It's still two factors. If someone has only your phone but not your password, they still can't log in. The problem here is that the phone number was also used as a password recovery option, which effectively means you only need the phone to log in. I suspect most gmail users with 2FA are doing this, which defeats the purpose of 2FA. It just becomes "different factor".
It's the password recovery by phone that's the weakness. But I think people getting locked out of their own account is probably a bigger problem for Google than people getting hacked, so they err on the side of saving your from getting locked out.
To those who don't like the use of this law, I think this is OK. Here's why: You live in a democracy where the popular opinion decides who's in power. You agree that's a good idea because you aren't moving to an authoritarian or libertarian country or voting to change the system. The popular opinion allowed this law, so you should accept that it's the right one according to the system. Of course there will always be a minority which doesn't like each law, and you happen to be a member of that minority in this case.
If it does become a bigger problem that affects the majority, they'll eventually decide to vote it out. Until then, it's nothing to worry about. This is the self-stabilizing effect of democracy. There can be small problems, but not big Syria-scale problems.
It's just part of the cost of sharing your country with people who think differently from you. If you really strongly believe the law is being used for "bad" purposes, the bad people are the voters who first allowed it, and after seeing it happen, continued to re-elect the same politicians that passed this law. Those are the people you should be complaining about - the two wolves voting on what's for dinner.
You might say those majority voters are ignorant and it's not their fault. No, they are taking action which you believe is wrong, so they are doing something wrong. If they aren't competent to decide who to vote for, they're being negligent by doing it recklessly.
PS I live in an authoritarian country where imagining the police have some restrictions on their power is only a fantasy. Your police at least do still have some restrictions, and they always will as long as you have a democracy.
> You live in a democracy where the popular opinion decides who's in power....The popular opinion allowed this law, so you should accept that it's the right one according to the system.
No. This is a Republic. Our elected representatives built and instituted this law in a power grab while the country was reeling from a terror attack.
> Of course there will always be a minority which doesn't like each law, and you happen to be a member of that minority in this case.
See the ^.
> If it does become a bigger problem that affects the majority, they'll eventually decide to vote it out. Until then, it's nothing to worry about. This is the self-stabilizing effect of democracy.
No, this is how democracies drift into authoritarianism.
I could go on, but it seems you're getting awfully relativistic, legally and ethically speaking.
>To those who don't like the use of this law, I think this is OK. Here's why: You live in a democracy where the popular opinion decides who's in power.
Nope: a bunch of marginal (and mostly rural) constituencies "decide" who's "in power" (which is not actual power but rather arbitrating positions between lobbies, anyway). Everybody else is just an extra.
Is that working? I thought we had successfully driven pedophiles away from professional help and into online communities where their behavior is encouraged.
Pedophile behavior in online communities doesn't harm anyone, and doesn't need professional help any more than homosexual behavior needs professional help. It's the illegal production of the product that causes the harm.
I wonder if these suspended states they talk about later in the article would actually extend your life for the duration of the suspended state. I presume the aging processes also slow down or stop. Perhaps this is a more realistic option for near-death people wanting to come back to life in the future than cryogenics.
Users don't fix bugs in open source software. For evidence, look at OpenOffice and LibreOffice, both riddled with some horrifying bugs that have been repeatedly documented for years. There's even a guy complaining about one well-known bug in a TED talk. Yet somehow none of their millions of users have fixed them.
These two programs are a prime example of how open source is just as inaccessible as closed source. It's simply too difficult to learn a large complex codebase. People have their own jobs to get on with.
"Users don't fix bugs in open source software."
The serious research-mathematics users of Sage often do fix bugs in Sage, and contribute fixes back. This is one reason a typical Sage release has well over 100 contributors, and we have had overall about 500 contributors to Sage (see http://trac.sagemath.org/). There's a huge difference in programming skills between typical research mathematics Sage users and OpenOffice users, because all such Sage users are programmers, and the language they use to interact with Sage is the language it is mostly written in. Yes, Sage has subcomponents in other languages, but an enormous amount -- maybe the majority by now -- of Sage is in Python and Cython. Also, successful mathematicians are extremely intense and dogged in pursuing something they get passionate about. Often they will devote a decade or more to attacking a problem, so spending a few days learning Cython (say) and debugging code is relatively little time in comparison to the overall time they devote to a problem. Anyway, I'm glad that when I started Sage I didn't believe the statement "Users don't fix bugs in open source software" applies universally. I didn't know either way, so I waited to see, and was genuinely surprised at how false that statement actually is in the case of Sage.
