mdc

There is value in specialization. You denigrate the OP with your condescending "too busy doing whizbang gollygee Important Work" and mischaracterize him as using words like "silly and useless", but the OP never said that. All he said is that he's focused on one part of the work and doesn't know that much about the others.

I've been considering these choices a lot. In my own career, I've made a conscious choice to pursue lots of different things that I found interesting, but I've become a generalist, pretty good at lots of different things but lacking the deep domain knowledge in any one of them that a specialist gains. You seem to be arguing that specialists should not exist, everyone should go for broad rather than deep. I think there's a place for both, and becoming a specialist often requires the discipline to stay focused and not pursue every interest and curiosity that rears it's distracting head.

I think there's value in a programmer knowing the whole stack, from language APIs to hardware implementations, and being able to understand the consequences of every line of code. But time is finite and someone at the beginning of their careers must make choices on where to build their expertise.

When I bought the game, the descriptions of the two version were pretty clear that db+ was the same levels as db but with more bonus levels. Maybe they've updated that since you bought.

I got db+ and was happy to see that the bonus levels progressed from symbols to letters/numbers so the last levels looked exactly like the algebra my kids will see in school. I think the game did an excellent job transitioning from the early levels that looked like many other kinds of puzzle/pattern games but evolved the symbols into more typical algebra equations in a way the kids barely notice but suddenly they're doing equations just like their math class. Very well designed IMO.

>The best course of action is probably for funny junk to get try and wring some minor concession out of Inman (that he'll inform them of any issues directly before publishing them on his website or something similarly trivial) and drop the whole thing.

Why should Inman concede anything? He's in the business of making fun of people, so why should he give funnyjunk a pass? IMO, what he should do is have their safe harbor protection invalidated because they don't conform to DMCA takedown requirements and go after them in court, but he's indicated that he wants to focus on his work. Funnyjunk should take that as the biggest gift ever and slink off.

They're taking saltwater from brackish aquifers inland, not pumping it from the sea. In terms of pumping costs, it's no different than their current sources of water that are pumping out of the Edwards aquifer or other fresh groundwater sources.

How selective is the zeolite in what it absorbs? Could this be used for water purification? That is, if you let the zeolite absorb water from an impure source, move it to a clean container and heat it to release the water, is the water potable? Even if it selectively absorbs water to remove contaminants, does the zeolite itself make the water non-potable?

Personally, I use the negative reviews much more than the positives. Especially on business reviews on Angie's List or book reviews on Amazon, I get a lot more info from the negatives. The company itself is usually able to tell me the positives. I don't let a few negatives rule out my business, but it allows me to compare more accurately between alternatives.

My wife doesn't need an excuse and I didn't offer one. I provided an explanation for this discussion lest you think we were recent immigrants or had some other cultural norm different from mainstream US. In fact, we're about as mainstream as you can get in this wonderfully diverse country, and no one I know bats an eye about us having different names. No one except PayPal and that one grumpy old Cuban* in south Florida who wanted some proof of our marital status for a rental car contract.

* and before I'm branded racist for pointing out his nationality without relevance, I'll add that he was the one who made a long case about how things were done properly in his country and how I lacked machismo for allowing this sad state of affairs. There was much wagging of fingers and clucking of tongues about this "American way". Maybe he works for PayPal now.

>share the same last name. This may make sense in the US

That counts me out. My wife was well-known professionally before we were married, so she kept her name. In my circle of friends, I know a handful of others to whom this also applies. Paypal's policy might have made sense in 1950's US, but not in the US as it is now.

I'm pretty sure their "the need may arise to take a closer look" language exists solely to cover the fact that most of their agents are so poorly trained that they don't know and can't be bothered to worry about consistent definitive answers.

>only to have 10 more drones pop back up

This only works if TPB has significantly more money than every government and commercial concern that would like to take them offline.

Sorry to see iKeePass missing from the analysis.

I've been involved in two types of usability studies. The first are academic, rigorous, well-designed experiments testing readability, visual search, or other issues in web site design. These were designed to provide statistically significant results. The second are small focus groups used to test, predominantly, GUI design elements.

This article claims the second kind of test is worthless and misleading, but I think that's ignoring obvious benefits. No, you don't get statistically significant results, but in most cases you're not aiming for some result like "85% of users prefer the blue button". More often, you want to watch a handful of people use your interface and a result like "2 out of 5 were really confused by the menu structure, so we should rethink that". That is, your useful data comes from watching the process, not recording the result.

