coherent english phrases have approximately one bit of entropy per character. your sentence wouldn't be that unusual if crackers were using the appropriate tools (which of course they aren't).

the xkcd example works better because it's nonsense. to see it intuitively, "eats cherry" is a common 2-gram (although salaciously ambiguous out of context) whereas "horse battery" is uncommon (as is its referent).

i know what copyright is, thanks.

and yes, it does matter.

It's a bit sui generis. It's using a substantial portion of the copyrighted work, yes, but it's transposing it to an entirely different medium.

A book review can summarize the entire plot, because doing so doesn't substitute for the experience of reading the book.

This is sort of, but not quite, like playing through the entire game. Does watching it substitute for playing it? It doesn't seem like it to me, at least in some cases.

According to my principle, it would come down to how much of the game is just a slightly interactive movie. For example, hours of tetris gameplay should be allowed since 1) it's still an infinitesimal fraction of the total possible amount of tetris gameplay, 2) the skill of the player is frankly a much more substantial portion of the work than the tetris game itself is. In contrast, a playthrough of ff7 would be less kosher and a playthrough of indigo prophecy/fahrenheit would be completely forbidden.

It's an autoupdater (surprise, surprise) called keystone (com.google.keystone.agent and com.google.keystone.daemon) which presumably got installed with chrome and/or the gtalk plugin. There are many complaints about it.

Interesting; explains a lot I suppose. Why is MTP so hard to get right? It's just a freaking protocol; it'd probably be comprehensible to someone fresh out of the 70s.

I counted it once and if you wanted access to the most Google products, you would want to use Windows. Maybe things have changed. Internally they use mac, sure (probably with plenty of VMs), but their products (either due to design or acquisition of other companies) most consistently targeted Windows, which is of course the majority market.

I guess I'm not surprised that Google services suck in general; I'd just never known any Windows user to complain about it.

Does Windows still need third-party apps for literally everything, or have they fixed that (I haven't used it since XP)? If it does, then it's not surprising that there will be conflicts. I know that the Google services will screw up a totally vanilla Mac.

A similar google service on my MacBook causes the keyboard to stutter every few hours and occasionally disables the camera until I reboot. There's a way to disable it, but I haven't bothered yet. However, the process is incredibly similar to this one for disabling applemobiledeviceservice on Windows.

Mac users don't complain because iTunes on Mac doesn't have this problem, or much of any problem that I've noticed. This is either because Apple doesn't know how or care to code for Windows, or because it's a conspiracy to get iPhone and iTunes users to buy Macs because "Windows is slow." In my opinion, it's probably a mixture. Apple just doesn't have as much incentive to provide a good Windows experience, so they don't bother, knowing that this will probably convert a few suckers to Mac.

Similarly, Google services don't seem to screw up Windows or Linux, and Google's MTP support for Mac (MTP is required for Nexus 4) is ridiculously minimal. It's an analogous situation. Vendors for system X don't care about system Y, news at 11.

The solution seems simple. Sell your iPhone to a Mac user, and buy an Android device. Why would you even buy an iPhone for Windows? I use a Mac and I still won't buy one.

but have never thought about it beyond "man change - man change bad".

that's because the Rs have abdicated their responsibility. they're the party of industry and heartless growth, and they need to grow up and apply this view to a new industry of climate manipulation, rather than just shill and try to bury the issue in unthinking support of old oil.

in the end, climate will work out; the only question will be who gets shafted by our implementation of climate change technology. the Ds, of course, want a sort of austerity and personal responsibility. the Rs should be advocating some kind of free market solution that shafts the poor and indigenous cultures, so that we can work out an equilibrium between the two.

I see how passing this test is important in principle, I guess, but since it is elementary constructs used in a very complex and artificial way, does it really have much to do with how real math will look?

At least it's objective. That's something.

That chrome (at least the MacOS 26.0.1410.65 build) falls down hard on even the more reasonable mathml acid1 seems more significant...

An astute analysis and very well-put. Thank you.

First, google isn't in the anonymizing-proxy business.

Second, this is for an interview. In order to get the subject to explain things, it's often a good move to play yourself down, give a terse summary, and let the subject elaborate on things.

Third, depending on what he meant by "the recipient needs to be replicated," i'd say he gets the gist of the tor network. There are multiple recipients in the routing chain. "Replicated'' isn't the best word to use, but it's not completely wrong.

if the "self-selected" wine tasters can taste the difference, then it is real.

it might not matter to you, but it is real.

you're mostly right, though. high prices are based on prestige as well as quality. i'm not an oenophile myself but as i've had it explained to me, you can get wines in the 90th percentile of quality for $20-30/btl if you research diligently and have a well-stocked friendly neighborhood wine store.

of course, if you don't have the time, or if you shop exclusively at whole foods, yeah, they'll happily charge you $100 for the convenience of maintaining your ignorance.

Truffle is trivially distinguishable from other mushrooms. Is it worth paying hundreds or thousands per pound to try it (more than once, at least)? Probably not. Is the taste going to agree with everyone? No. Is a large part of the price the prestige factor? Yes.

But to assert that it is indistinguishable is just stupid. Either you've never tried them, or you've had your taste buds cauterized.

Tomorrow, the first thing you do is go down to the newsstand and get Harper's.

it's hard to unroot when the phone is, you know, broken and thus actually needs warranty work.

of course the last time i sent it in, all that happened was they fixed it, flashed the stock rom back on (!), and sent it back to me. they didn't reflash the stock bootloader, though, so recovery was quick.