Posts by Mike Kamermans

I hope not

which encryption? password protected content? I hope it goes "I'm sorry, this is not open data, whoever put this file online is a complete idiot". But it's also just an open source project that anyone can use, which the article forgot to mention. Hit up https://github.com/mozilla/pdf.js and find out whether it does what you want.

Re: Bearded man has informed opinion

And this is where critical thinking comes in: the problem is that even if you opt in, you don't know *what* you're opting in to.

You don't just opt in to "Canonical gathering information", because Canonical won't gather information just to gather information and have it sit somewhere doing nothing. That data will be used for something, if it isn't already. In effect, you will be opting in to "Canonical gathering information on what programs you use, at what time, and anything they can think of that will generate them monetary profit or user base increases to effect monetary profit by either using or selling that data".

Without knowing what those products are (and even Canonical might not know that yet, they could come up with a terrible, but legal use of the data sometime in the future) you CANNOT know what you're opting in to, and offering the choice to opt in should come with a warning that's as explicitly scary as can be: "opting in to this program means you are okay with Canonical roughly knowing what you do throughout the day (sometimes knowing exactly what you do, depending on your use of this program) and gives them full permission to exploit that knowledge for any form of company gains. Once opted in, opting out will not remove the data already collected about you, your daily routines, and your behavioural preferences."

Unless someone reads you a nice long explanation of the ramifications of handing over personal day to day behavioural data in general, and relating to the technology industry specifically, your decision to opt in is based on incomplete information and a poor understanding of the ramifications of your actions. Should an OS maker be taking advantage of the fact that virtually no one understands the impact of the action when optin in? There's the crucial question: how you answer this determines, in a broad sense, whether you want to be free (in the *n*x philosophical sense) or not, and Ubuntu is currently breaking the rule that *n*x operating systems are free.

(Applications running on *n*x are, ideally, free too. However, there are plenty that aren't, and that's fine. Canonical can even make such a product themselves and then offer it as a download or even an install option, with warnings on the ramifications of installing. They don't do that. They pulled a Microsoft)

There, fixed.

It looks like you were trying to write something about science. Let me help you with that:

"The mystery of the creation of the Universe is clearly unsolved but being tackled by astrophysics. It's a tough one, but thankfully not related to this research. Whew. Also, the mystery of how DNA life came about is hard, and has nothing to do with 'evolution' as it applies to DNA life on the biological level. The mystery we're talking about now is one of chemistry, and it's also pretty hard to work on (but not as hard as the whole creation of the universe thing). That's OK, though, because 'hard' is not 'impossible'; just hard. There's questions left to be answered and some of us want to find those answers, because whether or not other people use single words as explanation, we won't accept anything as definitive unless it literally shuts us up and we can no longer ask 'but then how did that come about'."

There, much better. Now it reflects reality. Keep asking questions until everything's explained. Which, most likely, will never happen. But in our quest, we'll learn a lot of things that will give us a better insight into how things work than we had before.

Now we're thinking in science.

Re: it's only a matter of time before this kind of pixel density becomes standard

you answered your own question. Because now people have it, and consequently want it everywhere, whereas before you could get away with "no one else is doing it, why would we risk risk financial ruin".

Re: What?

I think you mean "today's emperor penguins reach 4 feet once full grown, how does an extra 2" make them giants compared to modern penguins?"

Good thing it's not illegal to destroy evidence in a criminal offense case, either, and not demand the authorities get involved.

Just because it's a browser, doesn't mean you need the exact same plugin to get the exact same functionality?

Chrome, like any webkit browser, comes with dev tools: hit ctrl-shift-I and there it is, doing everything for you in Chrome that dragonfly does in Opera, and firebug does in Firefox. Except you don't have to install it yourself, it doesn't slow down the browser (the current complaint by people working on firefox on the mozilla side), and doesn't require you to constantly phone home to your browser's maker (like dragonfly, which sends the page data to opera.com for analysis, unless you install it locally, at which point it becomes really slow).

Just because the monitor is unethical, doesn't mean the product is a security or privacy risk, let's be very clear about that.

If I slap a signal analyser on your keyboard cord, lo and behold I can see exactly what you're typing. That doesn't make the keyboard a privacy threat. Even if I hook it up to a device that looks at data going by in real time, it's not a privacy threat because it doesn't log.

