_broody

The endless attention-whoring and KIRF posturing invading my newsfeed constantly is why I gave up on social media. I'm much more at ease without it.

Most of these WTF examples basically boil down to JS doing type coercion willy-nilly. This 'feature' makes writing conditionals slightly shorter, in exchange for introducing the possibility of massive bugs everywhere in your code at any moment. Seriously, f* JS type coercion.

The other misfeature I hate is that accessing undefined properties doesn't raise an error (then, but you can be sure it will make your program blow up a bit later).

Typescript helps to solve both.

Yes, that was an absolute fiasco, but it's more of a problem with Head-Fi banning anyone who criticizes their sponsors because they make their money off of nurturing massive audiophile cargo cults.

Schiit products are battle-tested, high quality and high-value. You can tell the company is run by people who care about what they do.

I definitely like Ubuntu's font rendering engine better than either Windows or OSX's. The one used by other Distros though (FreeType) is like a way inferior version of MS ClearType.

One thing that definitely kills the Linux experience for most people is that they buy a new laptop model and then complain about Linux not supporting their hardware. In fact, the latest Linux kernel image will generally be pretty awesome about hardware support, but most Linux distros ship with an older kernel version.

Your argument is basically "It's not exactly like California". In general, in Latin America, internet access is slower but like all sevices, a lot cheaper than the US, and phone carriers still can afford to offer unlimited 3G plans so people use that instead of wifi. Spanish as a native language isn't a disadvantage -basically every single developer or indeed any techie in the world knows english anyways.

Wow. I just read that article yesterday while browsing for some critiques of The Hobbit Part 3: Alfrid's Quest[sic], and I was nodding furiously all the way through. Brilliant, brilliant framing of the state of Hollywood.

I was ensnared by franchise hype for the last couple of years, and seeing this film was the turning point for me to stop and reflect that not one of the dozen+ franchise movies I saw at the theater in this time managed to remotely live up to my expectations.

I believe all is not lost, though. Other industries have shown the public eventually fatigues from such exhaustive, quality-less milking. Personally I've had my fill of being duped with franchise marketing, and next time I start thinking of wasting my money on one more of these ridiculous plot-less, CGI-bloated rehashes, I'll look for a decent original movie to wash the temptation off.

I agree. Social campaigning will be much more effective than prohibition, that's what we do for legal drugs which also are devastating for addicts.

Prohibition does absolutely nothing to control drug demand. It makes the supply swell until it overruns law enforcement's efforts to stem it. It makes hard drugs with stronger effects for a small dose more profitable for smugglers, because they're easier to ship. And as American alcohol Prohibitionism showed in the 20s, it makes drugs more popular among the underaged.

Oil is only going to fall long enough for Saudi Arabia and the US to bankrupt Russia, though (and they're pretty far along into it already).

I don't know the details myself, but it is a position shared by U.S. officials that Saudis are Al Qaeda's prime backers, though not stated officially (it was exposed by Bradley Manning's embassy cable leaks):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saudi_Arabia%E2%80%93United_Sta...

Similarly, it is known that Saudis are the prime backers behind Hamas. Most of their money comes from religious "charities":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamas#Funding

Radical Islam will always go on doing its thing, as long as it has gas to burn. Curiously, the entire West is unwilling to go after the people pulling the strings of radical movements - those who give them money, holed up in so-called 'allies' of the West - Saudi Arabia, Qatar and more.

We will go on for decades killing grunts of Radical Islam, all while they take the lives of countless innocents, and not be one inch closer to ending with it. If we had put the sheiks and Imams funding Al Qaeda/ISIS/Hamas/Boko Haram/etc. in prison and frozen their assets, those movements would have died off years ago.

That's nothing laugh-worthy. Audio equipment faces massive diminishing returns. If you're looking for midrange sound you might as well pay attention to the people recommending sub-$50 headphones as to the ones talking of $150. For instance, the $30 Panasonic HTF600s is better-sounding than the $160 ATH-M50x frequently recommended as an entry-level audiophile headset. As for studio-quality headphones, chinese Superlux/Takstar models are as good as the $200-300 range.

It's more like everyone knows Sievers is under Poettering's umbrella ever since the 'debug' kernel flag debacle wherein Kay was banned from contributing to the kernel, and then instead of addressing the issue himself, Poettering came out and made that infamous "the kernel is just an implementation detail" blog post to defend him... https://plus.google.com/+LennartPoetteringTheOneAndOnly/post...

Honestly, I can understand why people are uneasy about this. "Yes, tight coupling is being introduced in many core Linux projects, but don't worry -it's only these shiny NEW features you don't have anywhere else!"

Sounds eerily like "Embrace Extend Extinguish" redux.

Don't get me wrong, I am aware systemd is a technically superior solution. But politically, it is a trainwreck.

