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bumblebeard | 6 years ago | on: FAA Bans Recalled Apple Laptops from Flights

I left a water bottle in my bag at SJC once. The TSA agent pulled me aside after I went through the scanner and pointed to it on the X-Ray to ask me what it was. I said something like "oh, oops, looks like I forgot my water bottle in there" and she asked me to take it out of the bag. She took a quick look at it and then just let me on the plane without making me dump it out or even opening the bottle.

I guess that means they at least looked at the X-Ray; it seems like a lot of the time they don't even bother to do that.

bumblebeard | 8 years ago | on: Ask a Female Engineer: Thoughts on the Google Memo

Sex, sexual orientation, and gender are different things. By gender spectrum she means that most people's behavior is somewhere along a continuum between completely masculine and completely feminine and that virtually nobody is at one extreme or the other.

I think the point she's making is that while men and women have different interests as groups, there are plenty of women who are interested in what are perceived as masculine things (in this case probably computer programming) and vice versa.

bumblebeard | 8 years ago | on: Being Thankful for Free Software Developers

Hybrid graphics likely depends on a proprietary driver to work so that's probably where the problem lies. As for the RAM, you might just need to expand your swap partition so its the same size in order for hibernation to work.

And really, this has nothing to do with free software; there are even more horror stories like this about Windows and macOS and those are both proprietary systems.

bumblebeard | 8 years ago | on: What libraries lost when they threw out the card catalog

Where are you that your local library is like this?

I've been to a few public libraries in my state and none of them have been like this. Most of them aren't very busy but they're always clean and usually have a decent selection of books and media. My local library is especially good; they have an entire floor devoted to children's books and I often see families in there picking out books together.

bumblebeard | 8 years ago | on: Horcrux: A Password Manager for Paranoids

Not OP but I do some of these things with KeePass as well.

For autofill, KeeFox works well for me on Firefox - there's probably something similar for Chrome. I think KeePass will do autotype if you right-click on an entry but it's not a feature that I really use so I'm not sure.

I store my password DB in my home folder and use syncthing to synchronize it to my other computers and my phone.

I don't know about iOS but I use KeePassDroid on Android and it works pretty well.

bumblebeard | 8 years ago | on: US Senate bill on “any digital exchanger or tumbler of digital currency”

Most utilitarians turn out not to actually think that way in real-life situations so I wouldn't worry about it. Moral realism is tied to religion for a lot of people and so some non-religious folks just reject it out of hand, which I think is a mistake.

IMO, moral truth exists as much as scientific truth we just interact with/discover it differently. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is a good place to start if the topic interests you:

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-realism/

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-anti-realism/

bumblebeard | 8 years ago | on: Hackers Are Hijacking Phone Numbers and Breaking into Email, Bank Accounts

Some kind of cryptographic challenge-response system might be a good solution but I don't know how to get your average computer user and customer support rep to use a system like that. All the ones I can think of are designed for computers to talk to each other so they aren't very user friendly. Is there something like Kerberos but for humans?

bumblebeard | 8 years ago | on: The Most Hated Online Advertising Techniques

I haven't tried Brave but that sounds like a good development. I still don't really like being advertised to but if it's relevant or at least easy to ignore then I don't mind either. I guess that puts me at about a 4 on their scale.

bumblebeard | 8 years ago | on: The Most Hated Online Advertising Techniques

They mention this at one point; 4 is neutral on their scale so an average of 5.23 just means that people have a mild to moderate dislike of advertising in general. I don't know anybody who likes advertising (well, one person but they work for a marketing firm) so that makes sense to me.

It would be interesting if they could remove that bias though - it would make the differences more obvious if nothing else.

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