icarus_drowning

No, you aren't. And what I find galling about the article is how they go out of their way to use sympathetic language in describing him. Just one example:

"Gembe's malware crimes, while undeniably exploitative and damaging, were crimes driven by a passion for games rather than profits."

I understand that it is important to explore his motivations, but the way this is phrased (in particular what seems to be an attempt to contrast the boy's "passion" with Valves lust for "profits") is pretty terrible. I don't think his "pure" motivations matter at all-- what matters is that he chose to steal the property of Valve and make it available to others. Whether Gembe meant for it to end up on the internet doesn't matter when it ends up on the internet.

I see a lot of comments on this that are sympathetic to the kid, and while I understand that feeling, I think a more sensible look at the situation demands that you feel sorry for him because he brought this upon himself, not because he was any kind of "victim".

I'm glad to see that he was able to get on with his life, and I probably don't agree with what U.S. authorities would like to have sentenced him to had they gotten ahold of him. But that doesn't make him the persecuted hero that so many people seem to think he is. And that doesn't mean he shouldn't have done some jail time either.

This seems terribly pernicious to me. Indeed, Stallman's arguments about the "GNU/Linux" terminology have always struck me as a rather naked form of question-begging designed not to make an argument, but to assume that he's already won it. That he is so insistent that everyone use his terminology merely illustrates that he is often not interested in making arguments so much as forcing everyone else to accept his conclusions.

Probably been discussed here on HN before, but what exactly causes the LiOn batteries to do this?

A Tonidoplug, which is a Sheeva plug with the Tonido software on it, is $99:

http://tonidoplug.com

They don't even need to do this. If you could purchase iBooks in the Kindle Mobipocket format, there's nothing preventing you from transferring them to your Kindle and reading them.

There are plenty of bookstores that sell books that work perfectly well on the Kindle without having anything to do with Amazon. Sci-Fi AZ is just one such independent bookstore: http://www.scifi-az.com/

Has anyone else noticed a distinct dive in Netflix streaming quality over the past few weeks? I used to be able to watch their full HD videos nearly instantly, and now I'm lucky if I get the lowest quality-- about half the time videos won't even start.

I haven't changed anything on my end that I'm aware of. Still, I can't believe this is all on Netflix's end, can it?

(2.10.11, at around 14:10 MST): How does this have any positive karma at all?

Another interesting look at the psychological theory of money on a recent This American Life:

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/423/t...

In particular, the section from about 10:30 discusses how Brazil combatted inflation by essentially replacing their currency with something that everyone agreed was valuable.

I use Reason every day, and while I assure that its design was somewhat appealing at first, the sheer insanity of having to deal with virtual instruments and sequencers as if they were the "real thing" grows tiring extremely quickly.

Even during my education, wherein I dealt with more than a few individuals in Reason's "target market" (see: aging film composers who have spent their fair share of time plugging real cables into real sequencers) found it appalling and difficult to use.

The only reason I still use the program at all is because it has a few excellent patches built into it. The fact that I have to wade through the swamp of illogic that is its user interface remains one of most frustrating parts of my job as a media composer.

Exactly. The problem isn't the price to features ratio, its the "lowest priced version" option. And somehow, its Apple that's offering the most choice there.

I went to a Christian college in Southern California. One of the things that I thought was interesting was how often professors in the Apologetics/Philosophy departments seemed to feel a kindred spirit with the world's Muslims. Whatever you think of either religion, (and certainly, this is the exception, not the rule, I'm sure) it is sometimes fascinating to see them ally with each other, especially when it seems to fly in the face of conventional wisdom. They have a lot more in common than either group would often like to admit.

The entire article rests on the assumption that the things which are produced in order to be consumed have no value-- or at the very least, that, as more of them are produced, the total value in "the system" doesn't increase. While this is undoubtably true for many things, is it true for all of them?

I mean, sure, I can't accept that enormous piles of consumerist junk manufactured every year don't really represent the creation of much value. But that isn't everything, and, I'd argue, it is dwarfed by the enormous amount of valuable materials, goods, and services that are produced.

In order for this kind of invective to carry in weight, one has to implicitly agree with the hidden assumption that the trillions of dollars of goods and services produced every year represent essentially no value to human beings.

And that seems to me to be a pretty ridiculous statement.

If you can make your site intelligent enough to stop sending me "you have a lending request" emails for books that I've already lent, I'll switch! ;)

I can't live without Visor. Its one of my favorite OS X utilities.

I use a TondioPlug[1] as a provider, and I've never had a problem with it. It is simple to use and doesn't require me to know anything about how OpenID works.

I suspect that until things like a TondioPlug become useful for a lot of people, (if they ever do) asking people to be their own provider will be a lost cause.

[1]http://www.tonidoplug.com/tonido_plug.html

I don't think these are technical problems for Apple (at least in terms of the question "do we include this feature"), but I have to believe Apple is interested in how successful those differentiators are once their competitors attempt to use them on the market.

What? A state-funded program that appears to have been somewhat hampered by bureaucracy?

Say it ain't so! ;)

Good point.

I think Listen's bugginess would only be mildly irritating if more critical (and official) Google apps like Voice didn't have almost-dealbreakers cropping up so often.

Apple is ahead of the game much of the time, but not all of the time. They seem to have this weird, innate ability to know when its best to be first, and when its best to be... well, best. This issue (iPad resolution) is a good example.

My guess? Apple will wait for the BlackBerry Playbook, which has close to the specs Gruber mentions Apple will need to support the "iPad retina display", and see how it affects (1) the price and (2) the battery life of the Playbook. I expect screen size and resolution to be a big differentiator if we ever start seeing the plethora of Android tablets we've been promised as well, which will lead to fanboyism criticizing Apple's decision to leave the iPad's resolution at its current state until 2012.

