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.

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.

I'm responsible for computer science admissions at an all-women college in Cambridge. I don't yet gave the figures for this year, but in the most recent year that I do have statistics for male computer science applicants had around a 15% acceptance rate, female applicants had around a 20% acceptance rate over the entire university. In spite of this, only 14% of our total admissions for CompSci were women. You can see the whole figures here. The women that we admit are not clustered anywhere particularly on the bell curve, so we're not bumping up the ratio by letting in inferior female candidates - we're just not seeing many women apply.

These numbers are even worse if you discount international students. The vast majority of women who make it to the interview stage are from outside of the UK. If you only count international students, then the gender ratios are more equal. To me, this means that there's something cultural in the UK (and, from what I've seen, the US) that isn't happening elsewhere, which puts women off computer science before they even get to university applications.

In some countries, the pressure is in the opposite direction. If you work in any computing-related discipline, you've probably worked with some extremely competent Iranian women (unless you work at a company like Google that refuses to hire anyone from Iran). If Iranian women want to pursue further education, they have a choice of engineering or medicine, but medicine in a country with a strong patriarchal ethos doesn't lead to many career paths (no one trusts a woman doctor), so they go to engineering. Within engineering, they have the choice of computer science or something that involves working in a factory, so most of them go into computer science. And then they graduate and realise that the job market looks much better abroad and that they have marketable skills, so they leave.

It's not something that has a quick fix, but it really needs to start in primary schools. It's easy to put young children off a career path very early on and very hard to fix it later.

Really? Because the review comments in TFS pretty much sum up how I felt about his LotR. The second part was the only film where I have ever fallen asleep in the cinema: During one of the big battles, where he was once again showing off what the Massive Engine can do, and not bothering to tell a story. After that, his complete recharacterisation of Farimir as being just like Boromir (rather than as the person that Boromir should have been) meant that I didn't even bother watching the third part. He could easily have cut some of the effects extravaganzas and kept Tom Bombodil in the first one, but he decided that he really wanted to show massive battles and skip on the plot (but introduce subplots that were not in the novel and didn't add anything to the story).

Do you know what the media and courts call people who damage computer systems by triggering bugs? Hackers.

Last election, Party C got a large enough share of the popular vote to get into a coalition government. Party D would likely do the same if they could get more than half of the didn't-vote crowd to vote for them next time.

No one outside of his constituency voted for him, that's now how it works in a parliamentary system (he's a Prime Minister, not a President). His party received 36.1% of the popular vote, 23.5% of the votes of those eligible to vote. Non-voters were the largest bloc in the last election. Perhaps this time they'll realise and exert some influence...

Because that happens at a particular time when the operating system can special case it. Most desktop and mobile operating systems will now, before exposing the network interface, check whether an outgoing HTTP connection is hijacked and pop up a browser if it is. This prevents damage to sites and apps that poll HTTP in the background and expect well-formed replies in a particular format. Doing it randomly bypasses this protection.

You're assuming that the connection that they redirect is a web browser. You might want to look at how many other apps poll things over HTTP periodically, and what they do if they don't understand the response (e.g. they expect a simple JSON response and they get a big blob of HTML). Even if it is a web page, what happens when the HTTP request that they hijack is a background AJAX request and not the main page fetch?

I've never seen it done, and it would be a spectacularly bad idea. It might have been fine 10 years ago, when most HTTP traffic was to a web browser, but now a load of other apps use HTTP as the transport. Intercepting and redirecting one can cause problems locally and sounds like a violation of the computer misuse act.

When I've had this kind of rejection, it typically means that the paper is not well presented. Part of the reason that papers that are rejected one or more times before publication tend to be more widely cited is that the rejection and editing phase forces you to make your arguments in a clearer and more structured manner.

While that's more or less true, it's worth noting that EPSRC doesn't require any accountability on the spent funds, they just use previous research output when judging the next application. That means that if you want to do something groundbreaking then you can apply for a grant to do something a bit incremental (ideally something that you've mostly done but not published), then use the money to do the groundbreaking thing. Then, when you apply for the next grant, the groundbreaking things that you want to do are easier to fund.