Typescript is similar to Actionscript and compiles down to Javascript. You can do stuff like interfaces, classes, inheritance, compile time typechecking etc. My experience of Typescript is the language is okay but developing it is painful because the tools are awful, particularly for someone coming from a place like Java where IDEs will give instant feedback on errors, code completion, formatting etc. Even stuff like ordering of classes can break the JS even when the TS compiles perfectly.

I would agree with the sentiment that people who think JS (or HTML5) is some panacea for Flash are idiots. Flash was hated primarily because it was TOO popular - sites abused the fuck out of it and multi tabbed browsers sagged under the weight of so many running instances. If JS is abused the same way the performance would be just as bad.

JS is often considered the problem, not the solution to web development. This is why coffeescript, typescript et al exit. Plus a raft of JS libraries like jquery, backbone, underscore, phantom, handlebars etc. to hide the differences or provide basic niceties that JS lacks. Plus the likes of dart, emscripten, GWT and so on which bury JS completely and spit out compiled JS. Plus the recognition from browsers that JS performance sucks and the optimization paths they've implemented (e.g. asm.js). That said, we're almost in a place where 95% of the use cases for Flash are probably achievable in JS. Personally I wish browsers would adopt PNaCl or something similar so code can be compiled and run at near native speeds - skip JS as an intermediate format when it doesn't make sense and just let sites ship bitcode.

That left / right split swipe in Android 4 felt wrong and looked pretty stupid especially for someone familiar with the behaviour on a smaller device.

A lot of money is riding on a game release. They cost millions to produce and market and delaying could cost millions more. A game would have to be seriously broken to be delayed.

So it's unsurprising that Ubisoft pushed it out the way it was. If they announced a delay, they'd lose out on seasonal sales, their preorders would be decimated and it would affect their quarterly figures. So they pushed out something with some serious bugs and performance issues and used an embargo to prevent bad press until after all those preorders were fulfilled. I'm sure they'll get around to fixing the worst of the bugs, but people have been sold a lemon.

As consumers, there is a clear lesson to be learned here - do not preorder. Do not reward companies who use hype and lies to promote a game that may not live up to expectations. If a game is THAT AMAZING, then it'll still be so in a week or two after release when consensus is formed. And if it isn't... well that's €60+ you've saved for a better game.

I don't believe that to be true beyond what you might get from shifting from one food source to another - some temporary effects to your gut. And besides if she affected her health by not eating then it is in her interest to start again even if that means gradual reintroduction and abstinence again when circumstances allowed for it.

So the meat was cooked and consumed anyway? What's the point of that if she ends up affecting her own health?

And it would be pretty trivial for the credit card company and police to notice thefts all occurring from this one shop and rain fire down on their asses.

Gah second para was supposed to say - if 'a' is_less_than c AND c is_less_than 'z' then ischar = 1' as an example of where EBCDIC would break horribly and it only gets worse with stuff like rot13, crypto etc.. Slashdot gobbled up the less thans and truncated that sentence.

ASCII digits aren't much harder to use for BCD than EBCDIC. In ASCII the digits would be 0011NNNN and in EBCDIC they're 1111NNNN as binary. Assuming you masked off the top 4 bits it would be the same code to do BCD with either.

Aside from digits, EBCDIC is infamous for it's bizarro alphabet layout which wasn't contiguous so code patterns like "if 'a' I suspect the EBCDIC only existed because IBM being IBM couldn't countenance interoperability with other systems and therefore tried to ringfence and enforce its own format.

It's not a case of installing anything. It requires a whole new secure protocol that browsers support out of the box.

It's still a CA and it's demonstrative of the uselessness of a CA in the first place. The cert makes a scary box go away nothing more. Even if its free (in money) it's still an onerous task in time and effort to obtain a cert. And with my tinfoil hat on, why should I trust an operation in Israel to generate a trustworthy certificate for my site? It's not the first time a CA has been compromised and issued phony certs for MITM attacks.

True but it still has the potential to build more meaningful trust to a site than a CA can. e.g. Red Hat could sign Ubuntu's site and vice versa and they could sign various Linux user groups and so forth. Just like happens with PGP keys. It's more meaningful than some random CA and far harder compromise especially if browsers cache keys and signatories or look them up in SSL observatory.

People had a holy war in support EBCDIC?

I've not had any issues with it and my machine starts faster. It works. Most of the objections to it appear to boil down to personality and philosophical issues rather than whether it is technically sound, e.g. the way the devs interact with the kernel devs, or whether it's too close to the way services work in Windows.

Having read the myths page I largely believe it was the right thing to do. Linux is a living operating system and sometimes it has to be dragged kicking and screaming away from things that may have been acceptable in 1990 but not when going against other modern operating systems. Wayland is another ongoing example of that and I'm sure that once it becomes the default choice in some dists that we'll see people being extremely vocal about that too.

Britain is encouraging solar and wind but it's amazing the opposition that some people (nitwits mostly) have to these forms of generation. Parties like UKIP actively oppose renewable energy.

Presumably biomass would become more valuable if power stations created a demand for farmers to raise their prices. It's also not the only way it could be created. Anyway, wind is not the only renewable - there is hydro, solar, geothermal etc. The fluctuations probably become more predictable with scale and you might find a region the size of Europe is able to build interconnectors to meet supply with demand.

Exactly. The whole concept of a certifying authority is fundamentally broken. It's just a tax on security. If I'm a bank or merchant then it might be worth paying a CA a lot of money to come and verify I am who I say and how I store and control access to my cert. But the standard signature that most sites obtain is worse than fucking useless. At most it might verify my credit card or my fake id. It's just a tax and the net result plain text is the default.

Sites should be able to use unsigned keys for basic encryption. Sites should also be able to sign each other's keys and build a web of trust. Finally if they absolutely must they can get a CA to sign it. Just like with PGP. There are disadvantages to unsigned certs in that they don't stop man in the middle but browsers cache keys and participate in SSL observatory so that visitors to sites still have some measure of assurance that the key is being manipulated.

Browsers could also present the security of a web of trust in a reasonable way as a checklist or traffic light system. Encrypts traffic (green tick); Protects from casual eavesdropping (green tick); Protects against man in the middle attacks (red cross); Signed by someone you trust (red cross) etc.

The current system is just dumb and I'd hope that somebody, be it Mozilla, Google or whomever would roll out something better that does away with the need for a CA or forgo all encryption.

I don't see it makes a difference. For anyone doomed to use IE6 for eternity, it won't matter what Google does in its own browser because they're not using it, at least not for whatever crappy internal website still requires IE6.