StrawberryFrog

> I don't know about the quality of the English translations of his books

I don't know about the quality of the original Polish, but ... some of his heavier works are well, heavy in the English version. I'm thinking of "Solaris", "His Master's Voice", "Memoirs Found in a Bathtub". They are good books - but so are Dickens, Tolstoy etc. which require a bit of effort from the modern reader.

However the Cyberiad is an absolute pleasure to read. I read it when I was in my early teens and I ate it up - it challenged my mind, made me laugh and was very easy to read. Other lighter ones - "Tales of Pirx the Pilot", "The Futurological Congress", "A Perfect Vacuum" are easy to read too.

It looks like he's using their logo too.

> Considering Assange has probably been pretty careful and paranoid

You'd expect that, wouldn't you. But then his whole career show less risk-aversion than most people. To put it mildly.

Conspiracies are pretty rare, but opportunistic behaviour by governments is not hard to believe. Pissing off governments is like running for president; your transgressions will be dug up and used against you.

Are you finding it hard to believe that the US government is trying to disrupt Wikileaks by unusual means, outside of any potential legal proceedings? But this is not theory, it's known fact - both Visa and Amazon dropped Wikileaks after pressure. It's been successful too.

I agree that lack of email is mad. But how big a decision can this be? If it can run programs, it can run an mail client. Even an exchange client. "it won't have an email client" is not part of the hardware design, it's just that the software hasn't been written/ported yet.

That's not quite right though; there is a CSS level 3 and these specs are in it.

In summary: no, they're in CSS3; but it's all modular and might not be implemented at the same time.

There is incentive for MS Grids to go forward soon, they're important to MS for use in Windows 8.

Also, they're cool, or rather they're a sane layout scheme and it's awful that CSS hasn't had one up to now.

The irony is that Firefox and Chrome will implement them at about the same time that they become official. But we won't be able to use them widely until IE7,8 and 9 have faded from the web. MS giveth, MS taketh away.

Are the ms-grids and the multicolumn layouts in CSS4? It doesn't look like it from that draft. Are they just free-floating proposals at this stage?

It shows that the DMCA and Patriot act were not an aberration, were not an anomaly that would be rolled back; but the shape of things to come, part of a trend. Note the use in the title of the words "back" and "worse than ever". This is not a one-off.

Have you tried reading a PDF on a kindle? It works. technically. But it's not pleasant.

> > In some sense you wouldn’t even be human anymore. People like Jeff are better regarded as hyper-intelligent aliens with a tangential interest in human affairs.

> I think Yegge's just defined the best characterization of the 1%

"she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human" - William Gibson, "Count Zero", 1986

Maybe, but I enjoyed reading all of Steve Yegge's rant. It was informative and funny. And I don't even work for google. And it wasn't really even 10 pages long. The criticism of its length is fatuous and flippant, and not substantive.