So now I'm a little internet famous 'cause of my advocacy in the #nymwars: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgyYu2RPH94

In other news, I've mostly moved over to G+ for blogging-type activity: https://profiles.google.com/saizai

I hope they fix the nymwars debacle pronto though, 'cause it really does sour me to have a service think my name and my friends' isn't WASPnymic enough to be "acceptable" to its "community standards". That's pretty insulting.

I do like G+ overall though, other than this one massive fuckup, and I'm actually in the final stages of a job application with them (tech committee approved me, waiting on execs). I think that for me and many others, the reason we're making a fuss about this is because we like the service and we have high expectations of Google overall to not be evil.

We wouldn't bother if we didn't like 'em; online, the way you really die is accompanied by a "meh". If people care enough to try to convince you to stop shooting yourself in the face, you've got a damn good thing going overall, and you should pay attention to your users.

Anyway, circle me over on G+ if you want to know what I'm up to.

EPIC.org just won their lawsuit against the TSA for instituting their irradiating strip search program as the primary screening mechanism in airports without first getting public comment.

tl;dr: You still have to submit to the "choice" of either getting the irradiation strip search or the groping. At some point TSA will ask you for your feedback and then blithely ignore it.

https://epic.org/2011/07/court-tsa-violated-federal-law.html
https://epic.org/press/Press_Release_EPIC_v_DHS_Ruling_071511.pdf
https://epic.org/privacy/body_scanners/EPIC_v_DHS_Decision_07_15_11.pdf

Having read the full opinion, here's my summary of the court's ruling:
1. TSA should have gotten "notice and comment", because the scanner program does constitute a "legislative ruling" that has substantial impact on the public
2. The program does not violate the 4th amendment, because it's an "administrative search" applied to everyone. * Nor does it violate the Privacy Act or Video Voyeurism Prevention Act.
3. The court decided not to decide whether it violates the Religious Freedom Restoration Act because of a technical problem of standing, so this may come up again.
4. The court won't stop the program; it's just going to tell the TSA they're being naughty and have to do that whole public comment thing real soon now please.

* By this logic, it seems the court would be just fine with actually requiring everyone going through security to be physically strip searched… would you?


I wonder how/if I should revise my TSA rights flyer… (http://bit.ly/tsarights — if you have suggestions for improvement please let me know.)

profiles.google.com/saizai (& in saizai.com sidebar)

Also: I'm interviewing w/ the Google+ team in a couple weeks. If you have good ideas for how to improve it, please let me know.

If you're a Bay Area friend and want to meet up sometime Jul 30 - Aug 5 ish, or can host me, please ping me privately.

I'm probably going to move most activity I'd otherwise post to YT or FB to G+, as well as some of what I'd post here.

I'd like to add a list to http://saizai.com/pubs.shtml - e.g. blog posts, major posts in online fora, etc.

I'll do some grepping myself of course, but if there's something you've seen from me that you thought was particularly good or memorable and isn't yet included on that page, please leave a comment w/ a link to it. I'm both biased and have a poor memory for things like this.

Thanks!

Finally, my ID matches the name I've used for the last decade!

I'm eating a quesadilla by cutting strips off the edge. Every time I cut a strip such that it is at the same angle A to the previous cut and has the same maximal strip width W (except perhaps the very last strip).

How many cuts does it take to eliminate the quesadilla?

What values of A & W give interesting results (e.g. cuts that don't intersect the previous cut, regular shapes, etc)?



PS [Iron Chef WTF]: Cheddar, pear, & "mexican style" fake ground beef on tomato tortilla. Yum.

("$\int_{E\cap X_2}$ haversto", says Alex. Ah, math-TeX geeks.)

How much would it cost to host a Facebook Wall / Twitter type service?

(extracted from some back-and-forth…)

Assume an average of 500M users/day, 1 post /user/day, 10 page reads /user/day, 20 posts visible per page, 150 friends/user, 10ms disk seek time per database read/write, 100MB/s disk throughput, and 100 bytes per post.

Include issues like how much you can cache; where the bottlenecks are; what's most likely to fall over and how to handle it; displaying less information than you have available (e.g. with content recommendation); etc.


Amusing sub-answer: 58 disks are required just to have the raw seek capacity, but this can be reduced by doing batched writes using a mutation log; and caching friends for the last 8h worth of users takes 12x more space than caching 8h worth of posts (~200GB vs 17GB).

Was a relatively hard question for me since it's been a while since I dealt with raw numbers on seek times, lookups, batching, etc.

… is an unconscionable term to include in a SLA.

One-sided "contracts" like this seem in general just exercises in writing a legal "fuck you" to the other party as much as (and often more than) allowed by law. So, fuck you back, Microsoft; I don't agree.

( Full copy of Microsoft Remote Desktop Connection Client for Mac 2 Software License TermsCollapse )

Matthew Martin has proposed the creation of a new Stack Exchange site for conlangs.

For those of you are unfamiliar with Stack Exchange, it's an extension of Stack Overflow to other topics. Basically it's a very enhanced Q&A site.

Cf. Math Overflow as an example of a successful Stack Exchange project; browse around to see how it's used.

If you want this to happen, you should
1. visit the proposal
2. log in / create an account
3. 'follow' the proposal
4. submit more example on and off topic questions
5. rate others' example questions as on/off topic and contribute your opinion to the site-definition etc discussions