sounddust

I don't know who they were referring to in the report, although you could probably contact them to inquire about the specifics.

But just by quickly searching Google I found quite a few instances in which real reporters were harmed or arrested: A WNYW Fox photographer (Roy Isen) was maced/attacked with a baton, a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel photographer (Kristyna Wentz-Graff) was arrested despite her credentials hanging from her neck, an RT television reporter (Lucy Kafanov) was struck with a baton, a journalist in TN (Jonathan Meador) was arrested. John Farley (a reporter for WNET in NY) was arrested. That's just from 5 minutes of searching, so it wouldn't surprise me if the 25 figure only represented professionals.

The report states that there were over 25 instances in a two-month period in which journalists in the US were beaten and/or arrested while on the job, with charges such as "public nuisance." That seems pretty clear to me, and consistent with their reasoning for ranking other countries.

My complaint about the bio is that Isaacson had exclusive access to Jobs for at least a dozen multi-hour sessions, and yet there's actually very little content in the bio that hasn't already been retold through other sources. What I hadn't already heard could have probably filled one chapter. It doesn't matter that Isaacson isn't tech-minded; any competent reader can deduce the correct meanings from his mistakes. Nor is it being too positive or negative toward Jobs, as the reader can make their own conclusions from other sources anyway. It's that he seems to have squandered the only opportunity anyone had to obtain more information about Jobs' life.

What are you claiming is the "real problem?" I'd argue that the housing market in CPH is no more scarce than any major city, and the only reason it seems so to you is because you were seriously handicapping yourself by not optimizing your approach.

The fact that my landlord's ad received over 100 replies just indicates that there's a pool of "bottom performers" who are repeatedly trying to find housing by responding to ads despite the fact that they're doing some things wrong. Every new ad is going to receive a large number of responses from this same group of hopeless people. If they want to find a place, they're going to have to find out what's wrong with their approach and make some changes, just as I had to do.

The problem is that you sent e-mail instead of calling.

I had the same experience in a nearby city, sending 30-40 emails for every 1 response. I finally decided to get a prepaid SIM and start calling people, and suddenly things became much easier.

The person who I eventually rented an apartment from explained that she placed the ad in the morning, went to work, and received my call (and a few others) before she returned home to read her e-mail, which contained over 100 replies. The people who called already had appointments to see the apartment, so she wasn't even going to look at the mails unless those people were uninterested. She also remarked that she could tell from our brief initial conversation that I seemed like a nice person, which helped my chances; she doesn't get that benefit from an email conversation.

Looking at it from a potential landlord's point of view, it makes sense that calling an ad that has just been placed is going to have the highest success rate; not everyone checks their mail as often as tech-minded people.

A few points on this post:

1) You don't have to sync offline tracks with the Spotify desktop software; you can mark playlists as "available offline" directly within the mobile app and it will start syncing them immediately. I've never synced my phone via the desktop app.

The mobile app is also intelligent enough to sync songs that you're listening to that happen to be part of an offline playlist, saving bandwidth (for example, in the case where your settings only permit you to sync over wifi, but you listen to a song over 2G/3G).

2) The Spotify app used to show song/artist info, but at some point it seems that all the audio apps I used stopped doing this at the same time. Are you sure this wasn't an iOS change?

3) The unavailable song issue is related to the fact that the available songs are completely different depending on the country where you live. I've found that the USA is the worst for what I like to listen to. You could probably change your region by connecting to the website via proxy.

4) Regarding your question about supporting the bands: from what I've read, artists receive almost nothing from Spotify licensing fees. If you want to support the artists, the safest bet is still attending concerts/buying merchandise directly.

As far as I can tell, the iPhone cannot determine one's location solely from the GPS antenna. If you travel to a place where you haven't been before, location services simply won't work until you obtain internet connectivity for a few seconds.

I don't know if this is because the iPhone's GPS functionality is crippled, or if it's a software limitation. I'd imagine that if you wanted to overcome this limitation, you'd need to jailbreak your phone and use 3rd party mapping software at a minimum.

*Note: once it has located you, it will generally track you correctly while you're moving, even if you leave the area where you had internet connectivity.

It's a common scenario in Europe. It's not "exotic" to take a €39 train ride from Paris to Brussels to visit for the weekend.

I don't think it's a privacy concern to store such data locally on the phone. In any case, it should be resolved by letting the user decide how long to cache the data; that would make everyone happy.

I often travel internationally (with no data roaming) and I've noticed that the iPhone's A-GPS is incapable of determining my location when I arrive in a new place, even if I've pre-loaded my route/maps in the maps application prior to arrival. But once I've connected to the internet - even for a few seconds - my phone is permanently able to track itself in that city, even after I've left and returned months later.

It's going to be unfortunate when I can't do this anymore because of people blowing this issue out of proportion. I hope Apple will at least provide the option of caching this data for longer than 7 days.

Why would writing a simple export feature set you back months? Sounds like something that could be done by one person in an afternoon.

Are you still going to support http://mobile.nytimes.com ? I'd be happy to pay for a subscription, but I don't like the smartphone apps and strongly prefer reading the mobile site on my phone's browser instead.

Nowadays, a significant portion of those "bandwidth abusers" are people who are just watching movies and TV shows on Netflix. The use of Netflix instant streaming has grown tremendously over the past year, and for many people, it's become the exclusive source for non-live video content.

This is great to know, but it seems like a lot of unnecessary work on our part to make it work. That means for each file we have to manually create and upload a compressed version, ensure that the compressed and uncompressed versions are always in sync, and properly set up custom origins for the files.

