lordlicorice

In high school I had to write a long apology essay in part because my computer teacher testified to the principal that the Windows command line is "a high-security area of the computer that students have no business accessing."

I tried to explain that she was wrong, but you can guess how well that went.

> Although each of these counts bordered on the preposterous, Ortiz and Heymann clearly reckoned that at least one or two would stick during the jury-room bargaining process. ... Prosecutors were also revealed to have offered a reduced sentence, but only if Swartz pleaded guilty to every charge

This is what really hit home for me. They weren't just filing court documents in a legal strategy to get a conviction. They were telling a man to his face that they expected him to plead guilty to patently insane trumped-up charges.

For me, external documentation is the absolute worst scenario. It takes me at least 4 times longer to read through and understand code without comments explaining in English what's going on. Here's a real-life example:

  // Toggle between Dropdown and Text
  if(_protected.fields[field].fieldType() === "Dropdown") {
  _protected.fields[field].set("fieldType", "Text");
    } else {
  _protected.fields[field].set("fieldType", "Dropdown");
  }

I think it would take me about 4 seconds to figure out that this code "toggles between Dropdown and Text" if the comment weren't there. Since the comment is there, I can just glance at the code and understand immediately what it does.

Unless the shared object file also includes an override for the function that expands environment variables to lie about the true value of LD_PRELOAD.

I think it has more to do with bureaucracy than with fear of litigation. In an ecosystem as complicated as medical care, lots of policies and procedures accumulate over time and there's nobody with the authority to cut through the bullshit and redesign the system.

I imagine that these policies come about not from lawyers' memos, but from the physicians themselves.

The screenshot at the bottom is one of the coolest things I've ever seen.

The "Dear Sir" and "Mr." built into the form letter on page 7 caught my eye. That's not something you see anymore.

The difference isn't just replacing {} with <>. Notice that the tag name is only specified once. The end tag is only an end } not a </tag>. This is more satisfying to programmers because the SGML style allows mixups like <a><b>text</a></b>.

`pass` is uncracked?

> Books need to be written, edited, typeset, 'printed' / 'put into ebook format', distributed, etc.

The author writes the book. Typesetting and "putting into ebook format" are a copy-and-paste affair, taking at most a day. Pirated books don't need to be printed or distributed.

There's nothing stopping people from uploading the files to bittorrent. It's only the hackers' anonymity that matters.

"What struck me most about the entry was Van Riesen's philosophical approach to the matter, which is remarkably prescient of the challenges we, as the human race, face with how to deal with the computer"

His opinion wasn't at all prescient. Computing gave unprecedented power to the people. It has absolutely never been a source of oppression.

Then again, maybe AI-based surveillance could eliminate crime without embarrassment from other people violating your privacy.

I typically take the classic step of choosing "What is my password?" as a custom security question.

> We calculated these times from the report's "Inventory Turn" metric, which estimates the number of times a company's inventory is sold in a given time period. Apple's number is 74, according to Gartner (or 76, according to Forbes). From there, it's a common practice to divide by 365 to "estimate the number of days [of] sales sitting in inventory."

Shouldn't it be 365 divided by the number of times per year they sell their average inventory?

They're going to have the reciprocal of the actual answer. Like, if it takes an entire year to sell off their inventory then their formula will give you 1 day turnover.