This, apparently, is the library.

No wireless. Less space than an obsolete iPod Classic. Lame.

Hollywood bullies Netflix into implementing draconian DRM.

But like any abusive relationship they're too afraid of losing their sugar daddy to speak out against it in public.

From the leaked Sony emails: "Netflix are heavily resistant to enforcing stricter financial geofiltering controls, as they claim this would present a too high bar to entry from legitimate subscribers. For example, they want people to be able to use various methods of payment (e.g. PayPal) where it is harder to determine where the subscriber is based. They recognize that this may cause illegal subscribers but they (of course) would rather err that way than create barriers to legitimate subscribers to sign up."

Yeah, right. I'll consider Netflix "heavily resistant" to draconian DRM when they launch a PR campaign publicly skewering Hollywood for asking for it.

Instead this leaked email tells us only that in private they're mildly uncomfortable with draconian DRM but at the end of the day they don't really give a shit and will fall in line in public for The Almighty Hollywood.

Keep taking those beatings, Netflix. Keep doing your abuser's bidding.

I'll consider Netflix "heavily resistant" to draconian DRM when they launch a PR campaign publicly skewering Hollywood for asking for it.

Instead this leaked email tells us only that in private they're mildly uncomfortable with draconian DRM but at the end of the day they don't really give a shit and will fall in line in public for The Almighty Hollywood.

Statistically significant: "Lots of Chinese people learn English, but very few English speakers learn Chinese."

Subjective anecdote: "I see plenty of English speakers learning Chinese."

I often wonder how realistic that possibility really is. Lots of Chinese people learn English, but very few English speakers learn Chinese. That has led to a one-way lingual exchange exporting English to China.

But to create a Chinglish-style creole in the future, the lingual export would need to be bidirectional. English speakers would need to be learning Chinese at at least a comparable rate that Chinese speakers are learning English.

One could argue that with China's increasing economic prominence that it may some day be necessary for non-Chinese people to learn Chinese, but even as the #2 superpower that still has yet to happen.

As such, I'd wager that English as it currently exists will continue to dominate in 100 years. The fact that it's the first language of several major countries and virtually everyone worldwide learns English as a second language is a trend that shows no signs of stopping.

Internet chat is a terrible hellscape and it's saddened me for almost two decades.

Unlike email and the web, the dominant systems for instant messaging have been proprietary forever. Sure, XMPP exists, but nobody uses it. There was a chance when Google Talk was using it, but ever since Google stopped federating, that's basically fucked.

Now we're seeing the slow death of IRC too at the hands of better but more proprietary user experiences being offered by Skype and Slack.

And it's easy to see why too. The proprietary chat tools out there like Slack are absolutely incredible user experiences.

If IRC and XMPP are ever going to be competitive with the new proprietary guys in town, it needs to get competitive on the usability front.

If we ever want to reclaim our freedom, we have to find a way to make XMPP is as usable as WhatsApp and IRC is as usable as Slack.

I don't really know how to do that. I wish I did. But I think the internet would benefit massively from it. Imagine if there were 5 different competing proprietary protocols for email or webpages? That's the world we live in now for internet chat. It doesn't have to be this way.

Malware on Android exists for the following reasons:

First and biggest reason: it has a massive market share. If iOS had Android's market share, you better believe it'd have more malware.

Second biggest reason: Google kinda sucks at curating their app store compared to iOS. This has nothing to do with sideloading. They let far too much malware into the Google Play store thanks to their policy of reporting bad apps rather than actively prescreening apps as rigorously as Apple does. Google really needs to get better at this.

Distant third: OS vulnerabilities. iOS suffers from this too occasionally.

Very distant fourth: sideloading. Way less than 1% of Android users ever enable sideloading. This is not where the majority of Android users are getting their malware. It's by far the least significant attack vector.

As such, I think it's pretty obvious that Apple adding an "enable sideloading" checkbox on iOS would not be a malware disaster anymore than it is on Mac OS X.

That's a false dichotomy. One platform can provide both. Android does that today.

By default Android is a walled garden and locked to Google Play just as iOS is locked to the App Store. You have to flip a well-buried switch in Android to turn that off.

On iOS there is no such choice. OS X does, but not iOS. It's totally arbitrary and unnecessary.

That response is kind of a non sequitur. You're correct that "the Sun" is correct, but I'm also correct that "the Solar System" is a planetary system named after our star, Sol.

The Solar System is a planetary system named after its star, Sol.

It's not "a" Solar System, it's the Solar System. There is only one.

Solar is a proper noun, not a generic term. But it is commonly misused that way.

I really wish news articles would get their terminology right.

Welcome to HL Tauri - a star system that is just being born

In short, this is the mother of all embryonic star system ultrasounds.

No.

The correct term is planetary system.

But hey, at least they didn't do what so many other publications do and incorrectly refer to exoplanetary systems as "other solar systems" as though "Solar" is a generic term and not, in actuality, a proper noun referring to our sun, Sol.

Okay I'll stop being pedantic now.

But seriously, people, use the terms correctly.

What if I want them to be purple! ;)

For those of you who are a fan of customizing the colors of message bubbles in Messages.app and don't like that Apple removed this ability as part of the iOSification of Yosemite, there's an app for that: https://github.com/kethinov/Bu...

I made this during the developer previews because I don't like the default puke green for most of my IM conversations. Hope this helps some people. Source code also available.