This has nothing to do with protectionism. Nobody is saying not let foreign software into the country.

As for foreign labor, I have no objection to bringing foreign labor in. My objection is kicking that labor out after it has gained experience. If there really was a tech worker shortage, these are the very workers we'd want to stay.

What this does is create a pool of offshore labor that's familiar with the work being done *here*. The obvious purpose is to use the immigration system to assist companies that want to relocate work overseas. And there's nothing special about American tech people; anything we can do can be done in India or Ukraine. That's fine, but I don't think the US government should be in the business of making it attractive for companies to move jobs overseas.

It's something so irrational (if we were to assume for the moment that the US government works for the welfare of the American people) there isn't even a word for it. It's the mirror image of protectionism. It's self-predation.

I hadn't heard of minnows, and didn't know what it was until I looked it up now :) Apparently you can go through half a lifetime as a fluent second-language speaker - using the language both professionally and privately - without encountering it...

We also all have an uvula, those trees can often have galls and many buildings have dormers. Doesn't necessarily mean they belong in a short childrens dictionary, though. After all, there are "real" dictionaries as well as the internet for anything not covered in the shortened one.

Well, Windows 8 is a capable OS too. It's just got a somewhat awkward and unfamiliar graphical shell.

I don't even hate the Windows 8 shell; I pretty much take it for granted that modern desktop shells suck. That's because designers keep trying to get them to do more for users, when users don't really need *more*; they need the shell to do what they want, when they want it, and then stay the hell out of the way. On top of that there's the unfamiliarity. Windows has always UI problems with putting a cheery facade over a complex train wreck, but the fact that they keep changing the signposts.

I just roll with it. It's like learning to conjugate irregular verbs when you're mastering a language, only they keep changing them every few years. As an *OS*, apart from the somewhat confusing shell, I have no complaints about Windows 8, unlike Vista, whose aggressive "optimizations" broke a number of tools I use regularly. It's all increasingly peripheral, anyway, as more information is managed through the web. The desktop is no longer the focus of the user's experience, it's just a terminal.

I've heard this story, but it was after my time there. It's definitely in the classic style of MIT lame nerd humor. There's an often element of ironic self-deprecation in MIT humor.

Up until the 80s at least MIT had an archaic phone system in all the dorms. It was almost certainly maintained in part by student labor, since due to tuition costs most students had work study jobs -- often quite technical.

Well, there actually is a legitimate issue here.

Not every takedown notice in the Chilling Effects database is bogus. By putting the text of legitimate notices in a searchable database, Chilling Effects can be used to find infringing content. For example I didn't see "Interstellar" when it was in the theaters near me. Using Chilling Effects I very easily found a number of sites offering bootleg downloads.

If Google removes an infringing link from search result, having the takedown notice copy stored at Chilling Effects appear in Google search result effectively nullifies the takedown. The offending URL is right there in the takedown text.

So what is being balanced here is Chilling Effects' mission -- serving as a database for researching takedowns -- vs. the legitimate copyright interests of the people issuing the takedowns. It won't stop legitimate or illegitimate users of the Chilling Effects database, but it won't guide casual search engine users to infringing content either.

Of course this won't satisfy intellectual property interest groups, whose only mode of operation appears to be "scorched earth".

Diving to 30+ meters? Probably air. And I'm guessing it's probably not a good idea to work divers to exhaustion.

Think passive near-field 3D-sensors, not holiday snapshots. User position, gestures, navigation, that sort of thing. Kinect-like functions everywhere. Fire phone, but with actual uses.

You could do a lot of subtle UI improvements if you can localize the users in space around the device for instance; you could figure out who is speaking and if they're turned toward the device. No more "Yo, googly Siri-man, what's mein wiener kapiche?"-keywords, as the device can figure out if you're addressing it or not.

They still use dot matrix printers in some rental car agencies -- if you're getting nostalgic.

As for the old rotary phones they were quite ingenious. The technology didn't exist to have out-of-band signaling between the terminal (phone) and the central office switch. Instead as he dial unwound it would interrupt the circuit between the phone and the switching station, essentially hanging up very briefly. Each of these brief pulses in the circuit current would rotate a series of servos at the switching office by certain amounts. What that meant was that you could dial a phone buy tapping the receiver cradle at a certain speed. When I say "you could" I mean in the same sense as "you can pick a lock with a piece of bent wire and a thin lever." In other words your mileage may vary.

When I was an MIT student a club I was in had a lock on their phone's dial to prevent people making unauthorized calls (long distance call used to cost lots of money. The lock was next to useless because so many people knew how to dial phones by tapping the number out on the receiver cradle.

They looked at the radiation coming out of the sample to find evidence of Am-241, an impurity that would be formed if the sample were created in a cyclotron but not if it were created in a reactor. This test doesn't require the sample even to be touched.

OK, I read it, and I wasn't impressed.

The reason is that your definition is circular:

That's fine as an operational definition of what a society *treats* as privacy, but it does no good in telling us what those boundaries should be.

I worked in an engineering lab at MIT when Mount Saint Helens erupted in 1980, and we'd developed one of the first digital field seismometers, and we used a similar technique. Seismometers that were left in the field for weeks were designed to start recording on to mag tape when an event started, but the problem was you'd lose the crucial minutes *before* where interesting things might be happening. Memory was fabulously expensive, so we fed the data off the A/D converter into an array of discrete flip-flops that functioned as a shift register. When recording was triggered, the mag tape would start recording the seismic reading from thirty seconds ago.

The thing is, memory is *not* fabulously expensive anymore. You can find 128 GB USB flash drives for under $20 retail, so the memory chips must be tiny fraction of that. It should be feasible to record an officer's entire shift -- even a double shift -- from an affordable device. I think it's much more practical just to load up on memory than to try to wire up an patrolman with cables and switches. And as with a volcano exploding, the seconds, even minutes leading up to an event are crucial to understanding it.

I took a course on computer privacy law a few years ago, and one of the big questions is "what is privacy"? After looking at all the various philosophical and legal definitions, I came away with this definition: privacy is autotomy -- the right to conduct your affairs without unreasonable and uninvited interference.

So I would define online harassment as deliberate and uninvited interference. Unpleasantness is simply one *means* by which the interference is accomplished, but it is not in and of itself harassment.

Example 1: you make the mistake of delving into Youtube comments. That's like crossing a Norwegian footbridge with a sack of goats. You have chosen to dive into a pool of nastiness, and unpleasant feelings are an unfortunate but non-actionable consequence of that decision.

Example 2: you decide to block some of the more obnoxious trolls. One of them figures this out and creates a new account so he can continue harassing you. Now that's harassment, because you have explicitly un-invited that interaction. He is interfering with your right to ignore him.

Example 3: one of the trolls doxes you and follows you to another website. That's harassment too because his *intent* is to interfere with your enjoyment of that website.

Example 4: You are on a website and someone violates the site's "harassment" policy. This is a matter for the site admins, not the police or courts, unless the person is cyber-stalking you. A reasonable person doesn't expect site policies to be strictly and swiftly enforced -- it almost never happens. By choosing to use any website you choose to expose yourself to obnoxious people.

DragonFly has had its own ntp-only client for years, dntpd. Not sure why this is suddenly becoming a topic now.

In terms of portability, every operating system has different sysctls or system calls for manipulating the clock. There is no single standard for setting the frequency drift correction, step, or slide operations to correct the time. And part of the problem is that most of these APIs are deficient in one way or another and make it difficult for the ntp client to run the corrections without generating feedback which messes up further corrections.

Beyond that, the code is fairly straight-forward.

-Matt

citation needed.