The Golden Compass is considered as dangerous by Christian parents as Narnia is by Atheist parents

So... not dangerous at all then? I'm an Athiest. I loved the Narnia series aged 7-11. I'll get my kids to read them. I know many Athiest parents who have allready bought The Lion, the Witch & the Wardrobe for their bubs before they can read.

I want my kids to be as wideley read as possible Most Athiest Parents I know feel the same way. Knowledge is something to be embraced. Not feared.

I'm with you on this point, "architecting" is an offence to the English language. In fact /. is highlighting the word as incorrect in the bloody editor.

This statement is bogus. 3rd parties cannot sue under copyright law. VLC is developed by multiple parties, some of whom wanted VLC in the app store & others who didn't.

Portraying this as Apple & VLC vs the FSF is a misrepresentation of the situation.

Pfffft, screw chipped squirrels, I want Squirrel Chips!

and they were filed because Amazon pays a hell of a lot more bribe money in Washington than Apple ever will.

It is unclear what you mean by 'bribe' money, but both Amazon and Apple spent huge sums of money lobbying over the last 15 years or so.

Amazon spends more, but not 'a hell of a lot' more. Both organisations do their absolute best to influence policy in their favour. The idea that Apple is somehow pure in this way is fantasy that could only come from the most delusional fanboy.

Jealousy and other issues as well. The Vice article seems to have strong opinions as to what sort of conditions other people may live in. It just states that it is dystopian without much evidence. And as to the poor in Dubai, they are already richer than many of their compatriots back home (many are immigrant workers) and given time and further economic development they no doubt will get richer themselves. The United Arab Emirates are the one most forward thinking areas in the Middle East. They are slowly going through what the West did in the reformation and enlightenment. Of course it will take time but I am sure they will be much more progressive societies in 300 years.

Then there is the issue that some people simply fetishise nature and assume that everything 'natural' must be beautiful. It simply is not the case. Most 'natural' places are ugly. The ones that we photograph are the elegant and interesting ones. A lot of the time those people who enjoy extreme temperatures and who are in excellent shape imagine that rest of humanity has the same take on their surroundings. It's so easy to forget that without keeping out the heat or cold many people would be miserable - particular in an extremely hot desert which is where Dubai is located. The heat is simply oppressive. And of course by allowing this dome, it means people can venture out of their homes and get more exercise - something that is otherwise not possible.

I can imagine that some people would say that humans should not be living there to begin with. To which I answer: someone gave birth to them and once there here on planet earth they have to live somewhere. And most people living in the middle east don't have much choice as to where to live particularly if they don’t want to live in absolute poverty. (So unless you want to stop Bangladeshi and Pakistani mothers from getting pregnant and /or prevent men there from impregnating them, you really cannot complain. I am always amazed at people who are shocked when they hear others moralize about women giving birth when they are very poor. They pontificate about every women having the 'right' to have children. Often these same people then later complain about the environmental consequences of such children when they reach adulthood.)

I've had loads fail, ignore the brand, they're all made in the same factory & stamped with a different name.

The real trick would be to put your unix-like box behind your gateway, routing all traffic through it. This has the massive advantage of not requiring you to go around, reconfiguring all suspect devices to use a proxy server (if they even can).

I assume this is possible with a mac, its certainly relatively easy to do with linux.

What about assuming that there is simply no way to ever travel faster than the speed of light (or use a worm hole to achieve the same effect) and thus different civilizations in different star systems are never even able to find each other, let alone visit each other.

Time was, phrases like, "if their entire platform doesn't want to play nice with mainstream standards" were deployed by Microsoft dweebs against UNIX geeks. Did you not notice that iPhone apps are written in Objective C / Cocoa? Swift could just as easily be called, The New Objective C, or Objective C^3, or Objective Cocoa, and none of what you're griping about has changed at all, since the iTunes App Store was first deployed. You don't own a Mac, so you're already not in the iTunes App Store market. Why, again, do you care about this discussion, at all?

Yeah, that definitely shouldn't be overlooked. Apple has a bunch of web-facing apps of their own, implemented in a variety of technologies, including some WebObjects/Java stuff, and some SproutCore/JavaScript stuff. Both of those are essentially clones of portions of (and different generations of) Cocoa (fka NeXTSTEP, which is relevant to recall here, because the WebObjects clone is that old, despite the fact that one of the largest stores on the Internet, iTunes, is built on it).

Here's an interesting political history of WebObjects around the time we last heard from it. As strange as it may seem, there's still an active WebObjects development community despite it being essentially self-supported for nearly a decade, now. Many of the developers in that community were, previously, Objective C developers, and the ones that survived the transition to Java are language agnostics. I suspect they might welcome the opportunity to migrate to a Swift/Cocoa web stack.

It will take some while, but Apple has just made the first step to a "language mindshare" play in the web application space.

I think you should seriously consider using an ad-blocker. In instances like this where a site is both being abusive (showing ads after you've paid to block them) & knowingly wasting a limitied resource (mobile battery & bandwidth), there is no moral quandry. Block them.

Typical, mention a fictional character & get upvoted.

No. Lazy fucker!

Didn't get upset, just love trolling /. Loop: See Loop. CRC fail.