links for 2009-11-24

Always going for a pun, that's a geek.

"If you're doing a telephone poll and want to oversample Democrats, you can just call states and area codes where more Democrats live. Call New York, LA, Chicago, etc. You can even call people in Democratic-leaning white areas if you want to mix things up a bit. That'll do the trick. Bury it deep enough in the sampling algorithm and maybe nobody will notice!" Cause all blacks blacks vote for Obama.

Are you a bot.

"One of the many casualties of the Bloomberg layoffs at BusinessWeek last Thursday was our library staff. The magazine will do without their services (and I don't know what Bloomberg will do with their archives. Will Six Apart house those, too?) In any case, below is the message for BW staffers at the library." The library requests you to check Google.

"Laboratory tests suggest morphine could in fact encourage the spread of cancer, for which it is routinely prescribed to relieve pain from surgery and tumours. US scientists say the opiate promotes the growth of new blood vessels which deliver tumours oxygen and nutrients. Speaking at a meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research in Boston, they also claim to have found a drug which counters this effect."

"Representative Patrick Kennedy has been barred from taking communion by the Catholic church. This is a politically motivated action to intimidate a politician into supporting a position on a political issue opposed by the church, abortion rights. Hmmm…using religion to commit extortion. How unusual."

"That's right: simply add a double-star ("**") to your name when logging in, and you'd have full admin access, including payment records with complete credit card numbers. While you'd think this issue would be Adam's top priority to fix, it turns out that there were even more pressing issues to address, such as being able to enter "/admin/payments" as the URL's path and see those complete payment records without even logging in." Who needs security.

"CSS3 can do some seriously neat stuff. Just check out some of the crazy 3D stuff you can do in WebKit. But as we all know, we need to be careful with what we choose to do with it. The most cutting edge techniques are fun to play with, but since since only a sliver of browsers support them fully, we can only use them in circumstances where they fall back to otherwise perfectly acceptable styling. Let’s look at a couple of quick, simple, cheezy examples."

"Business foes of health care overhaul legislation are outspending supporters at a rate of 2-to-1 for TV ads as they grow increasingly nervous over a final bill. Led by the giant U.S. Chamber of Commerce, opponents of the Democratic health care drive have spent $24 million on TV commercials over the past month to $12 million spent by labor unions and other backers. That's an abrupt reversal from the vast spending advantage supporters enjoyed most of this year, according to Evan Tracey, president of Campaign Media Analysis Group, which tracks political ads."

"But the best proof is what I pointed out above: Apple itself created almost no iPhone web apps. Successful iPhone developers don’t just want to write software that works on the iPhone. They want to write software for the iPhone that’s just as good as Apple’s. Today that means using CocoaTouch and the native SDK. When you write a CocoaTouch app for the iPhone, you’re not starting from scratch. You’re starting with the CocoaTouch framework. As Faruk Ateş astutely points out in his response to Koch, to discount the framework is to discount everything that sets the iPhone apart as a development platform. Not only are native iPhone apps faster and more capable than their web-app equivalents, but they’re easier to write. This may change."

"But we can all agree that — no matter where it comes from — rubbing the sore has become a lucrative business. The mutual contempt of the American extremes draws crowds and fattens wallets at bookstores, cable-news departments, AM radio stations and documentary film fests. Wilson's campaign kitty is just one example, and a fairly modest one at that. (His opponent, Democrat Rob Miller, also raked in $1 million in new donations thanks to the outburst.) Michael Moore makes far more than that with his capitalist-bashing movies. The new Senator from Minnesota, Al Franken, cashed in handsomely with his conservative-taunting books. Or check out Beck Inc. to see how loudmouthing can earn you a river of cash."

"Rupert Murdoch says that Glenn Beck was right when he called President Obama a "racist" with a "deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture." "

"During the last few months, our team has been working hard to support extensions in Google Chrome's beta channel. Today, we are getting one step closer to this goal; developers can now upload their extensions to Google Chrome's extension gallery. We are making the upload flow available early to make sure that developers have the time to publish their extensions ahead of our full launch." One more step along the way.

Pranking a skeptic.

Vendors hope you are a sociopath.