Jutta Degener

"The team gained control of almost 76,000 hijacked machines and ran what they say was the first large-scale quantitative study of spam conversion...After 26 days, and almost 350 million e-mail messages, only 28 sales resulted — a conversion rate of well under 0.00001%. Of these, all but one were for male-enhancement products and the average purchase price was close to $100. Taken together, these conversions would have resulted in revenues of $2,731.88." - Jess Lee via Bookmarklet

I went to school with Stefan Savage, the guy credited with leading this project. I am *consistently* impressed with his work. Check out some of his previous work - for example, the TCP hacks are really cool. - Chris Prince

See section 4.5 for the ethics background. "... we strictly reduce harm. First, our instrumented proxy bots do not create any new harm. [..] Second, our proxies are passive actors and do not themselves engage in any behavior that is intrinsically objectionable; [....] Finally, where we do modify C&C messages in transit, these actions themselves strictly reduce harm." - Jutta Degener

(via http://www.reddit.com/r/progra...) - Philipp Lenssen

Pie menus are okay in very limited circumstances including highly repetitive tasks with expert operators and where the contents of the pie menus is consistent (otherwise the physical memory of the gesture is useless). - Kevin Fox

The changing number of items isn't an issue if their position stays the same, i.e. items become deactivated rather than vanishing completely. I think the aesthetic problems are outweighed by ease of use (-> Fitts) and the ability to mouse ahead. It would be nice to see research on item positioning that takes human wrist anatomy into account. - Jutta Degener

I particularly like the Metapic puzzles. I think. I don't know yet. Let me stare at it for a little while longer... - Jutta Degener via Bookmarklet

A zip file that contains itself - Nelson Minar

...and extra payload! I think my brain just melted. - Jutta Degener

Possible explanation, of sorts, from http://www.reddit.com/r/progra...: "It is a bit more complicated than that. The compressed data cannot reference anything outside it. Not in a way that is compatible between unzip programs at least. So, the first thing that is done in the compressed version of droste.zip is repeating the first half of the archive (everything up to droste.zip), followed by an instruction to repeat that. A similar trick will have to be performed for the data that follows droste.zip in the archive. The trick is of course to do all of that in such a way that it will work out. A few bytes will likely be parsed both as part of the ZIP headers and as part of the compressed data stream of droste.zip. As a final step, the CRC of droste.zip ends up somewhere in droste.zip itself because the ZIP file uses it to verify the data. That will require some tuning to get right." - ⓞnor

Oh, I see. (So that's how zip works!) Nifty. - Jutta Degener

I'm not going to bother asking where I am... - Jutta Degener

Okay, you are officially super elite. Do you have more pictures? - ⓞnor

For your next trick, you'll need to stow away on a car freighter. - ⓞnor

Jutta ftw - j1m

like netflix for magazines? - joshua schachter

Nothing like netflix for magazines! Just bulk subscriptions, that's it. No reuse, no returns with replacements. And, ick, lumped into one category with "Nature" and "Science" is ... "Spirituality". Yeah, because when I'm done with my copy of "Air & Space", what I tend to turn to next is "Angels on Earth bimonthly".... - Jutta Degener

Caffeine is a tiny program that puts an icon in the right side of your menu bar. Click it to prevent your Mac from automatically going to sleep, dimming the screen or starting screen savers. Click it again to go back. - joshua schachter

Awwwww. - Jutta Degener

Clue: these two photos are related. - torque

Whoa... good work folks. Indeed the pictures were taken from an airplane - a few minutes apart. Both these were stunning in real life -- principally because of scale. - torque

I'm guessing these were taken from a Cessna? - Gabe

the manly arts - joshua schachter

Certainly useful list for more than few people. - Daniel Schildt

For an engineering magazine in 2008, targeting these instructions at only males strikes me as surprisingly sexist. I don't read PM - is this its normal tone? - Jutta Degener

Reminds me of: "A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects. " - Robert A. Heinlein - Stuart Woodward

that's just plain weird. - MikeAmundsen

It doesn't help that the time periods in the two graphics aren't aligned, and cropped to suggest a periodicity that isn't there in the larger frame... The other thing is - 100$ intrade = 10$ US; so the trade volume is smaller and grainier than what y'all probably think it is, and, yes, very much subject to manipulation by the malicious or stupid. Still, valuing Dem win so much more than Obama win *is* weird; I figured overestimated likelyhood of catastrophic events, but don't really have a good explanation. - Jutta Degener

Hmm... http://www.cqpolitics.com/wmsp... - Jim Norris

They only used drawings, not photos or live models? - ⓞnor

The difference between the horizontal and vertical layout in the picture goes far beyond stripe direction (shading in horizontal, none in vertical) - random or systemic error? $@!# gullible journalists. - Jutta Degener

