Honest question: could you really not tell that AC was joking?

your browser won't actually display any not-safe-for-work links, but the folks monitoring all your communications will think that it did.

No. The sync data will be transferred over HTTPS and no one watching the network will have any clue as to what was transferred, other than that it was browsing history. Sending this kind of information in plain text—let alone requesting that the browser actually do HTTP GETs on each URL!—would be madness.

Given Apple's success with Siri, Google has a long way to go to make their products as user-friendly as possible in the vaguely futuristic way Siri offers. Also, when you install Google Voice, it asks you whether you want to turn on Personalized Voice Recognition, so that Google can pick your voice out of a mess of voices. No, thanks.

i wouldn't be surprised if you see 20%, hell maybe even 30% uptick on their stock.

If that wouldn't surprise you, then you don't know what you're talking about. Seems to me you either have some Apple stock and you'd like to see it go up further than you think it will without your blathering, or you genuinely have no idea how stocks mature. The company with the largest market capitalization in the world undergoing positive growth of 20-30% in under six months? Keep dreaming, buddy.

The most lucrative profession a young geek can aspire do doesn't exist yet. Go make it.

Nick Denton is an idiot. He runs Gawker Media, which is itself a joke of a syndication network. He hires wannabe journalists and gives them bags of cash to bribe industry insiders into leaking stories so he can put them on his blogs. Of course the comments sections on Gawker Media sites are stupid. He also dismisses the politically charged and logically sound comments on Jezebel, which I wouldn't call the epitome of intelligent discourse on the internet, but it's definitely heads and shoulders above anything else hosted by Gawker.

Look at the comments on this Ars Technica piece: all topical and useful. Look at this comment thread (particularly this one! one of the most helpful comments I've ever read) about someone learning how to program in Perl.

In TFA, Denton says:

Give other commenters more power to "up-vote" or "down-vote" posts? "We don't really believe in the democratic process of decision-making when it comes to discussion," Denton said.

What a prick. Of course he doesn't believe in the democratic power of anything, because he's authoritarian, narrow-minded, grossly incompetent as a "journalist"—and deplorable as an editor, too—and all Gawker media sites (I'd entertain a counterargument defending Jezebel) operate on one rule: feed the trolls. Not all the examples of good comments I gave above have user-moderation systems in place, but the ones that don't just have good content that attracts good readers. Nick wouldn't know anything about that.

Could you expand on why you think this is better than just going with the GPL? Just asking out of curiosity. The obvious downside is of course license proliferation.

Personally, I don't view "license proliferation" as nearly as much a threat to the open web as inadequate variety to ensure a viable software ecosystem. You'd never say there are too many programming languages out there, would you? Just different approaches, different tools for different needs. In the same way, there's no single license that pleases everybody, and the MPL is not that panacea. Even though FLOSS is a huge part of the future of software in my estimation, the GPL in particular tends to scare some folks off of open source licenses, because they feel bullied and restricted by the mandate to share their code immediately with the world. In my eyes, this makes the GPL less free than similar licenses that allow for proprietary development (like MPL and MIT).

Even as an ardent supporter of FLOSS, I'm pleased to see influential companies exploring options other than the GPL, especially in a way that tries to maintain community relationships by keeping an eye on compatibility. Mozilla is one of the only organizations whose genuine dedication to creating and sustaining an open web I don't question.

Try installing Tomato or DDWRT and tweak the maximum number of simultaneous connections value. Raising that will dramatically improve your performance with BT. This will use up significantly more RAM on the router, though, so try to use a model that has beefy hardware (for a consumer-grade home router). I highly recommend the WRT54-GL, which has double the RAM of the standard WRT54G models. The "L" means it supports Linux. =)

Doesn't help the OP any, though.

Your decision to sell the Raspberry Pi to any interested parties, not just educational institutions, seems to indicate a broad-minded approach to education, favoring transparency and open standards. What percentage of your costs do you expect to cover by selling directly to individual, hacker-type enthusiasts, versus wholesale distribution to educational institutions for inclusion in curricula?

I'm no audiophile, though I do take the time (and space) to rip everything I buy to FLAC. What's the intended application of encoding around 96kbps? Most audio streams online passed that mark many years ago. All in all, this seems like a question best answered years ago. Can anyone point me to what I'm missing here?

More or less the thing for social networking in places like Brazil and India.

Of course. I think what Parent was saying is that better than this philosophy you identify is to implement an ethos of doing the job well. As this case illustrates, that would have been a better approach to take than focusing on "keeping investors' wallets open." Funnily enough, doing the job well is often a better approach, no matter what your jaded perspective on American commercialism may be (which actually feeds into the corrupt mentality of faking goods to get money).

I think you're being facetious, but it's worth pointing out that money spent on jets and other machines of war is wasted whether they're used or not. As plebian as it may seem to quote 1984 in a discussion like this, I think the point is worth the didacticism:

The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent.

Building machines of war, even if they are not used, is profoundly detrimental to the progression of culture in a harmonious and sustainable way. And, as Eisenhower tried to warn, they will be used if they are created, albeit against enemies most likely to be defeated (in this case, probably not China).

In my experience, mobile Firefox is beautiful in its replete feature set, but I find it deplorably slow—much like how Firefox 3.x was on the desktop. I haven't played around much with add-ons for fear of even longer browser startup times on my phone. NoScript is a wonderful project, but I'd like to see a lot more speed improvement on mobile Firefox before I go signing up.