timdierks

I really don't understand the classification. Most of Manhattan appears to be predominantly green. And while there's plenty of government/education/healthcare workers here, I don't think that's a reasonable classification for most of the companies with big offices in NYC. Something is off.

In what fashion is GCS not a distributed file system?

All that will prove is that someone was willing to burn less than a half an hour of CPU time.

http://www.tsa.gov/tsa-precheckR-application-program ; but consider Global Entry instead: it's another $15 but also gives benefits at immigration.

Zappos doesn't; it's a wholly-owned subsidiary of Amazon. They could all just be subordinate to Jeff Bezos.

Websites absolutely do lose money when you block their ads. Regardless of what one chooses to do, you should be aware of the facts.

If you don't value what the website is giving you, why are you visiting it?

Are there really CAs that copy the hash used for the CSR to the hash used for the cert? If not, the hash used in the CSR has nothing to do with Chrome warnings (as the browser will never see it).

I believe the issue is less that advertisers are unwilling to buy display web ads; it's more that they no longer place a premium value on buying them from branded publishers when they can reach the same users on many different websites with programmatic buying.

This hugely devalues quality publishers and increases the value of lower-investment publishers who successfully create a lot of pageviews. The latter inventory used to sell for bottom-of-the-barrel prices, but advertisers have decided it's pretty similar in value to reaching the same user on a high-quality site.

The best offensive weapon quality websites have against this trend is native advertising: create high-quality sponsorship offerings that commodity display ad impressions can't directly compete with.

You can export them into a file and reimport them into Contacts. https://support.google.com/mail/answer/24911?hl=en

(Disclaimer: I haven't tried this with the new Contacts).

Seems like a really good designer working with knowledge of manufacturing would design an aesthetically pleasing zipper pull with an asymmetry sufficient to allow such automated orientation (e.g. one end thicker across the width of the pull).

I didn't mean it was necessarily laundering, just that there's a number of regulations intended to detect and control money laundering that may apply to the author.

I am not a lawyer, but the author should consult one. Money transmitting businesses are heavily regulated in the United States, and operating such a business without registration and compliance with regulations may be illegal.

These laws are not a joke; there's a reason that all the mainstream Bitcoin businesses have these constraints, registrations, and rules, despite the way they impede customers and businesses: "know your customer", anti-money laundering and Patriot act constraints on terrorism funding are very real and serious interests of government units with powerful enforcement powers.

Be warned that this is not the same as selling lemonade in the government's eyes.

Moral: evolved complexity ≠ designed complexity.

I frequently want ad-hoc slots to create a structure of related values without the verbosity of a dict with static keys. What's the pythonic method?

E.g. when I want to carry a foo, a bar, and a baz around, but namedtuple isn't right (e.g. I need mutation). I'd prefer

    config = Someclass()
    config.foo = 1
    config.bar = "quux"
    config.baz = 3.3

and then using config.bar, etc.

over:

    config = { 'foo': 1, 'bar': "quux", 'baz': 3.3 }

and then using config['bar']

I implemented X.509 several times in the late 90's. Generalized ASN.1 is a mess: I don't believe there were any decent open source toolsets then, and the code emitted by the ASN.1 compilers I could test was lame and required you to adopt their conventions completely through your code.

Furthermore, ASN.1 has the usual lameness you get when people build generic description languages: for example, it's quite common to encode a particular ASN.1 structure, and then put the resulting structure into an OCTET STRING for inclusion in a parent structure (take a look at Extension in RFC 5280's ASN.1, for example). This is presumably because ASN.1 didn't (doesn't?) support an ANY type to allow inclusion of arbitrary structures that the decoder didn't know how to parse, so there's no extensibility without such tricks.

In the end, I punted and just used BER/DER directly without ever using ASN.1. This made a lot of things much simpler and produced much smaller and more efficient code (e.g. my cert parser for our SSL library for the Palm III ran with no additional allocation space, and compiled to a few K of code).

