It's functional. If you are dead set on going there and buying something, the Amazon website works. Whether the product pages are cleverly designed is another matter altogether - I think that currently, the product pages themselves are incoherent messes, random details strewn about the page with no rhyme or reason. You only find the crucial details you're looking for if you squint hard enough. (To their credit, at least the information is usually there.)

They deleted my account as well - didn't mess with the pledge stuff and no malice on my part, just the fact that I got game consoles and Linux gaming didn't really keep me on grip. =)

But the weird thing is this: they just now sent me a new password. Did you get this notice as well? I tried to log in with the new password, and it said the account didn't exist. I re-registered, boom, there I was again, so it was not like it was somehow closed for all the eternity.

Did they keep my email and hashed password on file after they deleted my account? If so, why the hell did that happen? If they wanted consistency, couldn't they just change the email to "former_user_NNNN@dev.null.invalid" and blank the password? I don't think they really have a good grip on security over there...

...that's not exactly what Facebook has been doing. This is how I picture it:

"Yes, we're perfectly aware that this lovely neighbourhood is in fact nuclear wasteland. Let no one say that we are a responsible company, however - we are giving all of you radiation suits, free of charge."

"That's, er, very kind of you. But what are you going to do to decontaminate the area?"

"What do you mean?"

"It's still incredibly risky to live there, isn't it? Sure, the radiation suits probably help you to survive there, but..."

"Well, hm, er, it's better if you don't ask difficult questions like that..."

I think Minecraft illustrates the problem perfectly. It's obviously a game that targets geeks: here's your digital Lego set, now go play with them. And that's what people do. And of course, Minecraft has features that are probably supposedly incredibly interesting for programmers specifically. You can build logic circuits and build incredibly complex machinery in it. Whee!

But in the end of the day, I have zero interest in making use of the circuit features. I have no education on digital signals; yeah, I know what an AND gate is, but don't ask me to wire one. I start getting weird ideas like "hmm, I wonder if it would be possible to tell LLVM to spit out Minecraft levels?" and reject them right away, because those ideas would take a lot of time and effort to implement and that time would be better spent on actually playing the game. =)

So, I'll just go out and build something else. I can build anything from rude mud huts to epic fortresses. Those things are much more fun to design and make. I can just hop on and be like everyone else in the game - it's time to just try to use my creativity and make something cool. That's what programmers are supposed to do, right? Make something cool? Last I checked, "Turing complete" is just a tiny, tiny subset of "cool stuff". =)

...that said, I've spend lots of time on Gears of War 3, Halo: Reach and Assassin's Creed series lately. "Doing awesome shit" is also a subset of "cool stuff". =)

Yeah. Here's the thing: The site is the Italian language Wikipedia, not national Italian Wikipedia. Wikimedia servers actually run in the free world, out of Italian government's jurisdiction. The worst that could happen would be punishment to Wikimedia Foundation's Italian branch (if any; I can't remember if they have local presence), and possibly seizure of .it domain names. And, of course, relentless persecution of individual editors within the borders. But the server itself would continue to run, unimpened.

There was a single case like this in Germany, and the locals had to settle for a more complex solutions and publishing retractions on wikipedia.de domain - no prominent dramatics on de.wikipedia.org itself, mind you.

But it is terrifying what kind of effect this kind of legislation would still mean from local perspective. A free hint: it involves (proverbial) importing of technology from China. Not a nice thought if it happens to a modern European country. If this sort of shit continues, EU really needs to bring down the hammer. Can't have prominent first-world countries trampling on basic human rights...

Back in the day, I had feeble dreams of someone making a paparazzi photography mod for Max Payne. Weapons ranging from tiny point-and-shoots to motorised SLRs with gigantic telephotos. ...no, seriously, that would look awesome on bullet time.

The problem is, the shady people who get the certificates end up actually using them, usually in the open Internet. The moment some third party notices any signs of impersonation, they go "now just wait a fucking second!" and there'll be some explaining to do.

