alan | 1 year ago | on: A QR code that sends you to a different destination – lenticular and adversarial
Static a/b testing?
alan's comments
alan | 1 year ago | on: How do I pay the publisher of a web page?
7 years ago I tried to start a project to allow customers to pay through the ad networks. IE rather than seeing ads, you'd see something saying how much you were providing to the web page owner. I've so far been unable to actually build it though.
alan | 3 years ago | on: The 90s were objectively the best time to be alive
Yes, and when I bought CDs back in the 90s I didn't really expect to be listening to them 25 years later. My tastes change over time.
On the other hand I'm a little confused what you mean by the format going away in 5 years. The format is sufficiently open that anyone can write a player for it (in theory). Unless I lose all copies of the files, there shouldn't be any reason it won't continue to exist as long as I like listening to it.
alan | 3 years ago | on: The 90s were objectively the best time to be alive
I buy .m4a files from Apple and download them, then copy them from my laptop to my Android Phone. At this point they're so disconnected from the Apple infrastructure, I don't see any way they could pull it out from under me.
alan | 5 years ago | on: Programming Language Creator or Serial Killer?
Based on the title I thought this was about people who created and killed programming languages. I was sorely disappointed.
alan | 5 years ago | on: Opaque: Passwords Never Leave Your Device
I think the server would be able to encrypt with the user's public key, that way they wouldn't be able to read it. They'd have to send the encrypted data to the client to be decrypted with the private key there
alan | 5 years ago | on: Duff's device
Duff's device does not do memcpy. It's writing all the elements of a string to the same location in memory, where there's a port.
alan | 6 years ago | on: Flood of Oil Is Coming, Complicating Efforts to Fight Global Warming
I never figured out why the cobalt has to come from the Congo. There are cobalt mines in North America that are sitting idle. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobalt,_Ontario
alan | 7 years ago | on: The Third Phase of Clean Energy Will Be Most Disruptive Yet
I'm suddenly imagining a hydrogen balloon-plane at take off that uses up the hydrogen in the balloon as it flies, until the balloon has been fully reeled back into the plane and it lands on a runway like a normal plane, with reserve hydrogen in its wing-tanks.
alan | 7 years ago | on: 'Impossible' EmDrive Space Thruster May Really Be Impossible
Hmm, could we use interactions with the Earth's magnetic field for thrust when in LEO? With the Sun's magnetic field? It would be slow going.
alan | 8 years ago | on: Planets evenly spaced on log scale
We might be able to start using this as a way to specify planets, rather than the arbitrary number-by-discovery. Try StarName(with catalog info)#log(approximate radius of orbit)
Earth would we Sol#0 Kepler-90#-1.3, Kepler-90#-1.1, out to Kepler-90#0 for the outermost one on his graph.
That way, finding a new planet doesn't require either renumbering to specify where the planet is relative to the star. (BTW, I'm not real happy about using AU as the base measurement. It might be better to use Megameters since you're less likely to end up with negative log)
alan | 9 years ago | on: Why Is the TSA Scanning Paper?
The World is Not Enough is the movie you're thinking of. From 1999, if you want to call that recent; going back 18 of the 55 years of Bond movies.
alan | 11 years ago | on: Nearables: Why a global lost-and-found network is finally viable
For that matter, the app could just record every time it "sees" an object and when you mark it lost, it tells you where it was the last time (GPS coordinates and all) it "saw" it.
alan | 12 years ago | on: The kilo is losing weight, changing all of science
Could the fact that the other kilogram weights are being moved around maybe affect their weight?
Like they're more exposed to chemical disturbance? Some form of tiny relativistic effect?
alan | 12 years ago | on: Pushed to the limit as a banking intern
Sounds like an industry ripe for disruption then....
alan | 12 years ago | on: OSI: The Internet That Wasn’t
> I'm not sure the author realizes TCP is a virtual circuit protocol (then again I'm sure OSI had one or more much heavier weight ones).
You've missed that they're referring to level 2 and 3 virtual circuits, IE "data is always delivered along the same network path, i.e. through the same nodes" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_circuits#Layer_2.2F3_v... )
alan | 12 years ago | on: Does a child die of hunger every 10 seconds?
My take away is that it's a child dies of poor nutritional education of the parents
alan | 12 years ago | on: Falsehoods programmers believe about addresses
Some websites now will include a hidden input field in all forms
<input type="hidden" name="snowman" value-"☃" />
to convince IE that it's supposed to be sending UTF-8, not latin1 (And so the site can recognize if the input was likely mangled.
alan | 13 years ago | on: New closure allows camping mattress to be inflated in seconds
I'm more interested in this "one-way valve" they're talking about. While they seem to talk mostly about blowing, the valve seems to be the actual invention.
alan | 13 years ago | on: Taping of Farm Cruelty Is Becoming the Crime
> This is the case in every country. Those at the top will take an inordinate amount of time to make rules that benefit themselves and their friends.
It's actually a bit simpler than that. Any set of rules will allow certain segments to rise to the top. Once there, they have great interest in keeping the rules in their favour, but they don't have to take all that much time making the rules favour them in the first place.
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