Ah, but DDG has !bangs, so you can... duck?... for "!g foo" to get the Google results instead. I spent a few days acclimating to DDG and now use it for almost everything, falling back to Google for the 1% of the time when I don't get the results I expect. Also works for a few hundred other things, including the old green mare herself: "!/. foo" searches Slashdot.

This is backward. What is the big value of not encrypting it, given that the data payloads are small enough not to require massive CPU resources to do so?

Encryption everywhere is the sane default and should only be removed when there's a clear reason to do so. You don't ever have to justify why to add encryption to something; you're expected to justify removing it.

Disclaimer: I'm not remotely a Node.js fanboy. I've used it and and chances are good that you've interacted with some of my code today, but it's definitely not my preference.

I said that "Node.js is concurrent" because 1) the summary claims it's fast, and 2) Node.js fans who don't fully understand it seem to think it's magically fast. No, it's not particularly fast: it's just able to handle a lot of requests at once. Those are orthogonal.

Node.js is mostly event driven, but it's concurrent in the sense that it can be servicing many thousands of simultaneous requests by doing the parts that aren't currently blocked. It's not quite single threaded, though, as the blocking parts are handled in their own threads.

1) Languages aren't compiled or interpreted: implementations are. Java has had a decent optimizing compiler for a long time, but JVM 1.0 wasn't exactly a speed daemon. JavaScript was a dog for a long time, but modern engines like V8 compile it to native machine code.

2) Node.js isn't fast. It's concurrent. You can handle many thousands of simultaneous requests, as long as none of them are working particularly hard.

3) Exactly what collision course are we talking about? I can't imagine many situations I'd consider Node.js for that I ever would have though about Java for in the first place. If anything, I see Node.js as more of a competitor to Python for building scalable backend services.

But it doesn't have a decent mechanism for sending responses before they're requested. With HTTP/2, your server can say "here's the page HTML, and here's a stream for the favicon linked in the HTML headers, and here's another stream for the JavaScript". The quickest request is the one you don't have to make.

The replacement servers come from somewhere.

If customer A consistently gives lower-than-average ratings, scale their reviews upward to that a "3" from them is a "5" from someone else. If they consistently give "5" rating but give a "1" to a particular driver, then pay attention to that deviation.

Same for drivers: if B frequently gives "1" ratings to passengers, then that's a roundabout way of saying that B is a difficult jerk and you can ignore those.

Why is 8GB overkill? I put at least 16 in anything I have control over.

I can't speak to Android, but Apple still supports and issues updates to the three year old iPhone 4S. Microsoft sometimes just walks away from stuff.

The enlightened self interest angle is that I don't want corporations treating H-1Bs like crap, because it enables the companies to get them for cheap, which depresses salaries in my career path. I want companies to have to treat H-1B visa holders well because 1) it's the right thing to do, and 2) so that I'm not competing against guys who'll work for 2/3 my salary for fear of being deported.

Precisely what I was thinking about your woefully inaccurate claim.

Correct, which is why I choose to believe the facts instead of naive misintrepetations off the Internet.

LOL that's precious. Meanwhile, the H-1B employees I know - my personal friends, people I hang out with and trust - describe a legal hellscape that's pretty much exactly indentured servitude. One of them managed to escape a bad situation by hooking up with a major corporation who could expedite the process to have the transfer done within a couple of months. That's two months of walking on eggshells so that they didn't get fired and deported. Another wasn't quite as lucky and had to ship out to the European branch of their new employer so that they can come back to America in a year or so, presuming everything is in order by then.

You're on crack if you think an H-1B isn't a recipe for suckishness. Regardless of what it hypothetically sounds like on paper, the situations I witnessed firsthand were terrible for the workers involved.