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Comment How about also deleting roads (Score 1) 50

Hopefully in addition to adding roads it'll let you mark that they don't exist or are blocked. Bonus if you can do that in time increments such as "blocked for the next hour". Every time I get to a road where there is an accident, or some other reason it's blocked temporarily, if you turn around or take a side road it usually just ends up telling you to do a U-turn or it leads you on a path that take you back to where you got stuck. If I could simply tell it "you can't go this way for the next hour" and have it intelligently route you around it that'd be a very useful addition. It wouldn't even have to get shared with anyone. As a bonus if you decide to take a scenic route it won't constantly try to take you on the main road if you've marked is a blocked at all intersections.

Comment Re:Cheaper: Use a deck of cards (Score 1) 98

I typed the password I created before shuffling it in Keepass password generator and it says 466 bits of entropy. I think it's from the fact that there are factorial(54) permutations but I have a 118 character password so I more than doubled the bits. If you knew I was using 'ah' for ace of hearts and '1h' for 1 of hearts, etc. then an I think you're correct. Or if I just labeled each card with a it's own character (say ace of hearts is A, 2 of hearts is B and keep going until you use the whole alphabet then use lowercase for the rest until you have 54 unique representations of a card) I think you're also correct. I used two characters for each card and if you don't know how I label each card then that increases the entropy. It's merely because my method encoded each card as two characters that you get the extra entropy from a longer password. If you type "aceofhearts", "twoofhearts", etc. instead you probably get a 1000+ character password and thousands of bits of entropy (I'm not going to do the math). Of course that presumes nobody knows how I represented each card alphanumerically or the extra bits don't help.

Comment Re:Every movie and TV show? (Score 2) 43

I was doing a thought experiment and looked up the information. Netflix as of a few months ago had about 36,000 hours of content. Their own website says 3 GB per hour (though they do have some content in UHD which I believe is 7 GB per hour). Assuming it's all HD then that's 108 TB. So, just about 5 seconds. SInce it's not all UHD I'll say you can easily do it in 10 seconds for sure. But, your're right definitely not in 1 second.

However, even if you could download it that fast I don't know what you're going to store it on as it looks like DDR5 tops out at about 51.2 GBps and a good SSD only has a write speed around 520 MBps :).

Comment Cheaper: Use a deck of cards (Score 1) 98

If you use a deck of playing cards and label the ace of hearts = ah, king of diamonds = kd, 5 of clubs = 5c, 2 of spades = 2s, and include the jokers you'll get 466 bits of entropy by shuffling the cards. Then you'll get a password that looks like this (before shuffling):

ac2c3c4c5c6c7c8c9c10cjcqckc
ad2d3d4d5d6d7d8d9d10djdqdkd
ah2h3h4h5h6h7h8h9h10hjhqhkh
as2s3s4s5s6s7s8s9s10sjsqsks
jokerjoker

On the downside you'll have a 118 character password. Of course you'll want to ensure nobody ever reshuffles the cards. You should probably label them in sequential order with a sharpie or something. Otherwise if you ever drop the deck or accidentally shuffle them you lost your password. If you decide some of the cards should use capital letters you can increase entropy but probably not enough to make the extra confusion for yourself worthwhile. I'm also not seriously suggesting you do this but it's cost $2 vs $25 for this dice thing and essentially do the same thing.

Comment Re:Term of Use (Score 1) 80

On the site under the "Use your own photo" button it very explicitly says "P.S. We don't keep the photo".

Then on the blog it says:

"Updated 5/2/2015

We've had some questions so we updated this post to be more clear. To answer the top one: No we don't store photos, we don't share them and we only use them to guess your age and gender. The photos are discarded from memory once we guess. While we use the terms of service very common in our industry, and similar to most other online services, we have chosen not to store or use the photos in any way other than to temporarily process them to guess your age."

So, if you become a Microsoft star you probably have a very good legal case. IANAL.

Comment Hair color and lighting (Score 1) 80

I tried several photos. I got as low as 23 and as high as 46 with photos from within the past 3 years (I'm in my mid-30's). In one photo I'm standing next to my mother who is in her late 60's in the photo. In that photo it says I'm 46 and she's 40. I believe the difference is that my hair is starting to go gray but my mother still colors her hair. In the picture where it says I'm 23 my hair is cut short and isn't noticeably going gray. However, I used the exact same picture and adjusted the lighting and it changed my age from 23 to 27.

