psranga

Is 50% your ETR if you only look at INCOME taxes (federal and state)? If so, you're probably an extreme outlier.

Or are you including payroll "taxes" (social security, medicare), sales taxes etc also?

IIUC, if you add up health insurance premiums (employer share + employee share) + all income taxes + all payroll taxes of US and compare it to the same quantity of other DEVELOPED countries, the tax burden on the US is not unreasonably high.

Keeping a developed country developed is hard/expensive. :)

Why does it still cost money to file taxes anyway?

https://www.propublica.org/article/how-the-maker-of-turbotax...

I take this blog post as confirmation that:

1) ANY one message can be intercepted even if the sender exhibits ideal levels of alertness [Whatsapp server drops message to recipient; sends a rekey request with a fake key; message is intercepted since fake key was generated by server. Sender will see a warning if they turned on that setting (default is to show no warning), but it's too late].

2) Only Whatsapp has this vuln, not Signal app.

3) Depending on sloppiness of sender, more extensive interception is possible. [E.g., server not supplying delivery reports + sender doesn't have warning for key changes + sender sloppy about noticing lack of double check mark => full transcript can be generated]

Of course, of course, this is unlikely to be an NSA backdoor. But maybe .... </CK_LOUIS>

i dabbled in this api way back in the past so i may be wrong about its capabilities.

skype used to be EXCELLENT at working in most networks, including "locked down" corporate ones. Network admins used to find it notoriously difficult to "ban" on networks.

so relying on skype to exfiltrate info may serve two purposes:

1) use another program's capabilities instead of reinventing the wheel.

2) hide the fact that some random program is doing network access.

skype could be one of a range of data exfiltration mechanisms with different levels of obfuscation.

Looks fine to me. Ikea's site looks similar (to my eyes at least), btw. And nothing like the 90's whitehouse site.

There's a lot of niche sites that get the job done without following all the latest "trends". More power to them.

Function over form FTW.

Sorry, I don't know.

This function works surprisingly well in practice.

IIUC, it's a hash function defined over 3D space with tunable gradient between points.

The cool thing about the the marble vase example is that marble texture continues on the inside. So if you look on the inside of the vase the texture will still be there. automatically [http://cims.nyu.edu/~perlin/doc/vase.html]

Here's an example I made [lots of copy pasta btw :)] when learning this to get a wood texture [a simple application of Perlin noise, btw :)]. If you cut through the wood, the texture will still be there.

http://shaderfrog.com/app/view/828 [the dividing factors in line 236 tune the gradient]

Is it possible that mining activity could accidentally change the orbits of one of these asteroids enough to send it crashing into earth eventually (in a few decades)?

bottle.py + Postgres + Nginx on Ubuntu on a VPS is my go-to boring stack.

I recommend just using SQLite for the MVP. Launch then iterate.

What could possibly go wrong with securitizing interest streams? :)

This line bothered me more than it should :)

    typedef std::string String;

    using std::string;

Yes, I noticed the capitalization change. But why do you want to change the name of a fundamental type?

I hope (1) FM radio receivers come back, (2) and phones implement a way to grab the waveform and modify it before it hits the speakers.

I can imagine useful public-safety capabilities that could be enabled via data over FM radio.

FM radio is an insanely low-power, low-tech way to do medium-range one-to-many wireless communications.

Actually, I'm happy to see that this author didn't give into the temptation of making a "one ring that rules them all" abstract design.

OpenGL is a C API. This adds a decent C++ API around it. Seems to be a decent effort.

The way I see it is that it's helping with "wallet bloat". It's a gizmo the end consumer buys to convert a stack of cards into a single card. Everything else is icing on the cake that I don't really care about.

I would pay $15 for this device.

Previous news stories? Such as unauthorized access of Sarah Palin's email.

IMHO, this is shortsighted. Art is of almost zero practical use. Investing a tiny fraction of society's resources in art is a sign of a society that has evolved beyond the starvation stage.

