I had a lot of sympathy for people on Facebook 4-5 years ago. After several years of repeated stories in the mainstream press about privacy violations, anyone who still has an account is guilty of wilful stupidity.

What secure OS do you run where the video codecs have had a full security review? Google found (and fixed) around 300 exploitable holes in libavcodec / libavformat in the last year. Do you want to bet that they found them all? Do you always run video codecs in an unprivileged process?

And yet the contents of the tweet made it into the Slashdot summary, quoting from the Huffington Post article. It's no doubt now been posted by other news outlets. How many people do you think would have seen some idiot's tweet, verses the number that will now see it quoted in the news?

Surely we should start with ping and then add Pong?

Huh? I guess that's true if you go back to the ancient greek Olympics (although the winners would rarely actually join the army). The modern olympics had competitions including poetry and sculpture when it began.

Hansard proceedings are now online. I wonder if this gives us grounds to sue all of the MPs that voted for this particular bit of legislation.

They only give you the free copy for the photo of the cover for public domain books. If you want to read these, install FBReader (which has a nice search interface for various online collections) and don't waste time with this app. To get copies of in-copyright books, you need to deface the copyright page. If you can do that in a book shop without having to buy the book, then you live somewhere with very tolerant shopkeepers...

I already have an app that catalogues the books I own by reading the bar code (which contains the ISBN in most cases). It takes a couple of seconds on my cheap phone (Moto G) to scan each bar code - it takes longer to look them up in a DB. Why would I want to use an app that relies on being able to recognise a cover, which is both more computationally expensive and less reliable (several of the books I own have had a dozen or so different covers for different printings - try looking at all of the covers an Agatha Christie novel has had over the years sometime)?

Ah, so I have to deface my books and take two pictures (one of the copyright page, one of the cover)? No thanks.

Glossy print, you fool.

So what's it a knock-off of? I don't see it being all that useful, but that's another matter entirely. Anyway, this is supposed to be news for nerds, and shoving another touchscreen into a device in a silly place is a very nerdy development.

What do you think inspired Locke to bother writing a manifesto in favor of something else? Had it already been what he wanted, why go to the trouble?

I thought that Santa is just a quantum wave function, and it is impossible to determine both quantities simultaneously to any sort of precision. It would explain how he manages to deliver so many presents without turning into an incandescent meteor in the sky.

Fake reviews can be eliminated by forcing the reviewers to post a key code along with the review.

The key codes would have been given to the reviewers by the hotel.

The hotel would have gotten the keys from Trip Advisor.

Therefore, TripAdvisor can then check if each review is legit or not. Non legit reviews would not contain the appropriate keys, and the keys would be expirable after a month.

This paper was published at ISCA in June and on Soylent News earlier today (or possibly yesterday). Why is it suddenly being circulated six months after publication? Someone trying to promote ECC memory?

He emphasised how parochial the Hobbits' world view was and he gave them the weapons that they'd carry for the rest of the book. The choice of the weapons and his explanation helped establish the individual characters of the hobbits.

In the first movie, the storyline is basically 'run, fight, run fight, run fight'. Anything that might be considered character development is cut. The novels have a lot of description and this is turned in the films into very slow shots of impressive visuals, which could equally be backdrop while things that actually advance the plot take place. Instead, Jackson focusses on impressive scenes of New Zealand and long tech demos for the Massive Engine. Plot takes very much a back seat.