sprout

Initially, but if they can get enough volume to start differentiating price based on features, a substantial market will show up for people who like the idea of not paying for things they don't want.

When you have high-quality documentation available to the public, you don't need specially trained engineers. Apple's secrecy creates an artificial scarcity which they can capitalize on.

Personally, I consider fixing test size to basically be an anti-pattern. You're sacrificing UX for design (which while it can be good business is never Good.)

How difficult is it to jailbreak an iPhone, install a trojan, and then make it superficially at least unjailbroken?

At the least steps 1 & 2 ought to be pretty easy.

I stopped reading the article after they wrote that the browser is almost more important than the OS, and then in the next paragraph said that Windows Phone 7 shows promise.

It has to have a pretty modern WebKit build.

Compare to Windows Phone 7's IE7/8 hybrid...

I still don't see any evidence that it will scale - especially in the US. Most areas still have signs, so the areas without signs remain exceptions that put people on the defense.

The last time I tried to buy a ticket, I failed to find anyone among them who recognized + as a valid character to have in an email address. I'm not sure whether their engineers are incompetent, or just looking to spam me.

Well, I know the latter is true, but the former is up for debate. In any case, I'm looking forward to people selling tickets that won't require me to give them my root email address, and probably won't even want to spam me.

I think iOS was already on every sysadmin's shitlist for quite a while. I remember some of my friends on the networking side complaining a good deal about the iPad's DHCP lease shenanigans.

I have to wonder to what degree this sort of thing mistakes specific people's learned adaptation to specific light patterns rather than innate human traits.

As someone who has been spending time on computers into various hours of the morning since he was in middle school, staring into an LCD just before bed is the most natural thing in the world, and I sleep a solid 8 hours a night.

No, they haven't. There was one recently linked on HN, but it was a fairly recent experiment, and it's far more likely to be attributable to the strangeness of it; people used to signs go into hyper-defensive-driver mode when they get to an area with no signs. You take away signs entirely the novelty wears off and people go back to driving like assholes.

Yes, but no one would ever use a hammer by itself. At a bare minimum you're going to need wood, nails, and probably a few saws. C isn't a hammer. Pointer arithmetic is a hammer, and there are other tools at your disposal in C.

I'd say saying "I'm a C programmer" is more analogous to saying "I'm a helicopter pilot." You can probably fly a commercial jet or fighter, but they are very different aircraft, with very different use cases and operation.

And there will always be a market for helicopter pilots.

I'm providing a hypothesis to support the data they claim exist (and I'm inclined to trust that it exists.) Unless you can provide information on case studies where deregulation has provided benefits, I'm going to trust the OP.

Data > intuition.

Also, alternate hypothesis: cabs are less likely to use meters when things are deregulated, so most people don't know what they're paying for, and overpay.

/r/netsec remains a great community. /r/coding is low-traffic, but aggressively moderated and has good content/people. /r/web_design is a lot like a slightly more informal version of Hacker News. /r/webdev is very small, but hey, it might pick up.

Then there are lots of specific communities you can sign up for depending on your religious beliefs that have various values... /r/emacs /r/vim /r/haskell etc. most of the language specific subreddits have decent traffic.

> the capital costs of entering the taxi business are low.

Is what I suspect is the key point. Because capital costs are so low, it's easy for anyone to get into the business. Because it's easy to get into the business, you end up with lots of turnover as people come in looking to charge high rates, get tired of it, and move on to some other job.

Medallions artificially raise the capital costs involved in becoming a Taxi driver, and therefore make people more likely to continue as drivers, since they want to recoup their initial investment, and it's not trivial to do so.

In order to determine the morality of the hypothetical shooting, you must establish who morally deserves sovereignty over Iraq and Afghanistan. (An inherently political question.) If America deserves sovereignty, you're right, it's like releasing documents from the WPP. If the insurgents have sovereignty however, it's akin to releasing documents detailing a drug smuggling ring.

So in short, you ask us to take politics out of the equation, and quietly assume your own politics as a given value.

Flip it around then. I submit that just as the American invaders cannot reasonably be compared to the Nazis, neither can the insurgents.

It's hard to say either side in this conflict has the moral high ground, so it's equally hard to say that a move to the detriment of one side or the other is amoral (unless it's clear that a move is to the detriment of both sides.)

People want to maximize utility, we'll use money as a proxy, people want to maximize money. I suppose there are economic schools of thought that use other proxies for utility, but you seem to be agreeing with me insofar as the primary stand-in for utility is money, and it is a poor one.

I especially like how moving a video from one monitor to another requires moving a bulky plastic (glass?) plate from one terminal to another, a plate sufficiently large to hold an entire computer, touchscreen, and information storage for a hundred videos.

Or that people don't get graduate degrees with the intent of maximizing their earnings potential.

I've often heard it said that the fundamental problem with economics is that it assumes people are rational and have good information. I'd say it goes deeper than that: it assumes that money is the rational thing for a person to maximize. In reality, money is something that bears some maximization, but it's hardly the primary consideration.

When it comes to security, people should not re-invent the wheel. An integrated installation and update method makes a lot of sense, and Apple negatively impacts the security of their ecosystem by using criteria beyond malicious intent to bar third-party vendors from the integrated system.

They also reduce the quality of third-party software, as even blessed software developers will still have to put time into planning for pushing their own updates should they fail to win Apple's blessing.

For security and ease of use' sake it really is useful to provide a standardized interface for deploying applications through Apple's own update channels. I don't see why Apple can't manage feature parity with most of the major Linux distributions. Something like universe in Ubuntu would greatly benefit OS X users.

That is very different from asking Apple to promote apps - just host them, police malicious apps, and take a small cut of profits for the service. Admittedly, that's a bit different from a package manager, but it's clear, consistent, and really the best option for Mac UX.

>Even open source web applications don't have this freedom... If wordpress.org were to do this, those users would be in the same boat.

It's pretty straightforward to self-host your own WordPress blog. Does WordPress not offer data dumps? WordPress users would be in a very different boat, because they have all the tools they need to rehost their blog, without building anything from scratch.

He didn't say RIM has any of those things. He just said that he's not going to pretend they're unimportant or even actively bad choices just because he hasn't implemented them (which is precisely what Apple does, and why I think they rightly deserve criticism for distorting reality.) It's one thing to say that they made some trade offs in designing the iPad, and the screen size is clearly a good choice. It's another thing to claim that 7" screens are categorically a bad design choice, which is just absurd.

Call me when a distro that implements package signing has shipped Python 3.

I know it's a little OT, but I can't take anyone seriously who ships unsigned packages and calls them a distribution.

Facebook has in a lot of ways run its course. They're still iterating, but I don't really see it benefiting users much.

I don't see a sale to Apple benefiting users much either, but the fallout could be interesting. If I were him I might sell just out of curiosity to see what would happen. It sounds, if not better, at least profoundly interesting.

I think you managed to demonstrate precisely why concision is overrated. In your quest for concision you used an obscure reference to a facet of an author's literary career most of us were unaware of, thus completely obscuring your point and requiring further clarification.

I hate to be so flippant, but do you not care where your money is? If money is hard to track, it's hard to tell who has been paid. Money laundering, for example, would be easier if money were harder to track. So... I can't imagine that making money laundering easier, in general, would be a good thing.

Credit cards have stiff fees? Seems to me it's pennies per transaction.

I really don't believe it's a ruse, or even that the fees are that large. They're large for small businesses - and that's far from the only place where small businesses have trouble competing with the economies of scale larger players can use.