meelash

Really? This got voted up to number 1 on the front page, and so many awesome real projects are buried without ever getting anywhere?

HN is really a joke now, I see. Haven't been around for a while. Sad.

Only if looking in the mirror does the same, I suppose :)

This article is claiming they've been trying to get rid of a worm for months? Why wouldn't they just format the computers and return to a previously backed up state?

Secondly, if the government needed information on how to solve the problem and didn't want to be detected, wouldn't they just send one or two of their top people to research it and then tell everyone else? How does large traffic from a certain country imply that the government is trying to find out how to defeat the worm?

Very strange article. Almost surreal.

The leaked letter is at the end of the article. The article is nothing exciting, but I found the letter an excellent and relevant read.

I've been thinking about this consequence of government ineptness for a while now. The problem is that politicians think (rightly) that they have gamed the feedback loop that is public opinion successfully. What they haven't recognized is that there is a much more serious and devastating long-term feedback loop, that will not just remove the politicians but thrash the whole country. The global brain drain that benefitted the US following WWII was not accidental or inherently one-way.

The only thing we're not seeing (or at least I'm not) is any country advertising themselves and sticking their neck out as a refuge. If there was, you could see the drain start swirling pretty quickly.

Respectfully, I don't think you've given the issue enough consideration. You're saying that if they didn't search the pilots, someone would fake as a pilot to get through security? Then what would he do? Stand awkwardly with the rest of the crew thinking up a story to explain why there are two pilots (or three, or whatever) on this particular flight? I would hope that a fake pilot would be fairly easily and quickly detected by the other pilots (who do know each other personally, after all).

Exactly. At least in Pakistan, a huge part of this problem is the insane emphasis of teaching everything in English, even though the people do not really understand English.

Imagine going through 10-12 years of schooling in Spanish, where instead of making an effort to teach you to conversate in Spanish, you just memorize the words in the book with little emphasis on what they mean?

Crazy!! It's like no-child-left-behind times 100.

I've never had this happen to me if I recall. Do the people who have a problem with this not keep their hand in "typing position"? It seems really difficult to me, with my left hand in position (which can be assured with the F dot) to hit W with my pinky or Q with my ring finger.

I have an honest question to ask, since the number of comments hasn't exploded here, I hope some thoughtful people can see it and answer. Please don't attack me for anything I may be implicitly saying; this is honestly something I'm confused about regarding the culture in which this event took place, and from which I am an outsider.

A number of people have taken great pains to emphasize that the behavior of the lady involved was not justification for an unwanted advance and that men should all understand this. Now I understand 100% that if she clearly and explicitly rejected his kiss advance, it was obviously wrong to go further (all of this is theoretical/alleged but ignore that for a moment).

Let's consider just the kissing portion and nothing beyond that.

Now, isn't sitting on people's laps and flirting exactly inviting this kind of advance? I mean isn't that exactly the point of those behaviors? To excite the passion of people it's being done to and who are watching?

It's very strange for people to vehemently deny this. It's like if I was a biologist of another race observing human kind, what would I identify through observation as the beginning steps in the mating ritual? So why is an impression being given that that kind of behavior is "having fun" and has nothing to do with sex, and trying to attract the opposite sex?

Again, let me state- I don't drink, I don't go to parties like this, I've never been to a bar or a club or a girl's hotel room. So please don't assume I know the answer and I'm trying to imply the answer through these questions. I really just don't understand how you can hold this idealistic view of mankind that a member of one sex should enflame the passion of the opposite sex, through activities and clothing with deliberate, intentional sexual overtones and then expect people to overcome their natural, biological response to that kind of show.

Comments, please?

Man, I wish those punks would do something like that in my neighborhood. 5 or 6 guys should get together with some nice, big sticks and go patrol the streets. Let some kid throw an egg at them and then go beat the crap out of him (meaning hit him once or twice in a non-vulnerable part of the body until he cries but not cause any actual physical harm). It will only take one kid, one year. Problem solved forever.

Self defense.

