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This is essentially how Magnatune works. You pay $15 per month, can download and stream any amount of music from the Magnatune catalog and 50% of your monthly fee gets paid to artists in proportion to how much of their music you downloaded and streamed.

One issue with just using a public key everywhere is that the most common public key authentication protocols result in some degree of non-repudiability. This is desirable for signing in to a bank but not for potentially embarrassing sites. I guess the cryptographic community might already have an answer to this, though.

About the Finnish system, you can find an example of the tax return form here:

http://www.vero.fi/download/noname/{302EA05D-2530-4021-8931-...

And instructions here:

http://www.vero.fi/en-US/Precise_information/Forms/Tax_retur...

As an actual example, in the GitHub penis incident, HN seemed mostly supportive of the target:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2601342

In Finland, your income tax rate only depends on your total yearly income. If you estimate your income too low and too much money gets withheld, it will be returned to you the next year. You can also adjust your estimate at any point during the year.

Firefox now comes with a console, DOM inspector and JavaScript debugger out of the box.

Try Sony Xperia U. I have the previous model Xperia ray and have been very happy with it. Great display (3.3 inch widescreen high-DPI), great camera, okay processor, would prefer more memory. It's so small that just about everyone mistakes it for a feature phone.

The Book Depository is owned by Amazon too :)

AbeBooks is actually owned by Amazon now.

Hyperbole, true, but it's equally silly to say that things just fine because it's the same situation in China and Korea. Why not compare to Japan where work permits are not tied to an employer and if you lose your job you generally have at least 3 months to look for a new one? Or many European countries with similar or better terms?

Some metro and train stations have those in Japan too, though they are still somewhat rare sight.

Raw TCP was considered for WebSockets, however briefly. Due to security reasons, WebSocket was designed so that it's impossible for a WebSocket client to spoof any existing protocol.

I would argue that things are actually swinging to the opposite direction right now. WebGL is very close to OpenGL ES 2.0, Web Audio API includes low level features, WebRTC 1.0 is slated to include datagram channels... Recent standards efforts are striking pretty good balance of flexibility, interoperability and security, IMHO.

Pure speculation: maybe these apps are actually ebooks or some other kind of static content just packaged as an app and they are generated by an automatic or a semi-automatic process. Assuming that the article is correct, of course.

I frequent a couple of niche forums where the rule is that you have to write an introductory post of at least X sentences (or come up with original witty answers to a list of questions etc.) before you are allowed to post anything else. All introductions are read by admins or volunteers and approved if as long as they seem written by a human. No spammers and very few trolls.

This sounds interesting. What Xerox document are you referring to and what is the most relevant part?

This also applies to Freshness Burger and Kua'Aina. I don't understand how the Japanese can pull it off but Americans and Finns can't.

Good advice here. I would like to add two things:

When Apple demoes desktop applications, they have multiple computers linked to a keyboard-mouse-monitor switch. If the demo fails on one computer, the presenter can quickly switch to a fresh system. IIRC there some videos that show Jobs doing just this.

If you can't afford redundant systems or it would be unelegant to have them around, make sure to make a video or a bunch of screenshots of the planned demo. One of the most fluid "demos" I have ever seen was just a sequence of screenshots. Because the presenter was pointing out things on the screen and clicking on where he would actually have to click to make the next action happen, it somehow felt more like a demo than a slideshow.

I once heard a lecture by Joe Haldeman, an author who was a close friend of a Heinlein. IIRC, he said that Heinlein liked to play by taking ideas to their logical extremes and much of what he wrote should be taken as "a modest proposal" instead of perfectly reflective of his personal beliefs.

Maybe something like this:

https://vimeo.com/8569187

A less cynical version:

https://vimeo.com/14294054

I'm a big fan of the model of teamwork where everyone is welcome to offer their opinion on and spend a bit of time thinking about and working on any aspect of the product, but there are fairly clearly defined responsibilities regarding who has the final say on what goes to the final product. Or to put it other way, everyone is involved in everything, but each thing has only one person responsible for it.

"The pixels you buy will be displayed on the homepage permanently. The homepage will not change."

Google could also stop releasing new versions of Android as code drops. Sony is trying to do the right thing and update a large part of their inventory but their ICS ROMs are currently still in beta because they only got access to ICS source in November.

http://developer.sonymobile.com/wp/2011/12/07/ice-cream-sand...

Except that Mobile Safari still crashes if you have a proxy server enabled and try to open a WebSocket:

https://github.com/LearnBoost/socket.io/issues/193

Pretty annoying.

There is also WebCL, an effort underway to put OpenCL in the browser, and River Trail, an experiment to execute subset of JavaScript using OpenCL as a backend. I don't know how difficult it is to write a CPU compute device driver, so I don't know if WebCL will become a viable general stategy for multicore execution in a browser though.

UDP will be coming as a part of the WebRTC effort. The current spec draft and prototypes don't include arbitary data channels, but they are currently being specced on the mailing list.

If you are willing to go smaller than iPhone, consider Sony Ericsson Xperia ray. It doesn't seem too exciting looking at the specs, but so far there have been quite a few pleasant surprises (camera, overall snappiness, solid construction) and not too much suckitude (unremovable Facebook and SE bloatware, lack of polish compared to iOS in places).

To my knowledge, IndexedDB is specifically intended as a low-level B-tree API that most developers will access via a high-level library of some sort [1].

[1] http://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/06/beyond-html5-database-apis-...

The Impact graph on the Stats & Graphs page gives a quick summary of recent major contributors to a repository. However, if you want to gauge the total contribution of a person across all projects, you have to check the impact graphs individually for each repository. Still no search for commits, it seems.

This is already happening, though unintentionally and in the other direction. A recent study found a correlation between time spent playing computer and console games and good English grades among Finnish high school kids. The effect is surprisingly large: the grades of students who play more than 15 hours a week are on average 1.5 points higher on a six-point scale than those of students who don't play at all.

On an anecdotal level, I can attest that some of the first English words my brothers learned were "load" and "save", for obvious reasons.

http://yle.fi/uutiset/kotimaa/2011/11/pojat_kiilaavat_tyttoj...

Mobile and online casual games have been pulling in very impressive profits for the last 3-4 years while many companies have seen console and PC retail profits decrease in the same period. The demand for hardcore games isn't being threatened but the supply might face harder competition for funds with casual games now.

"Might" as in I don't know how these AAA game publishers are organised internally. If the console division of Capcom sees decreased profits while the mobile division sees increased profits [1], does that mean that people and capital can get reallocated from the console division to the mobile division?

[1] http://www.joystiq.com/2011/10/26/non-mobile-capcom-profits-...