Bad Analogy Time: In ye olde days, thieves just wrote memoirs along the lines of "60 years ago, I busted myself into the most secure bank vault at the time and they still have no idea where the money went". In a digital-currency world, the thieves have to go out there and spend the stolen money. Which has the bank's supposedly unforgeable digital signature on it. Which makes people go to the bank and ask inconvenient questions about their security, while the manager has to say that "look, this may look pretty bad, but our security is top notch, I assure you".

Pfft. More likely: "AOL buys Yahoo". Comments: "No one visits us either! We just bought Yahoo so that we could reminisce of the bad old days when people actually thought we were important."

There's no feeling like opening a router box and finding a printed copy of GPL and a CD-ROM with the source code. Shows that the manufacturer takes license obligations seriously. And finding out that the router works damn well and is configurable to hell and back is pretty cool too.

This was a D-Link router. Most of the experiences with other networking gear go in the category of "there's a Linux driver for it somewhere, meh." =)

*squint* ...nah, they've just taken a subtle jab at the decadent capitalist propaganda, the "C.S.I.". This is obviously a GUI made quickly in Visual Basic, to trace IPs.

Seriously, though, just because a some form of an user interface, or mockups of the same, exists, doesn't mean the software does. And the IP address shown doesn't necessarily mean anything - could be just a random number. What it does show is that someone in Chinese government probably considering whacking Falun Gong sites, one way or other - and that would not exactly be news, now would it?

This isn't about marking images as "offensive". If that was the case, then that would be wholly subjective.

They're marking images as containing nudity or sexuality or violence or whatever - obviously not that subjective categories. This is about description of the content, not making judgements on either way. You can describe the content in a methodical and neutral manner. The idea is that if you find those categories of images offensive, then you can make the decision to not view them.

This is not bad, because the system, as proposed, is basically going to be just an improved and integrated reimplementation of an already existing feature.

You may have heard of it. It's called "AdBlock Plus".

That's essentially what the Wikipedia community has been telling people to use. Offended by pictures of prophets? Ask your local friendly religious WikiProject if they have a handy ABP list or user CSS file for you to use. Offended by sexual content? Yeah, it's a lot of blocking, but it can be done.

All this is going to do is that it will be integrated to the software. It will also allow better collaborative tagging of pictures. And, of course, it has transparency. You can't do a lot of evil censorship if you've got to be transparent about it.

"Sogo 7 Data Gloves, a GPL stealth module, one Burdine intelligent translator... Thompson iPhone."

Well, folks didn't foresee the future in 1995. Blender is GPL, but Metasploit is BSD. And iPhones come from Apple. (And why Johnny Mnemonic would use iPhone to begin with? All that jailbreaking! Bleh.)

This would be doable - if Windows had uniform package management infrastructure. Every installer ships as an executable that can do anything they want on the system, including messing things up and annoying the hell out of you.

Look at Linux distributions on how this is done right. While there are still executable scripts involved, at least there's a huge bunch of infrastructure that does a lot of stuff for you, and people hate you if you deviate from it. If you distribute software, you can set up your own package repository, and give out public keys so people can see that the updates really come from you. A software package may come with desktop icon, but the user can tell the icon to get the hell out of their sight.

I don't know why Microsoft never bothered with this. It's not like installer package software is huge business now that open-source Windows installers like NSIS exist...

Actually, seeing how common it is these days, I'm surprised the page doesn't have a gigantic "this newly restored recording is © us, now, here, until the hell freezes over" warning... followed by a lot of pointless whining when it gets uploaded to Wikipedia under the auspices of "no, seriously, read the law books some day, there's quite a lot of stuff about 1:1 reproductions there".

So thanks to the scientists - this is a remarkable piece of digital restoration and will hopefully inspire other restoration efforts, some of which may even turn out profitable. But there just is no copyright on a 123-year-old recording itself.