amitparikh

Maybe, but obviously we would need loss-less compression. And the current web standards like gzip are optimized and perfectly suited for "text-like" loss-less compression, so it seems a little pointless to apply any image-optimized loss-less compression.

Windows did it first... My Documents / My Downloads / My Movies / My Music / My Pictures. The author makes it seem like Mac's "default content folder" scheme was a novel idea.

If it has yet to be, I'm sure that an upper bound can and will be calculated. The SAM/OAM properties that are being exploited here are physical phenomenon that conform to quantum mechanics just like everything else. We're talking about photons here that have physical/dimensional properties -- therefore, there WILL be an upper bound. I agree with user:recursive that "infinite" is a bad choice of wording.

I'm very impressed with the super-computing community's commitment to energy efficiency. Sure, we could throw more cores at the computations, but making meaningful strides to minimize energy consumption -- in parallel with the iterative improvements to computational power -- is pretty noble and prudent.

hah, of course Book.com is owned by B&N. Can't wait for a FaceNook tablet.

Looks like Patrick has capped applications, so this is no longer valid.

http://twitter.com/phuesler/status/213644769367302144

And they refer to it as 'LUA', even though the About page http://www.lua.org/about.html clearly says to use the noun 'Lua' as the name of the language. First class journalism.

The yellow 'signal strength' bars under the 3 configurations -- 'Solid State Drive'.

Also, a 'solid state drive' is mentioned in the feature details under 'Turns on instantly'.

Pushing through my own cynicism here, you can't ignore the fact that there is added value to the consumer if she/he is a defensive driver. In the event of an accident, there is significantly more data for the insurance companies to use to determine fault and liability.

Some currents, like the Equatorial Counter Current (NECC) (which runs West to East just North of the equator) are actually wind-driven surface currents.

I've been programming for quite some time, and I find it fascinating how quickly I can learn, understand, and use the syntax of a new programming language.

I think there are similar mechanisms going on as compared to linguistics, particularly neurologically. Maybe all of us programmers are smarter, too, huh?

It's not quite perfect yet, but Python Tools for Visual Studio (http://pytools.codeplex.com/) is actually pretty nice. If you're used to the VS IDE, it's not a bad environment for Python development.

It's the Jon Stewart defense, except that he's not a comedian!

Every person in history who has ever said "X is unbeatable" has been eventually proven wrong.

created_at, hashtags, user_mentions, favorited, geo, id, retweet_count, retweeted, source, text, truncated.

That's just a small selection of the important elements delivered in the single tweet JSON packet. I didn't even get into the 'user' stuff, which is included so that all of the other fun things about the user can be displayed.

(Note: this is using the web interface to Twitter, which is what I'm assuming the OP was implying)

For reference, here's the Wikipedia article for the Loudness War (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war). In my opinion, hip hop producers like Timbaland and Dr. Dre really ratcheted up the effective loudness of songs by introducing heavy compression.

It's the (sad) reason why the Beatles' albums have been "re-mastered" and re-released so many times over the years -- our 21st century ears are so used to compressed music that old Beatles albums sound too quiet to us.

The pastebin post says that 'While some ISPs uses DNS caching, most are configured to use a low expire time for the cache.'

(Just re-iterating the post for Macha... I don't personally believe that the expire-times for ISP DNS cache is as short as Anonymous is making it seem -- but I don't have any numbers off-hand)

Every permission? How about the permission to access your Camera Roll (as described in this blog post)? Clearly that is NOT granted by default.

I think you're overgeneralizing...

I agree with some parts of your argument, but I really think that there is just too much content out there to consume. If you had "raw feeds of actual video, with absolutely minimal editing," I think you'll find yourself overwhelmed with information.

The job of the newspaper editor is to condense the material down, and like you say, correlate and aggregate it to form a narrative that is easier to consume. Sure, I'll concede that the majority of news editors choose to showcase worthless information -- particularly on television -- but you have to understand that it's a capitalist economic model and the newspapers are only delivering what the consumer wants.

"1st generation" reporting to me means a journalist who goes out and gets the interviews and video feeds. Do you think there were pre-existing "raw video feeds" out there for the Enron executives, the survivors of the Japan earthquake, etc.? "1st generation" reporting comprises the effort it takes a good journalist to identify which parts of the story need telling and going out and getting them. Yes, there is inevitable bias -- but we have to be able to take it with a grain of salt and make up our own mind based on potentially multiple narratives of the same story.

