“The unemployment rate in the US rose to 10.2% in October, which was its highest rate since April 1983, according to figures from the US Labor Department.”

“Some large-scale computer simulations may be overestimating the impact of climate change on biodiversity in some regions, researchers have suggested. They said models that analyse vast areas often failed to take into account local variations, such as topography and microclimates. Local-scale simulations, which did include these factors, often delivered a more optimistic outlook, they added.”

“In partnership with the OpenOffice.org community, WarMouse announced the release of the OpenOfficeMouse, the first multi-button application mouse designed for the world’s leading open-source office productivity suite. With a revolutionary and patented design featuring 18 buttons, an analog joystick, and support for as many as 52 key commands, the OpenOfficeMouse is intended to provide a faster and more efficient user interface for OpenOffice.org applications such as Writer and Calc than the conventional icons, pull-down menus, and hotkeys presently permit.”

“The point is that American Airlines is clearly a failing company. They’re losing hundreds of millions of dollars every quarter. The experience of traveling on one of their flights is terrible. Their website is terrible. These facts are not unrelated. How does this happen? It happens when a company is run by executives who don’t have taste and aren’t concerned about customer experience.”

“As you probably already know, IE doesn’t allow you to create rounded corners without using images or endless hacking. Enter the CurvyCorners javascript project. CurvyCorners allows you to quickly create rounded corners within Internet Explorer.”

Twitter icons.

“The best current estimate would be about 15 percent if peat degradation is included. Given the uncertainties involved one can not rely on estimates to the nearest 1 percent.”

“Sexuality is considered one of the most powerful tools of marketing and particularly advertising both online and offline. Post-advertising sales response studies have shown it can be very effective for attracting immediate interest, holding that interest, and in the context of that interest, introducing a product that somehow correlates with that interest.” The best trend used is great images.

“How’s this for a gripping corporate story line: Youthful founder gets booted from his company in the 1980s, returns in the 1990s, and in the following decade survives two brushes with death, one securities-law scandal, an also-ran product lineup, and his own often unpleasant demeanor to become the dominant personality in four distinct industries, a billionaire many times over, and CEO of the most valuable company in Silicon Valley.” I would have to agree.

“The internet chapter of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a secret copyright treaty whose text Obama’s administration refused to disclose due to “national security” concerns, has leaked. It’s bad.” Beyond bad.

“Let me remind everyone that Apple rejected a Someecards application last month partially due to the fact that one of the cards included was mocking Hitler (and more specifically, the film Inglourious Basterds). They flat out rejected it, didn’t require a certain rating for the satire, just rejected it. So when you see Mein Kampf in the store, complete with a swastika as its icon, you’ll forgive me if I’m a bit dumbfounded.”

“Google Reader and Twitter are fundamentally different products that serve fundamentally different purposes, regardless of how many different uniforms people try to squeeze Twitter into — but we’ll disregard all that for now and focus on why Twitter, in it’s current iteration and feature set, simply cannot function as a legitimate newsreading tool. I will do this by providing you with a dumb analogy I came up with while loading some towels in the dryer.”

“Even though Apple recommends it, placing preferences in their Settings.app is currently probably not a good idea. The list of applications in Settings.app quickly becomes unmanageable, and people don’t look for settings in there.”

“Fruttabuona, which is Italian for Good Fruit, is our first free icons set. When I first started drawing the apple, which originally was intented to be a personal avatar, I knew I wanted to do something glossy but not too shiny, with a heavy outline and a strongly circular set up. But, once I was smitten with my first one icon, I’ve kept going on drawing and here you are Fruttabuona.”

“I used to think that John Stuart Mill was right that when ideas were freely exchanged the marketplace of ideas would eventually expose the truth and that people would come to know it for the truth. But then I started learning more about the flaws and weaknesses in human reasoning and perception. We’re extremely vulnerable to this kind of emotional manipulation, and it threatens to overwhelm our rational faculties. Being true is different from being convincing. I no longer trust that the truth will win out. Talk about intellectual cowardice. This entire argument is a blatant appeal to emotion which should be dispelled by stopping to think for 10 seconds. But when you’re irrationally terrified, it’s hard to form rational thoughts. Too often, religion uses bad logical arguments slipped in the ‘emotional’ side door to our beliefs.”

“
OK, OK, I’m exaggerating for effect. But if the 2009 cycle is a referendum on either party, isn’t more of a referendum on the Republicans? Or perhaps, more precisely, a referendum for Republicans about the meaning of Republicanism?”

“Personally, I’m all about innovation. Allowing an innovator to benefit from his or her innovation through patents is what makes businesses innovate in the first place. At the same time however, gestures are not innovative, nor should they be patentable. Pinch-to-zoom is just common sense. How else would you do it with one motion? If Apple wants to patent something, patent the technology that allows the device to recognize multi touch and react to it, don’t patent the gestures themselves. Gestures should be treated as a language, like sign language for touch devices. We need a common set of gestures to interact with all touch enabled devices. I shouldn’t have to lean a different language just to use a different device.”

