kijinbear

Haha, you're right. I have dry skin, so I make heavy use of hand cream... which doesn't play nicely with touchscreens at all. The smudges are especially annoying on glossy screens.

That would make sense on laptops and other small devices, but not so much if you're sitting 2-3 ft away from 2-3 large screens. Which is not uncommon for programmers and designers these days.

Right now, from where I'm sitting, I can't touch my desktop monitor without leaning forward uncomfortably. Even if large touchscreens become cheaper over the next few years, my arms aren't going to get any longer, and my field of vision isn't going to get any wider (larger monitor = sit further away). In this situation, touch isn't simply imperfect, it's physiologically impossible. It'll be even more impossible if your "screen" is a 50" plasma TV on the opposite wall.

So it seems that @jonpaul does have a point.

There's Textile, but its handling of blockquotes and code samples is much less convenient than Markdown. Github's wiki used to use Textile, and it sucked.

Completely agreed. The method described in the article requires commenters to use HTML tags and even know how to balance them. In addition, it is supposed to detect code blocks automagically, which would be prone to errors. (How do you know whether a block of text is English or Python?)

Markdown is terse, easy to write, and readable even when rendered in plain text. There's a reason why so many web sites, from Reddit to Github to Stack Exchange, uses Markdown exclusively.

As for the alternatives: Wikitext ''seriously'' '''overloads''' the '''''apostrophe''''', often needs to be supplemented with <u>HTML</u> anyway, and contains [[wiki-specific syntax]] which is not relevant in most blog-commenting situations. BBCode is just a bastardized subset of HTML. It's popular in old-fashioned forum software, but I see no reason to use it in new applications.

Your last point is really interesting.

I use a desktop at home and a small laptop on the go, and everything I need is always on both computers. Files, bookmarks, browsing history, you name it. I can just log into either computer and keep working. The advent of cloud-based synchronization tools makes it very easy for people to juggle 2 or more computers. So instead of fighting over the "Desktop of laptop?" question, one can get both and not suffer any inconvenience.

After all, what would the average North American middle-class family do if they needed a vehicle that was both large enough for the kids' hockey games and fuel-efficient enough for the dad's long commute? They wouldn't settle for one mid-sized car; they'd buy a minivan and a Prius.

The proportion of people who are "always on the go" is rather small.

> some of them can be overcome: external peripherals for ergonomics, larger screens, and extra storage.

Once you've attached an external monitor, external keyboard and mouse, and an external hard drive to a laptop, you're using the laptop exactly as you would a desktop tower: something you only need to touch if you want to insert a piece of removable media.

In that case, you might as well fork out a few more dollars and put a real desktop tower in that space. Sync everything and enjoy the extra speed.

Actually, since you normally can't use anything but characters in the 0x20-0x7E range, the 8 char password has much less entropy: 95^8 ~= 6.63E15.

I love the backtick in my passwords. If a website accepts it and doesn't give me any issues, it's a decent indicator of basic security.

Some Koreans do this: they just type up some Korean words. Since most password fields only accept ASCII symbols, the password gets entered as a nonsensical string of alphabets. For example, the Korean word '비밀번호' (meaning 'password'), when typed on a standard Korean keyboard, becomes 'qlalfqjsgh'.

I'm not disputing any of that. I just get annoyed when people compare languages with frameworks. Ruby and Python have many advantages compared to PHP, but out-of-the-box XSS prevention is not one of them.

Rails is a framework. PHP is a language. If you use a framework with PHP, it's just as easy to avoid XSS. Likewise, if you use vanilla Ruby without any framework...

Most LiveCDs don't mount hard drives unless you specifically tell it to do so, for example, by clicking on the drive icon. Perhaps this distro disables even that capability, so you can't leave any trace on the machine even if someone got you to run the latest Firefox exploit.

So, when you copy somebody else's work (e.g. a song) for personal enjoyment, it's an outrageous crime; but when you copy a student's essay for profit, it's fair use. You're right, it's not at all surprising.

Just wait until people start talking about IE 26, Firefox 34, Chrome 42, etc. Now that even the Linux kernel is jumping onto the inflated-version-numbers bandwagon, it won't be long.

