mattdw

The bill allows our previously Foreign-intel Spy Agency extra domestic powers to (a) assist other agencies like the police and (b) undertake mass domestic surveillance with very little oversight in the name of "cybersecurity" and "economic security"

It's point (b) that's causing the real controversy, particularly since we're in the 5-eyes network and thus the GCSB are likely data-sharing with everyone else in the network (e.g. NSA, GCHQ.)

In reality the GCSB has been caught illegally spying on NZers, so the new bill is a rush-job to retroactively legalise it, but it's just ridiculously vague, and without even the protections of the US FISA court.

The oversight regime is that warrants are issued by the Prime Minister (the leader of the majority government party) and/or the Director of the GCSB (currently an old school-buddy of the current Prime Minister.) There's an auditor/investigator (one guy) who will get to review things once a year after the fact, although amendments to the bill might make it a panel of three doing the reviewing.

Assuming those would be beneficial adaptations, which is arguable :). Why binary search when you can pattern-match?

He'd rather write in Beethoven languages than Lady Gaga languages. Which is fine, but there's something to be said for "takes 3 minutes to perform with one voice and one computer" as against "takes an hour to perform with a team of 30 highly specialised professionals."

To stretch his metaphor.

'Mick' is slang for Irish; it's a racial slur. Your theory seems more likely.

"Sorry, this game works only in Firefox and Chrome."

Welcome back to 1998. For the record, it works fine in Safari too. Why do people even do this?

Or websites, apparently.

HexFiend[1] doesn't do the trick? (I have only occasionally need for a hex editor, but it serves well when the need arises.)

[1] http://ridiculousfish.com/hexfiend/

"In my experience a line height of 1.5 x the base font size is a great place to start, and is usually right on target."

You start with your base font size, you choose an appropriate line-height for that (based largely on designerly notions like visual weight, column width, contrast, intuition, etc.) then that lineheight (in pixels) becomes your rhythm.

The idea is that elements like headings, short quotes, possibly images are less sensitive to line-height than body copy, so it's okay to fudge them a little bit to keep the overall rhythm intact.

> A problem we face where I work is how designers sometimes limit themselves in the creative part of the work, because they don't know how to implement it later on.

My experience is actually the opposite. If the designer I work with is thinking about HTML (for example) he limits himself where implementation might be difficult. (I do the same in my own design.) So by separating the roles completely, there's much more freedom – the designer designs without thinking about implementation, which forces me to upskill, which means he can push design further next time, in a virtuous circle.

Clojure has "transient" (mutable) forms of its immutable datastructures, which can be bashed in place, but they're not allowed beyond function boundaries in either direction (I think). So you convert (copy?) to transient, mutate it in-place, then convert back to "persistent" before returning it.

To add to the cacophony of "I built one of these too!", here's mine:

http://mattdw.github.com/experiments/image-evo/

It's more strictly a genetic algorithm than the OP, too, as it's mutating a population, and instances age and eventually die.

When all you have is a flatMap, everything looks like a nested list ;).

(The author seems to be shoe-horning a lot of different concepts into flatMap via traits. I count several different Monads in there.)

WTF. How is this ever acceptable in a professional context? Talk about hostility.

Also a Kiwi here and I think actually most of us are more concerned with the Police and Govt's apparent disregard for the rule and application of law.

Kim Dotcom is pretty funny and makes a good case for himself when he's given TV time, but the big story is how much damage the government will take over their buddy-buddy with the MPAA and all the insider dealings they've been up to. Dotcom has exposed a kind of corruption we didn't realise we had.

See also MP John Banks' “I can only help you if your donations to me are anonymous” to Dotcom. This case is making public a whole lot of what looks like routine corruption.

Aside from the initial raid, and the illegal surveillance, and the invalid warrants, and the illegal seizure of evidence. Sure.

It's worth noting that in NZ, the Prime Minister is also the Minister overseeing the GCSB. He has to sign off on all surveillance warrants, too. So at the very least it's a huge and public failure in his department; at the worst, he's complicit in illegal surveillance.

It's yet to be seen what his involvement is, but his whole involvement in this case has reeked of ass-covering and distancing. It'll be interesting to see the outcome of this inquiry.

It just came back up. Phew.

Ah interesting. I wonder if they had to part ways with Google a little before they were ready to?

A competitor of TomTom indicates that Apple is relying mostly on TomTom for mapping data, and says "they've chosen the weakest partner" and "their data is terrible." Not exactly a neutral source.

Not that it's necessarily untrue; they might be gambling like they did with Siri, that the best way to get a service like this running well is to ship it and respond to real-world feedback.

It means those offers have been withdrawn. They are no longer an available option. (I just heard back from support.)

I requested that they honor the refund offer (as I'd already started migrating away, and as they've destroyed any remaining trust I had in them.) I just received the reply:

We are sorry for the inconvenience our change in plans has caused. This is the only option available. We will continue to honor your original Lifetime purchase, and you will continue to receive hosting services from TextDrive.

So, no, we can't get our refunds and get the f out. I'm deeply unhappy with how they've handled this, start to end. (I too failed to receive any of the mass mail-outs.)

The trouble is, the advertisers want exactly those users who would be willing to pay money; they're high-value eyeballs. By allowing their most valuable users to opt-out, they devalue themselves as an advertising venue. Of course, they also decrease the available impressions if a significant number of people opt out, making them a less attractive venue again.

The Affero GPL [1] is a specific license to address this, because existing OSS licenses have no specific clauses regarding network software; the idea of "distribution" is generally considered as "the computer on which the software is running."

[1]: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl.html

To reply to you and jashkenas, we weren't completely delusional. Sure, the project was big and tight, but we were pretty confident that we could nail it; none of the particulars were new, just the scale and the timeframe.

There was never any question of "can we actually do this?", just "can we do this in time?" Hence picking a tool that looked like it might offer some shortcuts. Yeah, it was a hell of a lot of work, but that was always going to be the case, and I accepted the project on those terms.

(My post perhaps came across as more extreme than the reality. We delivered. The site works. The code never got to 'unmanageable'. Given the opportunity to refactor this particular site, I'd leave it in Coffee, although I'd rework the build and deployment process.)

Could you explain this further?

I've been seriously considering ClojureScript (which is on top of Google Closure) for exactly those reasons. The extra toolchain complexity is still an issue though.

Let me readily acknowledge that our process wasn't optimal. The CoffeeScript version-change happened while I was completely offline for a week, having dumped the next dev right in the middle of things with insufficient handover, so we caught that a bit late.

In hindsight (1) I should have used something other than Make for my build process and (2) I should have figured out a way to move some of the build upstream.

Things to get right next time.

You can see the generated Javascript, and worst-case scenario is that you dump the .coffee and just massage the generated JS into shape. It can't get that bad.

Oh, same guy. That'd be why.