jsprinkles

Technically, the client did err, as it performed a request that is not legally permitted in its jurisdiction. For example, this response could be used for geographically-limited resources (such as BBC iPlayer), which means your client erred by not being in Britain.

If it's a takedown of some kind, your client erred by being subject to a government that ordered you unable to see the resource that you requested. The 4xx code fits, in this case, as 5xx implies the server made a mistake (it didn't).

Although I have my fair share of hesitance at worshiping cloud services, the fact that a service is "cloud" has nothing to do with the quality of its architecture. You can make a crucial architecture mistake designing a fleet of dedicated PHP servers talking to a MySQL cluster just as easily as you can building atop some cloud service.

Thank you, editing in to back up.

Best solution here would appear to be never sync that iPad again, back it up to iTunes, disable its Wi-Fi, and consider it her speech appliance. Don't update the OS, don't sync to iTunes, never do anything with it again aside from using it for this essential purpose. If you have to buy another one, restore it from your iTunes backup. These are the 'legal' avenues, clearly with jailbreaking it's simpler.

Unfortunate that a legal battle puts you in that position, but if this app is as important to her life as she says, she should be perfectly fine freezing that iPad where it is and not treating it like an iPad any more. It is now a dedicated appliance, not a general-purpose iPad. Buy another one for everything else.

Sucks, but, best solution given the circumstances, I think. Obviously, it'd be great if the circumstances changed.

(Edited to add backup.)

Even if Justin Beiber himself is clueless (and I don't think he is), the people around him are experts at creating a product that appeal to their target demographic. The most successful stars that, to you, seem to create shitty music are those that actually have the most clever people handling them.

Good points. I hadn't thought about it from a supply chain perspective or that of cannibalizing sales. That's definitely a consideration.

I used to edit video in Avid on a Mac Pro. Multimedia usages will drink memory like water, and your system being more powerful directly implies that you get more work done. Less render time is a big one.

To that end, I can understand some of the complaints.

Apple being as wealthy as it is implies, to the contrary, that it is not clueless.

My comment was a generality. For example, if Apple (or any company) tomorrow published:

    Q1 2013 (tentative)    iOS 6.1
    Q2 2013 (tentative)    Mac Pro update
    Q3 2013 (tentative)    iOS 6.2

Say you're Dell. You see Apple is working on a Mac Pro update. Does that change your priorities at all, strategically? Does it matter to you? Now Apple working on a game-changer, that I understand, but a simple update? Why keep that secret? What do competitors gain from knowing every little detail of what Apple is up to?

I'm trying to figure out Steve's reasoning, since I'm not terribly versed in business, and this generally seems to be a business decision. It's especially epidemic in IT, where all of us are writing cool software, but nondisclosure prevents us from sharing with competitors except in special circumstances. So instead of advancing the state of the art, we're all reinventing the wheel because our prior wheel inventions are nondisclosured to the prior company.

I just don't get secrecy.

Does anybody else think secretive companies annoy customers more than open ones? A lot of bad feelings could have been avoided yesterday were this public information, without Tim having to e-mail someone to break it. There was a genuine rash of anger, obviously (from the HN coverage), and just taking a few moments to say what's in the pipeline, while very not Steve, would have made this situation a lot better.

It's not just Apple I've noticed this with. Maybe it's time we rethink secrecy from a product development standpoint? Does it really give your competitors an advantage to know what you're working on in the days of the Internet? Is this something that business types have put thought into, since secrecy seems to be the status quo?

I can understand new products entirely, but a simple update to their Mac Pro is something they could just say, publicly, with little recourse, to reassure its small (and dedicated) fan base.

Daryl Oster's company has submitted proposals to Florida, at least, on building and maintaining a system such as this. I think part of the requirement for submitting such a proposal is at least a cursory cost analysis. Wikipedia reads a bit like the company wrote it itself, but:

The firm fixed bid for the 96-mile (154 km) Evacuated Tube Transport (ETT) system was $253M, this was less than one tenth of the cost of the bid by Global Rail Consortium to build electrified double track High Speed Rail for $2.6B. The bid by et3 contained letters of support by three entities in China to supply IP and key materials for the project. The engineering consultants hired by the authority did not dispute the validity of the et3 bid price or ETT technology, but recommended to eliminate the et3 bid from consideration for other reasons.[1]

This comment doesn't pass judgment on whether Daryl Oster is a patent troll or not, but that's also a discussion worth having.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evacuated_Tube_Transport

Safe to say that the terrorists have won, if the first eight comments on something as cool as this have to do with possible ways the terrorists can destroy it. What a depressing new era.

With honesty, what good will that do?

FunnyJunk is apparently responding quietly on their site, as just searching for the word 'oatmeal' results in no search results (that wasn't the case when this blog post went up). According to people I know that use the site, you cannot add comments with the word 'oatmeal', either. They also deleted every single linked image he exhaustively listed.

I have a hard time resolving litigation like this with the fact that the truth can change in minutes, as Web sites are fairly easy to edit. It's just scary.

Remember how you were surprised I was accusing you of being a troll a while back? And you were adamant that you aren't, and that I had you all wrong? (Amusing, given your bio.)

Now step back and read this comment, as well as your PowerShell response below, then rethink why I'd say that.

