From most perspectives Swift is ridiculously ugly and not very interesting.

public interface Troll {
  void post();
}
 
public class Complaint implements Troll {
  @Override
  public void post() {
      System.out.println("Swift is ridiculously ugly, especially compared to Java!");
  }
}
 
public class TrollFactory {
  public Troll getTroll(String trollType){
      if(trollType == null){
        return null;
      }
      if(trollType.equalsIgnoreCase("COMPLAINT")){
        return new Complaint();
      }
      return null;
  }
}

when Universal began offering lossless tracks, it encoded a watermark in the audio that manifested as an annoying buzzing noise, and eventually after much complaint it thankfully stopped doing that.

They just turned down the density, it's still there it can be detected with a long enough sample. It's similar tech to what they use in their film prints. I am acquainted with this issue.

Whatever you say, AC. However, I'm totally not surprised by a C-level executive and "Architect"-with-a-capital-A extolling the virtues of Java, Web UIs and giving the old song and dance about cross-platform only being about "performance."

Most future projects will be cross platform because user now don't know/care what platform your services run on...

Application vendors desperately want the platform to be a dumb pipe that disappears in order to deliver the Pure Application Experience. Platform vendors desperately want apps to distinctively convey their platform's benefits.

Can you listen to it with your headphones of choice? ...

Nah you have it all wrong, it won't be about the music itself. The key word here is "interactive," there'll be some necessary server/remote component that'll respond to user interaction and implement essential logic of the user experience, which will be tailored to the individual. The trick is getting people to actually want this thing, and somehow passing this thing off as "music" or at least the sort of thing someone like Bono could really exert authorship over (as opposed to merely brand or "inspire," while designers and engineers do the actual work). You wouldn't be able to "pirate" this thing any more than you can pirate a World of Warcraft account.

It poses fundamental challenges to the concept of "recorded music" and I personally think it's a pretty stupid idea, but interactive, personalized, "streamed" experiences are the only way artists seem to be able to get paid for their work on the Internet, apart from begging for alms.

I'm uncertain of the statistics on this, but whenever I see photos of "Indy dev" conferences I always see a lot of silver laptops with glowing fruit. I think most of these people are already equipped.

They can't literally make you tell them what they want to know, but they absolutely can punish you for refusing to comply with a subpoena, unless the testimony would require you to incriminate yourself, which the disclosure of a password does not if the fact that you possess relevant, incriminating information is a foregone conclusion. That was the decision in Boucher, from your own link.

Several courts have ruled contrary to this in the last two years, but these have only been in cases where investigators didn't know what they were looking for and simply wanted the passwords on general principles. The more general the search was, the more self-incriminating disclose of passwords became, and thus unconstitutional; and contrarily, if the government can show that you received incriminating information or it's obvious or reasonable that specific, incriminating information exists on your media, they can subpoena you to decrypt it.

Thank god we have Android Dalvik, where I can use my existing Java ME codebase. Oh wait.

We're going from Obj-C to Swift, this seems like a pretty lateral move from a "cross platform" perspective. I would have thought the Great Java Wars had taught everyone that true cross-platform development is a chimera that isn't worth either the vendor or developer's effort. Platform vendors compete on features -- cross platform is antithetical to competition on features.

What are you, 60?

TFA is actually mostly a Cocoa application stack guide. Discussion of the actual distinguishing features of Swift is minimal -- in fact I think the only thing they even passingly mention is unwrapping of Optionals. Otherwise it's just "How to build an iOS app"

but if the information is in the person's head, then he can't be forced to reveal it.

That's not how it works.

They had observational data from 381 people. The seven are a preliminary study to find the causal direction of the correlation observed in the bigger group. Seven isn't a lot, but it's decent for a preliminary look supporting something seen in a larger group.

Except that it's quite difficult to measure either side of that equation.

Both.

To study the effect of NAS in humans, we examined the relationship between long-term NAS consumption (based on a validated food frequency questionnaire, see Methods) and various clinical parameters in data collected from 381 non-diabetic individuals (44% males and 56% females; age 43.3 ± 13.2) in an ongoing clinical nutritional study. We found significant positive correlations between NAS consumption and several metabolic-syndrome-related clinical parameters

Finally, as an initial assessment of whether the relationship between human NAS consumption and blood glucose control is causative, we followed seven healthy volunteers (5 males and 2 females, aged 28–36) who do not normally consume NAS or NAS-containing foods for 1 week. During this week, participants consumed on days 2–7 the FDA’s maximal acceptable daily intake (ADI) of commercial saccharin

An observational study that people who consume artificial sweeteners tend to be heavier, have lower waist to hip ratios, higher blood glucose, etc. doesn't tell you whether eating artificial sweeteners does that or vice versa. An experiment where you take people and put them on artificial sweeteners does. So they took their observational correlation and did a (preliminary) experiment to find out what direction the causation is.

Sand.

Saccharin, sucralose, aspartame, sucrose and glucose were the primary groups tested. Decreases in glucose tolerance were observed between the artificial sweetener groups and the sugar groups.

As a secondary experiment, they used the saccharin group to investigate the mechanisms because it showed the strongest effect. It's possible that saccharin works by a different mechanism than the others, and I suspect they'll investigate that possibility in the future, but the primary finding applies to all the sweeteners tested.