This Escher-like description of fallback attempts sounds markedly worse than using a presently widely-supported technology that uses a single codec, and this is precisely why web developers don't particularly want to move to HTML 5 video. Spend many, many man hours encoding different versions of every single video plus a Flash container for all the various IE versions that it seems will never die? All because HTML 5 is 'exciting' and 'progressive'? No thanks.

Until the HTML 5 spec is sorted out and a video encoding standard is agreed on, it's useless. Flash has its problems, but it's also mature and has deep penetration. HTML 5 is no Flash killer, just overhyped by way of its future potential. Web devs are working on the web now, not in the utopian future.

"Er... Are you implying that making a video available through a tag is somehow harder than through a flash app ?"

It is. It's more effort because you need to sniff for user agents and then decide either which browsers to support or not, or create different content for different clients depending on which codec they support. On the other hand we have Flash which is basically guaranteed to work as-is in over 90% of clients. I'd call that the easier choice.

It was a meta-joke, referencing the popular gag, "there are 10 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't'. The joke is, of course, that people understanding binary and people not understanding binary comprises only 2 sets, hence the little endian '2' meta-joke after it.

You should also now see how comprehensively destroyed any joke is by having somebody explain it. Now neither joke is funny and it's all your fault. I hope you're proud if yourself.

"If the kid in question isn't already curious about programming, I'd bet money he won't ever be."

That's not a great bet to make. I had no interest in programming, hardware, or even really using a computer until I was about 22. I played games but they were just games, not something I was interested in doing as a hobby. My school didn't really have much of an IT programme beyond "touch-type all this crap into a word-processing terminal so you can earn minimum wage doing exactly that when you leave here!" It took watching a roommate put a PC together for the first time to get me interested in it. I'm a late starter, but I can match the profile you've posted word-for-word and I f*cking LOVE what I do now.

My point is that it's never too late to develop an interest. It'd be a real shame if it turned out that the kid would have adored programming if only he'd been introduced to it by somebody who knew how.

Not to try to get you to break with a long-standing and honourable /. tradition, but if you'd actually read TFA you might have noticed that it's not the OP's kid we're talking about.

I think asking one's friends for their opinions is a valid activity in parenthood. Maybe you disagree. Maybe you think that we are all genetically bestowed with the ability to know everything about everything parenthood-related. If that's the case then I'm afraid you're probably wrong.

Of course how your friends pick up their own opinions that you're asking for is entirely outside your control...

"Right. You know how when the 'new' Facebook had 'better privacy features' that it wanted you to add in everything visible to everyone more or less by default?"

This kind of misses the point that you must opt-in to using Facebook in the first place for that to even be relevant.

"maybe people would be less willing to laugh if the nationality and/or skin-tone of the targets was one they cared more for"

I doubt that, tbh - people generally mock fraudsters and scammers without prejudice to anything else about them. Rest of your post is spot-on, though.

Nah, that's just Facebook Connect. It's Facebook's own implementation of OpenID, and makes Facebook users able to use the same credentials to log into any site that uses it. People are a bit more likely to have a Facebook account than an OpenID one, so I guess that's why they've used Facebook Connect instead of OpenID (or any of the other providers).

I am having difficulty understanding why purchasing a publication from a retailer counts as IP violation.

Behold, the solution:

http://lifehacker.com/399765/turn-a-drawer-into-a-hideaway-charging-station