In truth, marginalia practicaly never make it into proper glosses. Glosses are usually assembled from authoritative texts that discuss the passage in question. And very few texts get the Gloss treatment: in the Latin world, it's the Bible, Corpus Iuris Civilis and Decretals above all. Some other texts might get glosses, but they rarely get a glossa ordinaria-class treatment.

And to the midrashim comment in TFA, I'd point out that Rashi did a bang-up job himself in Hebrew.

For the scholastic Middle Ages, criticism usually took the form of "one doctor says this ..., for these reasons. I disagree, rather saying this, for these reasons. To his reasons, I reply..."

Same as it ever was.

Lots of people have wanted to do space games. I've wanted to as well. A key part about doing such a thing with multiplayer (or even just the internet now) for me has been the use of computing. Folks have been building aimbots forever. What if the rules of the universe, and the ships, were only roughly (and/or inaccurately) described, and each player/ship had a limited amount of processing to figure them out and optimize the ship?

So I see Notch has a working 6502 emulator, and even a crude display system.

Boy, wouldn't that be cool if he actually built the game I've been longing to play? You know, he probably won't, but a sufficiently chaotic system with players coding things like navigation, weapons targeting, guidance, engine FADECs, that kinda stuff? As long as the failures are fun too, it'd kick ass.

The German-speaking Cantons all had majorities against the ban. The French-speaking cantons all had majorities [i]in favor[/i] of the ban. Swiss-Germans outnumber everybody else by a wide margin, so they won.

The argument for price-fixing is the same one behind the death of record stores. Remember record stores? Turns out there are a few hits out there that most people buy, and then those interested in music have wider interests, and therefore want a broader catalog to choose from. The record store business model is built on selling those hits and using some of that revenue to pay for the space to hold a broad selection and the expertise to guide customers. Even before the internet was making dents in music sales, the big labels were already running exclusive deals with Walmart and Target, sinking the record store business model. The same thing is going on with books: the competition to worry about isn't the internet; it's the big chains that can serve 80% of the market by distributing a handful of best-sellers, and screw the rest. And it's the publishers themselves, who cut deals with the big chains on their top sellers, and in so doing, contribute to killing off the market for their own books.

And yes, it's protectionism in the same way mandating broadband to rural areas is protectionism.

Real world, my ass. Yes, it takes applications time to load. Bring up a Microsoft Office product, and that load time is pretty long. But the interface comes up immediately (thanks, no doubt, to Microsoft's unique relationship with their OS).

My cell phone is an ancient, slow turd, but when I start it up, I can access the interface almost immediately, and the log on to the network is extremely fast. Only after that does it start doing things like preparing the indices of SMS and similar stuff.

"The cloud" may not be the answer in this case, but the problem is clear: there are two ways of loading a program. The easy way (for programmers) is to throw up a splash screen, load everything, and then give the user control (as in your Angry Birds example). The right way (for usability) is to get the interface up, and keep loading. It'll usually take the user a while to get "under speed" as well, so why not use that time to load up the bloat?
When someone in an office starts an application, that person wants to work on that application. Two minutes to load, every day, across a whole industry amount to more than enough billable hours to pay for optimization. Applying patches and updates at startup (or asking, "Do you want to start now, or wait 15 minutes while I patch in some completely unintelligible and probably irrelevant upgrade?") is also, in most cases, wrong. It's like telling someone at the McD's drive-thru: "Would you like to wait 15 minutes so we can deliver the same food in a bag that is 5% less likely to tear open?"

3. That's not relevant here, as the post by the Adobe employee was about load times, not EULAs, and it was not a post that portrayed Adobe positively. Besides, Adobe Flash's startup EULAs are worse.

4. If it's fast enough, you won't need a splash, or you won't care. MS Office has splash screens, but I only see them briefly. Photoshop, on the other hand, does nothing for about a minute, then writes over the middle of screen (might even steal the focus) a splash that lasts another minute. I am not impressed.

There's a lot of improvement that has to be done in interface terms, and saying "that's the way programs are" misses the point and affirms what need not be affirmed. Certainly, there are conceivable instances when long, bloated load times are required, but I suspect they're far fewer than the number of programs that are written for the benefit of programmers, and not for the users. Otherwise, why would my tools keep interrupting me?

They gave it a registry hive? I see they're porting all the best parts of Windows.

Microsoft has never been a "cool brand". The last time anyone got excited about Microsoft's entry into hardware was when they provided BASIC for the Amiga (and maybe the Atari ST). For most non-tech people, Windows on a phone evokes images of something complicated that you swear at, fear intrusions from, and get the nerd-in-law to fix. For tech people, it calls up a bloated mass of interruption and failure that grows at cancerous rates until planned obsolescence makes it unusable six months from now.

So WP could be the coolest, slickest thing on the planet, but the Microsoft AND Windows branding is just lethal. I mean, an outstanding Windows product has always been praised by "Well, it's not as bad as the last version", clear back to the birth of the brand thirty years ago.

I still use my 2007 N800.

My understanding is that the problem with measuring conductivity on materials heated in a diamond-anvil cell is that you have a central spot that is extremely hot, and then a steep temperature gradient to the rest of the material. Measuring conductivity on a diamond-anvil cell often results in simply measuring the circuit formed in these surrounding boundary areas. It's a pity people are still breaking diamonds with these things rather than thinking about the ramifications the test setup has for their measurements.

Here's the thing:
Mike posted it to his blog, as a professional with a large following. From previous experience (cf. Dickwolves), he knew what the reaction would be. Hell, he even ended his initial post with the guy's full contact details.

So he basically told the internet: "Here's this asshole, have at him," knowing full well that people would engage in illegal harassment of Mr. Christoforo. And those are details you could probably convince a jury in a tort trial of.

If Mr. Christoforo weren't such an idiot, he'd have lawyers in contact with PA, working out a settlement. The Avenger folks should be working something out too, preferably (for both parties) on friendly terms.

Yes, big douchebag Mr. Christoforo, but what Mike did doesn't strike me as blameless, ethical, or even legal.

If I remember the story correctly, the ""cargo cult" part of formula corrected a problem that hadn't existed since the war, and its purpose had escaped institutional memory. Then a transcription error of the formula made that part ridiculously high, and an innocuous change somewhere else caused an interaction problem.

So, yeah, I used the term "cargo cult". Nobody new what it was, or why it was breaking.

But of course, It's been fifteen years since I read the story.

Primo Levi, "Chrome" in The Periodical Table describes a similar problem with a paint formula at his factory in the 1950s. Evidently, during the war, they had a QC problem, included some chemical to correct for that, and the formula became a cargo cult, long after anyone knew what it was for. Someone changes some other factor, and their batch of paint gets the consistency of liver. So our hero had to reverse-engineer the trade secrets of a previous generation, back when he was working in the lab at Auschwitz.