They were not arrested by US agents - they were arrested by New Zealand law enforcement at the request of US agents. So there's absolutely nothing unusual there. Likewise, the seized servers were in Virginia. Whatever you might think of the case itself, your outrage over the method of the arrest is a little misplaced - we have mutual extradition agreements with many countries.

I don't know enough about the site to have an opinion; but if a foreign national, living in a foreign country, stole my identity and ran up charges on my US-based credit cards, tapped out my US-based bank, I would sure hope that US law enforcement (assuming they investigated and agreed there was enough evidence to prosecute) could get the cooperation of the government of the foreign country where the thieves lived and have them extradited for trial here.

And again, before anyone jumps down my throat, I'm not commenting on the merit of the case, or comparing piracy to thievery, or whatever. I'm simply saying that as per the international cooperation, there's absolutely nothing unusual here, and I would hope not. This is why we have extradition agreements.

Could not disagree more. I've worked with a variety of Web platforms/frameworks; on my current job, there is a bit of Drupal fandom, despite almost no one having any experience (except me) with Drupal - it's just become a popular buzzword here (another story).

So one of my first projects after arriving, management had already had it in their heads that it would be Drupal-based. After digging in to the requirements for a week, working on a prototype/proof-of-concept, I quickly hit some walls and realized I'd be spending as much time patching bugs in existing Drupal modules as writing original code - the data model is complex and Drupal's database abstraction layer is about as ugly as they get.

Annoyed and frustrated, after a few beers with an old friend the night before, I read the first few pages of the Django getting started docs on the way home one night - by the time I got home I felt like I had a strong sense for how the framework was structured, the conventions it followed, etc - the docs were clear, concise, and the framework sounded elegant and straightforward, with a clean design (unlike Drupal, which seems to suffer from no particular design).

I hit the ground running with Django and haven't turned back - since that first night with it, I've not run into any big surprises - everything just works as expected. The code is solid, the design obvious, and I'm really in love with Python (having only written simple scripts with it in the past).

I don't think I've ever found the docs to be wanting, and not sure what you mean by the config being touchy - it practically holds your hand, the integrated debug mode gets you straightened out quickly. It does help to understand what Pythonic code looks like - Django is pretty damn close to a perfect expression of what it means to be Pythonic, so it's advisable to get comfortable with Python itself of course.

The one thing I thought I'd hate with Python - the use of whitespace as structure - I got used to very quickly, with the help of a decent text editor. Otherwise it's been a joy.

FWIW.

Interestingly enough, this perfectly illustrates the folly of Flash on the Web. A single vendor controls the technology, and can pull the rug out from under it at any time, as they just did. The same cannot be said for HTML.

http://wiki.squid-cache.org/Features/IPv6

This guy had been building up an explosives cache for years and had not blown himself up. Therefore, one can only conclude that he was taking sufficient safety measures to prevent premature detonation. This, in turn, means that it should have been possible to destroy the explosives without endangering the property. Therefore, the tenant didn't destroy the property.

You moron. The guys gardner nearly got killed because of an explosive going off.

Just to be clear, Real ID - is opt *in* as you have to explicitly use it. Blizzard doesn't automatically give everyone Real ID friend status and then require you to opt out. Or did I misunderstand your use of "opt out"?

Care to expand on that? I've been with Wells Fargo for 14 years and, having also had accounts (along with my wife) at several other national banks, and a credit union, it's the one I've been consistently happiest with. Just curious what makes Wells Fargo the idiot's choice.

The only reason Wired for iPad is so huge is because of the ridiculous approach to laying out the content using a mass of essentially fullscreen images - not text, style sheets, and discreet graphical elements - thanks to the late stage realization that they couldn't ship an app cross-compiled from Flash... so they created a series of fullscreen imagemaps as a last minute hack, seriously bloating the size compared with a more sane approach.

http://www.macnn.com/articles/10/06/02/dev.explains.massive.size.of.magazine.downloads/

I mainly work on in-house applications - cool stuff (by virtue of the companies I've worked for), but rarely anything seen outside of the firewall. Working in creative environments means UI/UX is paramount to the success of a project.

I've built frontends for these apps in both Flex and using various JavaScript libraries (mainly jQuery). I have no idea what you mean by "they would never scale" - unless you're stuck supporting older versions of IE, I'm hard pressed to imagine a Web-based UI that would require more umph than modern JavaScript interpreters can deliver, but it is possible - I have a number of backend data management tools for a few projects, which I use to manipulate large datasets, and even current releases of Firefox is crushed by the jQuery work I'm doing, though Chrome and Safari both are snappy. For the frontends, I'm fortunate not to have to support IE, so I target Firefox as the minimum platform (it's currently the slowest JS interpreter I support).

As I mentioned, I also used to do a lot of Flex work - frankly, I loved Flex, and have little negative to say about it. It's everything I wanted from Flash technology as a developer - a consistent runtime... a pretty homogeneous development environment, decent UI libraries, solid database connectivity, easy path to compiling "native" apps with AIR... that said, since getting interested in jQuery I rarely, if ever, have a desire to go back. I'm not sure the choice between the two was purely rational, but I find myself longing for Flex much less now doing work that runs on a browser engine than I longed for HTML/JavaScript/CSS when I was working in Flex.

But again, what do you mean by "they would never scale"? Plenty of massive apps use JavaScript on the frontend... yes, older versions of IE suck terribly as a JavaScript runtime, and even Firefox has it's performance limits. If you have to support IE, and are building internal apps, I highly recommend Flex. If you don't have to support IE, just take your pick - learn both. If your UI is so heavy it's crushing your JavaScript interpreter, you're likely doing something very wrong.

Same. Out of the 200-30 or so matches through various phases of the beta, I've had exactly one person who was an ass (and boy was he) - the rest were either largely silent, or actually outwardly friendly and sportsmanlike. I'm not seeing that - I get an almost entirely friendly and sportsmanlike player in every matchup.

Every single petition I've ever signed involved:

1. Being asked what city I live in, to determine if I'm eligible
2. Being asked if I'm a registered voter, to determine if I'm eligible
3. Being asked if I've signed the petition yet, to determine if I'm eligible
4. Providing both my signature and printed name, as well as the address where I'm registered to vote

It seems to connect the act of my signing the petition pretty well right back to me - I can't imagine it being much less ambiguous unless they took a picture, thumbprint, or SSN.

http://www.icheg.org/

Flash Player on OSX has sucked since long before the iPhone, though it has gotten significantly better in that time.