joshaidan

Joined 15 years ago

Karma
655
Submissions
230
Member since
Apr 5
I am a computer programmer and I've read Pride and Prejudice. I work in the telecommunications industry and program iPhone and Rails apps.
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Recent submissions

Comment · 8 years ago
While reflecting on this--and ethical issues aside--it did occur to me that there's probably a lot more data you could collect from the audio gathered in the rainforest, i.e. what animals are active in what areas of the rainforest and what times, weather data such as intensity of rain or wind, volume of animal activity in a particular area of the rainforest, etc.
Comment · 8 years ago
Have the creators of this project considered the privacy implications of capturing, recording, or analyzing audio from the rainforest? What happens if people are walking near a microphone and a conversation is picked up by the microphones?

I realize that the audio is probably analyzed for the sound of chainsaws, and then thrown away, but there's still the potential that such a system could be misused. So just wondering what people think about the ethical issues related to this technology.

Comment · 8 years ago
> There are many fraudulent USB sticks in circulation that report to have a high capacity (ex: 8GB) but are really only capable of storing a much smaller amount (ex: 1GB)... Internet searches such as "fake capacity usb" will turn up lots of disturbing information about this problem.

This caught my attention. Never heard of this problem before, but doesn't at all surprise me.

Comment · 9 years ago
Stop blaming my feelings on other people. Always take ownership of how you feel; I'm responsible for my feelings.

For example, if I feel lonely because my friends didn't invite me to the party, don't blame them. Loneliness is my feeling, so I should do something about it. i.e. Go out and do something that I like, invite some other friends over, whatever... If I don't take any action, blaming other people for my feelings won't change how I feel.

Comment · 9 years ago
Bilingualism in Canada is very common among French-English languages, and depending on what part of the country you live in, your exposure to both languages can be fairly even.

My favourite bilingual situations is seeing a child "complain/whine" to their grandparent in English while the grandparent tries to soothe the child in French. Both understanding each other perfectly.

Something that blew me away once was this one kid at church who spoke with a British accent--I believe he lived in Whales before moving to Canada. A week later I heard this same child speak with a perfect Québécois accent. I later found out his mom was from Montreal.

Comment · 9 years ago
It's like having a BBS in my web browser.

This does bring back a lot of memories of sitting in front of a 486 trying to get Commander Keen to load.

Comment · 9 years ago
To me, obtaining bitcoin (or whatever crypto-currency) has been one of the most challenging aspects of using the currency. It's too hard to obtain. Mining these days isn't that feasible, but even if I could mine bitcoin, I probably wouldn't be able to do it at a rate to fund whatever venture I wanted to pursue. The only alternative is to purchase a crypto-currency with another real world currency, which to me seems to defeat the purpose of not having to depend on central banks or real world currency.

If there was a way for crypto-currencies to handle credit, I think that would greatly increase it's likelihood of replacing real world currencies and central banks--going mainstream. The money we use nowadays is transferable credit and central banks can produce enough to meet the demands of the economy. Crypto-currencies on the other hand are more like gold: there's a limited supply that doesn't meet the needs or demands of the economy.

Comment · 9 years ago
> The purpose of the app is to teach others about low fee index fund investing.

How does the app accomplish this goal?

Comment · 9 years ago
I was enrolled in the French Immersion program. At my school, we had both English and French programs. One of my memories of being in French Immersion, which is likely of relevance to this article, is that I remember in the 7th and 8th grade one of my teachers (who was also the vice-principal) was concerned about the segregation between the students in the French program and the students in the English program. i.e. During recess the students French program wouldn't play with the students in the English program, vice versa. We may have had a name for students in the English program--but I can't remember it now.

The segregation in the older years wasn't as strong as younger years, but it still existed.

Comment · 9 years ago
I find this story pretty fascinating. First, it's interesting how a broad attack, such as putting malware into software used by a large number of people, suddenly becomes a targeted attack: the attackers grab SSH keys and start cloning git repositories. I'm assuming that there was a significant number of victims in this attack. Were they targeting developers? Or did they just happen to comb through all this data and find what looked to be source code / git repositories.

The other thing I find interesting is this comment:

> We’re working on the assumption that there’s no point in paying — the attacker has no reason to keep their end of the bargain.

If you really want to be successful in exploiting people through cyber attacks, I guess you will need some kind of system to provide guaranteed contracts, i.e. proof that if a victim pays the ransom, then the other end of the bargain will be held.

It might seem that there's some incentive for ransom holders to hold up their end of the bargain for the majority of cases if they want their attacks to be profitable.

Comment · 9 years ago
Comment · 9 years ago
When I read the part about "Order your air taxi to the nearby landing pad," I immediately thought of the old Commodore 64 game SpaceTaxi.

`Pad 1 please` :)

Comment · 9 years ago
I encountered "process as proxy" today dealing with Cisco. We were requesting a replacement for a defective part, they asked us for our serial number, which we provided, but then responded to us that our serial number was invalid. Likely because it wasn't registered. We were told that we had to contact our sales manager, or open a TAC with a different department because they department only deals with technical issues.

Could they not have done something to help us, maybe forwarding the ticket to the department that could register the serial number, to help us rather than just leaving us stranded? It's as though they want to follow process rather than helping the customer.

Comment · 9 years ago

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