links for 2009-11-06

"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.