Codayus's comments

Point 7 - Port Binding: I'm interested in hearing anyone else's views on this. How would you even do this for a Django app? And is this really better than just using WSGI? Is anyone using Tornado with Django in production? Google showed a couple proof of concept demos, but nothing serious.

At the moment, I have some apps deployed with nginx > uwsgi > django, taking advantage of the fact that nginx has built in support for uwsgi these days. This breaks rule 7, since my app isn't just binding to a port - but would I really be better off by using nginx > tornado > django?

Point 3 - Config: The claim is that you shouldn't have a config file that you don't check into source control like Rails' config/database.yaml, or the common Django settings_local.py. Instead you should use environment variables. Um. I see the point,but I also see two problems with this.

1) I'm certainly not going to set env variables with database passwords and such by hand. I'm going to have a script to do it for me. I might even call it, oh, I dunno, settings_local.py. In which case, I'm right back at square one, needing to not check this into source control. In other words, how do you avoid having the database passwords in SOME file, SOMEWHERE? Does it "fix" anything if it's named "fabfile.py" instead of "settings_local.py"? I can't see how.

2) How do I deploy multiple apps to the same server? Let's say I've got a linode (or EC2 instance, or whatever) running a test, dev, and production deployment of three different apps. With config files, I just have a different settings_local.py file in each deployments project directory. With environment variables...what, do I use prefixes? app1_test_dbpass = 'foo'; app2_prod_dbpass = 'bar', and so on? Except they say NOT to group stuff together into environments by name. So uh...how do you manage name collisions?

Basically, they seem to have identified a real problem, then proposed a solution that doesn't fix it and doesn't work. What am I missing?

Objectively, her work is not that great. She wrote simple stories with repetitive plots and cardboard characters. And yet...

It's tempting to try and compare one of her books to, say, one of Louis McMaster Bujold's works, and sneer that McCaffrey was just a hack. And perhaps she was, but that rather misses the point. Bujold started writing in a world that already had McCaffrey in it (and McCaffrey blurbed some of Bujold's early work very positively too).

McCaffrey was a pioneer. No, she wasn't the first, but she was one OF the first, and one of the first to be widely popular, and certainly one of the first female authors to be widely popular. All of which are major achievements.

I couldn't begin to imagine how many kids got their first taste of sci-fi/fantasy because their local library had a pile of McCaffrey's Dragonrider books. And if many of them went on to "better books" later in life, and have barely gave McCaffrey's work another thought in the years since, well...it doesn't change McCaffrey's contribution. There's a non-zero number of readers (and, come to that, authors) who wouldn't be around reading (and writing) if it wasn't for McCaffrey.

RIP Anne McCaffrey.

I don't think the word ideological means what you think it means. Ideological behaviour is behaviour motivated by ideas, not profits. Corporate lobbying is essentially always motivated by profit, not ideas. Can you name a company who lobbies for policies they honestly think will lower their profits?

They're superb, but Das Keyboard makes a keyboard which is every bit as good, I think. I'm using one right now, in fact.

These rankings assume that signing a law that creates a new entitlement that will entail large payoffs in future decades is "free". Being in office when those promises come due is profligate. In reality, we should be using accrual accounting, and book liabilities when they are incurred. This would more or less upend the rankings. (Mind you, this would be very difficult. The magnitude of the liabilities from PPACA are essentially incalculable at this point.)

And on a related note, the rankings also assumes that there is no lag in terms of fiscal policy. A president is responsible for everything done by the government from the moment he takes office to the moment he leaves. But of course, this is absurd. It may take a couple years to enact a new policy, and another couple of years for the effects to start showing up in government accounts. A big tax cut (or tax raise) might take a decade to work its way through the economy, once you include knock-on effects like changes in consumption or investment. More generally, it's trivially obvious that the deficit in any given year is not only (or even mainly) the result of policy enacted that year, or even during that administration (especially for the first year or two of an administration).

And as other commentators have noted, all of this is assuming that presidents even have control over the budget, taxation, and spending. They don't. At best they can sometimes convince Congress to give their ideas a respectful hearing, but rarely (if ever) will Congress simply enact a Presidential policy or budget. (And that's when the same party controls the White House and Congress. When they don't, they'll often enact the opposite policy just on general principle.)

According to the article, this is a proposed amendment to ban corporations from making political donations or expenditures. It's not clear from context if that means companies donating to a political campaign, or if it extends to independent expenditures that would influence an election. Let's examine each possibility in turn.

If it just covers donation, then, under current law (which has been upheld by the Supreme Court) corporations may only contribute a maximum of $5,000 per candidate. To put that in context, Obama may raise $1 billion dollars this cycle; the Republican challenger will likely do similarly. Is $5,000 from Exxon or whatever really worth worrying about? (Besides, under Supreme Court precedent, you could probably ban all corporate donations if you wanted, instead of just capping them. Nobody's tried, because honestly, who cares?)

Alternatively, if covers ALL corporate expenditures that may influence an electionm then it would also remove all free speech protections from such things as: The New York Times, Michael Moore's movies, MSNBC, Greenpeace, and more. (Yes, Greenpeace, according the the proposed text of the amendment.) Or rather, they would have free speech protections as long as didn't say anything about any political figure or issue, such as the economy, the environment, or foreign policy.

