Area12

YouTube keeps showing me ads for online casinos even though I have marked Gambling as a "don't show me this" category in my profile. There doesn't not appear to be any straight-forward way to report this to YouTube. Perhaps they find the complaints too inconvenient.

I'm old enough to remember that commercial. A true classic, that one.

It would be very interesting to see that map for the rest of the world.

Psycho-Pass. Finish season one, which tells a complete story. There was a drop in quality in season two. Psycho-Pass is about two layers of futuristic police, "inspectors" with full citizen rights, and "enforcers" who are treated as "latent criminals". A brain scan from the end of a cop's weapon, which takes a second to complete, may determine your fate. The lead female character is initially very keen and eager to be an inspector, but soon questions the system and society. It's fast-paced and a great show.

I'm a doctor, not a bricklayer!

Convenient for me? No, I either stand there forever or leave with semi-wet hands. Paper towels work much faster and more effective, but the decision is made by facilities.

Does being clever with your money include a retirement fund that is considered absolutely vanilla in the country you are living in? Because the USA assumes that all financial services in the world provide exactly the same format of financial reporting that US services do. So retirement funds that are the foreign equivalent of an ordinary 401K have high compliance costs if you need to file with the USA.

I've had a quick look at the paper you reference, but my immediate question is ... this was written around 2009. If the costs and likelihood of getting hacked or phished have increased significantly, some of the conclusions of the paper may now be misleading, at least in detail. Has anyone done an update in the last year?

I still like the paper for one good reason ... it challenges IT people to ask the question: what risk am I mitigating with this rule on the users, and is it worth everyone's effort that will go into it? If yes, see if you can impose the rule. If no ... just be sure you didn't get the numbers wrong.

So much of The Psychology of Computer Programming is still relevant, and still worth reading. The title might put you off ... but this is really a great book that covers some practical topics regarding the human side of programming.

Free books are never 100% free ... because bookcases cost money and even if you pile books up on the floor, that is expensive real estate you now can't easily use for another purpose. Hoarders forget that the opportunity cost of storage drives most of their possessions into negative net worth. Source: I have hoarder tendencies.

Given that there will be people insisting that the main objective of the program was nuclear power, not weapons, a show like that would be risky. Does Netflix want their shows accused of glorifying murder? I'm aware that there is the argument, perhaps with evidence, that Israel was halting weapons research aimed at them, but Netflix may not want to take the risk that the debate goes against them.

True story. Years ago, I was driving with my wife, and I was wearing an oilskin rain hat. I felt a tickle, took the hat off and looked. Dropped the hat on the floor. My wife asked what startled me. I said "let me stop first". Parked the car. She was very worried by now. Said "weta in the hat". She ejected out of her car door like 2001: Space Odyssey airlock scene. Good times.

Does anybody remember when a default install of Oracle RDBMS also installed ask.com? It was at that point that I realised that a significant part of Oracle Corporation no longer cared about how disreputable they appeared. I can't even imagine that they got all that much money from ask.com, on the scale of their total revenue.