Rigorously-designed experiments which provide the potential for statistically significant results are great and they definitely have a place. But they're not the only tool in the box.

If Pinterest was mostly music tracks instead of photos then it would be equivalent to a web-based Napster and we all know what would happen under current copyright law.

>It was part of his CIA training to be able to do that.

In the '90s, long before 9/11, I was traveling with a girlfriend. She didn't want to remove her belt with a big metal buckle so she just went through the metal detector with it on. The machine buzzed and the agent sent her through again. A female agent looked sympathetic and told her to twist her belt buckle horizontally so it wouldn't set off the machine. That was my intro to security theater.

Moral of the story is that if you're a pretty white girl, you don't need CIA training to learn security secrets from lazy guards.

This echoes a lot of the ideas from Clay Johnson's book "Information Diet: a case for conscious consumption". That book has a few good actionable ideas about how to modify your sources and methods of getting news so you get better information and learn to identify bias.

This seems like preaching to the choir. How many people who read XKCD (or BoingBoing for that matter) aren't already aware of and opposed to SOPA/PIPA? I applaud the effort and a show of solidarity in the tech community is worth something, but it would be much more effective if we could black out Hotmail and a bunch of niche cat/knitting/scrapbooking forums.

>why don't you just code a native app?

It sounds like that's exactly what they did,

They just hosted most of the code on a server. It's kind of like the "native" iOS apps that just use a webview component to display a web app. Sticking with IE6 just means you have all the hassle of a native app (like needing to make sure IE6 gets installed and stays installed on every machine) with none of the benefits.

I agree. We tend to accept lies from politicians because they "always" lie and we don't expect otherwise. But understanding that this is the practical reality at the moment doesn't mean it should be acceptable. We should push back and expect more.

Every time someone repeats the lie that lying politicians are expected and accepted, they're helping make the lie true. Stop it.

>There's a flip side to this as well: as a voter, I don't know what information my elected leaders have when making decisions.

I once had a discussion with an Air Force officer who was involved with Homeland Security planning. I made points about warrantless wiretapping and other 4th amendment violations by DHS and TSA. He just shrugged and said I would probably feel differently if I knew all the things they had prevented. I said "Absolutely, tell me. Let me make an informed decision about whether DHS should exist or not".

He just shook his head and changed the subject. So much for an informed electorate.

It's not politicians certainly, but it's often unaccountable bureaucrats stamping something classified for questionable reasons. The conventional wisdom is that nobody ever got fired for classifying data, and the administration may classify a lot of information that is simply embarrassing.

The Intellligence Squared US podcast did a nice job of covering both sides of this issue in their June 8th, 2011 podcast on freedom of the press: http://intelligencesquaredus.org/index.php/past-debates/

If technology stood still, that might work. In 20-25 years, all politicians will understand the web and email, but the same kind of politician that today is ignorant of the web will then be ignorant of technologies x, y, and z that are new and cutting edge.

You're conflating two different things (quantum computers and quantum cryptography) which just happen to share a basis in quantum effects. An attack on quantum cryptography has nothing whatsoever to do with whether a quantum computer could be used to break conventional encryption.

Having an iOS version is a lot different than being iOS based. I use Dropbox, Instapaper and Pandora on iOS, but I use the web-based version from my laptop just as often.

I think many if not most people, especially in Wired's audience, access these tools from multiple platforms. If you had a list of "essential" desktop apps or web services, would you exclude those which also had an iOS version because they weren't exclusively on your target platform?

You mean trademark. Copyright doesn't work that way and is not relevant to this issue.

I suspect that when it comes to Google, Apple's review process may be to approve anything broken and ugly and to find a reason to reject anything that works.

Great list, but not all that surprising. It's the job of science fiction to be speculative and one of the things that can make sci-fi great is when the fictional technology is plausible, fits the science we know even if we can't go there yet. If sci-fi authors are looking at science and imagining where technology will go, it's only natural that tech will catch up to fiction in a lot of cases. I'll bet you could find a lot more than ten instances in the history of sci-fi.

Really nice interface. Kudos there.

Who are your target users, people using Etsy or eBay? Are you competing with other services like those on ease of use alone? For people looking to buy things, will you provide some search across all users or are you just giving your sellers a link they can promote?

Looking on the bright side, if FB were given a very broad patent on this, it would mean that we could focus on just blocking FB's efforts and let their lawyers keep anyone else from doing it to us.

This is just another step in the privacy versus marketing arms race that started with simple things like cookies and web bugs. Those who care will block it and those who don't will become resellable data.