“When I first learned about this, I was horrified. Mr. X is actually a good UX designer, and his email had me thinking there was hope for American Airlines. The guy clearly cared about his work and about the user experience at the company as a whole. But AA fired Mr. X because he cared. They fired him because he cared enough to reach out to a dissatisfied customer and help clear the company’s name in the best way he could.”

“You don’t want everyone. You want the right someone. Someone who cares about what you do. Someone who will make a contribution that matters. Someone who will spread the word.”

Indeed.

“An automated censoring service has left iTunes embarrassed after it censored “doo wop” to “doo w*p”, confusing consumers, including Radio 2 DJ Jeremy Vine. Doo wop was originally performed largely by African-Americans, but was later popularised by Italian-American artists. It’s the latter ethnic group that has borne the brunt of the racial slur in question, so in censoring the word, iTunes is being a little over-sensitive.”

“Look, you can apply whatever weird laws you want to yourself. Personally, I have a law that states that I’m only allowed to take an even number of steps each day, and that I must eat a bag of nuts each evening[2]. But I’m not going to come to your house and tell you how to walk and how many nuts to eat! Not everyone subscribes to your god, so you have no right to impose your own religious laws on other people, just like you don’t want other religious people to impose their laws on you.”

“If there is a practical limit to the amount of television a child can watch, we have not yet discovered it. Nielsen reported last week that children ages 2 to 5 spent nearly 25 hours a week watching television, the highest figure on record. They spent an additional seven weekly hours watching DVDs, playing video games, and watching TiVo-style time-shifted television.”

“Remember the evil maid attack: if an attacker gets hold of your computer temporarily, he can bypass your encryption software.”

“To be clear, this will not be a fully open source system, because it won’t give users the right to modify and redistribute the software. But it will be open in a very important sense, because everyone will be free to inspect, analyze, and discuss the code.” That’s a great decision.

“If you are demanding registration before checkout, you need to cease this practice immediately. It is costing you a fortune. If your site is handled by a web-design or ecommerce-engine company that is demanding your users register before purchase, I would strongly consider switching vendors. Any professional developer carrying out this practice this late in the Internet game is probably doing other horrible things as well.”

“Here is the problem with using the results from New Jersey or Virginia tonight to judge the status of the national political environment. It’s not so much that the races are “meaningless” in the abstract, but that ticket-splitting is so common in gubernatorial races that the noise swamps the signal.”

“To me, it all boils down to just 3 things. If any phone manufacturer gets these 3 things right, they’ll beat the iPhone at its own game:” Pretty much.

“After all, there was no federal act driving banks to lend money for office parks and shopping malls; Fannie and Freddie weren’t in the CRE loan business; yet 55 percent — 55 percent! — of commercial mortgages that will come due before 2014 are underwater.”

A web series about dressing like a grown up, equal parts interesting and awesome.

“And this has a truly weird effect in the American context: the best quarter-century of growth America has ever experienced, the postwar generation — which happens to be the era during which many of the founders of neoconservatism came of age! — has gone down the memory hole. After all, it’s impossible that living standards would double under a regime of high marginal tax rates, generous minimum wages, and strong unions. So it just didn’t happen.”

“Too often in “mainstream” political analysis, once it is pointed out that independents have swung in one or another direction, the analysis stops. The pundit inserts his own opinion about what caused the independent vote to shift (“Obama’s far-reaching proposals and mounting spending”, says the Washington Post), without citing any evidence. It’s a neat trick, and someone who isn’t paying attention is liable to conclude that the pundit has actually said something interesting.”

“Companies in non-network-effects businesses don’t become extinct because they only have 50% y/y growth. They become extinct because they fuck up a good thing and become their own worst enemy. They take a successful product and ruin it trying to reach for the moon. Joel, please don’t do that.”

“The results of an update to the comScore highly publicized “Natural Born Clickers” research, conducted two years ago with Starcom USA and Tacoda, indicate that the number of people who click on display ads in a month has fallen from 32% of Internet users in July 2007 to only 16% in March 2009, with an even smaller core of people (representing 8% of the Internet user base) accounting for 85% of all clicks.”

“I know the Bible can be a little hard to understand, so let me spell it out for you: God hates shellfish. You know what’s a shellfish? Lobster. Because of this, I fully expect a ban on Maine’s lobster industry ASAP. I know that’s a major facet of your economy and all, but you’ve illustrated that God’s word is more important than the well being of your citizens. I’m sure they’ll understand the dip in the economy, since getting into heaven later is more important than this life.”