Instead, Amazon's front end should just check the incoming accept-encoding header and automatically compress as needed.

Thanks for your response; this is fantastic news!

That's exactly how MaxCDN and SimpleCDN work, but Cloudfront and Rackspace Cloud don't pass through requests from your own server; rather, they require you to manually upload the files you want to serve via CDN in advance.

Is anyone else having the same issue with these services as I am - namely that Rackspace Cloud (and Amazon Cloudfront) do not support gzip compression? That means that any advantage in latency that you gain from serving a file locally is offset by the fact that it must be served uncompressed. It seems like it should be an absolute requirement for any CDN provider (and the smaller ones like SimpleCDN and MaxCDN do support gzip). I've repeatedly asked Rackspace if they plan to support gzip and they haven't given any indication that it's coming; this e-mail confirms it's not even on their roadmap.

Linking the coupon codes to affiliate links via onClick so that you're forced to click on them in order to copy/paste the code.

Yeah, same here. It seems a bit buggy; a couple more examples: it's impossible to say you live in Paris, France (only random cities elsewhere in the world named Paris), I can't turn on chat while looking at any of the profile pages (but can turn it on on any other page), etc..

A very important and effective technique in teaching others (regardless of the subject) is to never write or display something that's wrong, because it's often the only thing a student will remember. This is obvious when it comes to language, but it applies to pretty much anything.

You're going to make those types of generalizations based on a blog that just started and has two posts?

I don't think it's ever a good idea to make a headline more sensational. We should wait for a response from Microsoft before declaring them liars/cheaters. It's entirely possible that Microsoft has a valid explanation.

Personally - on at least two occasions, I've been accused of writing code that was specifically written to cause grief/problems with another person, only to have to explain that it was a bug and that their personal test-case isn't the only place where it fails.

* And even if the author did directly accuse MS of cheating, that doesn't mean we can't be more correct and rewrite it to be neutral.

Have you been anywhere else recently? Can you give an example of a community, of comparable magnitude, that is more open minded?

No community is perfect, but I'd say that Metafilter is considerably more tolerant and open to a wide range of opinions on a subject. You can't downvote others if you disagree with them, and baseless attacks are simply deleted by moderators; it forces you to build a well-reasoned argument if you want to debate.

Not me, but I wanted to point out that you would likely be more successful in your recruitment if you put your e-mail in your profile. As of right now, there's no way for anyone to get in touch with you other than posting here, which some people might not want to do.

I'm not trying to criticize the OP. My point was that downvoting isn't a problem if people are pushing them up again. If a comment is sitting at zero and you are capable of pushing it to +1, then there isn't a problem yet, assuming the comment deserves to be at +1 (and in my opinion, +1 is a fair score for the first two).

In other words, it's not worth complaining about downvotes until good comments are getting stuck in negative territory and you can't do anything about it. When that happens, I think that this is a discussion worth having. I don't think we're there yet.

Argue the case of the downvotes

I did, in my 2nd and 3rd paragraphs (the majority of what I wrote).

You can see the up/down arrows in the screenshots, which indicates that he was not only logged in (because of the existence of the down arrow), but hadn't yet voted.

Why didn't you upvote any of these? Your screenshots show comments for which you haven't yet voted. The first two (as of right now) are currently sitting at zero, and with your upvotes they would be fairly sitting at one.

I think that we can agree that the larger the community, the more likely that we'll see random downvotes. However, any unfairly-downvoted comments will generally be fixed by the rest of the community over time. The question is whether the comment scores fairly represent the comment in the long-term. I think that a score of 1 is fair for the first two, and if you had upvoted, that's where they would be.

I don't think there's currently a downvoting issue; the community is handling it quite well, and unfair votes are corrected quickly. There are some edge cases where some comments with a low number of views (such as those in a story with few votes, or in a story with a large number of comments) might unfairly get stuck at 0 or -1, but it's somewhat rare. If 1-2% of comments are unfairly sitting at zero or -1, I don't think it's a big deal.

I disagree with you about the 3rd comment. The last pair of sentences is pure flamebait, which is why it's being downvoted.

In any case, the software also shows a visual indicator of when it detects that your heartbeat, and it graphs your heartbeat over time. It's obvious from feeling your pulse while using it that it's correct, at least in my case with my phone.

Seems to work perfect for me; it reported 68, and I counted 66 manually (by counting the number of beats myself in 10 seconds and multiplying by 6). For reference, I have an iPhone 4 and it utilized the flash.

In my opinion, those two cases are not similar. I doubt that this type of automatic caching/publishing would have any protection under the DMCA safe-harbor laws unless you're making it clear to users what they're doing (I'm not a user of the service, so maybe you already are).

If I understand correctly, the users of your site are simply bookmarking pages. You are then caching it, storing it, and publishing it with a world-readable URL. There are many ways that you could provide the same experience to the user without making the cached page publicly accessible.

If you were to give users the option to make specific bookmarks world-readable - and you provided a disclaimer explaining that they should not make copyrighted material world-readable - then it might be different. But that's probably something you should discuss with an attorney.

There's a huge difference between what Google is doing and what you're doing.

1) Google is caching pages for a specific purpose and ensuring that they aren't cached/scraped by others:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/robots.txt

By not excluding robots, you're opening yourself to all kinds of situations where you are responsible for draining revenue from the owner of the content, which leaves you liable to lawsuits. By contrast, the way that Google caches content and their rules surrounding it do not generally harm the copyright owner.

2) Google honors all robots.txt, no-archive meta-tags, and other indications that the author doesn't want the page to be cached. Is historious doing the same?