Pretty much. I never close Firefox on my laptop, and haven't seen any performance degradation for over a year now.

Chrome on the other side, starts degrading my entire system's performance forcing it to hit swap memory the second the string of tabs on my top bar threatens to stretch across the screen. No need to wait for 'months of use without closing'...

It's a lot easier to stay focused on physical jobs, if only because they keep your blood flowing.

In contrast, office employees chug a lot of stimulants every day (coffee) and still manage to spend the afternoon fighting off drowsiness.

> Measured health outcomes did not go up, only self reported health did. Further, the increase in self reported health was present even before people had a chance to go to the doctor.

That's BS, that report only presents no change in points on some physical health metrics which are dependent on lifestyle and not medical attention anyways.

> If you think the data changed between 2008 and the next AHS survey, feel free to prove it.

Sure, have a go at it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_housing_bubble

It's clearly disingenuous to claim that the housing situation today is represented by a report concluded before the crisis where everyone lost their homes and/or jobs.

No, I don't get what yummyfajitas is getting from his own sources. The Oregon experiment article he linked to stated, verbatim, that 25% more people reported themselves healthier thanks to increased health coverage, and 10% better mental health. Yet he is using this link to claim better health insurance does nothing for poor people.

Also, using a pre-2008 crisis census report to argue that everything is fine today is extremely intellectually disingenuous. It's almost like he's openly trolling.

That's actually going to be ridiculously complicated. I doubt we will see such a reversal of the status quo happen in our lifetime.

That's just textbook Poe's Law at work.

It doesn't matter what Soma 'is'. As someone responded below, maybe it's religion. Maybe it's smartphones with endless social notifications. Maybe it's Farmville and similar internet addiction patterns. Sure, pot addiction might get you there too. It doesn't have to be just one thing, as long as it leads you to becoming a complacent, passive pawn unwilling to think past immediate gratification.

Asians have a very high carb tolerance from having lived with a high-carb diet for thousands of years. Comparing your diet to an asian's is definitely not a good way to determine whether it will be healthy for you.

The matter is not just about one couple engaging in 'stupid' economically self-destructive behavior.

The question is why is the issue so widespread? Why are these RTB businesses making such a killing exploiting a behavior that has become increasingly massive in the 7 years since the recession started? What is so screwed up in American society that the lower class families which should be saving up and making careful purchasing decisions to improve their lot in life, are instead throwing themselves at the wolves' mouths?

It was twice as expensive at launch, though. I suspect the new Dell model will follow suit.

When was the last time you used a Windows PC? Windows 8 boots and shows you the login screen in under 10 seconds.

Older iphones were recently rated by Consumer Report to be about twice as resistant to bending from pressure and might well have endured this with ease. Also, the gorilla glass screen may have been less scratch resistant (though more than good enough), but it is less prone to shattering too.

So once people may have fixed certain expectations about the durability of an iPhone. But those will have to be revised with the new models.

Still, the CR test doesn't properly reproduce either situation. Pressing the 6+ in the middle doesn't let you draw conclusions about how it will behave when pressed in the weak point under the camera or when placed inside skinny jeans' pockets.

Also, that test indeed shows the newer phones are structurally weaker than the 5, at any rate. The iPhone 6 can barely sustain half the pressure as the previous model...

Not sure the guy who bent the 6+ with his thumbs on that video was able to put 90+ lbs of force in them, but it has been noted that there is a very specific point of structural weakness just under the camera that allowed the phones to be bent this way. You can get very different figures depending on where you apply pressure.

Sadly, you're right. For all the talk of their impact, start-ups can't disrupt society worth a damn, except possibly to create more and more conduits for the vapidity of bored consumers.

Not sure why you're being downvoted. The NSA & Co. are technically subject to the rule of law, but mostly all three powers of the state choose to turn a blind eye to their policing violating the Constitution.

This is the default state of affairs, and it only changes when there is strong public outrage and pressure for the government to do their damn job of watching over the watchmen. Which is seriously screwed up.

Does Gruber's license hold any weight here?

They're not using his perl code. They aren't bound by any license on it. There was never even a markdown spec to license, just a blog post (and Gruber knows he can't claim any binding license over this spec, because he's not complaining about that, but just the name).

Gruber had an implicit trademark on the name Markdown, but holding a trademark requires that a) you actively exploit it and b) protect it. As for a), he completely abandoned Markdown in 2007, never going anywhere with it after a few years of bad stewardship. And regarding b), since he allowed other implementations of the spec to pop up and use the name 'Markdown' liberally before this one, it has become a common item and no one really has any claim over it.

For all the chest beating, Gruber has no business telling anyone what they can do with Markdown anymore, unless they're directly using Markdown.pl or taking code from it. Which no one is going to do ever again, specially not after this project sails away.