billybob

15 ms·

121.
by billybob 15y ago
A lovely interchange my wife overheard in a medical office: Parent: "He needs to gain weight, right?" Doctor: "Why do you think that?" Parent: "You can see some of his bones!" Doctor: "You're SUPPOSED to be able to see SOME of them."
122.
by billybob 15y ago
Steve Gibson calls this concept the "password haystack". The idea is that the clever hacker will do something like the following: 1) Try known common passwords: "password1", "monkey", etc. 2) Try dictionary words, maybe with leetspeek subst
123.
by billybob 15y ago
If people really only want to support musicians, it would make more sense to just hand them a nice note with some cash and walk away. I mean, isn't it weird that they want to make music, and you want to hear music, but it doesn't pay unle
124.
by billybob 15y ago
"If you are not paying for it, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold." The galling potential of this story is that even though you're paying for your cell phone and service, you are potentially still the product being s
125.
by billybob 15y ago
What useful metric would keystrokes be part of? "Users tend to press the T key a lot..."
126.
by billybob 15y ago
Is it considered voluntary if the app is running without your knowledge and can't be turned off? To me, that's about as "voluntary" as having your house bugged.
127.
by billybob 15y ago
TL;DR - On a Sprint HTC Android phone, an app is running without the user's knowledge, which cannot be disabled, which monitors nearly everything you do, down to keypresses, and reports back to the third-party company CarrierIQ, which presu
128.
by billybob 15y ago
I think that's a bad idea. If you are found out, it will really damage your credibility.
129.
by billybob 15y ago
I would much prefer your to say "that doesn't matter." It's more honest than trying to invent a reason why I can't tell you, and it's true - it doesn't matter. The question is how much are my services, with my current skill set and experien
130.
by billybob 15y ago
Side point: "Four out of five people think that internet access is a fundamental right, according to a recent World Service poll in 26 different countries." I'm all for net neutrality, ISP competition, etc, but this "right" makes no sense t
131.
by billybob 15y ago
I'd be much more interested in a presentation that takes the following tack: we know that some professions are mostly male, some mostly female, and some a mix. Lets pick a bunch of careers from each category. Can we find any common characte
132.
by billybob 15y ago
TL;DR - "It doesn't. Women and men are about equally good at math. Also, CS doesn't require much math ability." Actually, I don't see how those two ideas form a coherent argument.
133.
by billybob 15y ago
Wirelessly powering something that sits in my eye? I don't think so. Isn't it about 10,000 times easier and safer to do a HUD using glasses than contacts?
134.
by billybob 15y ago
Not if the software is open source. On the contrary, you could run Adblock and never see another billboard.
135.
by billybob 15y ago
I agree with your first sentence. Whether it worked in the past is arguable, since they continue to do slimy things. But one thing is sure: they can't abuse your data if you don't give it to them.
136.
by billybob 15y ago
Not sure we'd see fewer bills passed; the cognitive load for each one would be smaller, so maybe they could work faster. Anyway, "fewer bills passed" could be a good thing, depending on your perspective. The job of Congress isn't to pass as
137.
by billybob 15y ago
By the way, if you're ever confused about what behavior is native and what comes from your config, use the `-u "NONE"` option to run vanilla vim (or macvim or gvim).
138.
by billybob 15y ago
I feel exactly the opposite. The previous editors that I used required configuration through a menu system. I wouldn't have known how to take that with me elsewhere. With Vim, all my configuration is in files, which can be backed up. I have
139.
by billybob 15y ago
Under this system, how can a new party gain traction? Can they spend their own money if they don't have public funding? And if so, why would established parties NOT spend their own money if they have more than public funding will provide?
140.
by billybob 15y ago
I would say that what you describe is a MUCH better situation. If you have 100 small bills rolled into one, it's easier for representatives to say "I voted for this part, not that," or even, "I didn't see that part of the bill." With many s
141.
by billybob 15y ago
I don't get it.
142.
by billybob 15y ago
If you're shooting for the mobile market, writing a web app that works in the 5 most popular mobile browsers is a lot easier than rewriting your native app for each platform you want to target.
143.
by billybob 15y ago
"Why will software be any different? It takes no resources except a brain, a computer and a connection. The whole world has the same quality of brains and computers as we, and their connection quality is often much better and cheaper than o
144.
by billybob 15y ago
Your post made me do two double-takes. 1) People buy $30k rings!? 2) People put $30k on a credit card!?
145.
by billybob 15y ago
Same here. Also got nothing for 'inline' or 'block'.
146.
by billybob 15y ago
I think those are different. I say "y'all" because I grew up in the southern US, and we recognize the need for a proper second-person plural here. Not everybody likes that word, but I'm not saying it in order to annoy them. On the other han
147.
by billybob 15y ago
You can do what you wish, but be aware that when you say it, maybe YOU mean "very" or "awesome", but your listeners may hear something different. To me, the combination of a word that means sexual intercourse with a forceful tone of voice h
148.
by billybob 15y ago
"I think the problem is that students should be taught to think, not to pass tests." OK. How do you propose to determine whether a student has been taught to think? Whatever your answer is, that's your test. Maybe it's questions like "build
149.
by billybob 15y ago
Another reason might be toolchain. If you're coding in a Rails 3.1 application, Rails takes care of compiling your Coffeescript and SASS and such for you. If you're using a toolchain that doesn't do that for you, you have to set up watch sc
150.
by billybob 15y ago
If you mean "why isn't everyone coding in CoffeeScript and compiling to Javascript," the answer is that not everyone sees the benefit in learning a new syntax to write code they already know how to write in Javascript. "Prettier code" isn't

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