v21

What dangerous materials? They checked the apartment and did not find significant levels of radiation.

I'm not sure that's as pertinent a question as "do patents stop your ideas from being ripped off?" And as it currently stands, I think the answer to that is no. But I also see companies innovating like mad. Maybe the pace would be even faster with better protections, but I am sceptical.

There's not many games released for Linux, so when they are released, people get very excited.

And once you're in jail...

> With just 5 percent of the world’s population, the US currently holds 25 percent of the world's prisoners. In 2008, over 2.3 million Americans were in prison or jail, with one of every 48 working-age men behind bars

> Prior to the 1970s, private corporations were prohibited from using prison labor as a result of the chain gang and convict leasing scandals. But in 1979, Congress began a process of deregulation to restore private sector involvement in prison industries to its former status, provided certain conditions of the labor market were met. Over the last 30 years, at least 37 states have enacted laws permitting the use of convict labor by private enterprise, with an average pay of $0.93 to $4.73 per day.

> Subsequently, the nation's prison industry – prison labor programs producing goods or services sold to other government agencies or to the private sector -- now employs more people than any Fortune 500 company (besides General Motors), and generates about $2.4 billion in revenue annually.

http://www.alternet.org/world/151732/21st-century_slaves%3A_...

If you don't have friends to talk to and to listen to on a social media service, don't be on that social media service.

I'm an indie game designer, and I find this is by no means an uncommon view among game designers.

Tokenism indeed. I'm hoping similar fishy stories emerge from the Sun - but not that it'll close even if the exact same stuff happened there. To lose one red-top looks like misfortune, to lose two looks like carelessness.

Yeah, the Telegraph have been going great guns recently. But the Guardian have been hammering away at this for yonks.

(I am reminded of the expenses scandal - The Guardian had a journalist who was petitioning the government to release the expense data for years, but didn't get anywhere except repeated trips to the courtroom. Then the Telegraph gets copies leaked from within the expenses office. It's a dirty world out there...)

Competition sure can be a wonderful thing, when it happens.

I use Chrome, and this is the first time I have been ignorant of what version number my browser is on. So yes, most users don't know or care. But now, even techy users don't know or care. It really is a step change.

You might be right: http://sunday.co.uk

Why, yes it is. But less important to them than losing the BSkyB merger. Or, it would seem, Rebekah Brooks.

And the paper was largely finished by this point. No advertisers, no readers, an utterly tarnished brand...

But yes, the Beeb has just reported that employees will be placed at other titles within NI. But I would be surprised if they didn't still lose some headcount. After all, most newspapers have been trying to shed employees the last few years. The announcement that they were going to merge some functions between The Sun and the News Of The World was largely motivated by that.

Not sure - it may indeed not have been them. But it may have been done for reasons of plausible deniability, or by a different set of people than normally handle DNS stuff, or it was just a canny domain-squatter.

(was also registered with 123-reg, for the record)

Also, it would be The Sun On Sunday, not the Sunday Sun, as that already exists: http://www.sundaysun.co.uk/

Some (unknown) person registered the domains thesunonsunday.co.uk and thesunonsunday.com a few days ago. ( http://webwhois.nic.uk/cgi-bin/whois.cgi?query=thesunonsunda... )

And a few weeks ago Rebekah Brooks announced that editorial roles would be merged between the Sun and the News of the World. ( http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/greenslade/2011/jun/28/newsi... )

So I think Ken Clarke said it when he said: "All they're going to do is rebrand it." ( http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-14070856 )

I'm not sure the usual analogy between household and nation's spending is useful. Countries work in fundamentally different ways from people.

That's the best web demo I've ever seen. I'm a jaded person, but I clicked on all the things and did all the stuff and felt pride at using their (impressively easy) interface. Serious unexpected design chops from Google!

The difference between things that came true, and things that are still as far off as ever seems to come down to how much energy they take to do, and (which is much the same) whether the advance depends on Moore's law or not.

Tiny computers that auto-translate - not much energy, just raw computing power

Jetpacks - lots of energy, applied in a big dumb way.

