towelrod

I live in Hong Kong, and the people I know get paid roughly what they would get paid in the US. Most goods and services cost roughly the same as they do in the US as well. Some things are cheaper (taxis) and others are more expensive (imported beer).

There are a lot of people working for way less than what they would get in the US though -- domestic helpers are a prime example.

>Telecom, as an industry, is still the #1 or #2 source of political donations.

Its not even in the top 30.

http://www.opensecrets.org/industries/mems.php

In this particular application, I have to inspect PDF and TIFF files that might have hundreds of pages or frames. These files can be over 100MB easily. Running those through RMagick makes the process blow up to enormous sizes. Even if the memory gets garbage collected, Solaris doesn't really release it.

Its just safer to keep it in a different process.

Buying an i7-950 right now is also a terrible idea, since the Sandy Bridge i5s are faster and cheaper:

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/100?vs=288

No, its not. I just installed Skype yesterday, and the installer doesn't even mention the plugin. It just installs it.

I immediately disabled it because it has caused problems for me in the past.

The installer does ask if you want to install the Chrome toolbar.

I use RMagick for a rails based image repository, and I have to shell out to run the RMagick code because of memory problems. When I used to keep it all in the rails process, those guys would get up to the 2-3G range over the course of a couple of days.

I'll have to check out minimagick, it might be cleaner than what I am doing now.

Not only that, but he's stripping out the two things that would actually drive traffic back to twitter.com: #hashtags and @names.

I can see why Twitter might want to slow this one down.

Money quote, at about 15:20:

"The very attributes of Ruby that I find distasteful are what give rise to all the wonderful software that the Python world can never have. And vice versa -- the very thing that makes Python aesthetically pleasing to me is exactly what leads to not being able to do any of this cool stuff. Ever."

This is after complaining about how complicated Ruby syntax is, but then showing how RSpec uses that malleable syntax to make what he considers to be beautiful code.

He didn't control for parental education, he controlled for recent immigration status.

No, he already said that Liberals like to say that public schools are bad so the government can spend more money on them.

He has a strawman argument for conservatives, too.

>Which media outlets are those? Suggesting that outside of the context of an Op-Ed would be pretty unethical, but I haven't see that and I haven't read it anywhere.

For example, http://www.slate.com/id/2261780/

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-10781413

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07...

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/27/opinion/27exum.html

> First, the possibility that the logs contain more evidence of Manning's or Assange's guilt

You seem to think its ok for Poulsen to hide the logs if doing so would make Manning look better, or if it would somehow make for a fairer trial. But Greenwald isn't arguing that Poulsen is just making Manning look bad.

Greenwald's Wired critique is based on the idea that journalism is about discovering truth. Poulsen is hiding that truth, whatever it is -- that's what makes it inexcusable.

Unless they went out of business while trying to perfect the code instead of releasing any kind of product.

Most people don't care about things like this at all. Look at how many of them happily use Facebook. If Apple put in a warning screen that said, "Angry Birds is requesting the following information: your location, your contact list, and your phone number. Is that ok?", then I would bet at least 90% of the users would just click "sure, no problem".

We are losing this battle because very few people care about privacy any more.

You guys are right, no one should ever write a book. About anything, ever.

I find it very hard to take this article seriously, since there are constant interruption with things like "Work your entire body in 15 minutes with these three moves for fast muscle" and "Tied to the treadmill? Try these seven ways to burn more fat on the belt".

It reminds me very much of an old SNL skit with Jerry Seinfeld about "news-at-11" style reporting. I can't find a better link than this one:

http://snltranscripts.jt.org/99/99anewswatch.phtml

But the whole thing is filled with quotes like "Connor, it's no bark and all bite for golden retrievers and other so-called family dogs. What's causing these sweet and furry creatures to viciously attack sleeping toddlers? Stay, and we'll tell you in a minute.".

I'm confused. How did tagged get his contact list? If he's dumb enough to enter his username and password from gmail or whatever into some spam of the week website, then its his fault.

Or does tagged get that information some other way, like a partnership with yahoo or something?