BigZaphod

Twitterrific was retina-ready before the retina MBP even came out.

You never ever ever ever blindly trust the client to behave a certain way.

A patent is not a product.

This is stupid. 1994? Star Trek: TNG "invented" tablets, too - in the late 80s.

I'm no expert, but this doesn't seem to be any significantly better than a k-d tree, does it? I might be missing something. I find academic papers hard to parse.

I don't think there's any reason to believe they can't have their own rules in this regard - especially since senators in particular represent the state itself and the United States is (was?) a federation of the states, therefore the states technically have (had?) the power over the feds and not the other way around. Sending representatives from each state is (or should be) the state's privilege and should not elevate them to king-hood over the very state they are supposed to represent the interests of.

Of course.. it's never been tested because a recall attempt of a US Senator in any state that allows for it has never progressed to the point where it'd have to have been implemented and so it may ultimately be illegal if the supreme courts says it is. However states have a certain right to withdraw from the union as a whole because of disputes like this because the union itself exists at the request of the member states themselves. We at least know that has been tried, but it didn't go very well...

No, the point is that even if you ban it in order to protect "everyone else", people who insist on being unsafe will find new ways to do so regardless of the law. Banning behaviors is only effective if the ban is actually observed by the people who are most likely to cause the behavior you're trying to ban in the first place.

Edit: And yes, I agree with your last point about a PR campaign. Personally, I'm not convinced we should go about banning every little behavior (especially in cases like this which are effectively unenforceable) but instead spend the resources on education about why a behavior is undesirable, uncool, dangerous, etc.

I love this idea and fully support it, but a possibly unintended side effect would be reporting of this event taking a turn towards: "Holy crap, we all rely a lot on Wikipedia! Who are these people who run this global resource, anyway? Can we trust them? Should this sort of information source be regulated for the sake of the public good? Should it even be possible for these unaccountable people to pull such an important site from the internet without any oversight?! We need more laws!"

Twitterrific has done this for a long time. It was hard to make it perform well, but not impossible.

Does anyone know why that pile was valued at $1.1M in the first place? I occationally stack junk in piles myself, so I'm kind of interested in the prospect of turning that habit into a business model...

I don't know. Perhaps the utter iPod domination was largely a US thing - especially since it went hand-in-hand with Apple coming back from the dead and them not initially having the resources to go global in a big way?

I think Apple has been largely US-centric up until the iPhone, so that could explain why there's a disconnect online when topics like this come up since obviously non-US people will have had a different Apple experience over the last decade or so than those of us here who have been seeing iPods everywhere for years.

"Do they expect Apple to continually innovate in a non-competitive market?"

Probably, yes, and I would argue there is some reason to believe they would do so. Look at what happened in the MP3 player market: Apple utterly dominated that market long ago, and yet they kept messing with the product lines, adding models, changing the feature balances, etc. There was and still is a lot of experimentation going on there and there's essentially no real competitors in that market anymore. "Portable music player" and "iPod" are practically synonyms.

Apple (with Steve Jobs at the helm, anyway) is different from many companies. They don't see themselves as competing with other companies. Instead I believe they consider Apple of the previous year to be the competitor to beat for the current year.

I can relate to the <write line of code> and immediately switch to Twitter, email, etc. In fact, this is me right now!

However when I'm working on something truly interesting and challenging, all the distractions vanish. Tweets go unread, emails unanswered, RSS ignored. Unfortunately that state has become a lot more rare lately as I slug away on uninteresting parts of the project and my mind wanders to new ideas I don't have time or opportunity to play with.

I do think that when I was younger it was easier to be utterly immersed in a project because the whole thing was still new and challenging. Now some of the stuff I used to spend hours or days or weeks toiling away with intense concentration feel like.. busy work. It feels like I shouldn't have to program in assembly anymore and that it's tedious. It feels like I shouldn't have to implement yet another <insert data structure or process>. The act of implementing a lot of the small pieces are no longer interesting and instead I just want to get on to the large scale interesting bits, but it can seem that there's so much boilerplate and cruft in the way...

And so I check Hacker News...