much smaller scale than I understand happens down under. The goal here seems to be to burn out a buffer around homes rather than using fire to manage the whole forest.

The flora is quite different, too — a coastal live oak takes way longer to grow back than a eucalyptus (and is also less ridiculously flammable when established). So burning huge swaths here would generally not be a great thing.

Not to mention, the number of people typing "fbcdn.net" into a browser has to be vanishingly small to begin with.

Among its many other offerings, Google does still sport a quite serviceable search engine. Perhaps the commenter simply meant to convey that that was how they found the article?

Art. 85 of the GDPR defines the exemptions in terms of how the data is used, not with respect to who uses it.

> For processing carried out for journalistic purposes or the purpose of academic artistic or literary expression, Member States shall provide for exemptions or derogations ... if they are necessary to reconcile the right to the protection of personal data with the freedom of expression and information.

You can of course shift the argument to "what is journalism?", which does indeed have some fuzzy boundaries, but to claim that investigating and exposing widespread government corruption is anywhere near those fuzzy boundaries is a stretch, to say the least.

> if is alive is easier to look for symptoms

As I understand it, removing and examining the brain can yield a definitive diagnosis in cases where time is of the essence. In cases where it's not immediately obvious that the animal is rabid, it can take a week or two of observation to look for more overt symptoms.

That's how my parents ended up adopting a stray dog, who later became just about their favorite pet ever. By the time they'd watched him for a couple weeks, he wasn't going anywhere. :)

It doesn't specifically say as far as I can see, but I'm highly doubtful that the prediction was made at time 0 (i.e. with no seed data). That would literally be a lucky guess.

It’s just a flesh wound! /obligatory

Or a person who expresses their depression in an obvious way, like spending 7 hours a day in front of a screen, might be more likely to be noticed and helped toward a diagnosis.

It’s pretty good that they allow you to do that now, but it can’t retroactively remove those interests from the personal data they’ve already sold about you. So it fixes the smaller issue of what ads Facebook serves, but doesn’t address the larger issue of privacy.

I’m sure you could get some grad students to volunteer to sit around in the lab and play on their phones, if you wanted to up the exposure in a way that mimics realistic patterns...

But how many people use their phones for data while holding them against their heads? (Not to mention in a shielded cubicle?)

Wait, what? The “volume” of MIDI? I’m guessing they’re not referring to cc#7...?

(Also, I’ve never encountered a 9-pin MIDI connector. 5-pin maybe?)