If it logs, THEN it's a privacy threat, and punitive measure are probably in order. If it doesn't, this is an analytics tool, and any "keylogging" argument is nonsense. I for one look forward to the definitive call based on their source code. If it logs, they will be in a ridiculous amount of trouble. If it doesn't, this was a storm in a teacup.

same as humans then.

Humans don't solve Rubic's cube puzzles without knowing the rules for getting colors from one spot to another spot, either. Credit goes to the robot builders twice - once for understanding the workings of the Rubic's cube to the degree that they could write a program that solves them, and then even more credit for building an awesome (if a bit pointless) robot that solves the physical puzzle! Bragging rights doesn't even begin to describe their amount of win.

But if we're going to talk philosophy, robotics and AI aren't about making robots "intelligent". Shooting something down for not trying to is like claiming a dish made with "vegetarian fish balls" can't be tasty because it's not real fish, even though tastiness is not related to being fish. Time to get the qualifiers right: robotics and AI are about automating things that humans need to be intelligent for, ideally to the point that it's become trivial. Like, say, solving Rubic's cube.

Lots of things that you need to be really smart for as a human turn out to be trivial when have even a modest bit of robot kit available. A good scientific conclusion is that apparently intelligence isn't worth achieving, because it's apparently not necessary for doing useful and even awesome things.

Never mind that on a technical note, intelligence is an a posteriori evaluation, not a guiding quality. The actually useful quality measure is success at a task. Someone or something that has the potential to fail a task but achieves success, is said to be "intelligent", whereas someone or something that fails the task is said to not be intelligent (and someone or something that lacks the ability to fail cannot be rated). So talking about intelligence for robots is nonsense in the first place.

And then of course on a scientific note: "Intelligence" doesn't mean anything. It's not measurable, which means that using it shows you don't actually know what you really want to measure, or implement for that matter. Useful word when talking about people's behaviour, utterly useless word when objectively talking about carrying out some task.

When nature calls

you do what comes naturally. If someone collapses, you pull the emergency break, the train stops at the next station, where emergency personell will likely already be waiting, just like when you still had your cell phone available, because you don't call emergency services when you're on the BART, or riding the tube, or in the Paris metro. You push those magical buttons marked "in case of emergency, push this magical button and talk to the voice". Cell phones are a luxury. Also, completely irrelevant when it comes to transit system emergencies. Reality check: 1.

what budgets?

Sorry, "small budgets"? Maybe we're not talking about the same JSTOR. Take a look at http://www.jstor.org/ and tell me that's "small". It's only the largest academic information repository on this planet.

yes, that's how patents work. And always have.

If you have a good idea, a patent protects your idea from being implemented by someone else. While it would be nice to add a restriction that says "oh and you have to build it, too", you kind of need to tie such clauses to a timeline, and that's where it breaks down. It's not really fair to say "And you have to build this within five years or the patent expires" if, for instance, the machines that make the machines that make the machines that make your idea a real thing don't even exist yet. Five years might not be enough, and no patent office worked is qualified enough to determine, for each patent, what the expiry time should be. It would be interesting if patent law was changed so that a patent application must come with an applicant's estimate on how long they'll need to make the real thing, with an upper limit of, say, 10 years because if it's any longer the world will have passed you by already. However, registering a patent and then doing nothing with it has been common practice since the patent office opened. And US law was recently changed so that whoever got their patent first in a patent conflict, wins. Not whoever had the idea first. Whoever had the patent first. (the fact that it's easier for legislative system to alleviate symptoms, rather than solve problems, is a good indicator on how problematically big even a relatively small subfield like "patent law" is).

Compare them.

No, really. Save a file in WebM at the highest quality, then try saving the same file as a JPG, matching the file size. The JPEG will be much, much worse. Set JPEG to the same quality, and it'll come out a whopping 66% bigger (yes, that's how percentages work to those who see 66% and are confused by the fact that it's not 40% =)

Essentially, WebM isn't just "different", it really is unequivocally "better".

Grab yourself a copy of of the WebM Photoshop format filter, and a copy of filtermeister - open any random "real" image (let's saw a raw photograph of good old' nature, or a crisp illustrator-exported vector graphic), save it to highest quality JPEG, close the file, reopen the original, save it to highest quality WebM, close the file, and then open all three.