“At least seven people are dead and between 12 and 15 wounded in shootings at Fort Hood in Texas on Thursday, senior Pentagon official told CNN.”

“Web developers have waited for what seems like ages for this month to come along. Internet Explorer remains ahead of the rest of the competition, but since month after month it continues to lose ground to all other browsers, Firefox has now finally surpassed IE6, which is easily the most hated version of Microsoft’s browser. Firefox’s steady gain continues, Safari remains in a nonthreatening third place, Chrome is happily carving out a small niche for itself, and poor Opera can’t seem to budge from fifth place. In October, all browsers except for IE and Opera showed positive growth.” Really good news.

“NEC said it planned a version that used real-time translation to provide subtitles for a conversation between people lacking a common language.” Wow that would be cool.

“That’s unacceptable. I’ve been saying for ten years that the top developers have a choice of where to work, and the top employers need to work harder to attract them, because the top developers get ten times as much work done as the average developers. And yet, I still keep meeting ridiculously productive developers working in shitholes. We’re going to completely turn the job market upside down, for the best software developers and the best companies. This is a talent market. Developers are not even remotely interchangeable. Therefore, recruiting should work like Hollywood, not like union hiring halls of the last century.”

The modern liberal arts college lifestyle.

“As an industry, we haven’t done our best to make our content-rich websites suitable for learning and exploration. Learners require more from us than keywords and killer headlines. They need an environment that is narrative, interactive, and discoverable.”

“So if we take 3rd quarter growth to be more or less equivalent to average Clinton-era growth, even after 8 years of growth at that rate we’d only expect unemployment to have fallen from the current 9.8% to a still uncomfortably high 6.3%. It would take us around a decade to reach more or less full employment. As I said in my previous post, that’s well into President Palin’s second term.”

“So let em cheer. Today we live in a world where a lot of people who love each other can’t get married. In about 20 years, these people will live in a world where those same people WILL be able to get married, and they will have to shamefully explain to their grandkids why they were on the front page of the newspaper celebrating an ignorant and hopeless cause.”

“The underlying reason why smart people get the wrong answer is (according to the article) that they simply don’t take the time to go carefully through all of the possibilities, instead taking the easiest inference. The patience required to go through all the possibilities doesn’t correlate very well with intelligence.”

“In studies over the years, scientists have found that it can take a week or more for the cognitive and physiological consequences of poor sleep to wear off — even after increasing sleep. In a study at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in 2003, for example, scientists examined the cognitive effects of a week of poor sleep, followed by three days of sleeping at least eight hours a night. The scientists found that the “recovery” sleep did not fully reverse declines in performance on a test of reaction times and other psychomotor tasks, especially for subjects who had been forced to sleep only three or five hours a night.”

“Such is the case in Iraq, where the military there is using what is essentially dowsing techniques to try to detect bombs in cars at military checkpoints. Let’s be very clear here: they are using provably useless antiscientific nonsense to try to find terrorists who carry explosives. They may as well use tea leaves, or palm reading, or seances. The NYT article also has expert advice from several explosives and military authorities (including long-time friend of the JREF Air Force Lt. Col (retired) Hal Bidlack), all of whom conclude that this device does nothing. Given the product description on the company’s own web page, I agree as well. The description makes no scientific sense at all; it claims it can detect ions from a distance without ever coming in contact with them, and that includes through lead, concrete, and more.”

“People who download music illegally also spend an average of £77 a year buying it legitimately, a survey has found. Those who claimed not to use peer-to-peer filesharing sites such as The Pirate Bay spent a yearly average of just £44.”

“But is even veganism really enough? The cost that consumer society imposes on the planet’s fifteen or so million non-human species goes way beyond either meat or eggs. Bananas, bluejeans, soy lattes, the paper used to print this magazine, the computer screen you may be reading it on—death and destruction are embedded in them all. It is hard to think at all rigorously about our impact on other organisms without being sickened.”

“Mockingbird is an online tool that makes it easy for you to create, link together, preview, and share mockups of your website or application.” Looks super nice.

“Leaving a website untouched after its initial launch is, in many ways, like buying a car and never changing the oil or never filling up on gas — it might run fine for a while, but eventually it will slow down and come to a complete halt, providing no benefit to its owner or passengers. An ongoing routine of regular, scheduled analysis and maintenance using many of the techniques mentioned in this article could prove integral to the success and overall functioning of your website or web application.”

“It took Ignaz Semmelweis more than twenty years (he died before it happened, actually) to persuade doctors that washing their hands could save the lives of mothers giving birth. He had the data, he had the proof, but that wasn’t enough to change minds. What are you going to do when your hunches don’t match the data that’s now pouring in?”

