Posts by ratfox

43 members in the team?? Drone races are more complex than I thought.

Good move

This is one of the case where the open source version is on par with, and possibly superior to commercial products.

... Moderated comments? This seems like a benign and uncontroversial subject, though.

So what are the requirements?

I suppose you need to be natural-born American, have a security clearance, and have worked for the government for ten years?

Embarrassing for Amazon, but…

I understand it's not at all rare for large corporations to have an embarrassingly complex reimbursement system, which are not at all optimized because you optimize very hard things for users, and you don't care about optimizing paying money to suppliers.

I remember a story about a similar company in which for anything over a couple of hundreds of dollars, a supplier needed to first get introduced into the payment database which was maintained by a third-party contractor in Poland, which meant that first-time suppliers needed to wait months until they saw a dime.

If I remember correctly, there was a story on this very web site about Google being sued by a supplier over a ridiculous amount of money, because after months of waiting, they still saw nothing coming, and that was the only way they could see of speeding things up.

Sounds reasonable, but sampling is everything

I assume that all the amateurs and hobbyists who are coding an app or two for fun are mostly coding it for Android, since they are more likely to have an Android in the first place. On the other hand, people who develop anything for Windows are more likely to be professionals who fully intend to make real money out of it.

You would probably get similar results comparing say Python vs. Cobol developers. People who code in Python are dime-a-dozen and go from professional to high-schoolers, but nobody codes in Cobol unless they have somebody paying them good money for it.

So went the horses and carts

Innovation regularly makes whole industries redundant. That's a fact of life.

People in those industries can have trouble adapting. We may be able to help some of them.

For all the rest: This is why we need a good social security system.

The one mistake we should not commit is to refrain from innovating in order to protect existing industries.

This is wishful thinking

or it is possible to read the data off the flash chips and attack it in a VM until the password is brute-forced.

I don't see how it could be possible to stop this from happening. If a system exists that allows to enter a 4-digit code and decrypt the device, then surely, it is possible to reconstruct that system so that it does not erase the memory after N attempts.

The only way I can see to prevent this from happening is to protect the device not with a 4-digit PIN, but with a decryption key that is so long that trying all solutions would take centuries. But I frankly doubt anybody would want to type something that long every time they want to check their email.

MNO is Mobile Network Operator

In case somebody was wondering.

Something that Google could have done is offering links to multiple services. They actually do that when you look up stock quotes like https://www.google.com/search?q=amzn; you get a box showing the data, but if you want more detail, you need to click on one of the small links below, choosing between Google Finance, Yahoo Finance and MSN Money.

It's interesting that they do that for stock market data but not for maps. I'd be curious to know why. Maybe it's because Yahoo Finance has more users than Google Finance, while Google Maps was probably #1 by an overwhelming margin for a long time.

Can't believe I'm the first to quote...

https://xkcd.com/723/

Does that include doxing?

I'm not clear on what the decision of the UN panel was taken? Considering that nobody is forcing him to stay there… Having breached his bail, it seems pretty normal that he would be arrested if caught, without even mentioning the Sweden thing.

One way or another, I doubt the UK cares about that UN ruling…