Create two new images, copy the origina image's layer to both, and then copy the jpg layer to one, and the webm layer to the other. Invert the colors on both layers, and set their opacity to 50%. We now have a difference result. Flatten Both images, job's a good'n.

So that's the first thing we really care about: can you see any artifacting? I've had to run this test many times, My puny human eyes can't. Not without first zooming in a lot, anyway. But let's assume that this isn't enough to convince you, because what should be {127,127,127} could be {126,128,129}, right? Maybe you care about that difference. You shouldn't, but maybe you do, so let's see how strong the difference really is.

Fire up fiter meister and write a small color ramper - For all three channels (R,B,G, neither WebM nor JPEG officially support A), set up a color ramper so that if the color is off from the 127 mark, it gets stronly boosted, say fifteen fold, with a cap at 0 and 255. Now you can see the difference in how JPEG and WebM do their magic - WebM actually uses much nicer spells, with less intense differences between the original and the lossy encoded image.

This really is a fantastic image format, and long overdue. The only tarnish on its reputation is that the world hates "new" formats. Thankfully, the company that wants to push it also happens to make one of the more popular browsers. And you can be sure that the code for enabling WebM in Chrome finds its way into webkit, followed by the Mac supporting WebM. Photoshop already supports it with the download of a single file, and suddenly its future looks nice and bright - Superior image format alternative for JPG that makes super tiny files? About bloody time.

Mine's the one with the WebM filter on a USB stick attached to my key ring.

I'll let interpol explain it themselves.

http://www.interpol.int/public/TechnologyCrime/default.asp

yeah, except an android firewall is worth mentioning

Unlike an iPhone, which isn't going to allow an app that interferes with the "intended use" of the device, an Android firewall shows that an Android user has more control, that there's some cool tech to write about (oh look, a tech website =), and that there's still anti-fanbois to troll. Go WhisperCore.

really?

Are you sure? Being "the man who got Sony to be secure about user data" would probably make one immotal/

show your enemy your defenses, so that his attempts at an attack are channeled

A classic move - reveal a problem with the tool they use means they'll first have to fix that problem, which means you'll know where the next problem will be.

you nailed it

"If you're having to do that, you don't know what you're doing"... so that's 90% of PC users then? The very people that use their phones for logging into facebook and their bank on open wifi connection at starbucks, and the very reason the last sentence in the article is so pertinent?

The turing test is not actually an intelligence test

The Turing test is only a test on whether or not a computer is able to carry a conversation that, to a human, is indistinguisable from a human conversation. It's not a measure for being a proper AI at all. This is most certainly an example of an excellent implementation of a specific type of A.I. (namely an AI algorithm that reduces an enormous search space to singleton solutions). It's just hard to see - right now - how portable it is for other applications

(yes, I have a degree in A.I.)

equivalence vs. identity

It's basic programming time: there's a difference between equivalence, and identity. The first means that two variables both transform to the same thing, the second means the two variables contain the same thing before transformation. And of course there is the one-way implication that identity(a,b) -> equality(a,b).

Some languages solve the difference between these two by mixing operators and functions, like using "==" and "equals()" (java), some languages solve it by not supporting equality out of the box (C/C++), some languages solve it by only using functions (functional programming languages, notably, like prolog and lisp) and some languages solve it using only operators, like PHP, where "==" is used for equality, and "===" for identity.

Why do you need it? Well, some languages only support one function return type in which case checking returns is simple. However, PHP is not one of these. Loose typing means you can stick whatever you like in a variable to get the job done, so it's important to have a way to differentiate between a function returning, say, a number or a failure indictaor like "false" or "null".

A conditional like if(functionvalue(...)!=false) {...} will fire when the function returns false, but also when it returns null or 0, because they are equivalent -- but not identical. For identity verification, to be able to see the difference between a legal function output and a failure (without an elaborate exception framework), if(functionvalue(...)!==false) {...} will make that distinction, only firing if the output isn't false. As long as the function retuns anything that isn't "false", and that means even things that are equivalent to "false", the conditional will be jumped over.

It's not the most elegant solution, but you don't use PHP because it's clean, you use it because it's quickly written and as dirty as C, minus the hell of memory allocation. Any dirt in the code left after you're done writing is dirt you put in there, and didn't bother cleaning up.

start from scratch?

