sounddust

But just by quickly searching Google I found quite a few instances in which real reporters were harmed or arrested: A WNYW Fox photographer (Roy Isen) was maced/attacked with a baton, a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel photographer (Kristyna Wentz-Graff) was arrested despite her credentials hanging from her neck, an RT television reporter (Lucy Kafanov) was struck with a baton, a journalist in TN (Jonathan Meador) was arrested. John Farley (a reporter for WNET in NY) was arrested. That's just from 5 minutes of searching, so it wouldn't surprise me if the 25 figure only represented professionals.

The fact that my landlord's ad received over 100 replies just indicates that there's a pool of "bottom performers" who are repeatedly trying to find housing by responding to ads despite the fact that they're doing some things wrong. Every new ad is going to receive a large number of responses from this same group of hopeless people. If they want to find a place, they're going to have to find out what's wrong with their approach and make some changes, just as I had to do.

I had the same experience in a nearby city, sending 30-40 emails for every 1 response. I finally decided to get a prepaid SIM and start calling people, and suddenly things became much easier.

The person who I eventually rented an apartment from explained that she placed the ad in the morning, went to work, and received my call (and a few others) before she returned home to read her e-mail, which contained over 100 replies. The people who called already had appointments to see the apartment, so she wasn't even going to look at the mails unless those people were uninterested. She also remarked that she could tell from our brief initial conversation that I seemed like a nice person, which helped my chances; she doesn't get that benefit from an email conversation.

Looking at it from a potential landlord's point of view, it makes sense that calling an ad that has just been placed is going to have the highest success rate; not everyone checks their mail as often as tech-minded people.

1) You don't have to sync offline tracks with the Spotify desktop software; you can mark playlists as "available offline" directly within the mobile app and it will start syncing them immediately. I've never synced my phone via the desktop app.

The mobile app is also intelligent enough to sync songs that you're listening to that happen to be part of an offline playlist, saving bandwidth (for example, in the case where your settings only permit you to sync over wifi, but you listen to a song over 2G/3G).

2) The Spotify app used to show song/artist info, but at some point it seems that all the audio apps I used stopped doing this at the same time. Are you sure this wasn't an iOS change?

3) The unavailable song issue is related to the fact that the available songs are completely different depending on the country where you live. I've found that the USA is the worst for what I like to listen to. You could probably change your region by connecting to the website via proxy.

4) Regarding your question about supporting the bands: from what I've read, artists receive almost nothing from Spotify licensing fees. If you want to support the artists, the safest bet is still attending concerts/buying merchandise directly.

I don't know if this is because the iPhone's GPS functionality is crippled, or if it's a software limitation. I'd imagine that if you wanted to overcome this limitation, you'd need to jailbreak your phone and use 3rd party mapping software at a minimum.

*Note: once it has located you, it will generally track you correctly while you're moving, even if you leave the area where you had internet connectivity.

I don't think it's a privacy concern to store such data locally on the phone. In any case, it should be resolved by letting the user decide how long to cache the data; that would make everyone happy.

It's going to be unfortunate when I can't do this anymore because of people blowing this issue out of proportion. I hope Apple will at least provide the option of caching this data for longer than 7 days.

Instead, Amazon's front end should just check the incoming accept-encoding header and automatically compress as needed.

Personally - on at least two occasions, I've been accused of writing code that was specifically written to cause grief/problems with another person, only to have to explain that it was a bug and that their personal test-case isn't the only place where it fails.

* And even if the author did directly accuse MS of cheating, that doesn't mean we can't be more correct and rewrite it to be neutral.

No community is perfect, but I'd say that Metafilter is considerably more tolerant and open to a wide range of opinions on a subject. You can't downvote others if you disagree with them, and baseless attacks are simply deleted by moderators; it forces you to build a well-reasoned argument if you want to debate.

In other words, it's not worth complaining about downvotes until good comments are getting stuck in negative territory and you can't do anything about it. When that happens, I think that this is a discussion worth having. I don't think we're there yet.

Argue the case of the downvotes

I did, in my 2nd and 3rd paragraphs (the majority of what I wrote).

I think that we can agree that the larger the community, the more likely that we'll see random downvotes. However, any unfairly-downvoted comments will generally be fixed by the rest of the community over time. The question is whether the comment scores fairly represent the comment in the long-term. I think that a score of 1 is fair for the first two, and if you had upvoted, that's where they would be.

I don't think there's currently a downvoting issue; the community is handling it quite well, and unfair votes are corrected quickly. There are some edge cases where some comments with a low number of views (such as those in a story with few votes, or in a story with a large number of comments) might unfairly get stuck at 0 or -1, but it's somewhat rare. If 1-2% of comments are unfairly sitting at zero or -1, I don't think it's a big deal.

I disagree with you about the 3rd comment. The last pair of sentences is pure flamebait, which is why it's being downvoted.

If I understand correctly, the users of your site are simply bookmarking pages. You are then caching it, storing it, and publishing it with a world-readable URL. There are many ways that you could provide the same experience to the user without making the cached page publicly accessible.

If you were to give users the option to make specific bookmarks world-readable - and you provided a disclaimer explaining that they should not make copyrighted material world-readable - then it might be different. But that's probably something you should discuss with an attorney.

1) Google is caching pages for a specific purpose and ensuring that they aren't cached/scraped by others:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/robots.txt

By not excluding robots, you're opening yourself to all kinds of situations where you are responsible for draining revenue from the owner of the content, which leaves you liable to lawsuits. By contrast, the way that Google caches content and their rules surrounding it do not generally harm the copyright owner.

2) Google honors all robots.txt, no-archive meta-tags, and other indications that the author doesn't want the page to be cached. Is historious doing the same?