poblano's comments

Has anyone else switched to a standing desk setup? Do you like it?

What boggles my mind about Chrome is how terrible the location bar autocomplete is.

At least, that's how it seemed to me for ages when I switched from Firefox. I mean, I would have just visited a page with "foo" in the URL, and I would type "foo", and that recent page simply would not appear. But a page I visited two months ago with "foo" somewhere in the URL (or worse, somewhere in the page content) would appear.

I haven't noticed this so much recently -- maybe it's gotten better, or maybe I've just gotten used to it.

I've been shocked that I haven't heard many other people complaining about this. Maybe it's just me?

I guess, but the saving grace is that the passengers of such cars are less likely to care, unless they're in some special rush.

I mean, if I had one, I would be reading or working or talking to someone, and might not even notice a few extra minutes transit time. It'd be like riding public transit minus the inconveniences (noise, strangers, waiting).

Is Android not open-source? You would think any surreptitious phoning home it does would be well-known by now.

If Android devices really send data to Google -- even after disabling Google Sync, uninstalling Gmail, etc. -- I'd love to what it is.

Like iTunes.

The comedian Pete Holmes did an amazing routine on exactly this phenomenon, on Conan O'Brien:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQ4o1N4ksyQ

You're right. There isn't really an easy solution to this.

I agree this is probably a bad idea, but I still think the basic problem it's trying to solve is a real one.

A less hack-y solution might be for new languages to start incorporating more languages in their choices of keywords and class names.

Suppose someone were designing a new language (let's call it Foolang), and these were some of the keywords:

* publico, privado, protegido (access specifiers in Spanish)

* eetha/akhra (if/else in Arabic)

* zhen/jia (true/false in Mandarin)

I think this would be an interesting experiment. It would have to be a compelling language in its own right though.

Sorry, right -- I was just thinking of straight-up scraping of public pages. Asking for the user's password and logging in to do more scraping would probably be possible, but a lot more painful.

I was going to ask that exact question.

I think the answer is no, they can't stop you. And perhaps I'm being naïve, but it doesn't seem like it would be too terribly tedious if you used a scraping library, at least not for replacing basic API functions (i.e. getting a user's recent tweets).

Obviously this would be limited to public tweets (no private tweets, no tweeting on the user's behalf, and no DMs).

How are they expecting to enforce that? Are they really going to download and test every third-party app?

FYI, the article suggests self-driving cars have been approved in Nevada and California, which is true -- but in both states, a human passager (presumably with a driver's license) has to be in the vehicle. In Nevada, you actually have to have two passengers, which in some cases makes it more inconvenient than regular driving.

So ideas like sending your car home instead of parking it, or sending tractor trailers across the country without a driver, aren't going to be legal for the time being.

Re: 3, he didn't say mechanics would go away, just auto body/collision shops.

That's wonderful, truly noble -- seriously -- but you, OP, and people like you are probably a very small group, at least compared to the masses of people who are paying simply because they don't know how to jump the paywall (or find it unpleasant to). If the paywall is "working", aka "making money for the NYT," it's mainly because of the techno-illiterates.

I think the explanation is much more simple: it's working because most people aren't tech-savvy enough to figure out the loopholes and feel comfortable using them on a regular basis.

Kind of an interesting form of freemium business model, actually...

How hard would it be to adapt this for Ruby written for iOS using RhoMobile? I'm looking into whether to start learning RubyMotion vs. RhoMobile, and don't know much about either yet.