Given the recent revelations about NSA spying, I refuse to use these services. The risk is simply too high that the government might see my tax returns.

There's a lot of useful chemistry and energy in ammonia (a significant component of urine), because nitrates, or bound nitrogen, have potential energy. Gunpowder manufacture in the middle ages relied on factory-style processing of animal urine.

I think you mean KeePass and I quite agree.

It would be interesting to know which "level" people tend to choose for their MMORPGs (at least of those who have "levels"). On the one hand it's just a game, while on the other it involves a gargantuan investment of time and attention.

I haven't checked, but I assume my own Adobe account was part of this leak. And I don't care.

Along with a large portion of the increasingly savvy population, I have more than one "level" of password in use. My account used the lowest of these, basically something like adobe_123. Learning that is not going to help anyone form useful heuristics on how I create my banking passwords -- it might even poison them.

On the whole, I believe the breach will probably help crackers (if decryption can be achieved). But, I think it is foolish to automatically assume that accounts with "weak" passwords are contributors to the problem. As with me, they might be poor indicators of how humans choose more important passwords.

It's always interesting to hear of novel (to me) industrial processes Apple uses to make its product. Case in point: the article mentions Apple has switch to friction-stir welding.

A point I've read in The Economist, and has really stuck with me, is how one of America's strengths is the somewhat loose federation of the states, which allows for different approaches to any given problem. Each state can try its own approach to the ACA, or education, or taxation laws, et cetera. Eventually the "better" approaches should become clear, and the country as a whole will adopt them.

Now in practice it doesn't always work like that, but I think we see it in action right now with marijuana legalization and gay marriage.

Of course, the federation also means that, in cases where the "best" approach is known a priori, we lose efficiency when some states fail to adopt it. I don't consider that a big problem, because I think politicians are rarely capable of identifying and engendering quality programs right from the start, especially at the national level.

Let's hope the rule proves true here, and that other states copy Kentucky. (Maybe Kentucky can even share the code?)

He's a little off, but pretty likely referring to the Iran Contra Affair.

Clearly you are a Wikipedia editor.

I would have been interested to see what the gap looks like on a Hackintosh where, presumably, hardware optimizations would be in Windows' favor. I suspect the gap would remain, since the battery optimizations don't depend much on device drivers.

Samsung has been known to be unusually corrupt, even for Korea, for quite a while. Here are some links to discussions about it

http://lanle.wordpress.com/2010/04/28/book-on-samsung-divides-korea/
http://www.theverge.com/2012/11/30/3709688/samsung-25-years-lee-kun-hee

Indeed -- every place I've worked in the last 20 years has modified GPL code, and used the modified versions internally, while only rarely publishing those modifications externally. Declining to publish those changes is perfectly legal, and matches Stallman's original intent of the GPL as well -- namely that users have access to the source code of programs they are running.

Over time, many people have come to believe that modifiers of GPL should always publish their modifications. (Some sloppy license readers even believe they must). There's certainly a moral argument there somewhere. But in practice, more modifications are kept quiet than most people realize. In these situations, GPL and BSD are equivalent.

So far as I have seen, econophysicists are people who mistake applied behavioral psychology for simply characterized physical systems. But your joke describes them better.

Consider the following quote from the paper

Since both crashes and spikes are typically more than 30 standard deviations larger than the average price movement either side of an event (see Figs. 1A and 1B), they are unlikely to have arisen by chance

This statement implies that the authors believe a gaussian model "should" apply to the market dynamics. As Benoit Mandelbrot and many others before and after him point out, financial markets never have followed gaussian dynamics and they probably never will. It's especially silly because they go on to analyze the distribution of Ultrafast Extreme Event (UEE) sizes as a power law.

Today's market has both accumulation algorithms now used by mutual funds and other sophisticated "buy and hold" investors, and market-making algorithms used by HF firms, and I fully believe there is some interesting dynamics arising from all that. Whether it is any weirder than the slower, human-derived, dynamics of yesteryear is still in doubt. Humans are so much more complex than any of those algorithms that I suspect if you examined the market behavior in 1980, and sped it up, you would see plots wilder than anything Nanex produces.

The paper is somewhat interesting, but not very convincing.

Swoosh...you just restated his point.

You would think MIT of all places would be able to put together a website capable of withstanding real traffic.