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.

Also, video games tend to have no depth of field. How could they? The whole screen needs to be in focus so that you can look at any part of it. Movies have the luxury of deciding what you should pay attention to and focusing (literally) on that.

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.

Interesting. I know a couple of people who did well at Google interviews but were rejected on the grounds that they were Iranian citizens. Perhaps Professor Sahami has become a naturalised US citizen? It seems that US companies have a lot of difficulty hiring Iranian nationals.

I don't consider code quality to be a petty thing.

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I have not written a NTP server.

Pseudonymity would be enough. You don't need to know what the identity of the reviewer is, you just need to know what other reviews he or she has written and how accurate those were. Reputation needs to be linked to an identity, but there's no problem with an individual having multiple identities.

Does TripAdvisor have any kind of reputation system? I want to see reviews by people that have written other reviews that people have found helpful and confirmed by their own experiences in preference to reviews that someone who just created an account specifically to write a shill review wrote.