JackC

32 ms·

241.
by JackC 11y ago
The "whatever" library looks really neat -- thanks for the reference: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/whatever
242.
by JackC 11y ago
OK, so: Betz's Law says that the maximum energy that any wind turbine can extract is 16/27 of the kinetic energy contained in the wind that it blocks. Modern three-blade wind turbines reach 75-80% of the theoretical maximum, acros
243.
by JackC 11y ago
Funny, those were the same two I noticed. The document says it was written shortly before Python 2.5, which came out in September 2006. So it's probably about 9 years old.
244.
by JackC 12y ago
They announced new laptops at two of the last three WWDCs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Worldwide_Developers_Conf...
245.
by JackC 12y ago
This kind of thing is a great example of why Snowden had to release a large trove of documents to reporters. Earlier whistleblowers were easily dismissed this way, but now the personal attacks are basically irrelevant -- we have the documen
246.
by JackC 12y ago
ircmaxell makes a good point in that comment -- not that the concept of a pepper doesn't work, but that a two-way encryption function is a better choice than a hash function for applying the pepper. Your pepper will be a long, random
247.
by JackC 12y ago
Far as I can tell this is a really different use case from most markup languages: - Set up a Google doc. - Point a bunch of non-technical users (like reporters) at the doc to fill in content. - Continually parse what they're doing into
248.
by JackC 12y ago
> 1400 lines of python that tries to pretend that an interactive program is a library is definitely a problem though. Yeah, +1 for this. The lack of a proper GPG library is very strange. I'm in the process of writing a Python progra
249.
by JackC 12y ago
There have been some important efforts to make the law more accessible in the last, say, 50 years. E.g.: * Jury instruction have been rewritten using the minimum number of terms that jurors won't already know. * Legal decisions are wri
250.
by JackC 12y ago
I'm not sure if this is what Zykes is referring to. But this particular attack on Tor is different from a wiretap because it made traffic readable by the whole network, not only by the attackers. In what I think you mean by a perturbat
251.
by JackC 12y ago
> I'm common sense. Common sense is a great place to start from! Then you do science. You predict what will happen under various policies; you try some options and observe what happens; you revise your understanding of the problem;
252.
by JackC 12y ago
I see your point, but I guess I don't see why it matters. Like, let's say Person A says horrible stuff because he hates women, and Person B says the same horrible stuff because he likes hurting people and the person he wants to hu
253.
by JackC 12y ago
So, just more food for thought: this ideology (that it's bad to look at your tech through a feminist lens, or any other random social lens) tends to be a conservative force, not a progressive one. Tech has to be built for someone . Yo
254.
by JackC 12y ago
And with that, they've moved from being a dumb pipe to being a force for censorship. This has nothing to do with censorship. It doesn't attempt to make harassment impossible or illegal. It's a social strategy: you can choos
255.
by JackC 12y ago
which means instead of a discovery in lab A spurring a totally new way of thinking in lab B, it restricts lab B from ever thinking that way. This is not necessarily true. Patents, unlike copyrights, are additive. If you write a book based
256.
by JackC 12y ago
> Are we really going to say that these 40 character strings are illegal to share? Yeah, it's not unusual for short messages containing numbers to be illegal. Like: "The guy at 42 Foo St. is looking to sell a kilo of coke if
257.
by JackC 12y ago
This is fantastic! We were just noticing how segregated our own neighborhood near Boston is, and wondering what drives that and what could be done about it. You can see the same thing all over the city -- neighborhoods that are much more wh
258.
by JackC 12y ago
User table has two columns: userid; salt. Password table has one column: hash(userid+password+salt). Login process: given userid and password, look up salt. Check if hash(userid+password+salt) appears in Password table. Password reset proce
259.
by JackC 12y ago
I'd like to see the actual uses of the requested permissions added as legally binding commitments by the app developer. Android does this thing now (which is cool as far as it goes) where it warns you about everything an app could hypo
260.
by JackC 12y ago
It's not the "what" they did to Netscape (releasing a free browser), it's the illegal "why" they did it (to break the cross-platform web). As the government wrote in a trial brief: "In short, Microsoft fea
261.
by JackC 12y ago
LOCKSS is definitely a giant in this field, and David Rosenthal (who wrote the paper I linked as well) is great. But LOCKSS occupies a small niche. My hope is really that at some point a commercially-focused project with a ton of engineerin
262.
by JackC 12y ago
Are there distributed data stores like this that are also resilient to intentional sabotage? I've been looking recently at long-term digital preservation systems -- tools designed to archive large amounts of data for decades. This is t
263.
by JackC 12y ago
So to summarize: (1) You can use semicolons to get some web services to ignore the end of a request URL and respond normally, while tricking browsers into downloading the response as a file with an arbitrary name. This allows you to send a
264.
by JackC 12y ago
The author mentions a mitigation of specifying a filename in the Content-Disposition header, which that particular url actually does: Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="f.txt" Perhaps Google has fixed the problem
265.
by JackC 12y ago
I recently had very good luck debugging an IE8 problem with IE11 in emulation mode (via Sauce Labs on my Mac, incidentally). Not sure if it works for everything, but it was by far the best experience I've had with IE.
266.
by JackC 12y ago
Oh, another example that affects even the one-way lookup is stalking -- if I've been over to Joe's house before, and then he goes into hiding, I can say, "hey, I see Joe's access point, where am I?" That could be mi
267.
by JackC 12y ago
This is a great example -- thanks. So, is it fair to say that there's no privacy concern if the API only exposes a one-way lookup? I.e. "here are the access points I can see -- where am I?" That also addresses the other conce
268.
by JackC 12y ago
Can you say more about your privacy concern here? I'm not seeing it. As far as I know, the sole use of this database is to say, "if you can see this set of wifi networks, then you are probably at this GPS location." It's
269.
by JackC 12y ago
FWIW the other key feature missing for me is the histogram.[1] Pretty much everything I change in Lightroom, I'm keeping an eye on the histogram to make sure I'm not (unintentionally) blowing things out or losing dynamic range. Be
270.
by JackC 12y ago
I think the counterargument (elsewhere in this thread) is pretty persuasive -- that this defense won't help much if you intentionally set out to damage counterfeit chips. Think about it this way. Suppose the driver works like this: ```

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