Curiously, it seems to have a problem with infants. I have a 22 month nephew that depending on lighting says is either a 5 or 16 year old girl. I also tried a picture of my nephew being held by his mother at only a few months old and it guessed he was 5 years old. The algorithm is definitely using just the face as if it used other contextual clues it'd be very obvious a 5 year old is much larger than a 3 month old or that a 16 years old is much taller than a 5 year old.

Interesting concept but it appears hair color and lighting play large roles (simply based on my own manipulation of identical pictures).

Comment Trolleybus (Score 5, Informative) 491

They're called trollybusses and lots of cities used to have them. Apparently hundreds of cities in the US had them but most of them went away in the 1950's and 1960's. Currently they're only in use in Boston, Dayton, Philadelphia, Seattle, and San Francisco (List of US Trollybusses). I was recently in San Francisco on a tour bus and they said the reason they use them is the electric motor has more torque which is needed to go up the steep hills. I can't speak for why they're still in use in the other cities or why they went out of style in all but 5 cities. Growing up in Dayton I thought they were more common than they are since Dayton isn't that big of a city compared to the others on the list.

Comment Too Myopic (Score 1) 550

I haven't done it because I have severe myopia and all my ophthalmologists recommended that LASIK is not a good idea because it would thin my cornea too much. They have told me surgeons will do it at my level but if it were their eyes they wouldn't risk it. So, the only option for me is intraocular lens which I've been told costs $5,000 per eye and I'd rather use contact lenses to correct my vision to 20:20 than shell out $10,000. If I could do LASIK I'd sign up tomorrow.

Comment Re:*Some* old ones are valuable (Score 2) 219

Also keep an eye out for BIOS Disassembly Ninjutsu Uncovered by Darmawan Salihun. People are asking $1500 for it on Amazon since it's out of print. I guess it's a collector's item. The company I used to work for paid $700 for it on amazon 6 months ago and as soon as I heard that I googled the book to see why it was in such demand and discovered it was out of print and the author had even posted a PDF of the book on his blog. So, there was no reason to even buy it for the information; it's only worthwhile buying it as a collectible. The funny thing is they didn't know any of this and wrote their name all over it with a sharpie thus destroying its collectible value. What's not funny is they probably just billed the government for the price of a book they could've read for free...

Comment Finally a good idea for the post office (Score 1) 867

I see no problems with this. The post office will still need door to door delivery for packages. If someone is disabled or elderly then I'm sure it'd still be cheaper to create a registry where the post office delivers mail to the door of those people. As an added bonus every cluster box I've seen has a key to your mailbox so your mail is more secure and nobody other than the mailman can put mail in your box.

This isn't new either; as was mentioned already. I grew up in a small town of 700. Nobody in the whole town had a mailbox. Everyone in town had to go to the post office and get their mail form a PO Box. Sure, for some it was a mile away but your mail was always delivered at 9 AM if you wanted to check that early. This was in the 1980's and as far as I know it'd been like that the previous 30 years. Then when I went to college all the mail was centralized near the cafeteria. When I graduated and moved to small city in Indiana all the houses in my subdivision had cluster boxes for every 10-20 houses. This was a subdivision built in the early 1990's. Now I'm living in MD in a gated community and it has cluster boxes too although for some odd reason I have to walk past the nearest cluster box and down the street to next one to get my mail from that box. So, from my point of view I've never had door to door service.

Comment Re:One man, consumer parts (Score 1) 156

Unless the guy that invented it works for free the true cost is surely much higher than $1390. This IEEE article from a month ago says it took him a year and a half to develop so I'd include the guy's salary, lab equipment, CAD tool licenses, etc. unless he worked on it in his free time with all free open source software...

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Education Official Says Bad Teachers Can Be Good For Students 279

Zenna Atkins, the chairman of the Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted), has raised some eyebrows by saying that, "every school should have a useless teacher." She stresses that schools shouldn't seek out or tolerate bad teaching, but thinks bad teachers provide a valuable life-lesson. From the article: "... on Sunday Ms Atkins told the BBC that schools needed to reflect society, especially at primary level. 'In society there are people you don't like, there are people who are incompetent and there are often people above you in authority who you think are incompetent, and learning that ability to deal with that and, actually surviving that environment can be an advantage.'"

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