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scrodon [dead]

What really matters — the click-through rate that infolinks pays you to link the action verb in the sentence "Some incredibly special times were shared" to Scottrade.

scrodon DefendTheInter.net: An illustrated guide on why the Internet needs saving.

>I suspect you don't actually know what everyone else on the site thinks.

Cool, thanks for that incredibly insightful observation, marshray.

The best part about your original question is that it can be answered provably in only one way — the one you want. So given your patronizing tone and thinly veiled elitism, I'll happily take the side of the argument that you would force me to prove through induction, for the simple satisfaction of calling you out.

scrodon DefendTheInter.net: An illustrated guide on why the Internet needs saving.

Yes, you are. The fist symbolizes strength through solidarity and partnership, which is the only strategy that most Americans have for confronting consolidated corporate power.

scrodon Paul Graham: SOPA Supporting Companies No Longer Allowed At YC Demo Day

Take a look at the front page of the committee's web site:

>Markup Shows Strong Support for SOPA (12/16/2011)

>SOPA Has Strong Support (12/15/2011)

>Smith: Critics Continue to Spread Lies about SOPA (12/14/2011)

This is about as divorced from reality as you could possibly get. If this country is not the definition of a corporate oligarchy I don't know what is.

scrodon In case SOPA passes: IP addresses of popular websites

There's no need to ask permission from Google. You can already search the web using fully decentralized search engines like grub.org and yacy.net.

scrodon The scandal of the Alabama poor cut off from water

To call him a troll could brush aside a few things worth our attention. Disturbingly enough, a statistically significant number of people in the U.S. actually hold viewpoints like these, and unfortunately a few of them occasionally comment on this site. So to call it trolling would be to ignore the depth of the ignorance and repugnance of these peoples' viewpoints, and the menace it poses to society. It's important to recognize these people and bring into the light their extreme right-wing philosophy at every opportunity. You judge a society by how it treats its least — not most — fortunate members.

scrodon Riak Handbook

Well, the author has at least been working at Basho earlier this year:

http://basho.com/blog/technical/2011/03/02/Mathias-Meyer-has...

scrodon Apps are too much like 1990's CD-ROMs and not enough like the Web

Clearly. WebOS has proven the author correct with its stunning success in the marketplace.

scrodon Apps are too much like 1990's CD-ROMs and not enough like the Web

>As browsers get smarter native apps will introduce new interaction models, hardware accesses and new features. Those will get folded into HTML 9, then HTML 10 and the cycle will continue.

So in other words, the latest web technology will always be lagging behind. Yeah, that's pretty obvious.

But the sad thing is we're comparing two already horribly flawed systems. No one in their right mind should be arguing in terms of a locked-down, Disney-fied, compartmentalized experience versus a slow, infuriatingly clumsy and intermittently-available simulacrum of the same thing. We need to own our own devices and create, modify, and deploy our own software on our own terms. (And please don't insult my intelligence by claiming that the ability to browse to any given URL can constitute these freedoms in any materially useful way.) To publicly ask for anything less is so lacking in imagination and ambition as to be criminal; it serves only to reinforce the pathetic productivity-destroying dichotomy seemingly being forced upon us.

scrodon Why apps are not the future

Nice. So that pretty much guarantees that only those SAAS apps that are operated by the largest corporations, and that harvest your personal data most efficiently, are the ones that dominate. Everything else is only that much more likely to disappear in an instant, taking with it not only all your documents, but the app's functionality itself as well. I really don't know what people like you are smoking.

scrodon TextMate 2 (Public) Alpha

Depending on how well you can map your code to the built-in Cocoa text-editing classes, this could be as easy as adding two NSLayoutManagers (each directing one NSTextContainer and NSTextView) beneath a single NSTextStorage instance. Apple even uses this configuration for one of their examples: http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/cocoa/...

The built-in notifications and delegate-relationships handle everything else (updates & synchronization) automatically. This is actually NeXTSTEP-level stuff that's been around for decades.

scrodon TextMate 2

Sorry, but "neglect" is a pretty obnoxious accusation you're leveling against Alan. He's dutifully maintained Textmate 1.5.x over those years and has released many many updates. That these releases have not also served to entertain you is simply not a legitimate complaint, let alone an excuse to suspend "common courtesy".

scrodon TextMate 2

Your self-control is just masterful. Congratulations.

scrodon Google is working on integrating terminal emulator into Chrome

Shhh, now that embedded Java does everything we need, we must pretend it no longer exists — how else could we justify all the insane technological contortions that we'll need in order to justify profiting through sequestering users' data, renting 1980s-era features to them, and selling their attention, intimate habits, and social bonds to advertisers?

scrodon Don't Be A Free User

>No, it operates under the very correct assumption that paid services are MUCH LESS common to shut down.

