I use a similar password system (a basic formula with 8 characters, including letters, numbers and symbols, and a way of changing it for every application). This works well for most purposes (e-mail, academic logons, etc.), but generally not for financial websites (my credit card company, bank, brokerage account). So I have a different system for financial sites that _doesn't_ use any special symbols. This seems like a bad idea. Why would any website (especially one that wants the highest security possible) forbid the use of certain characters?

This idea would solve one set of problems (synchronizing events across time zones or figuring out the local time while traveling), but would create a whole new set of problems for long-distance travelers.

Currently people everywhere have a common set of expectations about what time the sun rises, when to eat meals, when to sleep, etc. If you travel to a new region, you change your clock once, and you're instantly slotted in to the local expectations. On the other hand, if we followed the proposal above, travelers would have to do timezone-type math for all these events every day.

Say you travel from California to Japan. What time will the sun come up? Well, at home in California it comes up at 14:00 UTC. California is around 120 degrees W and Japan is around 138 degrees E, so Japan is about 360-258=102 degrees east of California. The sun travels 15 degrees per hour, so events will happen about 7 hours "later" in Japan than in California. Add 7 hours to 14:00 and you can expect the sun to come up around 21:00 UTC. Great. Now what time should you make a lunch appointment with a colleague? Usually in California you have lunch at 20:00 UTC, so add 7 hours, modulus 24 to get 03:00 UTC.

It's a lot of work, but at least you'll know when to catch your flight home without adjusting your clock. You just won't know (without some math) whether that will be the middle of the night, first thing in the morning, etc.
This does not strike me as easier than the current system.

It's amazing to me that until September 2008, S&P was giving AIG a AAA rating, even though AIG was taking the bad side of everyone's bets on the mortgage market, but now S&P downgrades U.S. debt over concerns about "budget deficits and rising debt burden." The U.S. government still has plenty of room to raise revenue to pay off Treasury Bills, and may even be Constitutionally obligated to do so.

It's just hard to believe that the U.S. Treasury is now considered a riskier borrower than AIG was in 2008. It's also ironic, since a good part of the U.S. debt burden was incurred bailing out AIG and the rest of the financial industry (which assumed AIG credit-default swaps would protect them, in part due to S&P's high rating of AIG).

The ever-improving climate models don't actually give estimates of the climate's dependence on CO2 that are much different from the simplest models. Given how long it will take to change our energy system, does it make sense to take action based on our best estimate of the effect of CO2 now, or wait until that estimate is perfect, which may never happen? In your opinion, when would we know well enough to declare climate change a problem and begin doing something about it?

A related question for climate change doubters: Suppose hypothetically that emissions of CO2 really were on track to cause harmful climate change. How would scientists' behavior and results differ from what we're seeing right now? Are you ruling out climate change based on the predominance of the evidence or because you'd rather not believe in it?

Yes it's a complex system, but that doesn't mean we have to understand every last detail before we take action. We've known for over a hundred years that CO2 is transparent to visible light and absorbs infrared. Therefore, adding CO2 to the atmosphere will cause warming (allowing sunlight in, but reducing the amount of heat radiated back to space). The only scientific question left is how much warming, where and when. The most natural (and safest) assumption is that adding CO2 to the atmosphere will change climate. "We should wait until we perfectly understand this insanely complex system" is not a rational response.

People can differ over whether they think climate change will be a bad thing, or whether they should have to pay to prevent bad things from happening to other people or the natural environment, but there is no question we are causing climate change. People who argue otherwise are blinding themselves for their own convenience.

The problem with these geoengineering approaches is that a ton of CO2 added to the atmosphere will continue to warm the planet for thousands, of years. On the other hand, these solutions are temporary, e.g., aerosols are washed out of the atmosphere within a few months or years.

You didn't suggest this, but if we continue emitting CO2 and try to mask the effect with aerosols, we will need to add more and more aerosols every year, until it becomes economically unfeasible and environmentally devastating. You don't want to live in a world where we pump enough aerosols into the atmosphere to mask 700 ppm CO2, and they all come back as acid precipitation.

