CYRUS

Why the Public Can't Read the Press Nuts-and-bolts Washington coverage has shifted to subscription-based publications, while the capitol’s traditional outlets have shrunk. Jonathan Ernst / Reuters B ack in 2009, I had a job with a Washington, D.C.-based newsletter called  Water Policy Report . It wasn’t exactly a household name, but I was covering Congress, the federal courts, and the Environmental Protection Agency—a definite step up from the greased-pig-catching contests and crime-blotter stories I had chased at a community newspaper on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, my first job out of college. One of my responsibilities at the newsletter was to check the  Federal Register —the official portal that government agencies use to inform the public about regulatory actions. In December of that year I noticed an item that said that the Environmental Protection Agency had decided that existing pollution controls for offshore oil-drilling platforms in the Gulf of Mexico ...

Uber for banking? Coins.ph turns people into ATMs Philippine Bitcoin startup  Coins.ph  has come up with a way for you to move money without having to deal with a bank. A new service on its Bitcoin wallet called “Teller” turns anyone with a smartphone into an ATM, where you can deposit your money. Think Uber for banking. Here’s how it works: say you need to make a deposit to send money to a relative. To do this, you would open your Coins.ph wallet and find a teller near you using your GPS. Tellers can be people or small retail establishments like convenience stores. Upon meeting, the teller collects your cash and transmits the equivalent amount in bitcoins into your mobile wallet, while charging a small fee in the process. The maximum amount per deposit is US$50 (over PHP 2,000). With your wallet topped up, you may remit bitcoins to your relative, through your relative’s Coins.ph wallet if he has one, or his preferred mode of cashing out. Remittances can be cash...

Fun with(out) keyword  explicit Posted on  March 5, 2015 Contents  [ show ] Today’s post is about an incident with our compiler and a small little feature that sometimes seems to be underused or simply forgotten: Keyword  explicit . How a Bug in Our Code Could Hide a Bug in the Compiler A few days ago when I had completed a little coding at work, I recompiled the project and got a very weird compiler error in a very distant part of the code.  I would never had guessed that that particular part of the code could be influenced by my changes, but somehow something I did to one of the headers changed everything on the other side of the little code-world I work in. The error was in a very simple function and looked like this: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 #include <string> //more includes...   namespace MyNS {    bool checkSomeStrings ( std :: string const & a , std :: string c...