jedp

Sweet, but it's always risky getting the first generation hardware. I'm holding out for the iPhone SE/30.

Indeed they do (and far better than most English-speakers speak any foreign language). My point was that this has been professionally translated from Greek into many languages, beginning with German on January 13 (paywall, sadly). So there is no point in criticising the English of the original Greek author or authors.

Don't forget that they actually speak German in Germany, not English.

It is a fantastic book. I'd also like to recommend Practical Electronics for Inventors by Paul Scherz and Simon Monk (http://www.amazon.com/Practical-Electronics-Inventors-Paul-S...).

I'm in the crowd that's getting into analog electronics and digital circuits backwards, as it were, by starting with programmable microcontrollers (Arduinos etc.) and moving outward from them on the circuit board. I found the latter book was particularly well suited for self-learning. It is also huge and, as far as I can tell, vastly comprehensive. The writing is clear and concise. Explanations of concepts often draw on analogy, classical electrical theory, and quantum physics alike. This multitude of approaches has helped me grasp the fundamentals more firmly than other books. It also keeps an eye on practical applications. Sections on, say, power rectifiers or op amps or timers or debouncing circuits or whatever all show you many variations on a theme, with discussion of what you would want to use in which situations.

Also, if I'm speaking to anyone else like me, software engineers who want to know hardware, buy all the books you can, but get an oscilloscope. I waited far too long for this purchase. I wouldn't write code without a debugger; this is the hardware equivalent. I recently got this little Rigol model: https://www.adafruit.com/products/681 . It costs the same as a few big electronics books, and it's the difference between stumbling around a room in the dark and having illumination everywhere.

Since our daughter was three, we have read aloud to each other every night. Like others in this thread, we don't have a TV. When she was younger, she would sometimes draw or play with Playmobil while we read, but still we would always read together. When she became old enough, we would pass the book around and each read a bit. She would typically read one or two pages, a "reading sacrifice," while one of us would finish the chapter. She is now 10. We still read to each other every night, and she herself has become a voracious reader as well as an enthusiastic writer, using google docs to collaborate with friends and share with family and teachers. She reads chapters of her favorite books or her own writing aloud to us. She has her own laptop computer (chromebook to dual-boot linux for Minecraft), which I think she uses responsibly. When she goes online to chat with friends or play on a Minecraft server, she tells us where she's going. Just as we'd want to know if she's visiting a friend's house, we want to know who she's spending time with online. Ditching the TV (who needs it?) and replacing it with family reading has been wonderful for all of us.

There are so many great books that are enjoyable for young and old alike. It will of course depend on your and your child's proclivities, but our favorites over the years have included: The Wizard of Oz books (all 12 volumes, some of which are quite dark, except Ozma's birthday; blech); The Ramayana (seriously); Winnie the Pooh; Stuart Little; Narnia; Hobbit; Sherlock Holmes; Agatha Christie (we read 60 of these together after she turned 7; her favorite is The Body in the Library); Hugo Cabret; The Golden Compass; Sea of Trolls; Treasure Island; Tripods; Wrinkle in Time; Earthsea Trilogy; LOTR; Rumpole of the Bailey; James Thurber; Lemony Snicket (esp. All the Wrong Questions). In addition, she has her own favorites that she's read alone to herself over the years.

She also reads many graphic novels, which have greatly influenced her own storytelling and art. She has loved Amulet, Flight, Delilah Dirk, In Real Life, The Silver Six, Ghostopolis, Bad Island, Zita the Space Girl, Drama, Sisters, Smile, Rapunzel's Revenge, Bone.

For reading aloud, I especially recommend Sherlock Holmes, Agatha Christie, and other crime/mystery books with 19th-century decorum. They expose the crime, puzzles, characters, and social dynamics, while leaving the explicit sex and violence off stage. (She can of course ask about anything she likes.)

I hope people will respond with their favorite out-loud reading books.

in vino veritas

The title is a bit hyperbolic. The article shows how the Van Allen belts constitute a "nearly impenetrable" barrier preventing "ultra-fast electrons" from approaching the earth.

The UCB Logo logo is adorable

For one optimistic moment there, I thought this was going to be about, you know, ethics. Like how Uber abuses its drivers, or how it demeans women, or how it threatens journalists. But no, "ethically challenged" means they don't break the rules successfully enough.

I'm reminded of http://xkcd.com/1232/

(Edit: Not intended to be snarky; I just think people do ask those questions all the time, and this xkcd answers it well.)

Or even, Where were you 40 minutes before we heard that Philae had landed?

Cue the smoke and evil laughter!

I believe GPS was designed such that the US had the ability disable it over arbitrary areas to prevent its use by hostile forces in a conflict.

Link to the actual project: http://allaregreen.us/

I clicked on this article thinking it was about Telecommunications Devices for the Deaf, wondering what the alternatives are now that installed payphones with TDD consoles are not to be seen anywhere. I must look into the smart- and feature-phone alternatives.

I'm dubious about the meaningfulness of broad terms like "Christian", "Muslim", etc., because of their coarse granularity. I'm not religious, but from what I observe, I don't think the "Christian" crowd of Catholics, Protestants, Mormons, and Unitarian Universalists would say they believe the Same Thing. I'm guessing that if you asked a C of E whether they were of the same religion as Jehovah's Witnesses, they'd probably look at you funny. Ditto for Shia and Sunni. Such distinctions have great social relevance everywhere. Consider Latin Americans: Catholic vs Evangelical (and that in itself is already a ludicrous simplification) has massive post-colonial, political, and social ramifications; to lump them all as "Christians" is to throw away so much information. It would also be interesting to see a break-down that included people who culturally identify with a "faith" but who are non-practicing (like so many of my Jewish friends).