They called it Chrome. Don't worry though, it's going down exactly the same path.

nice one

excellent troll!

in all seriousness though, the page as presented actually looks more like a phishing attempt than many phishing attempts I've seen. I'm not sure anyone getting this page would even read it, rather than immediately close the browser or tab.

Taking a step back

When I see a sentence like "but I now know soooo much more than I did before. It'd be a shame to not have had that experience in my opinion.", the subconscious self-justification alarm bells go off: it took me effort to learn how to do X, for which I needed to know about Y and Z, so people who want to do X should also learn Y and Z!

Or, to fill those things in: "it took me effort to learn how to drive, for which I needed to know how a transmission works, and how to work a clutch and shift gears, so people who want to learn how to drive should also learn those things". Progress passes these statements by. You want to learn to drive, you could also opt for buying a car with an automatic transmission, and never bother with a manual. Yeah, during the transitional period one was better than the other, but the idea behing progress, be it about cars or X'es, is that the only thing that counts is doing what needs to be done. The methods in which you get there changes.

Doing system administration used to require the effort to learn lots of different, often mutually inconsistent tools. Mastering them took even more effort. But the reason you learned to use them was not "to use them", it was to get something done.

So what if this metatool makes the need for the old effort go away? entirely? The tool devs keep maintaining them to do what they do, and the people who write the metatools keep making sure that their metatool talks to the tool correctly. Why would anyone not part of those two groups ever have to know how that interfacing works? Just because it's a hard thing to learn, and once you've learned it, you have something "more" in your experience toolkit, doesn't justify someone else going "yeah but.. that experience has become useless, because now, with this thing here, you don't need it ever again."

It's like the engineers of old who have learned how a flipflop works, and are then told that for practical purposes, people who actually need the functionality offered by flipflops have no intention at all in learning how they work. They just need to work. There is outrage, their knowledge is valuable, but it's also completely irrelevant.

Same thing here: you could be a sendmail god, or a httpd.conf black mage, professing how it took you years to learn everything there was to know, and how other people should try to learn half of what you have learned, but you've gone too far: I don't care about learning those individual tools, I just want to know that when I tell my tool-using-metatool to first filter mails and then land them in an inbox, that that's what it'll do. Not how sendmail does that, or how my tool tells sendmail to do it; only that it will work. The rest is not relevant to getting the job done.

Yes, if it fails, you might be stuck. "You see? you needed our help all along!". Actually, no, I really didn't. I only need help now. All those days and weeks of months when everything worked, I was able to invest my time in learning other things. Things that are hopefully going to still be valuable in ten or even twenty years. In the knowledge that just because it takes me a lot of effort to learn, someone else might breeze past me because they got a shiny new tool for the job.

Anywhere within 100 miles of the border, the 4th amendment does NOT apply. To ANYONE.

Unknown to many, the US constitution's fourth amendment (and in fact several other parts of it) does not apply ANYWHERE WITHIN 100 MILES OF THE BORDER.

The ACLU calls it the "constitution free" zone, http://www.aclu.org/national-security_technology-and-liberty/are-you-living-constitution-free-zone, but that's not a 100% accurate term. However, what it does mean is that you cannot argue the 4th amendment to any official anywhere within 100 miles from the border. Even if you've entered the country and drove a good hour into it at maximum speed, a stop and search is still perfectly legal regardless of whether you're a drug trafficker, a tourist, or a US citizen.

fine, bluray then

Then compare it to bluray. If you buy a season of your favourite show, you get to watch it as many times as you like. Will you? No, but you can lend it out and make a family member really happy, or give it away after a while. For that $22, you get to watch it. Once. Then you get to buy it again. Give the gift of consumerism?

memory what?

It's a desktop OS, who doesn't have 4GB of memory these days? The point of all that mem is that it's being used, not that it's just sitting there unused "just in case you want to run photoshop". The more it loads into RAM using memory mapped file, instead of doing disk I/O, the better.

uh... lab only?

What do you mean lab only? Had you head of quantum encryption in banking before today? Several of the world's major banks employ quantum crypto for sensitive transactions *right now*. There's good money in being able to supply entangled pairs for the crypto required, and showing that the security offered through them is only worth $50,000 means these institutions now have a problem they need to deal with immediately.