delackner

Im no lawyer, but an API is the most creative part of an entire developer ecosystem to my mind. not the implementation. What made Cocoa so joyful to work with while years of previous Java and MS coding were dissonant painful experiences? All of them manage to get a button on the screen, respond to user input, etc. The naming and organization of different features in a clear and developer friendly way is entirely the API spec.

Whether you should be able to protect such a creation from copying is an issue for society to choose. So far it has chosen poorly.

This could be a coping strategy actually. Yahoo japan is notorious for throwing up overlays on their web properties that if accidentally tapped, force your default search engine to yahoo. How do you get back to google if you have no idea where to fix this? just type google. first result.

That quote at the end from Kagan is just utterly damning. It sounds like a magistrate ordering the burning of a witch for the seeming similarity, from an observer's perspective, of a telephone and magic.

Oh man i hope you manage to continue this bold and positive direction in moderation! At times it seems I have to wade through an entire thread just to see one or two comments about the content and not about something vaguely related.

Worse, the constant reinforcement of this sense that comment threads will be full of random unrelated diatribes leads more people to post their own such comments. It is incredibly hard to take a stand against them because they are often well spoken and interesting in their own right.

Thank you for highlighting a difficult point! The most instructive item for me was seeing a comparison of video of Bush in his run for the Texas governorship, showing his sharp mind. In such context though, the dissonance. erwee. his stated political objectives and his true violent objectives is disheartening.

This is really weird, but the / on the end of the link breaks it.

http://www.theverge.com/2014/4/14/5561250/cool-planet

I wasn't sure which article to submit, since this was on gimodo, popular science, and various other places, but this (albeit behind a paywall) is the original journal article.

I understand your suggestion and your point is well meaning, but you are saying no one should ever write downfor others to read, their own experiences or impressions, of things they have seen. In your original comment and this reply you repeatedly use the word "race" or "racial" but the article is about a culture and the comment you are so against is someone commenting on their experience living in that culture. would you have all stories about a particular place be written only by its inhabitants? i think you would find there are precious few, because we do not and cannot see the culturally unique attitudes and behaviors that so differeniate where we are raised from all other places, precisely because everything seems just so mundane and normal with no frame of outside reference.

If we all shy away from discussing the interesting and unique different perspectives of different cultural and social norms and objectives, we lose the opportunity to be inspired by one another.

I really dont care if someone later in the future discovers that i said i had an impression of something i saw in a society, and i dont think people need to be shielded from hearing what outsiders think of their society.

As for your suggestion that i have probably not been on the receiving end of such observations, as a non-japanese living in a country that has almost no foreigners percentage-wise, yes, i am aware of what it is like to be on the receiving end of blanket generalizations about "americans" "foreigners" "californians" and other groups, usually by people who have never travelled more than a few km by train from their home town. That kind of empty and idiotic thinking has nothing whatsoever to do with someone simply describing what they have seen with their own personal experience in a foreign land.

Total disagreement with your premise. Having experienced a place and a culture, it is perfectly reasonable to gain a sense of the uniquely different cultural attitudes and priorities that are prevalent in a society. Trying to relate such impressions to someone who has not been seeing for ten years with the same eyes, inevitably we choose anecdotal stories to illustrate the broad impression it conveys, not just to say 'this one time i saw something and this is my whole dataset'.

It takes some effort to recover quality standards after an entire country's industry and economy have been reduced to burning rubble.

well said and i completely agree. That said, the story of the hamburger maker is instructive. While it is true that many people in Japan practically lose their minds with the stress of contemplating perfection or failing to achieve perfection, this is the negative aspect of the mindset. The positive version, the version that drove that hamburger guy to success, is that anything you put your mind to doing, you should do with the intention of aiming for perfection. that may require years of practice and iterative improvement, but ANY task you decide to do is not worth doing half assed. I have seen people working in fast food serving water the best way it possibly could be done. They were not being paid extra for it, there is no tipping. It just reflects an inner pride of excellence.

That said, I think many people or even most of society misses that angle, and get cought up in the stressful negative side of perfection, leading to various horrible outcomes.

Sorry, I'm a developer and tapped that API link and the first docs page said not one word that stood out about the main questions I wanted answered: what exactly are you doing and what is the latency.

They sell Stevia powder packets that look just like sugar packets, albeit much finer powder.

Rarely have I seen a single article that more concisely summed up the total failure of the media to inform the public. The real story is the colossal decades-long failure of California state and city governments AND CITIZENS to produce a coherent policy for housing and transportation. There is a long and very deep story there, but you won't read much about it because it is complex.

How we treat minority groups is important in part because they are so easily ignored. There are real people around the world who yes, have reliable fast internet (something much more common outside the US) and yet are denied legal access to the media they would happily pay for. Now, you can suggest that they should just not consume content that is not available to them, but that is like saying just don't participate in modern society.