Yeah, LibreOffice has a few issues, but they don't punch me in the face daily like I surprisingly found MS Word does recently. After 14 years of using soffice -> OpenOffice -> LibreOffice simply out of not wanting to keep a windows box/VM, my recent 1 week experience with Word opened my eyes to just how glitchy the other side of the fence still is. An undo stack that doesn't. Image placement that constantly explodes like it's 1997. Press print and my citations/references decide they'll include neighbouring paragraphs instead of just referenced header text. And just try placing two images next to each other without making tables first... This is a trivial operation in libre office. I was also amazed to find that libre office far more readily provides consistent editing experience of various objects across the suite: paste an excel sheet into word? Nope, that'll make crappy exploding word tables. Paste drawing from Visio? Might as well be a JPEG now, because you can't edit that from the word doc. I also really missed the anchor icon that OO/LO provides to indicate where exactly in the text flow you're positioning an object. Sorry for the rant...
It struck me as odd that they avoided floating point numbers because of impreciseness, then used some other type of number without evaluating how precise it was. They're certainly not using typical integers with values like 10^9000. I wouldn't be surprised if those numbers are internally divided by 10^n and stored in doubles anyway - bringing them back to the same problem they're trying to avoid.
"the determinant of bigMatrix is, approximately, 1.95124219131987·10^9762."
Approximately? How many significant digits in the exact answer? If Mathematica promises arbitrary precision, even to 10,000 digits, they have a case. If not, it shouldn't be any surprise.
As for getting different results on each run, I've seen this with iterative algorithms that use random starting values. For numerically unstable problems, that can lead to different results each time because it converges to rounding error.
That doesn't mean Mathematica is wrong any more than getting wrong results from doubles means its wrong. It just means it's poorly designed so the user doesn't know about this limitation.
It's clear you aren't a mathematician. They work with "typical integers" like 10^9000 all the time, and certainly not as a trivial scaling of doubles.
There are 9763 significant digits in that calculation. They wrote it in shorter form because the actual digits were irrelevant. The numbers they got from Mathematica had the wrong sign and were off six orders of magnitude. There's no reason to list more digits to show that's the case.
Mathematica promises arbitrary precision. Here's the documentation. http://reference.wolfram.com/language/ref/Det.html . It says "Use exact arithmetic to compute the determinant", for the construction given in the paper. The also submitted a bug report, and got the statement "It does appear there is a serious mistake on the determinant operation you mentioned."
Yes, of course random algorithms can end up with different answers. The determinate definition is not random, the documentation for Det doesn't say it uses a random implementation, non-random methods to compute it are well known. Again, the vendor says it's wrong - why are you disagreeing with practicing mathematicians and the vendor? Why do you think you know enough about the topic to be able to judge what "odd" means, in the context of this sort of field?
He makes some dubious efficiency claims. It's true the colored LEDs have always been pretty efficient, but that's no use lighting your home. White LEDs have surpassed incandescent bulbs but still have a way to go to reach flourescent tubes and the grand-daddy of efficiency - gas discharge lamps.
One (the?) reason for low power levels is they generate so much heat and are difficult to cool. LEDs are still primarily heaters - useful in the winter.
I think you need to update your figures. High-end consumer luminaires have been coming in above 100 lm/watt total system efficiency for at least a year or so now, and with CRI superior to fluorescents.
I think expert witnesses serve that purpose. There have been complicated technical details in jury trials before the internet and this seems to be an adequate way to solve the problem.
The problem with expert witnesses is that the skill required to tell which expert is more credible is the same skill that each expert claims to represent best. And then you have the outright liars who have made their careers being expert liars in court, like Dr. Michael West, who are not backed up by the medical community, but by prosecutors.
Ronald Pelton was an NSA spy who's been in prison longer for participating in war. Except he's being held in the US and is still locked up today. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Pelton
The circumstances are a bit different: Mr. Pelton is indeed a former U.S. NSA intelligence analyst, but he's in an American prison for selling U.S. military secrets to the Soviet Union in the 1980s during the Cold War. The Wikipedia article says he'll be released in November 2015, which is surprising inasmuch as he was given three concurrent life sentences.
It is a China-bashing lens. The article also complains about:
"the location of a person’s “hukou,” or residency permit"
Employers in every country do this and we don't call it "just wrong" (though it is). They use the more international form of a hukou known as a passport.
Western companies also have hiring discrimination based on social abilities and who your friends are, even when it's of only minor relevance to the job. A person's personality is considered worth discriminating against (even for jobs working alone) but that isn't automatically more acceptable than physical characteristics.
It's the password recovery by phone that's the weakness. But I think people getting locked out of their own account is probably a bigger problem for Google than people getting hacked, so they err on the side of saving your from getting locked out.