Comment Re:picket fence mistake? (Score 1) 89
I get it. Thanks. I learned perl way back when to avoid malloc but should probably go back and get closer to the machine.
Comment picket fence mistake? (Score 2) 89
I'm a kludgy self taught coder and I just googled for a moment to no avail
What is a "picket fence mistake"?
Comment Penrose - Road to Reality (Score 2) 358
Hey great thread! I can confidently state that I'm in lower percentile of the posters here regarding physics and math (I'm just above the random trolls and bellow everyone else). I found Penrose - The Road to Reality a great overview starting with math I already understood, educating me about some concepts I didn't get before and ending up with today's physics of which I understood, charitably
And I've been flamed for recommending this book for reasons I didn't understand in the past so YMMV.
Comment Microcosmic God (Score 1) 161
Am I the only one who thought of Theodore Sturgeon?
(note I've only skimmed the comments so
Comment Re:BB Edit (Score 1) 545
> Thanks for using a great Frank Oppenheimer quote as your sig.
The quote's credited to Feynman. Didn't Frank Oppenheimer do the Exploratorium in SF? I went there as a kid.
Comment BB Edit (Score 2) 545
hey I like it more than vi
Comment Artist conception of a flying car (Score 1) 274
I had a meeting once to develop someones patent (they had been granted the patent already). I spent the whole time confused until I realized that they had developed none of the technology they had patented, wanted me to write a demonstration demo - a look and feel front end that didn't actually do anything under the hood but demonstrated the idea. I told them they were hiring me to draw a flying car as they had patented "personal transportation vehicle (car) that operates in three dimensions" but hadn't actually solved any of the technology at all (purely for description, their undeveloped technology was not a flying car). Anyway
I lost touch. I wonder if they're suing someone in Texas right now.
Comment meta subject moderating, plus by the hour (Score 1) 393
Break opinion posts down with non judgmental (yeah, right) category moderation. For politics: "conservative", "liberal", "libertarian", "Democrat", "Republican", "SDLP", "Sein Fein"
Combine this with Facebook login - that alone keeps me off the tech sites that use it - and - here's the important part - PAID MODERATORS who are monitored by karma (or whatever the site is calling it) holding users. Yeah yeah I know web 2.0 is all about crowd sourcing free content but I offer up youtube comment threads as an argument that it's time to move on. Let's get some new buzzwords going and start paying moderators as there are a lot of people out there who could use the telecommuting $10 an hour.
Submission + - Salt Lake City goes wallet-free with Isis (theregister.co.uk)
jitendraharlalka writes: Operator consortium Isis has selected Salt Lake City as its flagship deployment to show the rest of the USA what NFC can do for them.
The plan will see Salt Lake City's public transport system accepting pay-by-wave from a mobile phone by the middle of next year. Retailers have also been encouraged to adopt Near Field Communications technology at the point of sale, as Salt Lake City strives to become The Place You Can Leave Your Wallet At Home. The Utah Transit Authority already uses proximity payment cards, deployed in 2009, so adding NFC functionality to public transport is a matter of software not hardware.
The plan will see Salt Lake City's public transport system accepting pay-by-wave from a mobile phone by the middle of next year. Retailers have also been encouraged to adopt Near Field Communications technology at the point of sale, as Salt Lake City strives to become The Place You Can Leave Your Wallet At Home. The Utah Transit Authority already uses proximity payment cards, deployed in 2009, so adding NFC functionality to public transport is a matter of software not hardware.
Submission + - Fukushima Leak Finally Patched (powergenworldwide.com)
jones_supa writes: "After several unsuccessful attempts, Tepco has announced that the leak of radioactive water into the Pacific Ocean has been plugged. They injected 1500 litres of sodium silicate ("water glass") to solidify the crack, from where highly radioactive water had been seeping through and running into the sea. The company still needs to pump mildly radioactive water to sea as all the cooling water cannot fit in the plant's own storages. Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano also reminds that the patch has still to be inspected throughly and that the possibility for other leaks remains."
Submission + - Feedback Loops in The Fight Against Spam (net-security.org)
Orome1 writes: Much effort has been expended to try to define what spam is in order to classify and filter it. However, not only do spam campaigns mutate to avoid detection, but we have also learned that spam is in the eye of the beholder: What one person says is junk might be of some value to someone else, with great consequences if a filter gets it wrong. Open solutions that use feedback loops have been attracting attention for several years. In particular, a mechanism called the Abuse Reporting Format (ARF) was created by participants in the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG) some years ago. ARF allows exchange of feedback information between peer Internet Service Providers (ISPs) when spam or other abuse originating at one is received at another; a user clicks a Spam button in the mail reader and an ARF message is generated and sent to the originating service, where automated software quickly processes the complaint, and the systems at both ends have more data from which to learn.
Comment Drupal is like dealing with the DMV (Score 1) 88
I've done 2 (and a half) magazine sites writing fully custom CMS and am finishing a site with Drupal. Drupal can be pretty annoying but in the end you get caching for free which is a huge plus. Unlike Wordpress it's not for the "I just want to blog" crowd ("Born to Blog" might be a good t-shirt
Submission + - Fukushima vs bomb tests
opencity writes: With TEPCO dumping water with low levels of radioactivity and a leak directly into the ocean I was wondering if the more knowledgeable could compare the current situation with the oceanic bomb tests over the years in terms of amount of radioactive material into the ocean. With the naive hope that the discussion won't devolve into nuclear pro/con flame wars.
Submission + - SpyEye Man-in-the-Mobile Attack Targets Banks (net-security.org)
Orome1 writes: The customers of a European bank have recently been targeted by a man-in-the-mobile attack featuring a SpyEye variant. "The bank uses SMS based mTANs to authorize transfers," explain F-Secure researchers. "The trojan injects fields into the bank's webpage and asks the customer to input his mobile phone number and the IMEI of the phone. The bank customer is then told the information is needed so a 'certificate' can be sent to the phone and is informed that it can take up to three days before the certificate is ready."
Submission + - Free phone support for Google Adwords (tekgoblin.com)
tekgoblin writes: "If you are or have ever experienced problems with your Google AdWords account you can now call Google for free to help you. Currently there is only an online version of help available which may or may not have a solution for you. Google announced this new change on their blog today."
