Viewing profile — fjorder

I've hated iTunes for over a decade now, and that's not just because it's horrible, bloated software with a terrible interface. Almost any other method of buying an album will send…

It is a nice shortcut, but I think they added it mostly because they belatedly realized how much metro sucks for accessing settings from the desktop.

If you're a keyboard and mouse user working primarily in the desktop, it is very jarring to jump into the full-screen metro interface every single time you want to do something sta…

Here's an interesting line of reasoning: Had Adria posted the photo of the two men and made her claims about their conversation anonymously, would they have been taken as seriously…

Interesting article. Allow me to add a few fun details... Early agriculturalists actually had it much rougher than this article implies for a real kicker of a reason: Wild plants s…

Contrary to the claims of the extremetech article, they have not closed all loopholes in this experiment. Specifically, the detection loophole has not been closed. This loophole is…

They test a CHSH Bell inequality in this paper. This rules out local hidden variable theories. Non-local hidden variable (NLHV) theories are another matter entirely. Indeed, some N…

Hollywood is famous for playing so fast and loose with tax-loopholes that I just can't trust any of the numbers quoted. Practically every Hollywood blockbuster loses money on paper…

That article is not good. Biased reporting based on a biased study. Yes, all writing is biased, but sometimes evidence suggests it's worse than usual, and this is one of those case…

Let me rephrase the question in way that is probably more likely to be thought about by a second-term president: "Given that you obviously feel you can kill foreign citizens in the…

I sincerely hope Google keeps the cap where it is. That just might motivate copyright holders to reduce the number of erroneous take-down notices they issue.

It's a way to point out how wasteful spending on the TSA has become. People lack intuition for numbers on the scale we are talking about. Does $8.71 billion seem huge compared to $…

The TSA's budget is just a tad short of half that of NASA's. Cutting back on the little-old-lady-molesting budget and giving the cash to space-explorers seems like a no-brainer to …

Re: Pricing Fairness The article claims that if the Cable industry offered pricing based on what is fair, it would offer very cheap plans for little old ladies who barely use their…

Others have said it, and they're right. Skeuomorphism has become dated and Apple is now playing catch-up with Android and Windows. Apple has been playing catch-up with Android in t…

It bothers me when people say that science conflicts with religion. It certainly conflicts with specific religious dogmas, such as young-earth creationism, but the frontiers of sci…

It is being used in commercial systems (e.g. idquantique). Practical implementations are prone to vulnerabilities, but none have been found that cannot be remedied. Some techniques…

I think it was Margaret Atwood who described civilization as the intelligent trading of "freedoms to" for "freedoms from". For example, you can trade the right for everyone, regard…

The last I checked the MTBF on SSD's was substantially longer than for hard-drives. Barring firmware bugs you should probably strike that off your list of reasons for not using a S…

The author of this article seems to be very concerned about something, but I'm not entirely sure I understood. He implies that, under Obamacare, doctors will be compelled to provid…

The truth probably lies somewhere in between what the flaming fanboy and Mr.Disgruntled are saying. Apple seems to make the most money when they open up a new market and lock out t…

As Neil Young put it, "Piracy is the new radio". A pirate torrent site providing promotion for artists at the artists' request is not something new. Private music torrent trackers …

I was rather encouraged by the headline, only to discover that instead of ripping out unnecessary security theater they're actually just wasting more money on new machines. Man do …

This article critiques the theatricality of MS's release process quite thoroughly and concludes that it is not the same as Apple's. This is true, but nobody should give a crap. Wha…

Myhrvold is thinking about printer "piracy" in exactly the same way that RIAA thinks about music "piracy", and we all know how productive that's been! Placing artificial legal limi…