Are you saying that all art should only be commissioned by rich private interests? No investment in art by the public? You would demolish the National Mall, Statue of Liberty and other such art works?

Or do you draw the line at hoity-toity works (as decided by whom?).

IMHO, it is super important that societies develop the "refined" sides of the brain to control our atavistic instincts.

The Indian (and other govts) asked for the server to be placed in their country because otherwise RIM will invoke the technicality that that don't have to honor Indian govt's snoop requests since the server isn't located within Indian jurisdiction.

Complying with foreign snoop requests for a server located in the US may (IANAL) make it possible for somebody to sue RIM in US courts for complying with a request that didn't come from US law enforcement. So RIM is highly unlikely to honor snoop requests for servers outside the country making the demand. Hence the demand to place servers within countries interested in snooping on their citizens.

Umm, RIM is providing to India exactly what they have to many other countries. So you are probably excluding a large part of the world from your list of places fit for you to live. The agreement covers "consumer Blackberry services". Presumably, corporate Blackberry emails are encrypted using a customer-generated key and hence RIM can't decrypt those.

FWIW, I am happy to see such snooping by governments. If this is what it takes for mass adoption of encryption, then so be it.

Your points about corruption in India are on the mark. I disagree that "few are willing ...". I see signs of change and renewal all the time. Change isn't fast enough though.

I think he meant the "psychological profile" data, not his email text.

Software services companies in India grow very fast since many are they're tapping into the offshore outsourcing (or offshoring) trends.

It appears that they've been able to sustain it for the past 20 years or so. I agree it's not sustainable indefinitely.

There are companies in India where people are coders longer than five years (I was at one).

My gut feeling (inferring from conversations) is that the vast majority of companies do not perform work of sufficient complexity to require more than three years of technical learning. The only way employees there can then add value to the organization is by becoming a manager.

I think your summary doesn't include the most interesting bit imho: the sign of the error is different (incompetent overestimate their competence, the competent underestimate).

Yes, I knew about the "probationary period" etc.

But the unqualified "no leverage" of the OP seemed to imply at least to me that they thought that the green card would be taken away in a divorce irrespective of number of years of marriage (it doesn't after two years unless you got into a fraudulent marriage).

And I do not think the GP suggested getting a sham marriage. Yes, if you really enter into a sham marriage then the "wife" will have lots of leverage over you.

Huh? I think you and the upmodders do not realize that once the spouse gets the marriage-based green card, it doesn't get revoked in a divorce. AFAIK and IANAL.

Unless there is some other point to this comment that is going WAY above my head.

Business is NOT an exam. You can't call out people for "copying". Where did Lifeblob get it's "photo sharing" idea from? Nah, can't be Flickr.

When a guy running for one office uses the power of his current office to smack down critics, then it gives off a bad smell.

Think about this: if the AG was somebody other than Candidate Corbett, would he have started this inquisition? Highly unlikely, imho.

Btw, Google already has a BlobStore API which is in beta. Maybe they're releasing it at the conf. If so, not big news. It's the exact same price as Amazon and has a clunkier API (IMHO).

Competition is sorely needed in this space. I hope Google undercuts Amazon pricing. IIRC, Amazon has maintained the 15c per GB-Month pricing for 4+ years. I would have expected them to pass along at least some of the price reductions of bare HDDs.

I'm hoping for something like the $5 for 20 gig they offer for photos. I'll keep dreaming. :)

Such as? I am honestly curious. (You will have to agree to exclude the entitlements of their children born in the US, who're are legal American citizens.)

I thought Git handled huge files poorly too. What I'd read was that most algos in git assume that the whole file in revision control can be held in memory at once to do things like diff.

Has this changed, or was I always mistaken, or this guy talking about the sum of file sizes being a few gig?

Ironic last line:

    "Now he spends most of his time drawing",

    "He hated it it ... he wanted to be an artist.
    Paying bribes went against his principles, he says".