effigies

I got some Vibrams around Christmas and have been wearing them solidly for about 2-2.5 months (since the weather warmed up). The harder layer of rubber has already worn through on the heel, exposing the softer layer. I'm not so sure I'll be getting another pair.

The issue isn't what format the content is in, but that it's retrieved through client-side logic rather than as part of the query response.

Also, what's wrong with HTML/CSS that is in any way resolved by XML/XSLT? I'm genuinely curious why somebody would put their content into a format with no default, well-understood display semantics.

If you turn off Javascript and cookies, a ton of sites that serve what at least could be static content and which you don't need to log into simply stop working.

What happened to graceful degradation? Is it not agile enough to expect a server to be able to work at least minimally with any browser?

It's a gradient, not a binary.

Adding colors to the metaphor adds words with no increase of understanding.

> they are still inherently hypocritical in that they shift that oppression to the opposing class.

Calling affirmative action oppression of the "opposing class" (by which you presumably mean the privileged group) is serious decontextualization, ignoring the entire history of the two groups of people and pretending that the moment in which you compare two individuals is all that matters. The fact is there is a systemic bias against un- or under-privileged groups such that the privileged person will almost always perform better on even an objective assessment, so affirmative action is a systematic correction.

In order for a privileged person and an un-privileged person to be even within spitting distance of one another academically or professionally requires a hell of a lot more work on the part of the un-privileged person, no matter how hard the privileged person worked. Affirmative action recognizes this and rewards that work despite the decontextualizing "objective" assessments that would give the reward to the higher achiever, basically placing a bet that in aggregate, giving these people more opportunity will result in better results.

Will there be errors? Sure. But it's a bit rich to complain about white boys being oppressed by women and minorities.

To mangle a famous quote, "The greatest trick privilege ever pulled was to convince the privileged it didn't exist."

One of the toughest problems with structural inequalities is that they hide themselves from those who are benefited, largely because they are not directly and adversely affected by the inequality. This is exacerbated by the fact that on the whole, privileged people are not bad people, and coming to grips with how much the system favors you by virtue of being born into the right family can certainly make you feel like an undeserving wretch, profiting off of the misery of countless others. It is vastly more comfortable not to think about these things, particularly when thinking about them often makes you feel even worse when you realize there's no easy way to correct them.

But that discomfort is one price we, as privileged people, should pay. We should live in a shameful awareness of how we benefit from a system that undervalues and exploits people to greater and lesser degrees. We should recognize that denigration of things through sexist, ablist, racist or heteronormative language is an expression of indifference to the suffering of people. We should live our shame because it cannot match what we collectively allow to happen to other people, because otherwise we are passive participants in the continued oppression of other people, and because maybe being painfully aware of what we are doing to them will also make us aware of steps we can take to end the structural oppression.

Once more, with feeling: pagination is an inappropriate paradigm for most web content.

While I appreciate that they did not take advantage of the multiple page views to just get more ad impressions, it's still a pain in the ass to view a single item of content like that.

Are people really under the impression that Google and Facebook opposed SOPA for surveillance reasons? SOPA would have broken the Internet so fundamentally that they couldn't continue operating without special immunity from the US Government. Failing something that serious, I wouldn't expect them to be on my side, generally speaking.

Personally, I like Adblock Plus (Good Karma Edition). By default, it allows ads through, but blocking them on a website that uses them badly (which for me means flashing or making noise) is only a click away. My reason for using adblock is aesthetic, not paranoiac, so I'm willing to give sites the benefit of the doubt.

Nothing terribly new, but it's good to see it on Forbes. Maybe finally these arguments, which have seemed patently obvious to those of us on the consuming end, will penetrate the business and legislative classes.

I doubt it, but we're talking about gamers here. They are being inspired to give because it fits in with their hobby and there's a giant progress bar that they can do their part to bump a little higher every year. This is not to say that their charitable impulses are so narrow in scope and that they don't care about medicine and the like -- and I would wager that many donate to multiple charities, some of which might even do what you say -- but rather that this is a particularly inspiring charity that caters to community tendencies.

Child's Play started quite small, and to be frank, $3M is still a relatively small sum of money, particularly when you consider the number of hospitals over which it is distributed. However, it is consistently growing, and it might make sense to widen its scope, at some point. I would personally organize it like an RPG, and you can dump points (Earth monies) into games, medicine, etc. It would be consistent with the leveling impulse which I think Child's Play is harnessing, as well as giving people the option to decide among games and medicine and whatever other goals might be presented. I think you would see a fair bit redirected toward medicine, as people who are given the choice are obviously going to recognize that it is an important goal as well, but it wouldn't drive away people attracted to Child's Play for what it is now.

