Hell, where does that leave web developers who just want to test their website on a locally running copy?

Am I going to be forced to set up an HTTPS server just to test new features? Can you at the very least turn this off so you can test things locally without having to self-sign a certificate and then explicitly trust that certificate?

This is a ludicrously stupid idea from Mozilla.

Well, sure, but here's a question for you:

What was the first version of Internet Explorer that included it?

Because the IE XMLHttpRequest documentation doesn't list it as a member. (I think that's the most recent documentation, but with MSDN, who even knows.)

And their example uses oReq.readyState == 4 /* complete */.

Then again, who knows when that page was last updated, and the standards they link to do include DONE. (And I checked: IE 11, at least, has it.)

Basically this. jQuery is one of those things that's almost literally bloat: it adds nothing that your browser can't already do, it just wraps around it. You absolutely do not need to use it.

However it saves on development time. It's effectively a bunch of boilerplate code that you don't have to deal with. It's one of those things that if you were to decide not to use it, you're likely to end up rewriting a chunk of it by the time you're done anyway, so you might as well go ahead and use it from the get-go and save yourself some time.

(Which isn't to say you should always use it. I've written pages where the amount of dynamic code was small enough that using jQuery would make absolutely no sense. But the larger your project gets, the more sense it makes to use frameworks like jQuery.)

You mean it's there now. Going back through previous version of the XMLHttpRequest spec, it wasn't added until June 2007.

Who knows when it finally made it into enough browsers to be safe to use. By now no one uses it more out of momentum than anything else, but it wasn't a part of the spec originally, and people writing tutorials would use "4" because that would work even in browsers that hadn't been updated to use the latest spec.

Yeah, keep in mind Apple recently bought "Beats by Dre" which is a music streaming service (in addition to the headphones by the same name). Apple Radio (Apple's music streaming service) has been in the iPhone for a while. There's a very good reason Apple doesn't want their users to be able to listen to free radio on their iPhone.

Assuming you're aware that it requires an online server when you buy it.

I recently bought LEGO Batman 3 since I love the LEGO games and enjoyed the previous two Batman games in the series. None of them have ever had an online component. LEGO Batman 3 has no online multiplayer, it only has single player and split screen co-op.

Guess what? It requires an online connection to some server somewhere. This isn't mentioned in the Steam page anywhere. If you can't connect to the server, you can't play the game.

I hadn't thought to check if it required an Internet connection to play because why the fuck should it?!! (And if I had checked, I almost certainly wouldn't have found out about it because none of the reviews mention that fact.)

Hell, just look at the US version of Top Gear which is on a commercial channel (the History Channel because they ran out of WWII video to show and moved on to "reality" programming). The US version just does stunts. They don't do power laps, they don't do the star in a reasonably priced car, they don't do car reviews, they don't do any car news. (They actually did do the power lap times and the star in a reasonably priced car briefly during the first season, but they've since dropped those segments entirely.)

Part of the reason is surely due to time constraints: the US show only has 42 minutes to work with due to the 18 minutes of ads it has to fit the hour slot. But given that the closest to a car review they ever did was a blatant Tesla ad (ironically enough) and the show is almost always "brought to you by $CAR_COMPANY," it's fairly safe to say that the US version doesn't want to offend potential advertisers, and the show is horribly watered down due to it.

Are you talking about D Motor? I've never watched it because as an American I only speak American, dammit, but as I understand it it's a completely separate show done by a completely different company.

Which may be why it's OK.

Honestly, that's not the problem with the US show. I mean, Captain Slow works.

No, the problem with the US show is that they removed the Power Laps, car reviews, "star in a reasonably priced car" and news segments, concentrating solely on the stunts. It just doesn't work because you get no sense of the personality of any of the presenters. You don't see them being "normal," you don't see any banter between them, you get no chemistry because they're always out driving cars and doing stupid things. It just doesn't work.

It also has the side-effect of making the "silent racing car driver" (apparently you can't call the Stig "tamed" in the US) a character that has absolutely no context when he shows up. Why is there suddenly a silent racing car driver driving a random car for them to race against? Oh, and now he's gone, never to show up for the remainder of the episode. Uh, OK, that was sure wacky!

Have you ever watched any of the spin-off Top Gears, like Top Gear US or Top Gear Australia? They've already tried to "reinvent" the show, multiple times. It's yet to work.

The simple fact of the matter is that Jeremy Clarkson is the reason people watch Top Gear. Without Clarkson, there's no reason to watch.

And I agree, the BBC really has no choice, and the blame should be placed on Clarkson for being an idiot. But that doesn't change the fact that losing Clarkson will kill Top Gear. He made the show what it is.

It may not be Apple's fault (exactly), but it sure as hell is their problem. If more than 1 in 20 ApplePay transactions are fraudulent, what merchant in their right mind is going to accept it as a payment method? (Remember that fraud is paid by the merchants, not the banks.)

Even if it isn't Apple's fault, it sure is their problem to solve.

I would assume the repositories themselves could be moved. The thing is that they provide additional services beyond just hosting a git repository like issue tracking, wikis, and continuous integration support. Presumably that stuff can't be moved.

When the company I work for moved from Gitorious to GitLab we were able to migrate the git repositories with all their history relatively painlessly. GitLab had an automated process for doing it, but due to reasons apparently the Gitorious side would randomly flake out if you tried to use that. (It had to do with ulimits or something.) However you can still just clone a git repository and push branches from it to a new remote, which is the way I ended up transitioning most of the repositories.

The issue tracking and other features weren't an issue because we weren't using the built-in Gitorious/GitLab support in any case.

GitLab, not GitHub. GitHub is a different solution that provides pretty much the same software.

Strangely enough the company I work for recently (like six months ago) transitioned our internal git repositories from running on Gitorious to running on GitLab. From my experience GitLab is indeed the better product.

GitHub still seems to be better than both but I've never used that in a commercial setting.

I once had someone rip out a stream copy I'd written (int r; byte[] buf=new byte[1024]; while((r=in.read(buf)) >= 0) { out.write(buf,0,r); }) and replace it with a third-party library, because "we shouldn't reinvent the wheel."

Granted, I sort of agree, it's ridiculous that such a common thing isn't part of the standard Java library, but it isn't, and we didn't really need to add another 1MB of library dependencies just to do that...

You'd think that (hell, I'd have agreed), but people already pay by smart phone even without Google Wallet or Apple Pay. The obvious example is people paying by the Starbucks app, although there they get free drinks for paying that way so whatever. (However they could also pay by card, the app is just another method of getting free drinks.)

Another example is that you can apparently pay by smartphone in the cafeteria at the company I work at. I have no idea why you'd want to do this, but it's another "scan the barcode" thing, and people do it.

I have no idea why, but apparently some people find pulling out their phone and using that to be easier than using a card. Even when it takes longer because I'm not talking about NFC systems here, I'm talking about scanning a barcode on a phone.