Yep. Not to mention that, in paying for the service, you become the service's customer. The relationship with a free service is much murkier; instead, you are often its product, and the company has an incentive to manipulate you and breach your trust.

scrodon Show HN: RichestOnTheWeb - my submission to Hacka2thon

And those businesses are accordingly regulated by society. But good luck trying to foster that winner-takes-all free-market world of yours. I'm sure it'll be a real blast.

scrodon IOS 5's "Cleaning" Behavior

> there is a power to abstract, there is a freedom to not micromanage.

Oh, so is that like having freedom from porn now?

scrodon IOS 5's "Cleaning" Behavior

Your comment is completely salient and relevant here, but it's received down-votes because it proposes sacrificing profits (i.e., hand-holding, generally cloud-hosted software) for freedom, and Hacker News is simply too sophisticated for such idealism.

scrodon University of California teachers’ union aims to block online classes

I hope they succeed and I fully support their efforts. Distance learning programs will never be a substitute for genuine classroom-based interaction, and under no circumstances should they ever be used to replace skilled teachers.

And even if that weren't the case, unions have every right to fight for the interests of workers, and should do so at every available opportunity.

scrodon Tor-ramdisk

Perfect! Combine with your choice of the following for plug-n-play subversion:

  http://www.linuxfordevices.com/c/a/News/Linux-system-squishes-into-Ethernet-connector/
  http://pwnieexpress.com/
  http://www.gumstix.com/
  http://www.raspberrypi.org/

scrodon Google now has its own Beer

I await the time when Google Beer can be integrated into the already long line of Google Foods™ products.

http://www.google.com/onceuponatime/googlegulp/

scrodon What You Don't Get About the Job Search: Voices of the Jobless

Every example you give is in terms of an individualist view point, and yet understanding what makes a "functioning society" requires some conception of a common good. It is impossible for any significant portion of society to be treated by the very best doctors, or to send their children to the very best schools. To do what's best for society, the majority merely need access to good and decent services.

From the dictionary: Elitism is "the advocacy or existence of an elite as a dominating element in a system or society."

A society that favors the elite individual above all else is by nature hierarchical, exclusionary, and anti-democratic. Elitist societies by definition disempower the majority for the enrichment of a few. And as per the definition of "society" — "the aggregate of people living together in a more or less ordered community" — elitism is an absolute failure.

Your attitude epitomizes this online community, and that's not a good thing. Frankly, it's pretty repugnant.

scrodon What You Don't Get About the Job Search: Voices of the Jobless

What is possibly the only coherent comment in this entire discussion is already being down-voted. Sorry Hacker News, but your "cultivated community" demonstrably fails to perpetuate very little more than a disinterested, self-serving, center-right frame of reference with a strong undercurrent of elitism.

scrodon What You Don't Get About the Job Search: Voices of the Jobless

Don't worry, I don't have any sympathy for you, either.

And in an unrelated point, a good companion to this article is Being Poor:

http://whatever.scalzi.com/2005/09/03/being-poor/

scrodon The U.S. Postal Service Nears Collapse

>It's the usual story: capture of the USPS by its unions...

Oh, if only it weren't for all those undeserving, greedy workers! Clearly the problem is that they banded together to protect each others' wages, access to medical care, and dignity in the workplace! Thank goodness we have Businessweek to confirm our reactionary free market biases for us.

You guys must be loving these budget crises — they provide such a convenient pretext for attacking worker's rights and consolidating the power of the owning class while sidestepping the inherent contradictions of the system which caused those crises at the outset.

scrodon Lion Is a Quitter

Remember that an application has to support the sudden termination API, and indicate to the OS that it can be safely shutdown, in order to actually have this condition apply.

http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Cocoa/...

If you make no changes to your application, then the OS won't touch it. And if you do decide to support sudden termination, then hopefully you would call disableSuddenTermination before starting any background file transfers, renderings, etc.

scrodon Amazon EC2 Outage Takes Down Foursquare, Instagram, Quora, Reddit, Etc

LOL, the cloud.

scrodon Chosen: A javascript plug-in that makes long select boxes user-friendly.

This was my first thought, too. Safari does the same thing.

scrodon Byword: A Simple Text Editor for Mac

Thanks, but BBEdit 6 worked just fine.

scrodon Breaking the Cycle of Malware

Now I have to ask: how is the unsophisticated user (at whom these messages are apparently targeted) supposed to distinguish such alerts from actual malware itself that masquerades as anti-viral/anti-malware software? If anything it will establish a design that malware authors will be highly motivated to copy.