Yardlink

It's still two factors. If someone has only your phone but not your password, they still can't log in. The problem here is that the phone number was also used as a password recovery option, which effectively means you only need the phone to log in. I suspect most gmail users with 2FA are doing this, which defeats the purpose of 2FA. It just becomes "different factor".

It's the password recovery by phone that's the weakness. But I think people getting locked out of their own account is probably a bigger problem for Google than people getting hacked, so they err on the side of saving your from getting locked out.

To those who don't like the use of this law, I think this is OK. Here's why: You live in a democracy where the popular opinion decides who's in power. You agree that's a good idea because you aren't moving to an authoritarian or libertarian country or voting to change the system. The popular opinion allowed this law, so you should accept that it's the right one according to the system. Of course there will always be a minority which doesn't like each law, and you happen to be a member of that minority in this case.

If it does become a bigger problem that affects the majority, they'll eventually decide to vote it out. Until then, it's nothing to worry about. This is the self-stabilizing effect of democracy. There can be small problems, but not big Syria-scale problems.

It's just part of the cost of sharing your country with people who think differently from you. If you really strongly believe the law is being used for "bad" purposes, the bad people are the voters who first allowed it, and after seeing it happen, continued to re-elect the same politicians that passed this law. Those are the people you should be complaining about - the two wolves voting on what's for dinner.

You might say those majority voters are ignorant and it's not their fault. No, they are taking action which you believe is wrong, so they are doing something wrong. If they aren't competent to decide who to vote for, they're being negligent by doing it recklessly.

PS I live in an authoritarian country where imagining the police have some restrictions on their power is only a fantasy. Your police at least do still have some restrictions, and they always will as long as you have a democracy.

Pedophile behavior in online communities doesn't harm anyone, and doesn't need professional help any more than homosexual behavior needs professional help. It's the illegal production of the product that causes the harm.

Blaming the customers is what we do with pedophiles. It seems to work even though it's immoral.

I wonder if these suspended states they talk about later in the article would actually extend your life for the duration of the suspended state. I presume the aging processes also slow down or stop. Perhaps this is a more realistic option for near-death people wanting to come back to life in the future than cryogenics.

Users don't fix bugs in open source software. For evidence, look at OpenOffice and LibreOffice, both riddled with some horrifying bugs that have been repeatedly documented for years. There's even a guy complaining about one well-known bug in a TED talk. Yet somehow none of their millions of users have fixed them.

These two programs are a prime example of how open source is just as inaccessible as closed source. It's simply too difficult to learn a large complex codebase. People have their own jobs to get on with.

It struck me as odd that they avoided floating point numbers because of impreciseness, then used some other type of number without evaluating how precise it was. They're certainly not using typical integers with values like 10^9000. I wouldn't be surprised if those numbers are internally divided by 10^n and stored in doubles anyway - bringing them back to the same problem they're trying to avoid.

"the determinant of bigMatrix is, approximately, 1.95124219131987·10^9762."

Approximately? How many significant digits in the exact answer? If Mathematica promises arbitrary precision, even to 10,000 digits, they have a case. If not, it shouldn't be any surprise.

As for getting different results on each run, I've seen this with iterative algorithms that use random starting values. For numerically unstable problems, that can lead to different results each time because it converges to rounding error.

That doesn't mean Mathematica is wrong any more than getting wrong results from doubles means its wrong. It just means it's poorly designed so the user doesn't know about this limitation.

Great news. I guess efficiency is following a similar rapid growth to power.

He makes some dubious efficiency claims. It's true the colored LEDs have always been pretty efficient, but that's no use lighting your home. White LEDs have surpassed incandescent bulbs but still have a way to go to reach flourescent tubes and the grand-daddy of efficiency - gas discharge lamps.

One (the?) reason for low power levels is they generate so much heat and are difficult to cool. LEDs are still primarily heaters - useful in the winter.

I think expert witnesses serve that purpose. There have been complicated technical details in jury trials before the internet and this seems to be an adequate way to solve the problem.

It is a China-bashing lens. The article also complains about:

"the location of a person’s “hukou,” or residency permit"

Employers in every country do this and we don't call it "just wrong" (though it is). They use the more international form of a hukou known as a passport.

Western companies also have hiring discrimination based on social abilities and who your friends are, even when it's of only minor relevance to the job. A person's personality is considered worth discriminating against (even for jobs working alone) but that isn't automatically more acceptable than physical characteristics.

There's an obvious bias here. The piece ends with "localisation may keep small languages alive". Isn't that adding to the problem? We don't try to keep small programming languages alive (except a few diehards). Many small languages are the problem itself. They're not something to aim for.

I should add that I'm not complaining about making phones more accessible to more people. That's absolutely great. But why try to go further and use it as an excuse to drag out languages that the world would be better off without?

Is there are reason this language exists? They're solving a problem that's been solved many times over for at least 2 decades in the form of managed languages.