InnocentB

This is basically Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers, distilled to five paragraphs. Very nice.

I get a 403 from that link too...I've actually never seen that from Coral before, anyone know what's going on?

Jay Walsh's estimate for the number of articles under protection is quite a bit off. I count 7631 right now, not 1500 (see http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:ProtectedP...). His count is pretty close to the number of fully-protected pages, so he may just be confusing the two numbers.

Still a small number of the total articles, but I do regularly come across articles that I want to do some editing on, and am unable to without logging in (or in some cases, without being an administrator).

However, Igor's statement does hold true for (some) hashes that are at least as long as the maximum file size :P

"Zero bugs" and "zero known bugs" are two different matters entirely :)

Donald Norman (of The Design of Everyday Things fame) talks about the various strategies for this in his newest book, Living With Complexity. It's an interesting problem because it turns out enough people follow the antisocial strategy of taking from the larger roll (what Berners-Lee calls K in his protocol) that both rolls will often run out within short intervals of each other (less than µ).

Norman proposes the strategy of "nearest roll first" instead of "smallest roll first", which is an easier strategy to accommodate through toilet paper dispenser design. Many public stalls hide the spare roll inside a contraption for this purpose.

I wouldn't call either of those an example of a successful freemium business model. A free, ad-supported business model, perhaps.

There was actually an interesting study about this which got mentioned recently on the Freakonomics podcast (you can see a transcription of the segment at http://freakonomicsradio.com/does-college-still-matter-and-o..., the original study is at http://faculty.arts.ubc.ca/tlemieux/papers/unintended.pdf).

Basically, it uses men who were eligible for the Vietnam draft (who enrolled in college in greater numbers than they otherwise would have, to avoid military service) to demonstrate that success from college graduates is more than a "these people are the ones who were already going to succeed" thing.

At that point, you may as well stay in a 700-suite hotel for your $100.

Gasoline prices aren't a good indicator of cost of living. They are a factor to be sure, but their prices are too overwhelmed by political policy (ie gasoline taxes) compared with other expenses, which introduces too much noise into the data.

WA has good data on cost of living in the US, but I don't think it has comparable data for Canada. For example, if you take out a few of your terms there you'll see that for Toronto it's using the US national average, which is way off. If you try and check their sources, all they list is http://www.coli.org/, which has US data only.

I've never seen any reference saying the Rothschilds or the Rockefellers ever had more than a few hundred billion in today's dollars. Compare to the US federal budget, which is over 3 trillion per year.

You have to bear in mind that the Canadian graph is measuring kilbots per second, which is a far scarier metric :)

Basically, this article is saying that through piracy, you get more exposure for your app, and if your app has any social features in it, the network effects can outweigh any potential lost sales through piracy.

I think a more effective way to do this would be to make the app free for limited periods. You'll reach a much broader audience, with the same effects.

Especially in Emacs: http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs.git/tree/lisp/textmod...

This is unrelated, but how did Google manage to produce such awful URLs? Is this just a base-26 encoded GUID? If so, they could've saved a few characters: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=0xED11C880FA5611DDA6040...

Not that this is something you'd want to do in the first place, because it's hideous.

I get requests when an application wants to make use of my location in iOS. Android has permissions requests beyond this, but I'm fairly confident iOS has at least the one.

A look at https://github.com/languages yields some interesting results. I see VimL there at #10. Is this all just people backing up their personal vim configs, or is there actually anything interesting happening in VimL (seems unlikely)?

Maybe a better question: is GitHub just tracking the number of repositories that contain that language to gauge its popularity? That doesn't seem like the best metric.

I'm not familiar with the Maps API, but the site does it for you:

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&... (from searching Texas)

I think the parent is indicating that selling you a ticket is the expectation, and that Virgin went above and beyond that baseline.

I think you're confusing the whole "there was no year 0, so the millenium starts in 2001" business with decades. Decades start on the 0.

If you were to say "the 200th decade CE", that'd be a different story :)

My understanding from the Wikipedia article you linked is that you just had to have the string SEGA in a specific spot on your ROM, and that the logo was in fact part of the Genesis III BIOS. A four-character string and an image are pretty different, copyright-wise.

It being a library, refactoring often means that the interfaces are now different. Refactoring should mean your functionality doesn't change, but having interfaces change is normal (and expected). Given that the author isn't modifying the code calling theirs, stuff will inevitably break. You can presumably make an adapter to make it compatible, though in this case I doubt all that's been modified is refactoring.

"Swede" is a term from the movie Be Kind Rewind. It refers to homemade remakes of movies.

The problem isn't with getting some individuals to act on this. The problem is getting society as a whole to do so. This is a general problem with trying to incite a boycott of something that has very widespread usage: the dent you can make is often too small to be noticed, because society is too hard to organize.

Is this what you were talking about? https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=45375 - TITLE text is truncated.

Resolved in 3.0, but was outstanding for many years. The bug comments are worth reading (some of them are from the XKCD and Dinosaur Comics guys, whose sites this bug impacted fairly heavily). It doesn't make their dev community look like a place I'd want to be.