I think the main reason the vertical stripe drawing (in the article, not one of the above pics) looks thinner is because of the gradient effect that causes there to be a big white vertical stripe down the center of the drawing. - Jess Lee

rfid toys - joshua schachter

CueCat II ? - Jutta Degener

The appropriate way of consuming today's political speech is as a word smoothie. - Jutta Degener via Bookmarklet

Using driving directions for things other than driving seems to be a popular meme these days (cf xkcd) . - Jutta Degener

"Written and optimized from scratch by actual bears" - David Vasileff via Bookmarklet

Bored copywriter? - ⓞnor

More like bored CEO. Copywriters can spell better. Do we know anything about the actual tool? - Jutta Degener

I don't know, but proprietary APIs are no match for Kodiak's patented abstraction engine! - ⓞnor

"Summary - it's all right. Get the Churros. - Jutta Degener

Eric Urhane's Firefox plugin for vi-like textareas. I've been alpha-testing it on and off, and have come to greatly rely on it. - Jutta Degener via Bookmarklet

Seems like it really wants a block cursor. (Also, see the significantly more ridiculous and less useful "Vimperator": https://addons.mozilla.org/en-...) - ⓞnor

I've been trying this for a while but it screws me up that it doesn't take over every edit field ("rich edit" fields like gmail's are immune, for example, as are single-line edit areas), so my fingers never quite know what to press. Also, the status bar is distracting. I think I should stop trying to impose my old habits on modern computers, even if the old habits are awesome? - ⓞnor

Track I: CHUCK NORRIS. Track II: COMPLEXITY THEORY. Track III: LIES, DAMN LIES, AND APPLICATIONS. Track IV: GRATUITOUS INSULTS. ... - Jutta Degener

What would it take to make a system like this actually usable? - Jutta Degener via Bookmarklet

The structure seems about right, at least for the major featured debates. The individual points seem to have very little content associated with them, or maybe I'm unable to operate the interface. - ⓞnor

Thanks for the feedback. Happy to guide you through the details of the system as they are now and would welcome suggestions for further improvements. - David Price

"I wasn't really thinking there would be someone driving past with a video camera on the roof filming me either," - Rob Schonberger via Bookmarklet

Maybe it's the perspective, but that scene looks a lot like something out of The Sims. Did they publish an Intense Personal Pain extension pack? - Jutta Degener

Dan, compass pylon? IT's just interesting that this was snapped, right? Amazing to me how accuratily 'passed out' he looks. - Rob Schonberger

nice job with [dizzy's park slope] - ⓞnor

when I tried it, the first cuil result was the yelp review for dizzy's. It's not google's warm oil massage, but it's not as disastrous (anymore?) as the review claims, either. (Some cuil failure is due to system failure under load; let's treat that separately from internal best-case result quality.) - Jutta Degener

I like it. It reminds me of Gomoku: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G... - Adewale Oshineye

What will you be using the domain for? - Morton Fox

What ? and like cuil do you have a different pronounciation for it like amoku (pronounced :????) - Sidharth Dassani

"A complaint filed in federal court on June 13, 2008, accused Freshwater of inappropriately bringing his religion to school -- including by displaying posters with the Ten Commandments and Bible verses, branding crosses into the arms of his students with a high-voltage electrical device, and teaching creationism." Wait, what? - ⓞnor

One of these isn't quite like the others? Which one has the most lasting effect? - Larry Greenfield

wtf? - j1m

Details, pictures of the cross-shaped burns on page 9 of the report. - Jutta Degener

"The protest group has not only become a huge force on Obama's site--it is now double the size of any other user-created group and its traffic slowed the campaign's server last week--it has also swiftly asserted itself in the broader spying debate. Organizers have been covered and quoted repeatedly in the mainstream media, including a New York Times profile of founder Mike Stark" - j1m via Bookmarklet

On a side note - I read the NYT profile when it came out, and stumbled over the fact that Stark wasn't actually the founder of that group. He is cited as having "suggested to a group of liberal activists who share an e-mail list that they should organize a group [...]". The group was actually created by an unnamed "member of my.barackobama.com". Suggestions are cheap - I'm not sure why NYT made this a profile piece, rather than a policy piece. - Jutta Degener

i'm afraid that pressure is cheap enough - the other side which drove Obama into FISA shit is much thicker and applies pressure of different magnitude and quality - silpol

Where are past year's winners? - ⓞnor

2007: http://underhanded.xcott.com/?... ; 2006, 2005: http://www.brainhz.com/underha... - Jutta Degener

"I really like their tuna salad, except for one thing: about eight hours after eating it last time, I started throwing up, and pretty much kept at it for the next two days. This was about half a year…" - Jutta Degener

"I was hoping for a relaxed, quite dinner with simple food; instead, I spent an evening increasingly perplexed by the frazzled service that seemed to alternate between desperately soliciting our…" - Jutta Degener