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Comment Re:I agree. (Score 1) 166

> I'd be in favor of limiting stock trading to 1 minute increments

How would that work? Would bids and asks be blindly submitted to a trusted service, which somehow matches and executes them in one minute intervals? Or should people be able to see the bids and asks as they show up, as they do currently, except transactions only execute in one minute bursts? I guess this second option still leaves open the question of how buy and sell orders will be matched.

Comment Yahoo snatched defeat from jaws of victory (Score 1) 129

Yahoo games used to be one of the most popular places to play a ton of board game clones, but Yahoo snubbed mobile devices for years. What makes this extra mystifying is that almost all of their games were written in Java, and most mobile devices support Java. Why weren't they ported?

History was recently repeated when several shows such as Community were purchased to promote Yahoo's video streaming service, "Yahoo Screen". But the apps and Chromecast support didn't exist until the season was almost over, and they were far from polished. Even the web interface is perplexing.

Comment Re:One small problem (Score 1) 509

From Radley Balko's excellent column at http://www.washingtonpost.com/... :

When white people fled St. Louis in the early-to-mid-20th century, they took advantage of Missouri’s lenient incorporation laws to set up new towns to keep blacks away. As blacks began to move west, white people would move a little farther out, incorporate again, and set up new zoning laws to restrict black residency. The result is a county filled with dozens of tiny towns, nearly all of which have their own government and police force. The primary source of revenue for the local towns is sales tax. But the poorer (which means blacker) towns don’t generate enough income from sales taxes. So they turn to municipal fines to keep themselves from going under. The poorer the town and its residents, the more likely the town relies on fines for a greater percentage of its annual revenue. Which means that the blacker the town, the more likely its residents are getting treated like ATMs for the local government.

The cops in these towns don’t deal with felony crimes. The county police investigate those. A local officer’s job is to administer fines. Most cops are drawn from whiter, wealthier areas, in part because so many people in the poorer areas have arrest records. That means you have cops patrolling areas they aren’t from who are charged with extracting fines from people with whom they have little in common, and for petty offenses.

We did see a few examples of overt racism from city officials in the months after the Ferguson protests. But a system like this, one created by racism, will produce racist results even if none of the cops, prosecutors, or judges are racist themselves.

Comment Re:possible iOS Exploit? (Score 1) 180

Probably, and if you have physical access to the iPhone you can increase the rate of memory errors with mild heat. This paper from 2003 is pretty interesting and I'm not sure why it hasn't led to a new class of jailbreaking / rooting exploits yet. (That I'm aware of, at least.)
http://sip.cs.princeton.edu/pr... :
"Our attack works by sending to the JVM a Java program that is designed so that almost any memory error in its address space will allow it to take control of the JVM. All conventional Java and .NET virtual machines are vulnerable to this attack. The technique of the attack is broadly applicable against other language-based security schemes such as proof-carrying code.
"We measured the attack on two commercial Java Virtual Machines: Sun’s and IBM’s. We show that a singlebit error in the Java program’s data space can be exploited to execute arbitrary code with a probability of about 70%, and multiple-bit errors with a lower probability.
"Our attack is particularly relevant against smart cards or tamper-resistant computers, where the user has physical access (to the outside of the computer) and can use various means to induce faults; we have successfully used heat. Fortunately, there are some straightforward defenses against this attack."

Comment Re:Permenant Beta (Score 1) 295

Google seems to be breaking (Youtube), abandoning (Google Voice), and outright eliminating/neutering (Google Reader, Google Shopping) a lot of its better products lately. The official corporate word is that this is "improving the experience" or "putting more wood behind fewer arrows", but it's more about internal turf wars (e.g. Vic Gundotra's Google Plus) and new engineers not wanting to merely maintain new code when they can make a name for themselves with something "new". Throw into this the fact that the average Google employee works there for 3 years.

Maybe this all makes no difference to the average tech-ignorant user, but Google's flakiness is taking a toll on its reputation among anyone who pays attention. Ironically, most of this damage began when founder Larry Page took the reins, confident that he had finally learned how to CEO. Seems like he decided the way to do that is to emulate Facebook.

Comment Don't need to be a genius to be useful (Score 1) 659

Former child prodigy and current Fields medalist Terence Tao agrees that genius is overvalued when compared to hard work:
http://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/does-one-have-to-be-a-genius-to-do-maths/

As he says, "attributing success to innate talent (which is beyond one’s control) rather than effort, planning, and education (which are within one’s control) can lead to ... problems." (particularly for children; cf. http://nymag.com/news/features/27840/ )

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