I was thinking the believe it or not was on account of who invented the Yahoo store?

hmmm.. yeah, I didn't think of the repeat letter advantage. In english, at least, that does seem likely to be a significant advantage.

(a) I'm afraid you missed my point. I purposely stayed away from all matters of interpretation, and only replied to factually incorrect statements. None of the counter-arguments I presented were matters in which interpretation could be done, they were all factually incorrect statements, on whose basis that video was making interpretations. Now if the basis of an interpretation is a bunch of factually incorrect statements, then what need is there to argue further on the validity of the interpretation of those statements? It is meaningless.

(b) Now addressing interpretation, you cannot legitimately interpret the Qur'aan either the way that video words it, nor "to be peaceful". Rather, as appropriate to its claim of being a complete life-guide, it will necessarily contain the laws, morals, and motivations of both war and peace.

(c) "Religious books aren't perfectly unambiguous"-- have you done an exhaustive survey of all "religious books" to be able to make such a bold, broad statement? It seems likely you're relying on very limited information regarding a few religious books and abstracting, without any possible justification, to all religious books. This seems likely to be more based on personal dogma than rational thought.

If this is properly optimized, it should require much less finger movement than handwriting. And it can easily get even casual users to higher accuracies than even full size keyboards- the recognition is much more accurate because of the four quadrant, set, layout.

This is measurable- the minimum diameter of a circle passing through the four quadrants is the maximum distance the thumb can ever have to travel. Allowing for some safe radius from the central dot, you would end up with a shorter travelled distance for many letters, even in the worst case. Add to that the fact that qwerty is not optimized at all for the positioning of the thumb- so G is a farther distance away than Q for example- and we're talking major benefits.

I don't understand how it could be more tiring than tapping with the thumb? Unless your touchpad is rough or requires too much force.

Many of us make similar motions all day long on game thumb-joysticks.

It's hard for me to say intuitively regarding speed and the Swype, but I can see that Swype would probably increase accuracy by some statistically significant amount.

This device, based on my intuition, would probably offer significant increases in wpm, and definitely increase accuracy significantly.

It's not a question of being genuinely happy or not- if something better comes along, than obviously it should be adopted.

It doesn't really offer advantages on a computer that it does on a small device. Full size keyboards already allow no-look, potentially 100% accuracy typing, with multiple fingers at once. That spanks this system even worse than this system spanks mobile phone keypads.

Not just a bit, but a lot, IMO! Some people are comparing this to the dvorak vs. qwerty keyboard layouts.

A more apt comparison is to a keyboard laid out in alphabetical order vs. a qwerty keyboard. The adoption of qwerty keypads on touch screens is 100% based on familiarity and no ergonomic consideration in letter positions at all.

We're talking potentially major improvements in speed, assuming they have the science of letter positioning correct.

(Please let them have it correct, or we'll have the same dvorak vs qwerty nonsense all over again. Learn from history, people ;))

Compare relatively low error rates to zero error rate.

And no matter how good you get, no one (very few people?) can use Swype accurately without looking.

And intuitively speaking, it seems to me that if they've truly got some science behind the placement of the letters, it could be very, very easy for motor memory to catch on to this.

Wow, this is genius!

I don't understand why people are comparing it to Swype- just because both involving swiping instead of taps? In spite of this superficial similarity, don't you see they're solving radically different problems?

This system eliminates inaccuracy and allows true no look typing! Think about what that means for a moment.

Apple execs, if you're reading this, please license this technology and iphone it.

1. Okay, but this is not relevant to the story in question (see point 4).

2. Okay, but this is not relevant to the story in question (see point 4).

3. Okay, but this is not relevant to the story in question. (see point 4)

4. I'm willing to cede this and the previous 3 with regard to the parent. The question then becomes, do you believe in religious freedom enough to take the risk, or would you rather remove this threat and lose the religious freedom? The hypocrisy of subverting the constitution in order to protect the constitution is untenable. If you are truly concerned about this, it seems you should be explicitly campaigning for an amendment to the constitution to more strictly define the "acceptable" religions. If you're too ashamed to explicitly get behind that, it shouldn't be hidden by unwritten policies of arbitrary harassment of certain religions.