“AT&T Inc. is suing Verizon Wireless over its competitor’s “There’s a Map for That” commercials, saying in a lawsuit filed Tuesday that the ads are misleading and amount to deceptive trade practices.” Dumb move AT&T.

“About 300 protesters held a candlelit protest outside a Glasgow theatre over the staging of a play which portrays Jesus as a transsexual.”

“The outcome of all seven contests that we were tracking tonight appears settled, or very nearly so”

“It had been 20 years since a president was elected with a majority of the popular vote and no serious debate about his Electoral College majority. While Democrats delighted in reminding Republicans that George Bush’s 2000 “victory” was imposed by a Republican-dominated U.S. Supreme Court and that his 2004 “victory” relied upon a shaky “mandate” of Ohio’s disputed result, Republicans noted that (because of the interventions of Ross Perot in 1992 and 1996) Bill Clinton “victories” were attained with less than 50 percent of the vote. But Obama, always a more cautious man than his campaign suggested, has not governed big.” A reminder of just how historical the election was and how much has been accomplished.

“But this is different — here he’s charged not only with abusing the powers of his office to go after marginal groups like unauthorized immigrants, but citizens who dare criticize his actions, including political opponents and the media — influential members of the community. As such, this might not end as well for the sheriff as his earlier controversies.”

“The Vatican announced Tuesday it was making it easier for Anglicans to convert to Roman Catholicism — a surprise move designed to entice traditionalists opposed to women priests, openly gay clergy and the blessing of same-sex unions. The change means conservative Anglicans from around the world will be able to join the Catholic Church while retaining aspects of their Anglican liturgy and identity, including married priests.”

“Let’s be honest, a lot of standards are written for purposes other than promoting interoperability. Some exist to protect legacy advantages or to create an opportunity to profit from proprietary intellectual property. Others seem to take on a life of their own and seem to exist solely to justify the continued existence of the standards body itself or to create an opportunity for the authors to collect on juicy consultant fees explaining how the standard is meant to work to the poor saps who have to implement it. I think we can agree that, whatever they are, those are usually not good standards. Health data interoperability is far too important an issue to let fall victim to such an approach.”

“We wanted to make the wedding representative of the institution we’d like marriage to be, and I think we did a good job. Does any of this change the fact that marriage is a historically sexist institution or make it okay that millions of people are denied the right to be married? Of course not. But it made the celebration one that made sense to us, one that re-imagined what marriage as an institution should be about — love, equal partnership and community. (And seriously, to the some of the more conservative relatives at our wedding, hearing these sort of things at a wedding absolutely made an impact.)”

“For 12 days, not bad! The resciding of the Mexico City policy, rejection of torture, naming of the climate change envoy, and closing of Guantanamo all seem like banner moments. Hardly equal to, say, negotiating peace between the Israelis and Palestinians or being willing to give up your life to end apartheid. But, not bad.”

“White House officials say Mr. Obama took advantage of a rare political moment to break through one of Washington’s most powerful lobbies and trim more weapons systems than any president had in decades. Mr. Obama has said that he does not intend to reduce military spending while the nation is engaged in two wars. But Mr. Gates also wants to cut more futuristic programs to free money for simpler systems like helicopters and unmanned spy planes that can help the troops now.”

“A ton of technologies are ripe for further development in the coming few years. Social media and related apps are definitely going to be at the forefront of the Web for a long time. But plenty of other technologies are on the verge of becoming mainstream, either because of more social acceptance or because of advancements in hardware and applications. Read on for 15 predictions about the future of the Web.”

“But none of this answers the original question: why do we have an <img> element? Why not an <icon> element? Or an <include> element? Why not a hyperlink with an include attribute, or some combination of rel values? Why an <img> element? Quite simply, because Marc Andreessen shipped one, and shipping code wins.”

“The package includes 30 PNG menu icons plus the additional source files for further customization.”

“It’s not so much revenge as it is a smart business move. Intuit doesn’t need two different online financial planning sites for consumers, and it bought Mint because it couldn’t beat it. Combining the two is the obvious move.” Good to hear, Mint is so much better.

“Basically, we started out with a year that matched the Great Depression, but have since pulled back a bit from the edge of the abyss.”

“So what’s the proper amount of risk? A lot of people would say, “Gosh, zero?” OK, that sounds safe and reasonable. You worked hard to build your business; you’re counting on it for your retirement and your kids’ college and whatever. But if you’re not taking any risks, you’re pretty much guaranteed to fail. Somewhere, there’s someone out there who is taking more risks than you, and that person’s business is growing faster than yours, and that person’s business may one day come to dominate your industry while yours withers away.”

Very amusing.

“PhoneGap is an open source development tool for building fast, easy mobile apps with JavaScript. If you’re a web developer who wants to build mobile applications in HTML and JavaScript while still taking advantage of the core features in the iPhone, Android and Blackberry SDKs, PhoneGap is for you.”