Well, actually climate models do account for aerosols and this isn't news.

I used to wonder how shortchanging customers on food could possibly make a significant difference to the profit on a multi-hundred-dollar ticket. Then I realized that in a world where everyone chooses the cheapest ticket from Orbitz or Kayak, airlines have to get their ticket price as low as possible. If that means nickle-and-diming their customers, scrimping on food and service, then that's what they'll do. Because if they don't, a competitor will, and the competitor will be able to sell many more tickets for a few dollars less.

I have a Compact Cherry Mechanical Switch Mac Keyboard (SMK-88). It has buckling springs with the same "sound and feel" as the old IBM keyboards (which were indeed my favorite for a long time). The narrow layout (without numeric keypad) allows you to put your mousepad or pen tablet more directly in front of you, reducing RSI. It's also good for fitting all the input devices into a narrow kneewell below and old-fashioned desk.

I was pretty happy with the Cherry keyboard for a year or two, but the loud clicks did put me on edge a bit during long typing sessions. When Apple came out with their narrow bluetooth keyboard, I switched to that and haven't looked back.

Another relevant xkcd comic: Good Code

The nuclear industry claims a chance of major accidents around 1 in 10^7 reactor years, based on this kind of probabilistic analysis. But then we've seen 2 major incidents at western-style nuclear plants (Three Mile Island and Fukushima Daiichi) over a period of about 15,000 reactor-years. The problem is, these studies only account for the risk of simultaneous failures of pre-identified critical components within the engineered system. They don't account for acts of nature or people doing something dumb.

Ah yes, 25 hours in a day. I often work with hourly data from power system operators, and they are completely inconsistent in how they handle daylight saving time. Many only allow for 24 hours per day, and throw out an hour or insert a null when the clocks change (good luck figuring out which hour they threw out!). The better ones have a system which allows up to 25 hours per day. One day has 23, and one has 25, but at least you can tell what's going on. I suppose these will break if the UK switches to a 2-hour leap, or possibly if they switch to two one-hour leaps. Not that Double Summer Time was unforeseeable - it's been done before, even in the UK.

If the device has no automatic way to receive this information, then you have to allow the user to tell it when DST is in effect, either when it occurs or by updating the list of rules. They'll need to be able to update the time anyway if the device is moved to a new time zone, runs fast or slow, or loses power. This worked just fine for computers "back in the day," and it works fine for the clock on my oven. Daylight Saving Time has pretty far-reaching effects, and it's unrealistic to expect policymakers to lock it down forever, just so a few automated-but-not-networked appliances can keep following the same old rules.

The rules for starting and ending U.S. daylight saving time and British Summer Time are both set by legislation and have changed several times. Hard coding them into software is a serious mistake. The only safe way to deal with DST is to maintain a lookup table for the specific dates each year or a list of the years when the rules changed, and update these tables regularly. The more often the rules change, the more incentive people will have to adopt appropriate practice, rather than encrusting their software around the old rules. (Not that the rules should be changed arbitrarily; they just shouldn't be left unchanged for fear of "breaking" something.)

The "real" article is a little more clear than the summary linked here.

The authors claim that a lot of BitTorrent content comes from people who either (a) own a private BitTorrent portal and use it to lure customers (who then share it for free on the rest of the Internet), or (b) promote some for-profit website via the torrent. These websites are promoted by (i) tacking their domain name onto the main download file, (ii) putting the URL into "the textbox" on the torrent search engine (I think this probably means putting the URL into a descriptive text file within the torrent package, which then gets shown as the description on some torrent search engines), or (iii) adding a file to the torrent named after the for-profit website.

I guess the argument is that these 100 users are uploading tons of content in order to get URLs of their own for-profit websites seen by a lot of other users. Then, when the users follow those links, they generate profit for those 100 users, either by signing up for premium bittorrent services or viewing ads on the destination website.