wtracy

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391.
by wtracy 8y ago
And this is how science fiction authors have been shooting themselves in the foot. The golden age of science fiction, the era when science fiction was most popular with the public, occurred when most of that fiction had a positive outlook o
392.
by wtracy 8y ago
I would argue that the main reason Star Trek has had such enduring popularity in spite of its failings is that it is a rare example of utopian science fiction in television. (Deep Space 9 took a dystopian detour by focusing on several alien
393.
by wtracy 8y ago
Of all places, Facebook had a pretty clearly non-technical person screen me over the phone. Apparently they gave her a list of questions and answers. The questions were structured so that none of the answers were open-ended. ("What is
394.
by wtracy 8y ago
Those "many eyes" are the reason this was caught at all. I could easily imagine situations where this backdoor would go unnoticed for months or years.
395.
by wtracy 8y ago
“Keep asking questions like that and you will never get work in this field again.” Those words should never come from a government official in a democratic country in any context. Wow, just wow.
396.
by wtracy 8y ago
The simple version: WebAssembly does protect the host from a compromised process. WebAssembly doesn't do jack to prevent a process (and whatever data it controls) from being compromised in the first place.
397.
by wtracy 8y ago
I'm already imagining someone reverse engineering your one frame per second solution and uploading porn where every 24th frame has been replaced with the Windows XP wallpaper.
398.
by wtracy 8y ago
Ooh, I wonder if you could make a "family friendly" browser extension or firewall from that.
399.
by wtracy 8y ago
This article makes me wonder if we could see a Tegra successor for the data center: a chip with a few ARM cores that really just exist to coordinate the GPU cores and handle I/O.
400.
by wtracy 8y ago
I suspect that the VM gets suspended when you undock the phone. I wouldn't count on being able to use it for persistent background services.
401.
by wtracy 8y ago
I expect corporate HR departments to love this, actually. Give everyone identical cubicles with docking station and accessories. People can be shuffled around, and they can easily take their devices with their work with them. Send someone t
402.
by wtracy 8y ago
Nobody is arguing against sandboxing. The problem is sandboxing schemes that put the device manufacturers' needs ahead of the device owners' needs.
403.
by wtracy 8y ago
They're not consuming 3x bandwidth if they're bailing out after downloading less then a kilobyte of a video that's tends or hundreds of megabytes in size. That extra bandwidth is a rounding error in the grand scheme of things
404.
by wtracy 8y ago
No, but they ultimately feed into a river that does. My opinion: Features like this have no business being in a fantasy map unless the author has an above-average grasp of geology. Or there's a magic portal somewhere. That's fine,
405.
by wtracy 8y ago
Again, it doesn't just stop--it ends in a swamp. (An "endorheic basin", to borrow from Wikipedia.) I'm complaining about fantasy rivers that literally just stop.
406.
by wtracy 8y ago
The only instances I know of rivers naturally splitting is in river deltas. These form from sediment accumulating at what was once a single river mouth. The islands in a delta have consistent properties: they are flat, consist of soil and s
407.
by wtracy 8y ago
I can't imagine a human right more fundamental than health care. What good is freedom of speech or assembly or trade to a dead person?
408.
by wtracy 8y ago
I'll try to make an even simpler explanation. :-) Most games use scanline rendering. The program starts with a list of all the objects in the scene, and one by one calculates where they go on the screen. Raytracing starts with all the
409.
by wtracy 8y ago
Okay, here's my excuse to vent a personal pet peeves. :-) If you're going to publish a map of your imaginary land, map out the watersheds and make sure they make sense. You don't have to include those details in the final map
410.
by wtracy 8y ago
Ironically, this should have been an opportunity for Bing to differentiate themselves: Create a "safe" ad network that is not a vector for drive-by downloads or privacy violations, and go after publishers that are being hurt by ad
411.
by wtracy 8y ago
In this instance, that just ads one more level of convolution to the situation without addressing the fundamental issue. If you get ads for a malicious version of a browser on a new PC, why isn't it possible to get ads for a malicious
412.
by wtracy 8y ago
More specifically: "good" ads aren't modal and don't force you to click through to continue. If YouTube just mixed YouTube Red ads in with all their other ads, I doubt that anyone would be complaining. (Except for the pe
413.
by wtracy 8y ago
This comment gave me a thought: maybe the reason that employees rebel against these systems has less to do with the implied lack of trust, and more to do with the loss of autonomy? If the boss isn't around to watch you all the time, yo
414.
by wtracy 8y ago
My pet theory is that Google intends to eventually port the existing userspace for chromeos and Android to the Fuschia kernel. As long as your apps run inside Chrome's runtime, or interact with the Android APIs instead of the low level
415.
by wtracy 8y ago
I've never seen any evidence that Google intends to release a new consumer os called Fuschia. I'm reasonably convinced that Fuschia is a testbed for a new kernel that will eventually replace the hacked up Linux kernel underpinning
416.
by wtracy 8y ago
Duh, brain on. Yes, the Xbox One.
417.
by wtracy 8y ago
I find it strange what services attract hacking attempts. If anyone has attempted to break into my bank accounts or my Google account, I never noticed. (My Gmail account is used for TFA for most of my other accounts, so I would expect it to
418.
by wtracy 8y ago
I know that the Xbox 360 doesn't allow offline play. I wouldn't be surprised if inserting the disc automatically and permanently ties some unique serial number to your account.
419.
by wtracy 8y ago
I'm curious too. There may be a binding arbitration clause in the EULA that allows them to overturn any decision made by the court.
420.
by wtracy 8y ago
History seems to disagree with your basic premise. There are entire classes of security vulnerabilities eliminated by high level language features. (A trivial example: buffer overflows are a non-issue with runtime bounds checking.) In theo

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