But, if the iPad 3 does have a 'retina display', I expect it will also have battery life and system performance that will make its competitors look silly by comparison.

I think Apple, having been first into the tablet market will wait to do that tablet's resolution right.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlackBerry_PlayBook

As an Android user (and promoter to my friends/family), I'm starting to get worried about Google's approach to the product. Not because of "fragmentation" (which to me is an argument that essentially says "Android isn't going to ever be successful because its too successful now"), but because of the lack of attention it seems to be getting from Google.

It isn't just the OS itself-- several of Google's own apps are getting buggier and buggier. Voice worked fine when I first got my Droid a year or so ago, but has had a lot of bugs-- including dialing random numbers instead of the one I wanted. (Just yesterday, I tried to send a text message to XXX-XXXX and it truncated the last digit of the first group and complained that it couldn't send a text to XX-XXXX. Nothing I did could stop it from doing this except using the web-based version). Google Listen has stopped refreshing for huge numbers of people, and my wife's new Galaxy S won't even accept subscriptions. Not a word from Google on either issue, even though both show up in searches for the problem.

I had to install Launcher Pro to get any kind of performance out of my Droid, and even then it occasionally locks up on the home screen. Sometimes calls come in and the touch interface freezes, which means that I can't answer the phone. The Droid also will occasionally decide that there is no data connection when it has full 3G service according to the indicators.

I don't use it, but the stock SMS app has apparently has its own problems too-- at least Google has acknowledged those and is working on a fix, but as a whole, Android has gone from less technologically interesting (no wi-fi hotspots, etc) and stable to exciting and really buggy. Combine that with this kind of politicking, and I'm getting less and less enthusiastic about Android every day.

Its certainly probably that Iran doesn't want nukes in order to use them against Israel. But that doesn't mean you get to discount their rhetoric about destroying Israel, and the fact that such rhetoric aligns horrifically neatly with the notion of a nuclear Iran.

Still, the prospect of an Iran that is powerful on the world stage and the inevitable proliferation that will result probably increases the chances that someone crazy enough to nuke an Israeli city will get ahold of enough material to do so exponentially.

So this doesn't make it inevitable, just a hell of a lot more likely.

Thanks for the data. Seems like its a relatively underutilized feature.

If you're that worried about it, there's always thermite.

Do we know how many people use the icon, even as something like "% of Firefox users"?

It does seem a bit silly to remove the RSS icon without any data on its usefulness. Then again, maybe Mozilla has some data we're not privy to on how many people actually use that button besides Dave Winer.

Isn't the "closed" vs. "open" status of Flash a total red herring? Flash is a browser plugin that any browser maker can choose to support or not to support. Google is arguing that a specified standard should use something more "open".

In other words, I have a hard time seeing how bundling a plugin and not supporting a proprietary codec that is vying to be part of a new standard is hypocritical at all.

And that above all seems to be the most important part of Gruber's "argument".

edit: minor grammatical correction

And isn't one of the most important aspects of the F22 its avionics system? Do we have any information about the J-20's avionics?

I love my TonidoPlug. I bought one last spring and have been using it as my own storage and sharing for photos, videos, and other media.

This sharing feature works very well, I use it quite a bit to share media files with collaborators (mostly to get uncompressed music scores that I produce for web media up to the director). And no, it doesn't take any kind of 3rd party service-- you could just as easily point a different domain at your TonidoPlug and be all set to go.

It has a lot of other useful features too-- I wasn't home when Ubuntu 10.10 came out, but I was able to log in from my phone and get the torrent started, in a simple and easy way. By the time I got home later that day, there it was, waiting for me. (All of this from a "server" that only pulls 2-5 watts and thus keeps my energy bills lower).

I have really enjoyed owning the Plug (and using the software) for its convenience and ease of use. I would recommend it without hesitation.

Yeah, but the entire linked post is making the same kinds of assumptions about general trends in hardware. Now, those assumption might be stronger than these (I happen to think they are), but its logic really isn't terribly better than this.

This. So much this.

I honestly don't know if Terry Jones, et. al., realize that they are following in the footsteps of history's most ignominious figures and movements by doing this. I have to believe they are just ignorant of history-- willingly or not.

Its hard to believe that they've found a way to burn a Qur'an in a way that is offensive not only to Muslims, but also to Jews and Christians-- the two groups who are most portrayed as "at war" with Islam.

Pianos are tuned to an equal-tempered scale-- essentially (and, of course, over-simply) you "spread out" the "out-of-tuneness" that results from the fact that the Western 12-tone chromatic scale doesn't fit inside a perfect system of frequency ratios. See here for lots of math that I don't understand at all:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_temperament

As a side (historical) note, one of the earliest champions of Equal Temperament (or Well-Temperament) was Bach, who wrote The Well Tempered Clavier as a kind of advertisement for this tuning system. Prior to systematized equal temperament, it was impossible for an instrument to play in all 24 keys without being re-tuned. On a Well-Tempered instrument, you can play straight through all 24-keys without stopping to be retuned.

Singers (and brass players, and any other instrument that allows for fine, sinlge-cent level tuning) often use a different system called Just Intonation:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_intonation

Just Intonation is "more in tune" than Equal-temperament, but it is not noticeable by most people. I teach music for a living and have a degree in music theory and I have a very difficult time telling the difference.

EDIT: Yes, I did oversimplify by conflating equal temperament and well-temperament, but in the modern debate, they do tend to get lumped together.