The linked-to Reddit post, http://www.reddit.com/r/netflix/comments/2qevqt/meta_netflix..., makes it clear that it's not a VPN restriction: people are configuring DNS servers to resolve Netflix names with US geographic resolution, but the new Netflix app is no longer using system DNS settings, it has Google DNS hardcoded in. Nothing about VPNs, per se.

I searched for [Steve Martin] and my sole result is "iSteve", which, as far as I can tell, doesn't have the token "Martin" in it at all. This is despite five Steve Martin films currently streaming on Netflix US.

I'm guessing that if they had a major breach because of this kind of idiocy, they'd find a way to fix it after the fact.

Which sort of implies to me that they should find a way to fix it before they have a big breach.

If nothing else, the fact that they've been warned repeatedly and done nothing could be pretty compelling if there was ever litigation over losses.

For example, I could imagine someone successfully disavowing a trade at Schwab because they don't enforce the password authentication they claim to, and thus can't convincingly claim that the trader was in fact the account owner.

From my understanding, these systems send voice to servers to recognize queries, but they detect the prompting signal ("OK Google" or "Hey, Siri") entirely on the device, and both systems make a "Listening now" sound when they switch from one mode to the other. So, presuming that software is working as described, when you speak near an Apple/Android phone, your speech isn't being sent to the cloud in most cases.

Among other things, running the radios all the time to send audio to the cloud would be a battery-killer.

Those are harassment, unless you're saying them to a lot of people. If you're only saying it to women you think are hot, in an anonymous street context (not a singles bar), stop it.

And that's why I print all my documents in blood.

I wonder how much the twitpic domain is worth? That's a lot of dangling link juice.

It would be great for them to get a copy of everything to the Internet Archive.

It's reasonable to believe that "the building where you can ascend the furthest" is taller than "the building which would first puncture a descending dirigible".

The formal definition of "Height to Architectural Top" from the CTBUH requires 5 footnotes and a committee to decide whether the top features of a building are "architectural" or not.

And who put them in charge, anyway?

It's a little bit of hyperbole, sure, but I don't recall ever seeing a press article that used a patent disclosure to offer any real insight about unreleased products. I'd be happy to see a counterexample.

Yay, downvote!

What for? I continue to assert that articles that claim that patents reveal things about products are unfounded.

I have a number of patents myself: companies file them all the time with little to no concern for whether they'll use them in a product. Thus, the existence of a patent is little to no evidence regarding products.

Patents need have little to nothing to do with products, and any article which claims that a patent disclosure reveals something unannounced about a product can be ignored without reading.

It's the Theil index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theil_index

I am not an expert in its use, but IMHO, it's BS because it's dependent on the idea that you have maximum diversity if various subgroups are all the same size, but it's very dependent on the definition of subgroups. For example, in the case of ethnic diversity, the measure will vary significantly depending on whether you group people from Southeast Asia and people from the Indian subcontinent together as "Asian" or not, or any other subjective subdivision.

It might have use as a comparative measure with a predetermined set of classification groups, but you can definitely manipulate your conditions to construct different outcomes.

This is clever, and the incremental approach is a good engineering direction. That said, readers should be aware that the closures approach is a dead end for a large & complex service: unless you can figure out how to serialize the full closure state to data that can be exchanged between machines, you're always going to be RAM-constrained and subject to machine failure.

The loss of state isn't a big deal for a news site, but if you lost the user's state in the middle of a significant process (e.g. dropping the cart mid-checkout), it would be a big problem, even if it was infrequent.

What would be great if a language provided a convenient way to repose closures into data blobs that could be exchanged between machines or sent via the browser (an untrusted channel that would have to be secured with cryptography). That said, it's not obvious how to capture the semantics of the full closure of the system state without significant work (look at how fragile object serialization / pickling is). Definitely a good area for language research; I'm sure there's some advances I'm not familiar with.

While this is an entertaining hypothetical, I think Coase would say that you should go & offer the shopping mall $0.50 to rent you the spot. And the price might still end up being $20.

Applicability to domains: maybe they should all be auctioned?