(Also, just to touch on this... I think you're underestimating the value of the news agencies. They provide resources to make quality reporting a viable economic model. In addition, they provide a name behind which the journalists' sources can trust. Would 'Deep Throat' have divulged his knowledge to Bernstein and Woodward if they had not been reporting for the Washington Post? Obviously, we'll never know the answer to that question, but I personally believe it's an important consideration for any potential source.)

David Simon, the co-creator of HBO's The Wire and former Baltimore Sun crime reporter, speaks eloquently during a PBS interview by Bill Moyers on the demise of print journalism over the past 20 years and the loss of "1st generation reporting". (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JeNc5y7lpYA&t=8m10s)

It's certainly uplifting to see that online journalism has something of a light at the end of the tunnel. It's just my personal experience, but I find the shift towards "long-reads," particularly by The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and other similar publications, to be a great boon to the people of the world. Is it so hyperbolic to say that "1st generation" journalism is as important to society as democratic government? I don't think so.

Either way, I'm glad that Salon has published this data to show that there is another way (a better way?). If you look at all the lemmings that simply followed the "quick-hits" journalism that Kerry Lauerman is talking about in this blog post, no one 5 years ago had the guts to turn the model upside down. I'm very glad and grateful that we are making progress to getting to a point where "1st generation" journalism can be found -- and will be sought after -- in online media.

Yup. I was just pointing out the misuse of the terminology. Specialized computers certainly are, as you say, just general-purpose computers with restrictive software. But calling all of the restrictive software 'spyware' or 'malware' is unfair to a multitude of devices that are intended to operate in a specialized way. I think it's scare-tactics and a failure of the author to generalize all restrictive software as 'spyware' or 'malware'

The article raises some interesting points, but I think the author makes a major error by misusing the terms 'spyware' and 'malware' multiple times throughout.

The term 'spyware', in particular, has a well-defined meaning which indicates that the malicious software is communicating data back to the creator in order to exploit the user unknowingly. The author of this article uses the term to refer to non-general-purpose computers, and I think that's exceptionally misleading. The iPad could be considered a non-general-purpose computer, but most people would not go around labeling it as coming pre-loaded with 'spyware'.

Because reddit sometimes does show real ads in that space. And I think this feature was designed with 'fun' in mind -- it's lighthearted!

References: http://blog.reddit.com/2010/10/fun-in-sidebar.html and http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/dqse4/fun_in_the_sideb...

This is a pretty cool demonstration, but it should go without saying that all computers are built, fundamentally, to be "functionally complete." (http://www.cs.umd.edu/class/sum2003/cmsc311/Notes/Comb/comp....)

The NAND and NOR functions, independently, are the most well-known functionally complete sets -- that is, all Boolean logic can be derived from each of those single Boolean functions.

I think the point here is that Lego is fondly remembered as -- and maybe even should be -- a gender-neutral toy. There was never anything inherently male or female about Legos. In fact, I remember playing with my younger sister often -- I'd be building a spaceship on one side, and she'd be putting together a house on the other.

The problem is that Lego has gotten away from being a gender-neutral toy and is now marketed specifically to boys. And the travesty is, they've dug themselves such a deep hole that the only way to get back any female users is to pander to their lowest common denominator.

I hope they have tested this new design with some of the old "Gmail Labs" modules. I've been using the "Right-Side Chat" Labs module for a long time, and so far, using the Preview Theme, resizing my browser window sometimes causes me to lose my chat box.

If you know that the input data is ASCII-encoded (or Unicode-encoded and capable of being ASCII-encoded), then using Python's cStringIO package (http://docs.python.org/library/stringio.html) is preferential for the significant speed boost.

Oh c'mon, now you're just submitting links blindly -- that's definitely not an official Amazon offering. That list is generated & curated by Amazon user "fargowifeandmom" and was last updated at the beginning of this year.

Bulls make money, Bears make money. It's the pigs that get slaughtered.

No, you picked an outlier. OP pointed out a trend -- 8/10 of the top "Movers and Shakers" are bats/batons. That is significant.