Viewing profile — jbri

It's in the field of copyright rather than patents, but the Righthaven suits suggest some form of precedent in this area. But that's kind of a sideshow - I believe the real issue b…

> again, maybe I'm getting old, but to see the pixels on my current screen I have to get my nose almost right up to the display, which I'm never going to do The point of going to h…

Of course, the reason that language was introduced into the standard was primarily to mitigate this sort of attack.

The author mentions that he only evaluated drives that have some form of power loss protection - doing some quick searching around, I couldn't find any Samsung drives in the given …

Given that these techniques seem to be well-known, it would be interesting to see a JPEG compressor which uses what we know of human vision to minimize filesize while keeping the i…

If you want to build new crypto, people would be absolutely happy for you to design and present a new cryptographic scheme - hopefully with some advantages over existing ones. Peop…

If people want to support the TrueCrypt developers, there's a "Donate" button on the TrueCrypt website. People have instead chosen to give money to an initiative to have a thorough…

On the other hand, if you allow outside communication (such as unrestricted access to the internet), you open the door for "I'll pay someone who already knows this stuff to phone i…

I'll confess I'm not intimately familiar with the details of this case, and I'm speaking in generalities. But still - it doesn't matter whether the charges are invented or not, or …

It shouldn't matter whether these specific charges are made-up or not. At this point they're unproven allegations, and it's up to a court to decide whether they're valid or not. It…

In theory? Quantum and thermal effects inside an unstable configuration of transistors. The simple example is a basic SR latch (two NOR gates, where the output of one gate feeds on…

> and early PS3 were reluctantly compatible with the PS2. And they did that by effectively putting a PS2 inside the case alongside everything else, ironically making backwards comp…

It seems unreasonable to claim that academia would reject the idea out of hand when no-one's even written a paper to attempt to submit to a peer-reviewed journal. If you showed me …

Reading your link, it appears that the author just flatly assumes that space is not expanding, and everything else stems from that assumption. The author provides another article t…

The primary reason people use monospace fonts is historical inertia. It's definitely worth trying out a proportional font if your environment is amenable to it (some tools don't co…

The optimal mechanism is to indent with tabs, and align with spaces (that is, you have the same number of preceding tabs as whatever you're trying to align with, and then use space…

I believe the big reason for the power-efficiency is that it's entirely clockless - the power consumption of an idle transistor is very low compared to one that's switching, and a …

Honestly it seems fairly obvious to me - "clocks changed" is kind of the first assumption you make when two time strings that appear very close together parse as far apart. After t…

The electric eel has lots of insulating fat just under the skin - so it wouldn't be too much outside the realms of plausibility for it to have higher electrical resistance than som…

No, that's not it. If you restart the simulation a few times, you should eventually get something where everything forms into one clump with low initial angular momentum. If you ke…

Something seems off about the simulation - once you get a big clump, it starts spinning faster and faster until it tears itself apart again. Ignoring that, it's pretty neat - and r…

That seems like a bit of a sideshow, considering they'd get exactly the same (combined) amount of money if they weren't living together. What makes it any different from a bunch of…

> those keyboards that result in vi/vim not being able to exploit control characters. Modern vim uses control characters just fine. Have you used it any time in the last decade? Be…

That seems like the wrong way to do it. The post sentence spacing was never really treated as two consecutive spaces - conceptually, it's a single area of whitespace that is larger…

There is indeed a massive advantage of a mouse over a keyboard-based interface - it's far, far more discoverable for novice or occasional users. In fact, I'd venture to say the mou…