“SimpleModal is a lightweight jQuery Plugin which provides a powerful interface for modal dialog development. Think of it as a modal dialog framework. SimpleModal gives you the flexibility to build whatever you can envision, while shielding you from related cross-browser issues inherent with UI development.”

“This page contains the 252 allowed entities in HTML 4 and XHTML 1.0, as outlined in section 24 of the official HTML 4 specifications, published by the W3C.”

Neat site that has a ton of ajax spinners available.

“To compete with thousands of iPhone apps in the App Store, having a good app icon is not enough. A nicely designed website for the app is very important. A beautiful website helps to drive traffic in and also makes your app stand out from the crowd. This post showcases a gallery of appealing iPhone app sites and common design trends that I see.”

“Last week British Home Secretary Alan Johnson fired University of Bristol neuropsychopharmacologist David Nutt as chairman the British Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs for failing to recognize that “his role is to advise rather than criticise.” Translation: Nutt made the mistake of publicly telling the truth about drugs. In particular, he noted that the hazards posed by marijuana pale beside those associated with cigarettes and alcohol, and he said the British government’s decision to move marijuana from Class C to Class B, which is associated with more severe penalties, was based on political rather than scientific considerations.”

“Against almost every expectation, nearly half of all people watching delayed shows are still slouching on their couches watching messages about movies, cars and beer. According to Nielsen, 46 percent of viewers 18 to 49 years old for all four networks taken together are watching the commercials during playback, up slightly from last year.”

“Federal investigators reported Thursday that imported Chinese drywall that homeowners have linked to health problems and odors had higher levels of some chemicals than its domestic counterparts. The investigators, however, were unable to link the chemicals, sulfur and strontium, to the health problems and smells in thousands of homes built during the recent housing boom, and said further testing was under way to determine any possible connection.”

“Yet, for some reason, Adobe feels they’re essential to the new administration’s mission of transparent and open government. I on the other hand feel like picketing the event they’re having next week to sell their wares (hey hey! ho ho! your-binary-low-parsable-formats-for-government-data has got to go!) because in fact, they’re quite the opposite. Here at Sunlight we want the government to STOP publishing bills, and data in PDFs and Flash and start publish them in open, machine readable formats like XML and XSLT. What’s most frustrating is, Government seems to transform documents that are in XML into PDF to release them to the public, thinking that that’s a good thing for citizens. Government: We can turn XML into PDFs. We can’t turn PDFs into XML. This is nonsense. The fact is, sticking to open, standards based technologies like HTML, XML, JSON and others are far more important and useful in getting your information out to the public than the proprietary formats of Adobe.”

“Maricopa County, Arizona, Sheriff Joe Arpaio says his office doesn’t racially profile people while looking for illegal immigrants. So how do they decide whom to question? “Certain criteria,” said Arpaio. “No identification. Look like you just came from Mexico, and they admit it. That’s enough.” Jerry Sheridan, Arpaio’s director of custody, explains, “I think you can tell people that are not from this country. And I’m not talking Hispanics. Maybe someone from France looks a little different than somebody from Europe or somebody from England looks a little bit different than we do.” ” I literally can’t add anything else to this.

“The Democratic brand is marginal in about half the country, but the Republican brand is radioactive in about two-thirds of it. You can actually make the argument — although maybe it’s not a good one — that Republicans should in fact find a way to pull a Blackwater and switch their party ID when nobody is looking, from Republican to capital-C Conservative. This would probably involve at least some degree of bona fide structural change, and undoubtedly some near-term trauma: an orchestrated chaos. But the ‘conservative’ brand is just as powerful as it ever was in America, whereas the Republican brand is as weak as it has been.”

“IQ tests are very good at measuring certain mental faculties, he says, including logic, abstract reasoning, learning ability and working-memory capacity — how much information you can hold in mind. But the tests fall down when it comes to measuring those abilities crucial to making good judgements in real-life situations. That’s because they are unable to assess things such as a person’s ability to critically weigh up information, or whether an individual can override the intuitive cognitive biases that can lead us astray.”

“Sometime in the next few years (if it hasn’t happened already) the world will reach a milestone: half of humanity will be having only enough children to replace itself. That is, the fertility rate of half the world will be 2.1 or below. This is the “replacement level of fertility”, the magic number that causes a country’s population to slow down and eventually to stabilise. According to the United Nations population division, 2.9 billion people out of a total of 6.5 billion were living in countries at or below this point in 2000-05. The number will rise to 3.4 billion out of 7 billion in the early 2010s and to over 50% in the middle of the next decade. The countries include not only Russia and Japan but Brazil, Indonesia, China and even south India.”