Same, here. It's really just the consistency I like about it. Or we could switch to Xtmas.

People abbreviate Christmas as Xmas. I feel that, for consistency, it should be Xian, rather than Xtian, but Xtian seems to be the standard.

Incidentally, I enjoy that you used the slur "Christain." alt.atheism?

That was actually one of the particular things I was thinking of when I said "multiple solutions to the same problem", so I didn't add it as a separate thing. Though it is a pretty major difference that can trip someone up moving between two distros.

In general, the main differences between distros consist of:

    - Versions of software included
    - Whether any "non-free" software is included
    - How the directory structure is used (for instance, do you use /opt or /usr/local)
    - Is there a package manager / ports system, or do you compile everything on your own?
    - In the event of multiple solutions to the same problem (common), the distro often makes a default choice
    - The GUI often has custom features, such as configuration applets
    - The support culture around each

But if a piece of software can be compiled and installed on one distribution of Linux, though I'm sure there exists an exception, you can generally count on being able to get it to work on another, though it may take some work.

My favorite 404: http://www.rathergood.com/404

You know you can hit the cancel button and it'll take you to the actual article, instead, right?

> Penalizing both students is clearly wrong if one student did the assignment properly without cheating, and the other student copied the first student's work.

I had a professor who would actually give the person who did the work the worse grade, under the justification that you can never get rid of demand, but you could discourage supply. I thought it was a pretty clever solution. If I'd worked my ass off and somebody copying me got a 50% where I got a 0%, I'd be much more careful about what I shared.

It doesn't do any training during the game, except that it uses the correct answers already seen in a category to give weight to a specific interpretation of the category title.

I was at a watching party with a couple of IBMers who worked on Watson, and one thing they said is that it's not a question of speed, but of timing. Players time their pressing to an estimate of when Alex will finish the question, and Brad Rutter in particular has been clocked at under 2ms with shocking regularity. The advantages Watson has are consistency and the emotional perturbations in its opponents. You could see them getting frustrated, and that likely only served to harm their ability to hit that window between the end of the question and Watson's button press.

Yes: http://www.nexenta.org/

While I'm not sure if there's an actual fusion in the depths of the naval, for practical purposes, the abdomen can be considered homeomorphic to the punctured plane, and treated accordingly.

... "for practical purposes" ...

Sigh. I guess I'll have to turn in my pure math degree.

This is kind of neat. It seems like it'd be useful as a more easily debugged Haskell.

I'd be more inclined to actually play with it, though, if it accepted a superset of Haskell, which allowed arbitrary IO tainting. So I might write:

    do
        pure code
        {- Scotch debug statements
        ...
        -}
        pure code

And then just dump it into the Scotch compiler/interpreter when I ran into issues.

Of course, this would only work if you could guarantee semantic equivalence to the Haskell except in those debug bits.

Perhaps I have not paid much attention, but I wasn't aware this community was so fond of companies tracking their internet usage.

This fellow's argument doesn't seem to be against GM but rather against the predatory practices perpetrated by the purveyors of GM seeds.

With floating point, the first 9 bits are sign and exponent. You could thus check with:

    int ispoweroftwo(float x) {
        return !(*(int*)(&x) << 9);
    }

This only works for exact powers of two, though. It's possible to get something that's really close that will fail this.

Woops. I totally missed this one:

> It has to be a "real" language. As in: a language that is actually used by a significant number of people in paid jobs.

Either way, as first languages go, they're not bad, as they let you get those immediate results. There's pretty minimal fluff. (I think. To be honest, I couldn't write anything in either of them, anymore.)

I suppose you could call them oddball, though.

My first two were Logo and VBA. (I don't really count the tiny bits of dabbling in Basic. I got bored by hello world.)

I'd say both of these meet his criteria. But neither of them got me hooked. It wasn't until I started on Perl to help a friend parse chat logs that I really started getting into programming.

Personally, I don't use it to stay informed. I don't think it's well designed for that purpose. While there are many people/companies who update their twitters with new product information or blog posts, it's all too specific and in order to get a good spread of updates, you'd be opening up a crapflood, and I have little inclination to filter it myself.

I use it to keep up with what's happening with people I know, a couple humorous feeds (e.g. @fakeapstylebook, @shitmydadsays), and authors who are writing books I want to read.

Also, there are a couple people I follow who tend to post links of interest to me (at the moment, @donsbot and @bos31337, as I'm currently obsessed with Haskell), and they don't post frequently enough to pollute my feed with their lives.