Fair enough, but when i lived there, every single person i knew had a car and real estate in SF is so astronomically expensive that none of my friends, all of them highly paid, live IN the city. So living in SF but never getting in a car doesnt seem realistic unless you dont mind never visiting your friends. I suppose that makes SF liveable without a car

In general yes, but as a someone who that fits that story arc, I find the dichotomy of insanely overpriced tiny city vs desolate parking lot, well, lousy. I love the idea of what apple is building but there is still no walkable / bicycle friendly place to live in the bay area. In central Tokyo i can cycle to work in less than 15 minutes or walk in 40. Or take one of the many many buses or trains departing every 2-4 minutes. Does that quality of city planning exist anywhere in the US? I have not seen it.

This is exactly how I have been sitting this week, on a sofa actually, since my chair was getting too uncomfortable, and now my neck feels alarmingly stiff.

CEO loved the idea of getting a patent because he thought it would make us look impressive and it would defend us in advance if someone else made a similar thing and tried to attack us with their own BS patent.

Makes me sad when i consider the comparison with my grandfather's multiple rounds of back and forth with the PTO fighting to finally get a patent on a mechanical device. Comparitively yes, they rubber stamp software patents because they clearly dont understand the art. They kind of understand more traditional (aka real) inventions.

As holder of a US patent on a purely software "invention" (aka, some game I wrote) I can categorically state that the only way it could have been granted was that it was rubber stamped because it is just a lot of talk about the algorithms I wrote, executed on a portable game system.

It also doesn't work with pure ATM cards that lack a Visa/Mastercard logo. Maybe I am a bit over-paranoid, but I don't like the idea of staring at a zero bank balance while some fraud department promises to fix things up real quick now if I just stay on hold.

Anecdote != data.

You put $100k of equipment in checked luggage, then you probably have some very specific insurance that covers you. If you don't, you are lucky. Most people most of the time do not have anything stolen.

If a baggage handler steals a $3000 camera out of someone's luggage, the airline will totally deny liability.

Here's an article interviewing a former TSA handler who was arrested with more than 80 stolen cameras and other assorted electronics in his home at the time of arrest. http://rt.com/usa/tsa-stealing-from-travelers-358/

People, please read the whole linked post before passing judgement. It sounds highly believable, from someone who was teaching pilots in Korea very recently (2003-2008) and makes the claims of a fantastic turnaround success story sound mostly like a very ineffective re-education campaign that has failed in the face of an entrenched educational culture.

For your own peace of mind, please never put expensive gear in checked luggage. It is very likely to get stolen.

It is perfectly reasonable to maybe make one comment saying "I think congress should just abolish this abomination, and be done with it" would be a measured response to this side-issue. Spending a lot of energy arguing about the acceptability of the FISA spying on foreigners or not having any adversarial component just probably riles up people who are understandably very upset at the larger situation. I guess what I'm saying is having a long argument about all this is like being the political version of a grammar nazi.

Revealing such a recording would enable the government to prosecute him for "targeting" such information without a warrant. Of course he has bigger worries than whether they try to tack on such a trumped up charge...

The whole point of backups is that you should never expect a single hard drive to stay alive, no matter how young it is. Lots of hard drives with defects die early. For your own sanity, it is best to think of any data you have only one physical copy of as data that may not be there tomorrow. Personally I don't get comfortable until my most important data exists in two physical locations, so fire is not a risk.

No one is attacking you personally here. You have simply said some misguided accusations about a country whose history you clearly have not read very much about. That is fine, we all make mistakes. Digging your heels is unnecessary. Perhaps this story would make you pause and reconsider your perspective. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shin_Dong-hyuk_%28human_rights_... One exerpt is particularly chilling:

"""When Shin was 14, he overheard his mother and brother planning an escape attempt and informed the guards, which was something he was taught to do from an early age.[4][5] Rather than reward Shin for turning his family members in, the guards tortured him for four days to extract more information from him.[4][5] According to Shin, the guards lit a charcoal fire under his back and forced a hook into his skin so that he could not struggle,[12] and this caused Shin to receive many large scars from the flesh being burned and other abuses.[13] On November 29, 1996, camp officials forced Shin to watch the public execution of his mother and brother, and he knew that he was directly responsible for the execution """

And just a few days ago people were discussing how that ATMs prefer to just give you money and overdraw an account rather than deny you cash when you go overdrawn. I guess this is the result? Systems that are only synced once an (hour? day?) provide a window to let thieves do a coordinated hit on different network partitions.

Gimp absolutely does not support 100% correct conversion from psd. Layer effects are particularly broken. I have not seen any third party tool that properly handles psd files containing non-rasterized layers.