“The health insurance industry likes to cite figures showing that 87 cents of every dollar in premiums is spent on medical claims. But a new Senate analysis suggests that for-profit insurance companies are spending much less than that, especially for policies sold to individuals and small businesses. Instead, as little as 66 cents of each dollar paid in premiums goes toward doctor and hospital bills, while the rest covers administrative expenses, marketing and company profits, according to the analysis.”

“Earlier this year, as part of a partial settlement in an ACLU lawsuit involving the right of women prisoners to obtain timely, safe and legal abortions, Arpaio agreed to follow a 2005 court order prohibiting Maricopa County correctional facilities from requiring inmates to obtain a court order before an abortion. However, in the course of settlement negotiations, Arpaio decided inmates must prepay transportation and security costs associated with obtaining the procedure. In his ruling today, Judge Robert H. Oberbilling of the Superior Court of Arizona indicated that requiring inmates to prepay security and transportation costs could be more onerous than the court order Sheriff Arpaio previously required.”

“I think this says it all.”

“This is why, as engineers, we stick with something that works for us. This is why the ancient likes of vi and Emacs continue to flourish. Once we find a tool that works for us, once we’ve chosen that tool, it becomes ours and remains ours. It allows us to get foamy.”

“Muslim women in a district in Aceh Province will be forbidden to wear tight pants or jeans under a regulation that will go into effect in January. Officials in West Aceh district said the Shariah police, who are charged with enforcing Islamic law, will shred any offensive clothing and require women in tight pants to change into government-issued skirts.”

“But never fear, Geocities-style sites remain alive and well in one corner of the Internet: .gov! Check out the site of the Senate Armed Services Committee for a classic example”

“I will agree that belief in demons is a sign that you’re dealing with a primitive religion and superstition.”

“Is this surprising? Not to an economist. It is relatively easy to move around the timing of when someone purchases a durable good, but much harder to affect whether they buy a durable good or not.”

“Yep: after one of the biggest moves toward budget balance in history, a majority of Republicans, and a plurality of all voters, believed that deficits had increased.”

“Though many advances have been made in rendering on-screen typography, most have been aimed at treating the symptoms and not the disease. Until everyone has a 200 PPI monitor sitting on their desk, it will be up to designers and developers to use the proper technologies to ensure legibility without degrading the design of the typeface.”

“Mr. Friedman, who had written a column for Newsday since 1996, quit last week over the paper’s decision to require some readers to pay for access to its Web site.”

“A little late for Halloween, but still amusing” Jesus as a Venn Diagram.

“Wow — you’ve gotten acquainted with javascript frameworks! In fact, it appears you’ve gotten so good with the popular javascript frameworks that you’re using multiple in each of your client websites. I see jQuery, MooTools, and Dojo in the same page! Good idea — the more frameworks you add to the page, the more plugins you can add without needing to code any javascript yourself. Well thought-out. I also see that you’re adding javascript frameworks for simple getElementById() selection — why not? I’m sure you’ll use more advanced javascript on your client’s website at some point, so best to include the libraries now.”

“When you watch Fox News Channel, what you see is the advancement of that agenda through a media organ that seeks to turn regular people against their own interests — the better to enrich the coffers of Murdoch and his heirs — and that actively organizes those whose paranoia it has fed with lurid and untrue tales.”

“So, I’d make organ donation opt out, public religious observance opt in, newsletters opt in and smart financial choices opt out. Anything that tricks a consumer into paying for something ought to be double opt in. And without a doubt, email (and commercial transactions of all kinds) are opt in. Smart for both sides.”

“And yet, it would be a mistake to equate what Olbermann and Maddow do with what Fox “News” does. There are many important differences. The primary one is that they provide factual news with opinion instead of presenting opinion as factual news. Yes, viewers are going to hear exactly what Olbermann thinks about each and every news story. But he is not merely making things up to manipulate his audience.”

“The patent suggests that “the modification to an excerpt performed by the synonym substitution mechanism may not significantly alter the meaning of the excerpt to a human reader,” which sounds just like the something that someone who doesn’t actually write in human languages for a living might suggest. Perhaps we should suggest we should go into this software engineer’s code and swap some of the code around. Oh, sure, it might not significantly alter the meaning of the code. But then let’s run it and see where it gets us.”

“Actually, as we said in our recent article about the impact of cap-and-trade on employment, official figures from the government’s Energy Information Administration show that under the House cap-and-trade bill, future job growth might be constrained by between 388,000 and 2.3 million jobs – in the year 2030. The agency drew up 11 different scenarios based on varying sets of assumptions, and the 2.3 million figure was attached to the case in which nothing goes right. But EIA also said that this scenario’s unrelentingly gloomy assumptions are “inherently less likely” than the mixed positive and negative developments assumed in all but one of its other scenarios.”