Not necessarily: the Gömböc-shape could be a envelope of similar shapes. Any object within that envelope is a Gömböc, and ones just outside it are "almost Gömböcs"

But on the other hand, I can do it (I think) quicker than entering a PIN code, and without looking at my phone. Always a tradeoff...

The thing is, the blog format is a pretty lightweight format. It works for a large variety of purposes. More to the point, it works well as a searchable archive of essays. I agree that a ordering that de-emphasized time would be preferable, but it would either be replaced with wiki-walking or cumbersome index pages (and how would those be sorted? Recency is still a good ordering there.)

I'm not suggesting that you offer management tools, but an addition to your API that allows for specifying multiple recipients for a single message would probably be quite popular. It would also reduce your server load, as you would receive far fewer requests. Of course, this complicates sending back the status of the message, and with large volumes you probably have carrier-side rate limiting, so it would probably be asynchronous. Many sighs. But probably worth building at some point, for those that don't want to use SMPP.

As far as text encoding - it's a hideous world, and I'm glad to forget the details. But you should probably give a link on your documentation to the GSM03.38 character set, and specify what happens if you include something that isn't on it, for a start. And maybe provide optional support for non-GSM03.38 encodings.

I wish there was a name for this law. It runs something like this:

If there is a reasonable proxy measure for a desirable behaviour, and you reward the reasonable proxy measure, it ceases to be a reasonable proxy measure.

"Long-term"? The ones rioting in the Parisian banlieues were typically second or third generation (if they were not native). And those riots were caused by a lack of opportunity, not a bleeding dry of the state.

And I live in the UK, and could read anti-immigrant rhetoric in the papers every day. So I'd disagree with your "unpopular idea", more's the pity. For example: http://www.mailwatch.co.uk/tag/immigration/ Popular points of views, widely claimed, and yet I would not call them serious people. But I do think they deserve shame.

And when I search for UK connections, that cheap quoted price is via Manx Telecom, not direct-to-carrier (which is, as they say, more reliable). I'd assume their inbound VMNs are, too (which means some networks would get hit with International rates).

There's other complications that they don't seem to handle that well (Text encoding! Bulk sending!). But they may have some luck - their website is easy on the eye, their APIs look sane, and the pricing isn't so bad.

I agree. Watching this, I start thinking of all the exciting shit I could do with it. But I'm not a company with a contract with Ninty. So i won't. Hopefully the protocol is easy enough to decipher, and I can start using it as a remote control for the PC hooked up to my TV.

Hm. I don't know that this is a defense either - but this design decision was at least made deliberately, with awareness of the trade-offs involved.

" The find bar is presented as an overlay in order to prevent page relayout when the bar is shown or hidden. If the text the user is looking for is under the bar, it will scroll the page, or slide out of the way."

http://www.chromium.org/user-experience/find-in-page

There seems to be a consistent, understandable aversion to pop up windows within Chrome. Excepting the Downloads bar, there also seems to be an aversion to shrinking the display area of the screen. Putting the Find in Page UI overlaying the site causes the browser to show more of the page than if it shifted the page down, something that is clearly a high priority for them (see the Status bar for an example).

Every design involves compromise. I think I prefer the way Chrome went on this one.

Well, these folks at Google have been working on something along those lines...

Where did he call them unbiased? (I would call them reliable, though they certainly have an agenda. But they've always struck me as working hard to present facts, or at least label opinion as such. Certainly I can't think of another site about drugs that I would trust over Erowid. And I would be very interested indeed to hear of deliberately misleading information posted there.)

Fuck, I cried at work, just as a son who loves his father.

The best example I can think for online, executable wikis is http://scraperwiki.com - it allows you to create web scrapers, then periodically runs the scrapers and offers up the data in a nicer feed. As it's a wiki, anyone can reuse the scraper, or fix it when the structure of the page changes and the scraper breaks.

But it doesn't follow the example of literate programming, I guess largely because the code is generally boring, and written to quickly solve a problem, not primarily to act as an exemplar.