If it's 100,000 years from now, I won't lose any sleep over it.

Of course! Magic coconuts! Why didn't we think of this sooner?

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/malaysia-recruits-witch-doctors-find-missing-passenger-jet-article-1.1720770

Those are for when you are driving and it is so much easier to just leave a VM. Also, when the background noise in the car makes a dictated e-mail look like it written by a drunk, illiterate wombat.

That's a decade or two out of date. Maybe more. Here's this weekend's list of sex and fetish events in SF. There's a nostalgia tour for tourists of SF's sex history, and a screening of porn films from a Berlin festival. Yawn.

It's not an uncommon belief. If the code is well factored, and has a good narrative, comments can actually be harmful. This is because comments have a very major problem: They can be updated, and are often updated, at a different time the code does. So it's not rare to find comments that are downright deceitful: They don't say what the code does: But what the code used to do, years ago, before the system worked. So making the code agree with the comments will break the app.

We have the same problem with most specifications: They are instantly out of date.

So what do we do? We want something that helps us explain what the code does, and yet cannot deceive us on whether it's true or not. We call those executable specifications and unit tests. If the tests don't pass, they don't reflect reality, and we have to figure out which one is right. If the Executable specs stopped running, then we know what broke them.

So I'd leave comments down to situations where I am stuck doing a level of language trickery that I do not expect my average reader to understand, but that I cannot actually avoid. So maybe a comment on a performance optimization, or on some crazy type conversion trickery in Scala. But every time I feel like commenting is necessary, I know my code is doing something I am not happy about.

I'm not seeing this. It's a dull period for San Francisco. The first dot-com boom was more fun. Connecting up everybody and everything was important. This boom is all from ad-based companies, and most of what they're doing is rather banal. So are many of the people doing it.

Almost all the artists who need more than a desk and a laptop moved out years ago. SF used to have lots of big empty warehouse and factory spaces that were used for art projects and wild parties. That's what SOMA was. Those are gone, replaced with "live/work lofts" or giant bullpen workspaces.

I do not get why tech people want to live in the Mission. I've had friends there for years, and it's tolerable, but not a place to live in by choice. Wednesday I went to a stand up comedy improv thing in the Mission where people tried to put together presentions from random PowerPoint slides. Heavy bouncer presence outside because it was right next to a service center for homeless people. The comedy sucked, too. That's what the tech crowd is bringing into the area.

Here's a typical Mission location, one which also happens to be a Google bus stop. "Cafe la Boheme" has crappy food, and it's had crappy food for years. The place with the graffiti is an upstairs dance studio which is hanging on. "Chinese Food and Donuts" isn't very good at either. That corner has looked the same for many years. There are some decent restaurants a few blocks over on Valencia, but not at this corner. There are cool places to live in SF, but this isn't one of them.

This is what the European Union really does - they set standards so stuff works all over Europe, across borders and across vendors. Like GSM phones. In the past, over 20 years they moved the 220V and 240V countries to 230V. That was completed in 2003. Trying to get the whole EU to use the same AC power plug, though, was not successful.

No, I think you didn't parse the story carefully enough. If you look, it's saying that MITM attacks are the kind of thing that COULD be used to break SSL, if you had bogus certificates. It does not say that there's any evidence of this actually happening on a large scale, and indeed one of the surprising things about the Snowden leaks so far is that there isn't much (any?) evidence of SSL sabotage, even though it obviously must be one of their highest priority targets. The MITM attacks that NSA/GCHQ have been doing have all been reported as being against sites that, at the time the attacks took place, were not doing SSL.

Regardless, if all you want to do is inject an exploit into a browser you don't need to beat SSL. It's not widespread enough so eventually someone will browse to a non-SSLd website (like slashdot) and get pwnd. At that point you can read all traffic before it gets encrypted.

Syria is a country far from the UK that has no connection to Britain at all, and despite that we (I'm also a Brit) are so amazed at ourselves for the fact that politicians finally voted no. Why the hell did the decision even come up in the first place? Right, because both Blair and Cameron are warmongers who squeal with delight the moment a far off country destabilises because it gives them a chance to prance around on the "world stage", as they put it. Not so different from what they accuse Putin of, is it?

Ukraine is right on the border of Russia and has a lot of Russian people in it. The first thing the new Ukrainian government did (if you want to call the outcome of a revolution/coup a government) is start to try and suppress the Russian language. If you're looking for a better analogy, perhaps look at Ireland, the long-festering Troubles and the occupation-like conditions that parts of Ireland were put under by the British Army at times.

George Bush and Obama were also very popular at times. Is the majority of the USA suffering from mass psychosis?

Putin is popular because the economy of Russia has recovered a lot since he took power. There isn't really anything magical about this. It's the same with China. Leaders that make poor populations a lot wealthier get a lot of slack in the authoritarianism department.

Actually the latest polling on Scotland gives more like 38-40% in the "yes" block.

I would like to see evidence for your claim that Ukraine is not really a divided country and that's all Putin's propaganda. Everything else I've seen suggests that Ukraine really is a highly divided country with a large population of people who would prefer to be a part of Russia than the EU. I'm not convinced this is something Putin is just making up.

The problem here is that the west has already decided it doesn't matter what the outcome of the Crimean referendum is - if Russia wins, that must be because of foul play, intimidation or excessive "propaganda" (as if western elections are not also filled with propaganda). In fact, I don't see any way the people living there could ever actually decide they prefer to be aligned with Russia without western powers decrying it as the work of the dastardly Putin.

Here's an idea. Why don't you go compare American propaganda (Obama's comments) vs Russian propaganda (Putin's comments). In particular note that Obama doesn't even bother taking press questions any more, whereas Putin takes lots of very aggressive and straightforward ones.

I think it's something specific to MacBooks. I used to find I could hardly see the background, but if I tilted the screen a bit suddenly there it was back in the old yellow colour. The new yellow "Ad" icon is much easier to see though.

Google went public a decade ago. I think you have to do a better job of showing cause/effect than that.

Or if you have it on a hot wallet, and your computer is infected by a trojan. Or you have it all stored in a medium that fails. Or if you use it to buy something, and that something never arrives. Or you give it to non-shady people to hold if for you, and they are big enough to be a target for hackers.

So it's all good as long as computers don't lose data, and the entire meatspace around computer security has no flaws. Good luck with that.

User Friendly feels extremely dated now, but that's not because it was a bad comic back then, but because it was trying to capture the geek mindset of the time. It's a bit like Dilbert, a comic that only really makes sense when you've spent enough time in a megacorp's big cubicle farm. The main difference is that User Friendly came from an upbeat world that, frankly, does not exist anymore, so today it just can't be funny.