“As I have said here many times, people have the right to believe in what they want. However, I think they should at least try to educate themselves on the way the Universe works so they don’t leap to the wrong conclusions (as Richard Feymann once said, science is a way of not fooling ourselves)– and certainly the journalists out there have an obligation to do a little research when reporting on such events.”

“Astronomers have confirmed that an exploding star spotted by Nasa’s Swift satellite is the most distant cosmic object to be detected by telescopes. In the journal Nature, two teams of astronomers report their observations of a gamma-ray burst from a star that died 13.1 billion light-years away. The massive star died about 630 million years after the Big Bang.”

“In preparing this post, Erick asked me, “Is Apple is a media company?” I thought about that and the answer is really that Apple is what media companies are missing. The missing part of the puzzle is what made media conglomerates such juggernauts in the past. Namely, distribution. The internet is stripping them of their control over the how their products are distributed. Media companies used to be able to create scarcity merely by delaying the distribution of their products across different channels—theaters, pay-per-view, DVD, cable channels, network TV, and so on. The internet disrupts this ability to create media scarcity. It is such a huge disruption, in fact, that it threatens the fundamental profit engine of the media business.”

“Experience is just another word for losing hope.”

“Computers perform calculations in quite a different way from the methods that humans use to do arithmetic – and that means that they habitually come up with the wrong answer.”

“I’m going to forcefully sodomize your editor.” Direct quote from John Mayer in response to this question: “You don’t always have to rhyme, though.”

“Yes, how inappropriate that counter-terrorism measures, which are pitched to “us” as being about defending rights and freedoms, should be conducted in a way that avoids human rights violations. … So you’re saying folks with less relative power and privilege along gender lines can’t be killed in terrorist attacks, can’t be the victims of terrorism, and are probably terrorists? Are only the most privileged cis men the victims of terrorism?”

“The easy single-handed operation of the iPhone1 is not one of its obvious selling points but is one of those little features that grows on you and becomes nearly indispensable. A portable networked computing and gaming device that can be easily operated with one hand can be used in a surprising variety of situations.” If I had an iPhone I would have to agree.

“For new apps, there’s now little reason to make separate free and paid versions — it now makes sense in many cases to have what I’ll call a “free+” app until someone else thinks of a better shorthand term: free for a limited or ad-supported version, with in-app purchase for premium features or content. But this doesn’t completely solve the separate-app problem for everyone:” I agree totally.

“A ruling from the Arizona Supreme Court yesterday means that from now on the metadata of public records is now part of that record, and has to be handed over in response to a public information request. The original Arizona case concerns a police whistle blower, who suspected that bad performance reviews had been created after the fact in the digital personnel files to justify his demotion. The department refused to hand over the data about the creation of those records, but now the court has ruled that they must.” Very important ruling.

“Almost 40 percent of the nation’s 18– to 24-year-olds in 2008 were enrolled in college, a record number, according to a Pew Research Center report released on Thursday. The rise was driven almost entirely by a surge in students attending community colleges.”

“So 70 percent of Americans may indeed support a public option. As long as they hear the word “choice” when they’re asked about it.”

“The US is to end its 22-year ban on people with HIV entering the country, President Barack Obama has confirmed.”

“Earlier this week the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI), the nuclear power industry’s principal trade organization, released a proposal asking for billions of dollars in taxpayer subsidies and radical changes to the federal regulatory process that would shift even more risks and costs from the industry to the public.”

“I understand the need for journalists to not be biased. But to suggest that there are two sides to this story and that they deserve equal time is ridiculous. Eugenie Scott knows her science. Comfort doesn’t know his.” The more I think about this issue, the more I agree.

” 1. Set a maximum height to the dropdowns
2. On hover, reveal the submenu
3. Calculate a speed multiplier based on the height of the submenu
4. Watch for mouse movement in the menu
5. Scroll the menu with the mouse movement, based on the multiplier
6. On mouse out, close the menu” Very neat trick.

Awesome.

“In treating user myopia, it’s not enough to place important stuff directly in the user’s eyepoint. You also need to ensure that you’ve placed the absolute most important stuff at the top of the page — and haven’t created any accidental barriers to scrolling, so they can find the rest of it. The fold is far less important than it used to be, but it isn’t quite as mythical as Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster quite yet.”

“It’s tough to see the mighty fine distinction between the two. But this is hardly a new semantics battle for both Democrats and Republicans. While it would be misleading to say that Pelosi and the Democrats are implementing this tax hike or creating it – the cuts are scheduled to expire at the end of 2010 under the law passed by Republicans – those who benefited from the cuts would indeed see their taxes go up if they expire. And those taxpayers, we suspect, would call that an increase.”

