Hemospectrum

There really isn't. I hope they do that.

More likely they'll just switch to a new default shell. Perhaps that will be zsh, or perhaps they'll just go back to tcsh.

Or perhaps Terminal will no longer be installed by default by the time they complete their purge.

I wasn't aware Bash had also moved to GPLv3. Wonder how long till that gets removed.

The difference is that someday this will also work in Firefox, Opera, and/or Safari -- perhaps even the mobile versions. It requires Chrome today, but it won't require Chrome forever.

"Intellectual property right" sounds vague enough to cover patents and trademarks. To me, that sounds like Apple could order customs to destroy, say, all Android phones.... Welp.

But the game industry isn't desperately fighting the internet the way Hollywood is. A lot of smaller game studios (and a couple big ones) clearly understand that clinging to an obsolete business model is futile nonsense, and have embraced the online market. And they're absolutely thriving for it.

The console market isn't making the transition nearly as quickly, but I'm certain this is chiefly a matter of getting value out of existing investments (deployed hardware).

It's straightforward to permit SSH access but not shell logins.... if you can administer user and group settings. I guess stuff like scponly (http://freecode.com/projects/scponly) is useless if you're running Windows server-side.

In markets where even a delayed rebroadcast is vanishingly unlikely, online streaming is absolutely thriving. For example, a whole lot of anime hits Crunchyroll and Hulu before the fansub groups ever get a crack at it. These sites and a few others are also expanding into live action Japanese and Korean TV.

However, I think this only works when there's very little competition (from broadcasters) for individual shows. The BBC is probably in the worst position possible for an attempt to move to this model due to interplay between company-wide policy and the negotiating power of its international counterparts. Previous agreements with cable companies can't help much either.

For some reason it fascinates me that for a project promoting the strengths of Common Lisp, one would write the translator in Python.

EDIT: Apparently this is because GCC has a Python plugin API. All right, I guess if there was a CL plugin API then the author would write the translator in CL.

Ada has a reputation for being dramatically overengineered, especially among programmers with exposure to Ruby or Haskell (or Lisp, naturally). I've never seen a demonstration of how well it works for rapidly prototyping code and "filling in the blanks" iteratively. Would you mind providing examples?

Research funding could be socialized, I suppose. Or the patent monopoly period could be reduced. Or medical patents could get an exception of some kind.

But these are all suggestions that should be coming from Congress and from lobbyists while they're negotiating the terms of the deal, so they feel like they've accomplished some level of "damage control." Meanwhile they've wasted a lot of energy inching away from the ideal/extremist proposal and towards the compromise we actually want.

It would be wise of any developers to give their new language a shakedown on smaller, less important projects before staking their whole business on it.

Of course, if it turns out to work amazingly well and they can port all their old code (or interface with it) with relative ease, there's no reason not to jump ship from the hellfires of C++ compilation. They've had major issues with that lately, after all.

Reverse engineering would be a lot less of a pain without the clean room requirement, so I'm not worried about that.

Anyway it's a pony suggestion, not a serious proposal for a law. What I'd actually like to see is reduction of copyright/patent terms, abolition of certain patent types, expansion of fair use boundaries, and explicit rules for determining fair use without going to court.

Total abolition of the copyright and patent systems. That's a start.

More information is not necessarily better information.

The used textbook market was on shaky ground well before ebooks arrived on the scene. Every year, publishers force new editions on the market, making changes to the exercises (so old editions are incompatible with new ones) but making no substantial changes to the actual learning material. Some instructors prefer to assign old editions so their students can find cheaper copies, but most don't care, and others are even contractually obligated (via the school) to use only the newest edition.

According to Wikipedia, magnet links are in fact based on ed2k and Freenet URIs.

Tumblr has already had a blackout event. Users loading the home page for the first time that day saw text that was randomly changed to strings of "██████" and images defaced with censor bars. (Subsequent viewings showed only the anti-SOPA banner at the top.)

Inherited from FreeBSD, of course.

Everyone complained so they changed it.

> Further, why are we talking in terms of the actual command-line commands? (...) I'd much prefer you tell me the name of the popular Windows/Mac client and walk me through the workflow I'll actually use on a day-to-day basis.

To be perfectly clear, the command line tools ARE the popular client. The only widely used GUI I'm aware of is the one specific to Github. There are others but they generally expect you to be familiar with the command line workflow. Perhaps this is because Git is easily integrated into IDEs in a way that makes sense for that particular IDE; perhaps it's because the command line interface is actually very good, with features like spelling suggestions (if you've mistyped a command name) and autocompletion scripts (sort of like IntelliSense).

By the way, I can't speak for Windows users but the overwhelming majority of Mac and Linux developers are well aware that their shiny GUIs are thin layers over the gross 70s Unix parts underneath. In this world there's no stigma concerning beards or the 70s, and your dismissal of the command line comes across as backwards and absurd. It's a bit like badmouthing non-Hollywood filmmakers because a lot of them work in foreign languages and you "don't want to read some German thing for four hours" when you go to the movies.

You would opt into it implicitly just by having your pictures on Facebook. Not necessarily just by having an account, mind you; your friends might upload and tag pictures of you.

Yes, it would be a huge privacy violation. Facebook just likely wouldn't care.

If you assume you'll never need the 8th bit of any given character (which you wouldn't, if you only ever handle pure 7-bit ASCII) you can safely use it for storing a single bit of per-character metadata to avoid consuming excess memory.

This seems very much a work in progress despite the apparent degree of polish. I wonder if the author asked for feedback in #haskell and someone decided to run around posting it here and there without reading it carefully? That happens a lot with Haskell...

Really, Apple is the only example you need. If even Apple permits easter eggs, you can take them for granted in the general case.

That startup time is probably the biggest turnoff for people seeking to write lightweight scripts in JVM languages. If your script's runtime is 100ms after a 5 second startup, it doesn't particularly matter if the machine code version runs at half speed.

MPlayerX has fewer weird bugs and a nicer interface than VLC, and is free of the lag issues that Perian displays with certain formats.

Obviously web design work should be done in HTML, or a very close approximation thereof (HAML). However, despite the link title above, Markdown isn't a web design language at all. It's for writing and editing copy, which is a very different task.

Let's say you have a bunch of untrained writers who needs to do some semantic formatting. They don't know HTML, so you can't ask them to just write HTML. If you let them run rampant with a WYSIWYG word processor (probably Word) you'll wind up with monstrosities where fonts were manually bolded and enlarged to indicate headers and such, and someone has to clean up after it.

If you have Markdown editors, though, you can turn an untrained writer loose with a cheat sheet ("write # to get a header" and such) and you're all set. As a bonus, you can put the Markdown document in version control, export to formats besides HTML, and a few other useful things.

Some major websites like reddit have also successfully made use of Markdown and its competitors to permit rich text comments from people who know nothing about HTML.

It involves a computer -- and the examiners employed by the PTO just don't have the time or training to properly understand computer patents. That's the only explanation.

If examiners can't figure out whether something is patentable, they err on the side of good faith on the part of the applicant, and leave the question to the courts.

In Haskell, mostly. This is probably because most Haskell programmers learned about monads without understanding applicative functors, which are more general and a much better fit for a lot of tasks.

Google's C++ style guide discourages the use of references altogether.