twir

I see your point; although if you look at the specs for a lot of easy-to-parse formats for computers, a stated design goal is also easy-for-humans (e.g. Markdown, YAML).

Large, complex object hierarchies with lots of nesting might make more sense represented in binary (e.g. Avro).

I realize I'm making a little bit of a McLuhan-esque argument in a largely computer science-oriented context, but I hope you can see what I'm getting at.

One of JSON's selling-points is to be human-readable. I would struggle reading any JSON document with a nesting level greater than 6 or so. Why would I ever want a nesting level > 100?

Yes, iOS is a better example. I'm not a big fan of closed platforms in general. I like to be able to decide which software I run on my device, so my most recent laptop and phone purchases have been GNU/Linux devices.

I understand and appreciate the security advantage that comes with protecting users from themselves, but at least SELinux and related software still give users the rope needed to hang themselves if they're into that sort of thing.

I don't mind those features in and of themselves, and I see their value; it's Apple's paternalistic attitude that bothers me. I've used Macs for my entire life and always felt I still had a semblance of control over the hardware and software that I bought, but that feeling of control is going away.

Add "System Integrity Protection" to the list of reasons why my next laptop won't be a Mac. Although based on a free operating system, Mac OS is gradually taking away users' control over their own devices. Either the user controls the software, or the software controls the user.

Very interesting - thanks for sharing. Is there a corresponding brief by the plaintiff? I'd like to see both sides of the story.

Ooh, here come the Scientologists!

I'm as skeptical of big Pharma as the next guy, but to say with such grandiose broad-stroked generalizing that psychiatry (or, perhaps you mean instead/also neurological pharmacology) is not science is simply untrue.

Anyone with Google at their fingertips can find a dozen peer-reviewed articles about serotonin's link to mood and behavior.

EDIT: accidentally a word or two.

Where's the privacy policy?

While I see your point, I don't think it's fair to chalk up the opposition to merely piracy supporters. There are a large number of people who fear the broader ramifications, and a lot of organizations, who are against SOPA and not necessarily pirates.

That's not necessarily true. If you look at the corporate or organizational opposition to SOPA, you'll find eff.org, mozilla.org, etc. These folk aren't necessarily in favor of piracy. More realistically, they're in favor of free speech or free software.

ITT: pedantry over the words "clean, crisp, and cheerful."

Great! Thanks for the info.

Interesting. So if I understand correctly, the goal is largely to promote guidelines that improve compatibility and performance?

This looks neat, but being a DIY kind of dude, I'm not sure what this is for. I'm probably missing something--I think I know "what" it is, just not "why". Can anyone give me a brief rundown?

I'll bite.

It's a fantastic idea. What is missing from it is how the infrastructure is and probably always will be under the domain (pun intended) of corporations.

For example, how do we provide "internet access" with these servers? We don't own the fiber; it it gets shut down we're dead in the water. ISPs run the networks and therefore control the content and charge for it as much as they want.

An alternative is state-controlled ISPs--but we all can guess how fun that would be.

I'm trying to think of yet other alternatives, but I'm drawing a blank.

I think it's the principle of the thing. Criticism works when done right, that is when it's traditional criticism like we all learned in art class. "Your shading is inconsistent here, and the use of lilac is cliche."

Contrasting, this blog 37signals is going on about just smacks of the zeitgeist that is modern "criticism":

Nowadays, criticism is rarely substantiated. Instead, folk spout out inflammatory nonsense like "it's a flaming load of dog crap" rather than the much more helpful "a combo box was a bad choice here."

To the critics: make it constructively funny. If you're just going to badmouth me then put up or shut up you non-contributing zero.

Looks like a lot of people are assuming a solution would some sort of voting system like stackexchange, etc.

Why not allow individual users to hide sites from their own search results and save the info in their google account? For example, provide a "hide this site from my results" link next to each result. Each person decides which site they don't want to see and SEO and global results remain unaffected.

Forgive my ignorance, but when is this useful?

Don't most self-respecting DNS providers allow you to do this?

Ah, somehow I missed the date the article was written. Apologies to Mr. Pincus for making it seem like he was an a priori hypocrite.

Still, I find it a little ironic that he would later say things like, "I did every horrible thing in the book to get the revenues" -- paraphrasing since I don't recall the exact quote.

As far as the charity split is concerned, I agree 50% isn't bad in most cases. However, I imagine margins are essentially zip for Zynga in this case, whereas most charities that take a cut of donations do have high operating costs.

Thanks for the source on Zynga's connection to Zwinky. I knew there was some sort of connection, but my face got horribly red when I realized "wait, he's right--Zynga didn't make Zwinky."

An ethics lecture from a man whose company sells spyware (Zwinky toolbar) and highly profitable add-ons to games under the pretext of charity (Farmville "donations" to Haiti)?

EDIT: oh, and whose company essentially ripped off the idea of Farmville from someone else. Forgot about that one.

I don't think we can agree. I'm neither a pediatrician nor a viral pathologist, so I can't lend an opinion to whether spacing out vaccines is good or bad. Unless you're a medical expert, your opinion probably doesn't hold too much value either.

Hmm, on second thought--I didn't realize these were all daily mail links.

Cigarettes seem to be conspicuously absent from the list.

Then again, I guess the link's been well established already.

At first I was like, "wow, that's offensive."

But then I was like, "damn, how come I didn't get that email too?"

A bunch, actually:

MySQL, PostgresSQL, SQLite, and SimpleDB.

In the spirit of due diligence I started up a debugging proxy before I ran the scanner, so that I'd be able to tell if it collected any info.

Happily, it seems the only requests made are to fetch the javascript that does the scanning, and to various Facebook pages and associated content such as Facebook's CDN and "channels."

Good point. I guess it does depend on context and the purpose of the app.

Exactly. If it's hogging the CPU, it's hogging the CPU--it's irrelevant if it's more or less a hog than something else really.

Truth be told, I'm only running a Mac Mini. That being said, iTunes seems to be more efficient at streaming audio, video. Other desktop applications seem to do a better job at graphics in general.

I guess part of the performance hit one experiences with Flash is due to the overhead of a nice cross-browser, cross-platform, web-oriented runtime. Java applets, which do more or less the same thing, are also pitifully sluggish, in my experience.

I didn't see anything in that post that disproved that Flash is a CPU hog.

I work with Flash and AIR apps on a daily basis, and I can tell you that invariably by the end of the day my browser's Flash plugin is using the majority of my CPU time and RAM.