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patcheudor's comments

patcheudor | 7 years ago | on: Electric Scooter Company Uses Technology to Go After Dangerous Riders

It would have to apply to all vehicles because any new vehicle which enforced either would be unmarketable to a large number of people. Honestly, as much as I hate the idea, I do like the fact that the value of my non-nanny vehicles would likely increase if such a thing were to be mandated in new vehicles.

patcheudor | 7 years ago | on: Facebook Is Letting Job Advertisers Target Only Men

Blaming Facebook muddies the water a bit. Ultimately the companies advertising on Facebook broke the law when they checked the wrong boxes. Facebook should; however, make that information public knowledge by allowing the public to see the advertising parameters of any given ad if they are curious but to my knowledge, no law requires it. Maybe it's time to start having a conversation about the need advertising transparency.

patcheudor | 7 years ago | on: Keybase’s browser extension subverts its encryption

It cannot be said often enough: when you reference someone else's JavaScript in your solution in a way in which it has access to either the DOM or user interface components, it's no longer your solution. You therefore cannot, with any level of integrity claim that your solution is secure as you simply don't know what's happening in that bit of JS which is loaded by the solution into the user-space.

patcheudor | 7 years ago | on: Interactive Camera Simulator

I didn't see it mentioned, but it should be noted that the motion blur example would be based on a fixed camera on a tripod. You need to adjust the shutter speed based on the focal length of your lens using 1/focal length as your starting point and go faster from there. Shooting at 1/60 hand-held with a 50mm lens will provide pretty great results. Shooting 1/60 on a 300mm hand-held lens will result in a motion blurred photo from camera and lens movement, even with in-body motion stabilization. The slowest the shutter should be when shooting hand-held with a 300mm lens would be 1/320. It's surprising how many people don't know this and as a result think that shooting manual is far more difficult than it really is.

patcheudor | 7 years ago | on: Fear the reaper: characterization and fast detection of card skimmers

"The measurement card has a carefully etched set of traces in the magnetic stripe, (aligning with each of the three data tracks). When a read head contacts the card it bridges a pair of electrical traces and completes a circuit back to the microcontroller."

This seems to me to be a detective control which relies a bit too heavily on obscurity, obscurity which is now blown. Having knowledge of how this works, ATM skimming gangs who's devices might be found by local authorities with this device can now take the active counter-measure of placing a piece of Kapton tape over the read-head.

patcheudor | 7 years ago | on: Most Remote Spots in USA Wilderness Complexes

To be more complete "from roads, machines, and motors." I live in Idaho and know for a fact you can get further than 18.76 miles from a road. The addition of "machines and motors" brings motorized trails into scope and yeah, at that point I believe it.

patcheudor | 7 years ago | on: Whole House Fan and Evaporative Cooler

We have one whole house fan that cools 4700 sqft. During the day I turn on our mini-split in the theater and leave the door open. On the vast majority of 95F days the main HVAC doesn't come on at all. On days where it hits 100F, the main HVAC might kick on for an hour or so.

patcheudor | 7 years ago | on: Whole House Fan and Evaporative Cooler

While it could be problematic for a stove blowing out, it's slightly worse. If in your home, the most readily available airflow is through the exhaust vent of your gas water heater or HVAC unit and either are running it's possible for the whole house fan to pull the exhaust (carbon monoxide) into the house. This is why it's very important to consider where a whole house fan is placed as well as ensuring there's enough incoming air through an open window or vent. Ours will do this if we don't open a window. For an abundance of caution, I have a CO detector in the HVAC closet as well as one's elsewhere in the house.

patcheudor | 7 years ago | on: I've Paid $18,000 to a $24,000 Student Loan, and I Still Owe $24,000

Keep in mind, the 2008 financial crisis happened because a tipping-point number of people didn't understand how variable interest rates worked & after that crisis, we did exactly nothing in our public education system to explain how they worked. It's not like 2008 happened and everyone had an epiphany. The predatory loan practices simply continued in the student loan space.

patcheudor | 7 years ago | on: I've Paid $18,000 to a $24,000 Student Loan, and I Still Owe $24,000

>Why did she go to private university? There's no shortage of public universities with substantially better financial terms...

If my daughter would have had to take out student loans to go to public university, she would have likely been on the hook for around $30K a year factoring in room and board. With a part-time job, she may have been able to reduce that loan debt to $20K a year. At four years, that would have been between $120 to $80K in student debt, just to go to a public university.

patcheudor | 7 years ago | on: Bill Gates: I would short Bitcoin if I could

I was the architect for a major Microsoft partner adoption of The Microsoft Network (MSN) back in the early 90's. I'd just finished our companies BBS project a few years prior, followed by our FTP software service and WWW support services. I did the whole MSN thing, complete with a training camp in Redmond and attending their party on The Queen Mary where I met Bill Gates. The whole time it was very surreal because in contrast with my work on our web solutions, working on MSN was like taking very significant steps backwards. I even walked out of one of the trainings after they couldn't point me towards a way to automate content uploads to MSN. For all my work, I was then subpoenaed by Congress to provide my perspective on Microsoft locking out third-party browsers from Windows. Luckily the company lawyers took care of that one for me. I very much got the sense that a lot of Microsoft employee's knew the game was over, but they had too much momentum behind MSN to turn back.

patcheudor | 7 years ago | on: Electric Meter Saga (2017)

I had something very similar happen. Our power bill went up 30% in March of last year over what it was in February after the power company installed a smart meter. This was odd because March was so temperate that we didn't use our HVAC once and we have a gas water heater. I called the power company and we confirmed they were reading the right meter. Trying to evaluate it further went nowhere as they claimed that despite the increase, we were in-line with other homes of our size and suggested maybe our analog meter was wrong. After a few weeks of arguing with them, I ordered and installed a Sense. It absolutely doesn't track at all with what the power company is reading and I shared the differences including my own measurements with an ammeter on the 120 lead legs into my meter which match with what the Sense is reading but the power company won't investigate further. To mitigate the increase in electricity use, I decided to get into the cryptocurrency mining business and have gone from ~$200 to ~$600/month power bills, all of which are easily paid from the mining. Since I was lucky enough to start last year, all the hardware is paid as well (thanks December crypto currency market madness).

patcheudor | 7 years ago | on: Gravitation water vortex power plant

Not really the same at all. The gravitation water vortex power plant is designed in such a way that fish can easily go through in both directions because the turbine is in the upper, not lower portion of the vortex, leaving the drain clear for fish (and a certain extent, debris) to pass through. This is just a turbine installed in the drain. It's really not much different than a traditional hydro plant.

patcheudor | 8 years ago | on: The F-35 Is a $1.4T National Disaster (2017)

Depends on your perspective. If you are running a consumer grade drone over 2.4Ghz, okay. However, it's actually getting impossible to jam military drones because of technologies like direct sequence ultra-wideband (DS-UWB). Further, if directed by satellite, further measures can be taken to block ground based jamming using directional antennas. Finally: AI. We are already at the point where we have weapons that when they lose communications, have their own camera for target identification.

patcheudor | 8 years ago | on: The F-35 Is a $1.4T National Disaster (2017)

Let's say China builds a jet that is as good as the F-35. Given our ability to precision target planes with missiles delivered by drones, what's the point of the F-35? Putting a human in the cockpit of an aircraft for any form of warfare really doesn't feel like thinking about future wars to be honest.
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