Comment Re:He's going to be chief youth jargonist (Score 1) 232
I predict his first WaPo post will be a dupe!
j/k good luck, and don't fuck with Pogue if you know what's good for you!
Comment No Access for Amateur Coders (Score 1) 469
Amateur programmers couldn't run and test their own code on it.
If nascent code monkeys weren't interested, then you lose the wow factor pretty quickly.
GEnie, Compuserve, Applelink, and AOL had some success because they were 1/2 BBS-like and 1/2 virtual desktop publishing.
One look at Mosaic + HTML, though, and it was painfully obvious that not only could you publish your random crap without AOL, but you could spend an eternity tinkering and extending it.
Comment hey eeplox (Score 2) 730
submit this to boing boing and the agitator. They'd probably love this.
Comment Re:sony all over again.. (Score 5, Informative) 270
On December 8, 2011, U.S. District Judge Richard Seeborg dismissed the last remaining count of the class action lawsuit, stating: "As a legal matter, [..] plaintiffs have failed to allege facts or articulate a theory on which Sony may be held liable." He then removed massive amounts of wax from his ears after the trial.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OtherOS
Once again, I am in the wrong damn business.
Comment 1976 (Score 3, Insightful) 144
"Dammit, all these charts a tables need to be on a computer!" -- me in 1976 playing D&D.
I would argue that the "immigrants" have a more pressing desire to innovate because they felt the crushing limitations of the non-virtual world first hand.
Comment Re:Let it happen (Score 1) 105
Please, yes. These infected moroons are tomorrow's clients and damn I need the cash!
Comment Re:I'd comment but... (Score 1) 142
from toilet seats of course!
Comment I'd comment but... (Score 1) 142
...this webOS browser is like slow burning syphilis. The only, and I mean only, thing that's right here is the $99 price tag.
YMMV for phones, sure. But for a tablet webOS is like a delicious cake made without leavening.
Anonymous Cowards, Deanonymized 159
mbstone writes "Arvind Narayana writes: What if authors can be identified based on nothing but a comparison of the content they publish to other web content they have previously authored? Naryanan has a new paper to be presented at the 33rd IEEE Symposium on Security & Privacy. Just as individual telegraphers could be identified by other telegraphers from their 'fists,' Naryanan posits that an author's habitual choices of words, such as, for example, the frequency with which the author uses 'since' as opposed to 'because,' can be processed through an algorithm to identify the author's writing. Fortunately, and for now, manually altering one's writing style is effective as a countermeasure."
In this exploration the algorithm's first choice was correct 20% of the time, with the poster being in the top 20 guesses 35% of the time. Not amazing, but: "We find that we can improve precision from 20% to over 80% with only a halving of recall. In plain English, what these numbers mean is: the algorithm does not always attempt to identify an author, but when it does, it finds the right author 80% of the time. Overall, it identifies 10% (half of 20%) of authors correctly, i.e., 10,000 out of the 100,000 authors in our dataset. Strong as these numbers are, it is important to keep in mind that in a real-life deanonymization attack on a specific target, it is likely that confidence can be greatly improved through methods discussed above — topic, manual inspection, etc."
Comment Re:I for once, welcome our ...nevermind (Score 1) 148
Ron was good with tools. It would not surprise me a bit if he knew enough about copseyes to knock out the whole system.
Maybe someone ought to stop him.
But knocking down copseyes wasn't illegal. It happened all the time. It was part of the freedom of the Park. If Ron could knock them all down at once, well . . .
Maybe someone ought to stop him.
- Cloak of Anarchy, Larry Niven, 1972
Comment Re:What is he smoking? (Score 1) 203
Leo sold me a freakin' sweet $99 ebook reader, so he's alright with me!
Comment Re:Sigh (Score 1, Offtopic) 176
Today: "Yeah, Steve screwed us, but at least he didn't post the video on YouTube."
2050: "The MPAA and RIAA led the fight to make media cheaper and more accessible worldwide."
Come to think of it, the survivors of the Confederate States of America went through the same mental gymnastics.
Comment thanks (Score 1) 7
saw the headline in my feed and it made me chuckle. Figures it was from the onion.
Saw a graphic a few days ago about how many US bases surround Iran... Now it occurs to me that IRAN HAS SURROUNDED THE REST OF THE WORLD1!!!1!
Comment Re:MEETING (Score 4, Funny) 134
The Social Media Twelve Steps
We admitted we were powerless over social media - that our lives had become unmanageable.
Came to believe that a better broadband connection can restore us to sanity.
Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of a All Knowing Server Admin as we understood Him.
Made a searching and fearless inventory of our posts.
Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our spulling erroz.
Were entirely ready to have The Next Thing Better Than Facebook remove all these defects of character.
Humbly asked Customer Service to remove our drunken posts.
Made a list of all persons we have stalked, and became willing to block them all.
Avoided making direct amends to such people wherever possible because it pretty much looks like even more stalking.
Continued to hide our personal baggage and when we were wrong to rise above the desire to ragequit.
Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with cute kittens as we understood Them, praying only for the power to not forward it.
Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to social media addicts, and to practice these principles in all our status updates.
Where Would Earth-Like Planets Find Water? 168
astroengine writes "The term 'Earth-like worlds' is a vastly overused and hopelessly incorrect term that is popularly bandied about to explain some recent exoplanet discoveries. Although some of the distant small worlds being discovered by the Kepler space telescope may be of Earth-like size, orbiting their sun-like star in Earth-like orbits, calling those worlds 'Earth-like' gives the impression these alien planets are filled with liquid water. It turns out that we have only a vague idea as to where Earth got its water, and it will take a long time until we have any hint of this life-giving resource on worlds orbiting stars thousands of light-years away."