“Now CBO has revised its opinion, based on new evidence. Citing recent studies, including two new economic papers published only last month, CBO concludes that limiting malpractice liability would reduce total national health care spending by about one-half of 1 percent, or about $11 billion this year. That would save taxpayers about $41 billion over the next decade in lower Medicare, Medicaid and other federal spending for health care. That’s still not close to what Bush claimed five years ago, and what some Republicans are still claiming. But it’s a significant point in favor of a health care proposal that is generally opposed by Democrats.”

“Executive summary: Since I infamously rage-quit the iPhone (due to the apparent rejection of the official Google Voice app, and ongoing frustrating app store policy decisions) and came crawling back a month later, it remains my primary phone. I’m still very wary of the app store as single-source of software. But over the long term, I couldn’t continue to throw the baby out with the bathwater. And it is a big, beautiful baby to be sure.” Too many good points to talk about them all in this post.

“Font choice is not the most import­ant decision you make when design­ing with type. On the web, cur­rently, it is way down on the list because of the con­straints of the medium. With com­mer­cial font embed­ding just around the corner, we stand on the edge of an incred­ibly excit­ing time for the typo­graphic web. In eight­een months time, I think the web will be start­ing to look very dif­fer­ent. And about time too, but let’s not get dis­trac­ted by the shiny.” I’m with this.

“If you think that your current plan options will continue to be this bad for the next 10 years or more, and you don’t think you’ll leave your company before then, then it may indeed be better to just invest outside a 401k plan. (Keep up the IRA contributions!) However, I think that soon 401k plans will be more tightly regulated, and the trend is for plans to at least offer a few low-cost options. I know my plan seems to get a little better every year. If it were me, I’d probably suck it up and still tuck money away in the 401k in the hopes of a brighter future.”

“In my humble opinion, $200 — $300 for a SSD is easily the most cost effective performance increase you can buy for a computer of anything remotely resembling recent vintage. Whether you prefer the 80 GB X25-M SSD or the 128 GB Crucial SSD, it’s money well invested for people like us who are obsessive about how their computer performs.”

“A Senate bill would allow the president to restrict access to government or “critical infrastructure” networks in case of a “cybersecurity emergency.” But it has bipartisan support, and even critics admit it would not allow him to shut down all private Internet traffic.”

“One way to really see this is when people on Twitter auto-update their Facebook (guilty as charged). The experiences and feedback on Twitter feel very different than the experiences and feedback on Facebook. On Twitter, I feel like I’m part of an ocean of people, catching certain waves and creating my own. Things whirl past and I add stuff to the mix. When I post the same messages to Facebook, I’m consistently shocked by the people who take the time to leave comments about them, to favorite them, to ask questions in response, to start a conversation. (Note: I’m terrible about using social media for conversation and so I’m a terrible respondent on Facebook.) Many of the people following me are the same, but the entire experience is different.”

“For Palin to show up in Iowa looking for a check, rather than bearing one from SarahPAC–which brought in three-quarters of a million dollars in the first half of this year and has already drawn scrutiny from FEC–means that she is either the most dim-witted presidential aspirant ever, which I seriously doubt, or her interests clearly tilt toward cashing in on her star-power. Although one might ask for a $100,000 speaking fee from a giant corporation or trade association, requesting it from a non-profit 501©3 group–no less one that promotes conservative family values and is based in Iowa–is about as stupid as it gets.”

“In a column on the Christian Broadcasting Network’s Web site, writer Kimberly Daniels asserts that “demons” sneak into bags of Halloween candy at grocery stores.” Okay then.

“A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF USER INTELLECT BASED ON ANTI-PRODUCTIVITY APPLICATIONS INCLUDED IN OPERATING SYSTEMS”

“I’m not sure what could reasonably be done at this point to give the Wii better longevity and gameplay depth. Nearly every third-party title is awful. Nintendo’s games trickle out at a snail’s pace, and many of them are just as shallow, or more so, than Wii Sports.”

“This should go a long way towards battling the seemingly ubiquitous stigma and discrimination HIV-positive people face worldwide. What a great way to end the week!”

“In the wake of several major lobbying scandals, the Senate Select Committee on Ethics announced Tuesday that it will hold a special series of intensive sessions inside its recently completed 200-room Ethics Mansion.” The Onion right on the money as always.

“We are uncovering better ways of failing in this industry by doing it and helping others do it. We are adding yet more bloated and abstract concepts that are so complicated no one knows what they actually mean. If they do mean anything at all.” Fail Harder.

“The internet regulator has approved plans to allow non-Latin-script web addresses, in a move that is set to transform the online world.”

“All Hallows’ Eve is nearly upon us, and like many others I suspect, I’m scrambling for last minute costume ideas for the festivities planned for the weekend. I can always pull out the old tickle trunk, replete with the bits and pieces of costumes past, but where’s the fun in that? If possible, I like to repeat as little as possible.” I really like the tech blogger costume, awesome.