> I really liked the way it doesn't make the debate as "fiat" vs. non-fiat (as though fiat were a dirty term)

When someone uses the word "fiat" in casual conversation with me (without meaning the make of vehicle) I reply, "oh, a Bitcoin fan, eh?"

http://www.google.com/trends/?q=fiat+currency&ctab=0&...

"Sexism" and "creepiness" are not synonyms of each other.

Thank you for speaking up. Just as it's crucial that women not be silent when being excluded from tech, it's just as (if not more) imperative we hear that you're not feeling discriminated against. Especially when there is a rallying cry from men saying that you should be, or that we should hold Microsoft responsible for this great sexist faux pas.

This community is overcorrecting in a bad way and starting to identify sexism where it isn't. Usually, women don't correct this assumption. Please keep doing so. I hate that the definition of the word "sexist" is starting to evolve to mean "offensive".

No. Most of my conversations revolve around my career, and I'm a system administrator. Bike shedding I had already identified to be a problem. Pedantry like this I'm starting to notice as well.

Not just the last few weeks, the last few days. I was already drawing that conclusion before this disclosure, and internally speculating that the same group or person might be responsible.

Your entire comment would be wise were it not for, both in the case of my anecdote and this original comment, the observation that someone is incorrect. It's one thing to enjoy intellectual pursuits, it's another to put down others, belittle them, or critique their opinions because of a perceived mistake they made (such as the geometry). It's doubly worse if the mistake has no bearing whatsoever on the actual opinion, like the finding and the opinion I was sharing in my anecdote.

Also, I like to think of myself as intellectually inclined, and I simply hate discussing and arguing minutia like this. It just doesn't matter, and my time is limited. I don't want to argue with you on what Dickens meant by a certain character's dialogue in David Copperfield, I'd just like to enjoy it as a great novel. (That is fairly specific, and there are instances where it's fun to think about, but in general it isn't.)

> Clearly you don't care about that topic, so that acknowledgement shouldn't cost you too much ego.

Not about my ego, oddly (most everything else is, but this isn't). It undermines the opinion or discussion at hand from everybody else's perspective, however subtly. It's an annoying opportunity to show off, as you say, like those people that get up at conferences and ask a question that shows off at the expense of everyone listening. Both are distractions from the topic and are a detriment to the conversation, regardless of their original purpose.

It's unfortunate that it's easy to forget the judicial branch (I do too). It's tough to perceive their actions as governing in the same way that Congress governs, but it is in fact the case. It's also great when it's used effectively.

I'm beyond disappointed that the article is about the most important ruling regarding patent law in recent memory, and the overwhelming majority of this thread is arguing about the geometry cited in the judge's order. Rational people understood what he meant, even if maybe it's not 100% mathematically sound.

This pedantry really frustrates me, and it extends beyond Hacker News. It's pervasive in conversations I've been having recently as well, as if we're all looking for the slightest thing wrong with what someone has said so that we can achieve some kind of acclaim by pointing it out. I made a point recently about how people need to work together and cited a Star Trek film as a joke, and some jackass in the group decided to go to the mat with me on the fact that I had cited the wrong Star Trek film (my quote was in III, not II).

There is nothing more frustrating than a pedant. It seems like it's tech people that do it most, too, which makes sense, but still.

There's a lot of untapped creativity from the masters of film and television production in gaming, because the skills don't map well. I'm definitely keen to see what happens to that situation once the engines get closer to simulating the real world. The possibilities are endless, since suddenly a great lighting director's skill set is much more valuable to a team working on a AAA title.

That isn't to say this doesn't happen now, just that it's only going to get better.

I prefer to stay semi-anonymous, but a few people know who I am (it wouldn't be rocket science to deduce). When I posted under my real name folks I did not know would come up to me at conferences and argue with me about things I had said on Hacker News. People tend to get offended by my remarks because I disagree with a lot of this culture, so it's also easier to just keep that separate from my career.

Thank you for the kind words.

That means DHH is doing well, and has little to do with 37signals.

The state that xip.io is in right now could, theoretically, result in DNS failures 50% of the time on any device.

(The author of the software wrote a comment here: "So you're just here to shit on things?", which he has since deleted.)

I genuinely and honestly cannot log into your Gandi account and fix your nameserver delegation, so that means I'm just here to shit on things? That's a logical leap for you? You are delegating xip.io to a nameserver that is refusing queries for your zone; that's seriously broken and can result in resolution failures, making your clever hack worthless.

I don't know why I bother providing feedback, since people from your school of thought (I'm looking at the 37signals community as a whole, here, which you're being a shining steward of) just get defensive and take your software being broken personally. You wrote a poor DNS server. Read the spec, study BIND's or NSD's source to understand the years of work that went into this before you, and understand the problems I've pointed out. I just get annoyed when people flagrantly misimplement DNS, because that starts trends, like Heroku suggesting for a long time that you use a CNAME for @ (don't do that).

I'm not making this up: http://i.imgur.com/zFNkV.png

I can't patch your registrar misconfiguration, but, thanks for the response.

I'm sorry, I edited my comment (the broken zone is more troubling to me than the impetus for using it) and made yours look out-of-place. You responded to something accurate the first go, and I agree with you.