Yes, all his code is available at the github repo linked at the end of the page [1], and .pde is a Processing file.

[1] https://github.com/blackencino/SimClass

Persona uses third-party cookies, so this is expected with this add-on. If you whitelist persona.org (e.g., just visit persona.org and set self-destruct to "never"), then Persona works fine.

JSONSelect lets you do queries on JSON objects using CSS-style selectors. There's an interactive demo here:

http://jsonselect.org/

The code is on github:

https://github.com/lloyd/JSONSelect

I think I just peed my pants.

Mozilla Identity dev here. The reason for that was due to a large degree to time and priorities. We were close to shipping Persona preffed off in Firefox over 18 months ago. Then FirefoxOS came along and our focus was changed to implementing Persona as the sign-in system on the device (which we did; it's natively supported there). FirefoxOS has been a massive effort on behalf of the whole company, and it has diverted crucial resources from the Persona effort on desktop. Then we shifted our focus again to Firefox Accounts and revising Sync. A native implementation of Firefox Accounts should be landing in FirefoxOS 1.4. As a result, we have native BrowserID support (both Persona and Firefox Accounts use this protocol) in FirefoxOS and as a backbone in desktop Firefox. There is a lot of persona in Firefox right now, but sadly you can't see it. Despite these massive efforts, we still have not been able to land the last patches to surface this in the UI on desktop.

And you're right, it appears to send the message that Mozilla did not see enough importance in federated, user-controlled identity on the web to make sure it landed in the desktop browser. But Mozilla, like all organizations, has to balance its priorities. There's a lot going on, and the decision was made that other projects would take priority. I hope the decision is revised in the future.

If it looked half-hearted, I can assure you it was not from lack of effort or dedication from the team. We believe in Persona and poured our hearts into it.

If your email is hacked/malicious, and that's where your password reset requests from twitter, facebook, HN etc. are sent, it doesn't matter whether you reuse passwords or not; the attacker has the power to change them.

I agree. As a parent of a kid interested in programming and math, I would only suggest replacing "for kids" with "for beginning learners." From what I've seen, kids over 7 and grown-ups are pretty much on even footing as beginning programmers. Additionally, "for kids" has a trivializing ring to it, like they're not full humans; my daughter does not like anything with a "for kids" label on it. (If only "Python for Kids" were not called that!)

Yes, though I want badly for them to be true, the photos do look to me at the very least manipulated and at worst very poorly composited. I haven't looked too closely at any of the images, and I don't even have my glasses on :) But my initial sense is that the powerful frontal speculars and weird foot contact in the first photo look totally bogus (beyond strong lens-axis flash bogus due to the feet); As he walks up the stairs from the subway, the illumination on his legs is the opposite of the lambertian falloff you might expect (furthermore, how can the sides of the stairwell illuminate his legs?), and the frontal diffuse light on him and speculars on the shield don't fit with the illumination of the railings to me; on Puerto Rico day, you would expect the strong speculars on his shield to register similarly on the glasses and jewelry of the woman next to him (and also, the diffuse light on both appears to be falling from slightly different directions); Jumping out of FDNY truck, illumination again seems reversed, and though the left-hand door has a shadow, he doesn't; Meditating in the park, possibly just really strong strobe. Maybe there's just some really janky flash work combined with over-zealous post-processing going on here, but I feel that most of them can't be real. Well, he does at least pop out in every shot!

That said, I'm not sure I care if the images are bogus. Faking the imagery would be a kind of metatheater that could somehow seem appropriate here. At the very least, we're all going to be scrutinizing the image of a turbaned Captain America, and debating the authenticity of the image, feeling that on some level, whatever the ostensible manipulations, the image is in fact real, and hoping that others will perceive it as such.

This is also why people should hire Ryan Seys when he's done with university. Oops - I didn't just say that! Hopefully he'll be coming back to Mozilla :)

(Identity team member here.) Yes, that's right. tincan is against running an ephemeral instance of Persona that doesn't do the account bridging, and doesn't share a database with the real persona.org. We do plan to integrate this with Persona. Also, while I think this is an awesome use case for Persona, and we do intend to land it in Firefox [1], it's worth noting that the proposed webrtc idp proxy architecture [2] is designed to work with any identity provider, not just Persona, and could be incorporated into any browser.

[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=878941 [2] https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-rtcweb-security-arch-...

Oh my god. This is the best thing ever. Thank you.

Sure thing. In addition to many of Mozilla's own sites, here are some examples:

- Times Crossword: http://crossword.thetimes.co.uk/

- Openphoto: http://current.openphoto.me/

- Voost: https://www.voo.st/

Our test application is this notepad application: http://123done.org/ (which you can clone from github)

Hi, John, you have some cool ideas there! Hope to see you hacking on Persona. As a member of the team, I just want to clarify that this is not an effort to make firefox alone more secure; it's an effort to make the web more secure. Any browser vendor can implement the protocol, natively or in a plugin, and we hope other browsers will. Same for identity providers. The spec and code are all open-source: https://github.com/mozilla/browserid So Mozilla's strategy remains the same: Put the users of the internet first. That's why we made this.

If you log out, that's the password you'll use to log in again. The login session is good for a while so you can continue to login with already-authenticated identities (and you can have as many as you want) on persona-enabled sites.