Viewing profile — halfninety

For the sake of arguments, let's just assume Windows is perfectly secure. Then if child pornographers or ponzi scammers use direct, encrypted links instead of emails to exchange in…

Isn't any software with a goal of eliminating security holes essentially "specifically designed to disallow lawful intercepts of individuals"? Should all software providers be forc…

He says people will have less motivation to improve performance because they can afford losing the job, you disagree. Then you go on and say that people will have less pressure to …

I would argue that actively avoiding to mention a horrible event will cause it to be forgotten and wouldn't help prevent a similar event from happening again.

I feel sick when I see people taking analogies as equations, because I like doing analogies myself. Analogies are intentionally exaggerated (but still being logically valid) to mak…

You are talking about bias in the "article level". There could possibly be a "topic-level" bias in the article, that is, if one side is currently winning the edit war, and the auth…

You can have the best of both worlds, just backup your feature head before rebasing.

Search what people are likely to say when discussing this topic, it may be in the form of a question and maybe not.

We have unfortunately already occupied much of our neighbor's garden, should we destroy our farms and cities and return all these land to animals?

Try using promises, and a small utility function to convert library functions that take callbacks to ones that return a promise.

Democracy is a way to guarantee human rights in a developed or semi-developed country, it's not a way to develop your poor country. Installing democracy in a poor country is like i…

How do Apple get away with including iCloud in the OS without having companies like Dropbox up in arms? And they do call it "sync".

My opinion is the exact opposite. I don't think the 5C is an appealing middle tier, I believe it's a dumb middle tier, and maybe intentionally so, to make the premium offering stan…

Signing up wasn't so simple back in the days. I still remember when I wanted to see the full text of an answer, Quora asked me to sign up, so I went to the signup page, and it said…

I have been hating Quora all along for this, and wondered whether this constitutes cloaking (because they serve different content to Googlebot and the user), which is against Googl…

Wrt the "the E you use to calculate P/E should actually be the long term expected earnings" comment I made.. I was not trying to say that the standard financial metric called P/E r…

"The P/E ratio is, quite literally, the number of years required to pay back a stock's purchase price at constant dollars and earnings." Yes, this is what I mean. I'm no expert on …

I think it's quite easy to understand Apple's low P/E. Smartphones isn't like other industries, it changes quickly. The fact that Apple earns so much money now doesn't guarantee it…

Well, not necessarily. The guy who stole $6M worth of bitcoins with his pyramid scheme used 'Pirateat40' as his id. Geeks (include those here) tend to admire and trust those who ca…

Aside from other considerations, I'm afraid that abusing a good move (the $15 waiver) will discourage similar moves in the future.

I can't stand the mob, sometimes I feel that they are insulting my intelligence. But no revolution is possible without them. When intelligent people come together and try to make a…

Indeed. Public money should pay for the function of entities like JSTOR. The public already paid 99% of the money for public research, yet only 1% of them have access to the fruits…

Oh really? I thought universities and companies paid for JSTOR so that they could redistribute those academic works for profit. If not, why would they care if someone else gets acc…