sielskr's comments

Since the link is in a comment that begins, "MS is not a horrible stack to develop on," and ends, "I'm glad I went with .NET for my startup," a reader could get the impression that the link somehow provides support for your pro-MS position.

The writeup on what Quora is built on say that, "Quora uses Ubuntu Linux as it’s OS of choice," and does not mention any Microsoft technologies at all.

Read this passage again:

>"The dirty little secret," a former AOL executive says, "is that seventy-five percent of the people who subscribe to AOL's dial-up service don't need it." [emphasis mine].

The OP (at Huffington Post) very strongly implies that they do not need it because they connect to the internet through DSL or cable. I take that to mean that these customers use web services and client software that AOL offers for free or at a much lower rate if the customer does not need AOL's dial-up service, i.e., basic TCP/IP connectivity, to connect to the internet.

I like the UIs of HN and Craigslist much better than most sites.

This promises to remove the only obstacle to my spending $99 on an Apple TV box, namely, my fear of being locked into Apple's content distribution system.

Will someone unaffiliated with the project please describe their experiences with using this software to watch mp4s of movies? Any restrictions or gotchas?

"Note that you will have to repeat this process every time you upgrade your Mac OS to a new patch release (10.6.5 -> 10.6.6)."

"If visual contact was essential for forming significant relationships then the blind would be unable to make friends."

Maybe the blind are much less successful at making friends. What is your evidence to the contrary?

Wait because the software is busy. E.g. OS X's spinning beach ball.

(Emacs is single-threaded, but so is a Unix shell.)

I would rather have an Emacs that offers fewer choices but looks good out of the box.

Example: the software supplied by Apple with a Mac does not have any themes except for the choice between Blue (colorful) and Graphite (subdued) in the Appearance system preference pane.

OTOH, I regularly have to wait for the software supplied by Apple and I almost never wait for Emacs.

I regret the trend towards gray rather than black maintext.

Thanks for the AdblockPlus rule!

I'd like to grayscale my browser while leaving Emacs in color.

Actually, I'd pay good money for a grayscale version of Firefox.

"Submissions are cheap and skippable."

By that logic, you will not mind if I spam your mailbox since emails are cheap and skippable.

Can a person join an existing Posterous Group using only email?

"big budget entertainment will increasingly have to compete with more and more free and low-cost entertainment options on the internet"

By "free and low-cost entertainment options" do you mean pirated content? I do not see non-pirated content competing effectively with big-budget movies and television the way that non-pirated textual content (blogs, sites like HN) competes effectively with newspapers and magazines.

I saw compiler flags for OSX in the source tarball [1] but to install on OSX probably requires installing from source, and if my experience with using macports to install Conkeror and uzbl is any indication, installing all of the dependencies correctly is likely to be something that requires hours of tedious effort unless one is an expert. The reason for that is that luakit (and Conkeror and probably uzbl) rely on a very large stack of "non-Mac-like" software including the GTK toolkit and the X windowing system.

If you can get around in Linux, I would test drive the software on Linux to make sure it is as useful to you as you imagine it to be before doing the work of figuring out how to install it on OSX.

I will add that the difficulty of installing relatively unpopular Linux packages on OSX is one of the biggest disadvantages of OSX for me. (The unavailability of laptops in which everything Just Works is of the biggest disadvantages of Linux for me.).

I've tentatively given up on relying on software that requires X while I am using OSX: I plan to keep on test-driving such software (on Linux), and if I decide I have got to have access to it, I will switch back to Linux.

[1] https://github.com/mason-larobina/luakit/blob/develop/config...

because the authorities have no control over the supply of cash, would never try to outlaw cash, or never require banks to report the withdrawal or deposit of cash.

Sure, but I did it because the OP did it. Also, there's a good chance that Orwell would have just as much of a problem with "estate tax" as with "death tax", "estate tax" being the choice of people with an agenda after all.

When I saw "the Deaths of Four People Cost the U.S. Government $6.5 Billion" I imagined the government taking 6.5 billion from taxpayers and spending it extremely inefficiently. But I am not a journalist living in New York City (if the blogger wrote the headline or an editor for the New York Times if an editor wrote the headline of the blog post)! What the headline is really talking about is the government's failing to collect death taxes that it could have collected if Congress had voted differently.

So apparently according to this journalist every time the government fails to collect X dollars that it could have collected through the legitimate operation of elections, Congressional votes, etc, that failure "costs" the government X dollars. I am having trouble escaping the implication that the headline writer believes that any money that Congress could have voted to collect rightfully belongs to the government, and if the money remains in private hands, maybe that is worth a blog post in the New York Times!

Well, now that Assange has demonstrated the effectiveness of using internet technologies in this way, yes, Assange is probably replaceable.

If (as I suspect) the technology to do what Assange did was available 10 years ago, that is evidence that if Assange had not acted then it might have take a lot longer for someone else to do what he did.