Viewing profile — JohnStrange

In my experience from organizing conferences people who self-identify as vegetarians eat milk products and eggs, though sometimes reluctantly. Vegans don't.

It will make things way worse, since politicians from now on can and will plausibly deny any video evidence about them. Candidates will literally rewrite history instead of merely …

Interesting blog entry but I was a bit disappointed not to hear about Solomonoff induction, as it is often taken to determine quite rigidly what is in principle learnable by induct…

Insecure defaults are always bad. The other way round would be the right choice. Let users downgrade their security for performance, if they insist.

It contains all the information you need, loads immediately, etc. It's a perfect web page.

I'm changing my system soon and I can tell you that I'm very, very happy that most of my games are on Steam. I remember that manual installation from DVD used to take minutes to ho…

That's correct, and I should mention that Schadenfreude can sometimes even be used with a positive connotation, namely when a bad person suffers some misfortune due to his own wron…

What about microwave beams? Wasn't one of the theories that these could have been used for surveillance and caused brain damage with similar symptoms?

Gmail also drops sent mails occasionally for no apparent reason. They don't even bounce back, they simply disappear and never reach their destination.

Yandex is pretty good but I haven't found a use case for DDG yet. Whenever I set it for "privacy" reasons (not that I really believe them), I have to go back to Google to get reaso…

I believe Brexit is a loose-loose deal. It's bad for the UK because it causes a lot of complications without producing real benefits. Basically, the UK will loose lot of political …

I wish they would still make calculators as beautiful as that one instead of all the cheap plastic we get today. All the Casio FX-880P would need is a slightly faster processor and…

You mean those eternally scrolling pages whose main purpose is to hide content that belongs to the user in the first place? These sites are a pest.

I can speak for CommonLisp, scheme and Racket. Someone else will have to answer for Haskell. Generally, LISPs are extremely flexible, reasonably fast, compiled languages with macro…

Ahhhh ... it doesn't suffice to simply do your work without slacking, we need no less than the best and brightest for mostly boring office jobs in the government! Maybe some groups…

I agree that browser-based password managers and password managers on Android are insecure. These platforms have huge attack surfaces. I'm using ForgotIt? [1] because I'm its autho…

Some contemporary mathematical theories such as " Inter-universal Teichmüller theory "[1] are so complicated that only one or two dozen people in the world can understand them. Pro…

It's not just that, people spend way more time going through mathematical proofs, finding, and formulating them. If you give programmers time to muse about every function for weeks…

I can see the difference, but I think in reality these cases are way less clear and the lines are way more blurry. I also wasn't really discussing the legality of his actions, I wa…

People loose millions every year without consequences. It's only considered a crime under certain circumstances and if you don't fulfill the general expectations in terms of behavi…

Don't you have to run your own IMAP server for that to work? Although my mail provider is fairly generous about storage space, it's not unlimited.

Are you sure about your noncompliance status? IANAL, but aren't there treaties between the US and all EU countries that avoid any double taxation? You have to pay income tax wherev…

I'd like to see a return to semantic markup, accompanied by pragmatic information about the purpose of the data and its intended size. The data should also be strongly typed. Then …

No big surprise here. The US is a member of the UN, of course, and the US and the UK were the driving forces behind the inception of the UN, which was first conceived by the US Sta…

Bitcoin and other crypto coins are a neat idea until their underlying cryptographic primitives are broken. Then they will immediately loose all of their value. Every cryptosystem o…