5. I'm embarrassed someone on Hacker News would except that video as "legitimate interpretation". The fundamental factual errors about the Qur'an and Islam would be comical if it wasn't juxtaposed by the sadness of meeting someone that actually believed that without independent research. (Nearly?) every factual statement made to support the opinions presented is factually incorrect:

(a) "The Qur'an is not full of symbolism or vague analogies-- implicitly stating that the New/Old Testament are "full" of symbolism and vague analogies and not meant to be taken literally- a self-serving, unsupportable implication.

(b) It is mostly direct commands-- false, by far, by any interpretation of "mostly"

(c) The Qur'an contains contradictory statements-- he seems to be confused about abrogated verses- actually, any statements of early Islam that were abrogated later were removed from the Qur'aan before its final compilation as a book.

(d) The Qur'an ITSELF provides a way to know what to with the "contradictions"-- ??? this simply does not exist

(e) "It's explained in the Qur'aan.... "-- Again, this does not exist. It's simply a bald-faced fabrication.

(f) The peaceful tolerant passages were "written" earlier in Muhammad's career-- again, false. The earlier passages did not deal with either peace or war, they dealt mostly with self-rectification. The later verses, after the establishment of a monolithic Islamic community with communal dealings with the outside world, added to that verses with guidance regarding both peace and war.

(g) "those passages have been abrogated..."-- see point c- if that were so, they would have been removed entirely during compilation

(h) "There is no picking and choosing" -- finally an accurate statement

That brings me to 2:54, and I'm too bored to continue answering nonsense that any 10 year old Muslim sunday schooler could have responded to.

6. See 5.

7. See 6 and 4.

Yeah, I just pulled a http://xkcd.com/386/ But you know what, it was cathartic after reading some of the embarrassing comments on this piece. I just picked the most ridiculous one and went to town.

How does this work? Do you have multiple US passports? Or passports from multiple countries? Doesn't the US care and couldn't you get in trouble for having passports from other countries and not disclosing them?

Yeah, turns out the cost is also more than an order of magnitude- an aircraft carrier is somewhere in the high single digit billions of dollars, where as your jumbo jet is in the hundreds of millions....

That's catchy, but kind of a non-starter for people who area actually worried about their privacy.....

It would be like PETA protesting by eating live animals or something.

How far out to sea does one have to be for the TSA to not have jurisdiction? Has anyone thought of an airline that ferrys passengers out to a ship off the coast and the airplanes take off from there?

How much does an aircraft carrier cost? It seems this would be extremely expensive, but then, airplanes themselves are extremely expensive so it kind of comes with the territory. But I wonder if we're talking orders of magnitude higher costs.

Not sure how crazy of an idea this is; it came to mind and I figured I'd throw it out there. :)

hmm... There were signs at JFK and also at SFO that prohibited cameras last time I traveled internationally (about a year ago). Where is this quote from?

Ah yes, I learned to do this as well with certain professors. I always found the ME professors were impressed after the first lecture and could tell I was paying attention. But with some others, it was a different story.

The best way to take notes is to not do it during the class. Pay full attention only to the teacher/speaker during the class/lecture and make a conscious attempt to remember everything they said. Immediately following, get together with 3-5 like-minded friends and attempt to as a group write the entire lecture from start to finish from memory. If no one can remember something, skip it.

It takes a few weeks/months to develop your focus, attention span, and memory enough to be able to get near 100% short-term retention, but you start to see benefits almost immediately. And the long-term benefits to your memory and focus can't be understated.

Also, it's really interesting how many other people are expressing that they never took notes in college. I was famous for it in my college (my advisor wrote a paragraph about it in grad school recommendations), whereas I always thought it was common sense, seeing other people who spent the whole class scribbling, but didn't really understand a bit of what was actually taught.

Maybe it doesn't count because it doesn't fold closed? :p

That's the one that runs for a day or something on just AA batteries, isn't it?