yaakov34

32 ms·

211.
by yaakov34 15y ago
I agree with him - it's impossible to remember a unique high-entropy password for every account. I disagree that password managers are the solution. They are a huge single point of failure both for getting locked out of accounts and for sec
212.
by yaakov34 15y ago
Can someone edit the submission to say "steganography"?
213.
by yaakov34 15y ago
* Well. He's 55 yrs old * He's 55 years old now. He was 33 in 1990, when he stopped working (according to him). The idea that an electrical engineer and physicist with tons of programming experience to boot, and with references from Lockhee
214.
by yaakov34 15y ago
He was only 33 years old in 1990. According to his story, he already had 8 years of experience as a senior engineer at Lockheed, plus two masters degrees in Physics and EE, and more than a decade of computer programming experience, and conn
215.
by yaakov34 15y ago
I also suspect there is more to the story, and I would like to point out that he was unemployed from 1993 to 2007, which is a period that included an immense economic boom. I don't see how the current tottering state of the economy explains
216.
by yaakov34 15y ago
I remember reading somewhere in the discussions which I linked to that the bench ended up being at that height simply because the nearest structural pipe (to which it is welded) is there, and all models of the bus stop have benches at diffe
217.
by yaakov34 15y ago
No, that's not it at all - I am referring to his main blog at tema.livejournal.com. It's a profanity-laced display that really needs to be appreciated in the original to be believed. E.g. his response to the bus stop fiasco was along the li
218.
by yaakov34 15y ago
When it comes to Lebedev's designs, one would do well to reserve judgement until seeing the final result. For example, Lebedev designed bus stops for the city of Perm with tremendous fanfare, see here: http://www.artlebedev.ru/everything/p
219.
by yaakov34 15y ago
I don't get the objection. A company providing an online service has to be paid somehow. It's either going to be paid by subscriptions, or by advertisers. The people have spoken: the ad-supported model is nearly universal, the paywall model
220.
by yaakov34 15y ago
This is immaturely and badly argued. So it took a massive two days for an intern to add IE6 support to a web app. This is actually a good argument for keeping IE6 support for the several percent of users who still have it. I am not saying t
221.
by yaakov34 15y ago
Hopefully there will be some movement on increasing accountability for state workers. It is not impossible - I heard that New York City is ending its infamous "rubber rooms" in which bad teachers are paid to do nothing for years and years
222.
by yaakov34 15y ago
The article tries to make it sound like this is some kind of a computer-age cyber-problem, but in fact, any face recognition technology, including the Mk. 1 human eyeball and brain, is going to have a certain false positive rate. Actually,
223.
by yaakov34 15y ago
I find it interesting not in the sense of "I thank them for sharing their wisdom with me", but in the sense of "look what's massing on the horizon". And as for Google's policies in practices, as users of their consumer products, we're expos
224.
by yaakov34 15y ago
It's an interesting OP in the sense that it shows that some big players are trying to brew up trouble for Google using antitrust mechanisms. The screed itself is not very informative (it's an attack piece by a lawyer for the other side). No
225.
by yaakov34 15y ago
The picture I was looking at is weight in the economy. We - I guess I am making some assumptions about the audience here - sometimes get so caught up in the kinds of things that are important to us, that we forget that this is not the whole
226.
by yaakov34 15y ago
It's useful to keep these numbers in perspective in all the excitement. Browse http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companies_by_revenue and convince yourself that we're not quite living in a virtual world yet. The list is dominated by gi
227.
by yaakov34 15y ago
What actual search results became worse for users as a result of these changes? Anyone got examples? If this is a matter of certain SEO-reliant websites being sent to the back of the line and not being able to figure out how to cut in fro
228.
by yaakov34 15y ago
Oh, I completely agree, nothing is ever a panacea. But there is a difference between a security incident and a fundamentally broken system. And I believe that the current password systems are fundamentally broken in at least 2 ways: (1) The
229.
by yaakov34 15y ago
We really, really need to move away from passwords as the primary security mechanism. Let me count the ways: (1) We cannot make people choose hard passwords. We just can't. As proven by recent leaks in which people still, after a million wa
230.
by yaakov34 15y ago
I don't agree that "the energy is not being emitted"; the Sun is roughly in thermal equilibrium, and the energy emitted equals the energy produced by fusion. The same would happen to a "bright light inside a box" - the box would emit the sa
231.
by yaakov34 15y ago
So according to you, the major advantage of fusion is that it will take us beyond the next thousand years, which is the amount of time that we can supply our needs with fission (I am not taking maximum numbers). Let Dr. Prager say that in
232.
by yaakov34 15y ago
Thanks, I was not aware that the surface of the Sun is very bright. If we're going to analyze the performance of our "reactor", then we need to include the fusing fuel, the "confinement", which prevents us from being very quickly destroyed
233.
by yaakov34 15y ago
Thanks for the correction about runaway fusion reactions. Does this only prevent it from doing a "Ivy Mike" on us, or can they actually make it passively self-regulating to the point that it can't breach the containment? I still think he is
234.
by yaakov34 15y ago
My basic point is that the time scale and size scale of stars are so far, far outside human scales, that it's misleading to talk about a reactor somehow being like them, even if it uses fusion. It's really a completely different process. Th
235.
by yaakov34 15y ago
I am arguing with the sort of vision of fusion power that's presented in popular articles, like the NYT one that started this thread. "Clean power that powers the Sun" - yup, he said that. A senior scientist who knows the numbers. See below
236.
by yaakov34 15y ago
Not 100,000 years, he is talking about the total energy produced over the Sun's lifetime of billions of years (his calculation is for the last 4 billion, actually). The number is still surprisingly small - 2.3e13J is only a few billion kcal
237.
by yaakov34 15y ago
I understand that this is the promise, but it all starts to sour once you look at the details. The most commonly proposed fusion reactors use D+T fusion, which produces hugely energetic neutrons, the most dangerous kind of radiation that yo
238.
by yaakov34 15y ago
OK, sorry, it's hard to explain what I mean without going into the actual calculations. The Sun produces 3.84e26 Watts and has a mass of 2e30 kilograms. So suppose you can harness all the energy produced by a kilogram of the sun for 100 yea
239.
by yaakov34 15y ago
After actually looking at the numbers and the details regarding fusion technology, I've come to the conclusion that the advantages over fission are illusory. I think people believe that fusion is somehow "way more powerful", because they kn
240.
by yaakov34 15y ago
I am not invested into any lighting companies either. Maybe I should be, I am sure they stand to make a fortune on mandated fancy technologies. I am not sure why you think I advocate CFLs. I advocate letting people keep using incandescent b

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