And that's really the only two options. Either the amendment does absolutely nothing worthwhile (stopping the scourge of Exxon being able to donate $5k to a candidate), or it eviscerates pretty much every vestige of a free press left in America. There's just no way to interpret this as a good idea.

Further, if it DOES stop all corporate expenditures, the only people this amendment would really benefit is the rich. The 99% can't get our message out without the help of other people, banding together to help each other. By removing one of the main ways people group together to get their message out, you muzzle the little guys. But billionaires face NO restrictions! Nothing in the amendment stops the Koch brothers from spending an effectively unlimited amount of money on promoting their favoured candidates and ideas as long as they do it from "personal" funds. What do you call an amendment that stops me from donating to Greenpeace so they can run a pro-solar power ad, but doesn't stop the Koch brothers from running pro-oil ads?)

(Note: I've used left-wing examples as the good guys, and right-wing examples as the bad guys. If it helps, swap them. Consider the damage done to Fox News and the NRA, while it lets George Soros spend with impunity, if that's more alarming. I think this proposed amendment should give everyone something to hate.)

This is pretty interesting looking. I'm tempted to try using it on my next project...anyone else used it yet? Seem stable/bug free?

Google and Microsoft have a huuuge list of projects they jumped into, and failed, leaving the competition stronger than before. All sorts of half-baked apps and ideas - from Google Knols to Microsoft Frontpage.

(Yeah, okay, Adobe isn't exactly a small company. But they're a lot smaller than Microsoft, but Dreamworks has consolidated its position, and Microsoft killed off Frontpage...)

This is a little bit like, oh... Opera writing a blog post about how you shouldn't use Firefox because it won't display any Google page.

...ie, it would be very important and interesting if true, but it's 1) not true, and 2) trivially verifiable as not true.

Groupon works in the precise opposite way of how Womply claims they do; they provide payment to the vendors well AFTER the voucher is used, not BEFORE the voucher is used. Every single point and conclusion made by Womply is not just wrong, but describes a world precisely opposite to the one we actually inhabit.

I have never heard of Womply before, but apparently they're run by fools. At best they have no clue how their competition does business. More likely they do know, but assume that their customers don't, and feel no compunction about lying. Either way...

That's a bit too charitable to Apple, I think. Yes, the decision is covered by the terms of the agreement - they can do what they did. But since the result of their decision is 1) bad press and 2) increased risk of security holes, it's not "understandable" unless you think Apple is run by morons...

The lack of contrast between read and unread items ridiculous. The following custom CSS makes it bearable:

#entries .entry .card-common { background: #eee} #entries .entry .card-actions { background: #eee }

#entries .entry.read .card-common { background: #fff} #entries .entry.read .card-actions { background: #fff }

Okay. So who is offering a service that can match Google's offering? In particular, they need to offer a good (ie, at least as good as Google's) webmail client and spam filtering.

Uh... Current deficits are future taxes.

This is a bit like going out to lunch with some friends, agreeing to split the check evenly, having one of them start ordering incredibly expensive bottles of champagne, protesting, and being told "don't worry, nobodies had to pay for their share of Bob's drinking". Sure, not yet. But the bill hasn't been presented yet...

Also, sure, stopping banks from selling risky bonds as AAA-rated securities would have helped. But no regulation announced to date in the US has stopped or will stop credit rating agencies from calling a risky MBS AAA-rated, or banks from selling a risky but AAA-rated MBS to a willing buyer. Indeed, no such regulation is even possible; it would fall afoul of the US constitution.

The author's glib dig about regulations that "fix" the problem is arguably the best bit in the article. Can you name any regulation promulgated since the crisis that might, even in theory, help? The biggest one so far has been Dodd-Frank, and it's a joke; many analysts think it made the problem worse.

This is completely wrong. Credit standards not only dropped dramatically at Freddie/Fannie, but they drove the decline elsewhere. Causality is clear: Private banks issued loans that they knew that Freddie/Fannie would securitized; as the government agencies decided they'd buy crap, the private banks provided it. (For crying out loud, the government agencies CREATED the subprime market.)

In actuality, about half the bubble has been directly traced to the lowering of underwriting standards by Fannie/Freddie, which in turn was directly caused by....a desire to provide home ownership for the poor.

Apparently the abuse in question included creation of throwaway email accounts. That makes email filtering harder, at a minimum.

I dunno. I'm sympathetic and all, but this seems to boil down to:

"Nasty person A keeps harassing nice person B via email in ways which do not warrant the involvement of law enforcement."

Which is terrible and all - especially for person getting the nasty emails - but this really doesn't seem to have any real relevance to anyone who isn't involved.

This looks great, but I'm still kind of at a loss: How is this different than Trello?

Yes, the largest problem with the graphs is that so much work is being done by the phrase "taxable income".

Imagine Joe Example makes $500,000 per year, and faces an average tax rate of 80%, but through various quirks of the tax code he can deduct $400,000. He pays $20,000 in taxes on his $100,000 in "taxable income". Next year a tax reform bill is passed; his tax rate drops to 40%, but deductions are completely removed. He now pays $200,000 in taxes. In other words, his tax rate halves, but the tax he pays increases by 1000%.

Deductions matter! The headline rate is, frankly, one of the less important variables in how a tax system works.

(A smaller problem with these graphs is that it only shows income tax. That's only one of many taxes, and for the rich and poor, it's often not the most important one. Payroll, capital gains, and dividends matter too! As do sales taxes, property taxes, and even corporate taxes...)