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sigmaxipi | 13 years ago | on: Newegg refuses to repair defective laptop because user installed Linux

Note that the NewEgg's refusal is based on the original OS being missing rather than a new OS being installed according to that email. My guess is that the user formatted the HD before installing Linux. Most OEM PCs now come with a recovery partition which is used to perform a factory reset. If the user erased this partition, then NewEgg would be unable to reset the device to its initial state for testing. It would be similar to the user returning the device by not returning important CDs.

sigmaxipi | 14 years ago | on: Mustafa's Space Drive: An Egyptian Student's Quantum Physics Invention

This appears to be another reactionless drive [1] that sci-fi authors and crackpots come up with every few years. There are many variants of these designs [2] and a drive based on the Casimir effect is just one of them. However, they all tend to violate a critical law of physics or depend on a custom theory of physics [3]

BTW, the original article at http://www.onislam.net/english/health-and-science/science/45... goes into slightly more detail about her invention and mentions that it's related to a differential sail.

[1] http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ReactionlessDrive [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakthrough_Propulsion_Physics... [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inertialess_drive

sigmaxipi | 14 years ago | on: Google Changes Tack on Android

Customers not on a contract and willing to avoid AT&T, Verizon and Sprint can avoid quite a bit of fees. E.g. T-mobile has a $30 plan for 100 minutes, 5GB of 3G (and EDGE after that), and unlimited SMSs. The 100 minutes is problematic, but I use Google Voice so I can just use my computer for phone calls at home. And at $0.10 per minute overages, it's still cheaper than any of the contract plans.

There are also other carriers in the US with cheap plans if you're willing to shop around.

sigmaxipi | 14 years ago | on: Men In Tech

>Women's life experiences are thus characterized by a constant and unending fear of sexual assault. >When you ask men the same question---to list what they do to protect themselves in their daily life... --> the answer is just about nothing.

Why is this fear a bad thing for women? Interesting fact: men are more likely to be victims of violent crime[1] and this has been pretty much true throughout history[2] though it is getting better. That fear is probably quite useful in keeping them alive since women are only half as likely to be victims of assaults by strangers[3]

[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20060926004448/http://www.ojp.usd...

[2] http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_on_the_myth_of_violen...

[3] http://web.archive.org/web/20060927115258/http://www.ojp.usd...

sigmaxipi | 14 years ago | on: This Is What Developing For Android Looks Like

Windows does a good job of abstracting the hardware away and preventing the OEMs from tweaking the APIs so this isn't an issue in most cases. The major exception is for the large game developers who have to buy tons of various configurations of GPUs and motherboards in order to test various configurations. Basic hardware accelerated graphics works well across platforms but AAA games use complex shaders and heavy optimizations which are based on the incomplete and broken implementations of GPU vendors.

sigmaxipi | 14 years ago | on: Carmack on why transatlantic ping is faster than pushing a pixel to the screen

>if you lived at the right point in time and weren't a slave You've just excluded the majority of Athenians[1]. If you generalize "slave" to "bottom Nth percentile of the population, the conditions are much better now than they were before. While someone low on the social pyramid in ancient Greece probably had no chance of contacting someone like Plato, many more people in modern times would be able to write a letter (or email, tweet, forum post, etc) to someone famous and actually receive a response.

[1] "According to the Ancient Greek historian Thucydides, the Athenian citizens at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War (5th century BC) numbered 40,000, making with their families a total of 140,000 people in all. The metics, i.e. those who did not have citizen rights and paid for the right to reside in Athens, numbered a further 70,000, whilst slaves were estimated at between 150,000 to 400,000.[7] Hence, approximately a tenth of the population were adult male citizens, eligible to meet and vote in the Assembly and be elected to office." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Athens#Geographical_...

sigmaxipi | 14 years ago | on: Fl0wer.png.html

In some cases, it's even worse. Low end netbooks running Chrome will load the page and then the entire machine locks up as the WebGL starts rendering and takes over the weak GPU. Easy way of DOSing someone is to send them a WebGL link if they're on a weak computer.

sigmaxipi | 14 years ago | on: Google co-founder Sergey Brin spotted wearing Project Glass prototype IRL

Augmented vision technology makes perfect sense for blind and vision impaired users. For example, the latest version of Google Goggles (http://www.google.com/mobile/goggles) performs image recognition on the live camera feed and speaks out the results as it recognizes items such as banknotes. Running the same software on a headset would allow the user to receive an aural interpretation of text or images around them.

sigmaxipi | 14 years ago | on: Why We Haven’t Met Any Aliens

Regarding #2, there is also the possibility that if a civilization converted its light cone into computronium, we would not notice. Maybe because they used exotic matter as a substrate and that matter did not strongly interact with the rest of the universe. Or maybe they figured out how to "escape" this universe by creating a computer that can perform and infinite amount of computation without affecting its surroundings. This idea is explored in Greg Egan's Permutation City where the main plot involves creating a new pocket universe for simulated beings with access to an infinite amount of computation but can be bootstrapped on a normal computer.

sigmaxipi | 14 years ago | on: Hey Google, thanks for making my daughter cry.

There is an interesting rule in COPPA that is the cause of this bad experience: http://www.ftc.gov/privacy/coppafaqs.shtm#teen

For sites that choose to age-screen, age information should be asked in a way that does not invite falsification. See Question 39, below. In addition, we recommend that sites that choose to age-screen employ temporary or permanent cookies to prevent children from back-buttoning to change their age in order to circumvent the parental consent requirement or obtain access to the site

...

However, as described in Question 38, above, should you choose to block children under 13, it is important that you design your age collection input screens in a manner that does not encourage children to provide a false age in order to gain access to your site. If you take reasonable measures to screen for age, then you are not responsible if a child misstates his or her age. For example:

...

Not encouraging children to falsify their age information, for example, by stating that visitors under 13 cannot participate on your website or should ask their parents before participating. In addition, a site that does not ask for neutral date of birth information but rather simply includes a check box stating “I am over 12 years old” would not be considered a neutral age-screening mechanism.

sigmaxipi | 14 years ago | on: Hey Google, thanks for making my daughter cry.

FYI, you can still log into a Chromebook with a Anonymous/Incognito/Guest account and use it as long as you don't care about persistence. Chromebooks are designed to be orthogonal to a Google account so changing the accounts that are attached to a given Chromebook is trivial.
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