jimwise

Hmm. My Mom was a trained engineer. She's no longer with us, but if she'd lived long enough to select a Bitcoin wallet, I have no reason to believe she'd have picked a poor one...

(And yes, I get the irony that they probably picked this headline out of fear that "not your dad's..." was sexist.)

Without newsblur support, not really likely to rebuy.

I respect the work involved in moving what had been a google reader client into a true multi-provider client, so would rebuy it it supported the provider I actually use. :-)

This doesn't seem to me to mean as much as the author thinks.

By the same reasoning, after all, email as a communication mechanism is "dominated by" spam, much of it similarly shady in nature.

There is an interesting difference, though -- while spam actively hurts the usability of email, botnet traffic which parasites on the TOR network helps make the system as a whole stronger, by adding more noise in which the important uses of TOR can be lost.

Yes. A central idea of the American experiment is that there are exchanges of liberty for security which it is not acceptable to make even if the people collectively decide to make them.

That is why certain liberties are enshrined in the Constitution, which is intentionally made hard to amend, rather than merely in law, which is relatively easy to change.

Looking at the number of totalitarian systems which started out as expressions of the collective will of their societies in the two-plus centuries since, I'd say the founders got this one right...

Dumb question, but the author kept running a TOR node at a site he knew was under NSA surveillance? That doesn't strike me as very responsible...

Except that before "just supporting Linux (and maybe MacOS)" was the thing to do, it was "just support Sun (and maybe HP-UX)". And before that, it was "just support BSD/Vax (and maybe SVR2)".

So, when you take a broader view than "just support what everyone uses", you're not just helping niche platforms -- you're future-proofing.

Beyond the question of how meaningful these metrics are, wouldn't it be a more useful metric to look at how complex the code you write when you use each framework is, rather than the code that implements each framework?

I suspect -- but don't know -- that these might even turn out to be inversely correlated for some types of frameworks. DSL-based frameworks often require some interesting tricks to get right.

So which is better? A complex framework that lets you write simple, concise code? Or a simple framework that requires a lot of boilerplate and complexity to use?

This will not only miss non-ascii printing characters, but it's not even much shorter than typing

  [[:print:]]

to use the explicit character class.

This would seem a problem that could be solved by a cloudish sort of solution, though -- have an iPad app which hands actual typesetting of a document off to a server somewhere, sending TeX sources, and receiving a PDF in return.

A simple starter implementation might require your TeX to be a single file, and could just run TeX in a mostly-readonly chroot jail (bearing in mind that TeX can shell out, read/write arbitrary files readable by the executing user, and so on), and serve up a PDF, all wrapped in a web service of some sort.

This wouldn't be terribly fast, but given TeX's performance, the actual typesetting is likely to be the bulk of the time spent, even considering the round trip.

I think you're not considering enough ways in which one technology can be superior to another.

Ruby wins for the web not because it is faster _at executing code_, but because the combination of Ruby and Rails is faster _at iterating new features_; the optimization which has led it to win is performance of programmers, not code.

Likewise, Windows is inferior to Unix as an OS design -- but it is vastly superior to (non-MacOS) Unix in the time it takes to get a semi-technical user from a machine still in the box to a machine which can do the things most users care about (browse the web, edit documents, and so on).

In the long run, which matters more? Machines are getting faster much more quickly than programmers or users are getting smarter...

No disagreement with the basic, point, but was a bit surprised by this quote:

"So, here's our situation. We have a man (presumably; at any rate he appears to want to be identified as such) in the Australian Linux community, who targets women by sending them private abusive emails from a throwaway address and with a name that can't readily be connected to any publicly known member of the community. His ISP won't hand out information about him without a court order, his abuse doesn’t present the kind of imminent threat to physical safety that might interest law enforcement, and despite Linux Australia’s diversity statement and Linux.conf.au's anti-harassment policies, it's not clear that there’s any practical thing that either of those groups can do about him."

Is it Bayley's position that ISP's should give out information on their users in response to warrantless requests -- from private individuals, no less?

Is it likewise Bayley's position that law enforcement should be going after people for making lewd comments online?

There's a Mr. Turing here to see you about whether this site is really connecting him to a lady, sir.

There are a couple of ways around this -- all of which fall under "be careful". :-)