ignifero

tl;dr ... haha not really. Google is on a roll. I both fear and love it.

But it's not like he joined the company last quarter. If the launch of g+ indicated anything, google is speeding up.

The implementation at browserid.org returns the email only. So there's no way to change the email without visiting all the sites you've registered in using browserid.

- No need to register your application with browserid.org

- No need to use an oauth library (just 1 GET request)

- Oauth provides access to user data on the provider, while browserID provides no data. Less anxiety for the users.

- No request_token/access_token pairs

- In the future, the user will (hopefully) be able to change his default browserid and as a developer you just don't care.

Do an online poll and ask people "Do you know your openID" vs "Do you know your email". Users are trained to use emails for login, and that's a significant investment already.

I believe you will definately rely on one (of many possible) 3rd parties.

OTOH, facebook id != identity, neither is twitter username. There will always be some id that you won't be able to change. But you are right that email is a bad choice, and i was surprised they give away the email address to developers. They should provide the browserid.org ID only.

They give you a token, you do a GET request to browserid.org with it and get the user's email, that's all. The user has to register their email with browserid.org first.

You can try it live at http://textchannels.com/ . I like it , it's pretty simple and neat. Easier than oauth login.

Isn't that what happens when someone compromises your email too?

This may sound embarassing, but i still get mass forwarded emails. I hope G+ will put an end to this.

This is actually a spatiotemporal cloak, not purely temporal. The probe is simply the laser (the green lines in the article picture).

I don't understand, since every single comment disagrees, why was this in the frontpage? Maybe because people like inspiring, loud words; they soothe, make you feel enlightened and accomplished without doing anything. I hate all this new age self-help enlightening crap telling people how to live their life, mostly because some of the world's greatest oppressors used the same methods in the past.

Not really, it's not a relativistic phenomenon.

no need for a box. You put a camera after the second lens, and, if "things happen" between the lenses, the camera will fail to record what happens while the cloak is on. Not because the light has moved around the events, but because it has been split in two parts, a fast-moving and a slow-moving, leaving a short gap in time in which neither the fast or slow parts can interact with the events.

probable application: Magicians can make their tricks completely undetectable using a cloak while they do them (assuming they can do them in sub-microsecond time).

Schrodinger and his cat have nothing to do with this.

There's a better article in the guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2011/jul/13/harry-pot... . They have an interesting intuitive description:

He used one set of lenses to prise open a gap in a beam of light, by slowing down long wavelengths, such as red, and speeding up short wavelengths, such as blue. With a second set of lenses, he then closed the gap, so at the end of the experiment, the light beam looked exactly as it did at the start.

I'm not sure that i understand it correctly, the "cloak" occurs because there is no light during the event as it has either moved on or is lagging behind. It's the recombination at the second lens that does the trick, giving a false sense of continuity to the observer after the lens.

Thank <insertnamehere> for XFCE.

But that situation is not anywhere near impossible. What's more, the patent system is there to serve a purpose, innovation, even (and especially) for the indie developers. Now, if that purpose is not served, which seems to be the case for software, it's time to lobby for governments to interfere, not to give up on independent entrepreneurship.

i assume from your comment you are a computer scientist. this does not hold for most of other sciences.

Facebook is an exception due to its huge scale, i was thinking of the medium size social apps space. Surely scaling problems are hard, but maybe not fundamentally new to the web? It would be interesting to hear some unconventional solutions employed in the facebook scale.

I sure hope they did not do it because of the reasons Munroe outlined in his post, which were baseless and sexist (towards men).

Also it has to be un-rippable, which i don't think is even possible.

Yes of course. But you can choose certain colors, not gray that look faded to the eye but are not in rgb values. In any case, captchas are always mediocre solutions.

And many more work with enabling people's social lives online. The truth of the matter is, while popular an useful, social apps are quite plain vanilla in terms of the science and technology behind them. The endorphic rewards one gets from creating social apps is derived mostly from popularity rather than some internal sense of achievement, beauty or genius.

But it works!

He was probably ill fit for a company that "values technology, not social science" - I love google for that. And i think changing careers is always rewarding. What's more interesting is his thoughts about how the "web is being fundamentally rebuilt around people". Personally, i would not like to see that happen. The value of the web for me comes exactly because it's the information that matters, not who said it and what others think of it. I also see the ubiquity of identity information to be a blocker for radically free thinking, a factor that has given great value to the content of the web till now. It's good to have social networks for those who want to use the internet as a communication medium, but i personally dislike the way social networks become omnipresent.

Ehm, a scam with good intentions? Come on, are you a Nigerian prince?

How can this be a "mistake"? They created something that looks like a captcha to fool the client into believing it's an actual captcha. If they did't know how to make a proper captcha it's better to tell the client so someone else does it.

i believe i wasn't being literal.