It's not Google criticizing Sony, it's Andrew Hintz posting on his Google+ page.

Looks like a ripoff of Linode's logo, topped with a bit of Minecraft texture.

$12.99? Why pay more? Namecheap has SSL certs for $9/year.

You'll probably need to win the lawsuit before the judge can order something like that.

Ah, sorry. I meant UN, not EU. The article I linked to in the great-great-grandparent says UN, not EU.

Western Europe sucks. Too much MAFIAA influence there.

In the case of individual countries, it's often construed as a constitutional right. But in the case of the EU, you're right, it's a human right. Thanks for the correction.

I have a couple of very small VPS's which cost $15-20 per year. That's less than the cost of a cup of coffee per month. There are plenty of similar offers on sites like LowEndBox.com. A few SSH tunnels on a minimal Debian install shouldn't take up more than 64MB of RAM, so you don't really need an expensive Linode for that.

Caveat: These low-cost "companies" go out of business all the time, so you'd better read the reviews. But since I consider them disposable anyway, I don't really care if the uptime isn't 99.9% or the company goes bankrupt after 9 months. If you plan to do anything other than tunneling with your VPS, I'd suggest that you pay at least $10 per month.

I don't think there's any penalty for false accusations of copyright infringement. Likewise, nobody needs to pay for falsely accusing you of anything unless you sue them for defamation.

If your ISP actually cuts off your internet after 6 false accusations, you might want to take them to the courts. EFF will probably love to take on such a suit. Unfortunately, very few people have the financial means or guts to sue the RIAA/MPAA and follow through with it.

Some European countries [1] and even the UN [2] have recently begun to recognize internet access as a Constitutional right. If similar decisions were made here, one might be able to sue one's ISP for breaching that right... but maybe not, as long as there's free internet at public libraries. I'm also very pessimistic that SCOTUS will recognize internet access as a Constitutional right any time soon, what with the MAFIAA still at large.

[1] http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Global-News/2010/0309/Is-Inte... [2] http://www.theatlanticwire.com/technology/2011/06/united-nat...

> DNS is a natural resource,

Interesting idea, but I don't think this analogy works. Sovereign nations routinely assume complete control over natural resources located within their territories. (Maybe they shouldn't, but that's another argument.)

I think it depends on what you mean by "due process." If you mean "whatever the law says the government can do, and/or what the government customarily does," there may have been no violation of due process.

However, the phrase "due process" also often means "what the law should say the government should do." Such an interpretation usually appeals to a higher moral authority, the Constitution, etc. This is how people often criticize the PATRIOT Act for violating due process, even though the PATRIOT Act defines clear processes to be followed. These people are saying, in effect, that the processes defined by existing law don't count as "due process."

You are right that court challenges are the way to fix problematic laws. But I disagree that "none of these people have been deprived of due process," because I think that any process worthy of being called "due process" should involve, among others, presumption of innocence until proven guilty, and a bunch of documents signed by judges. I don't know what the law is really like in the US, but seizing property in the absence of a criminal conviction (except temporarily, to gather evidence) sounds like a gross violation of due process.

You're right. It should say: Unix time is the number of seconds since epoch, not counting leap seconds.

The FBI still took Instapaper's blade servers, and that was wrong. I don't think it was intentional at all, but it was certainly careless, and therefore I don't think there's any need for Marco Arment to apologize to the FBI. If anything, the FBI should apologize for their careless seizure of hardware not covered by the warrant.

Theoretically, you're right. But how many "enterprise" intranet apps actually make use of cutting-edge HTML5 and JS5 features?

Exactly. This "new browser version will break everything" argument applies very much to Internet Explorer, but IMO not so much to better browsers like Firefox and Chrome. There might be minor quirks here and there, but those are never going to be serious enough to require more than a couple of days of testing if the app is standards-compliant to begin with.

Being "replaced in functionality" by a superior product that costs at least 3 times as much doesn't make the inferior product "dead" any more than BMW makes Ford "dead". The author makes some good points, but the MacBook Air is a bad example.

The company in question is actually located outside of the US, and so are all employees who have access to the key. It keeps its servers in the US only because of issues with cost and latency, I think.