> Snowden most likely defected to the Chinese government
I keep reading this hypothesis
Am I right in thinking that it still has no evidence to support it whatsoever, excluding the fact that he announced his identity while in a Hong Kong hotel?
I can't link to it now because the site is down, but lingscars has a PDF of 'web design tips' where she explains the design and gives tips on website design. She's obviously got an eccentric public image, and the design tips document is a bit of a joke, but the design here was a deliberate choice to differentiate the site from competitors, make potential customers feel less intimidated and more socially involved. There was even a webcam of the office with a button which apparently played a song in the office when you pressed it.
The proposal is to have a standard for a way the browser communicates with non-standards compliant DRM encumbered (essentially encrypted) video.
Anyone is still free to write a client which consumes the standards-compliant parts of the page, but will be unable to consume the non-standards compliant DRM encrypted video.
In this way, it is similar to existing non-standards compliant web plugins like flash. For a long time nobody could just sit down and write a client which consumed flash animations (they were bound by the flash license, which prohibited mobile flash runtimes for example).
I don't agree with this inclustion by the w3c myself, but your argument isn't a powerful argument against it. My objections to it revolve around the w3c overstepping their responsibility (why is it THEIR job to cater to one specific plugin family - is it being driven by political pressure), the futility of its inclusion (they expect an open source implementation, which probably isn't possible for this kind of technology), and the self contradictory statements in the original w3c announcement.
PS.
Calling an argument bogus and leaving it at that isn't helpful. If you see flaws in an argument you have to identify them point by point.
I don't think so. People posting overly-wordy comments is already a problem here, I assume because it makes the comment seem more "in depth". I think a minimum length would make that problem worse.
The redditification problem comes up every so often, but from what I've read in those threads I think it's being dealt with by other means, i.e. by tweaking the vote weighting.
I don't think it's worth talking on a blog post or in a technical forum just for social reasons (e.g. I don't think reddit's meme or pun threads would be valuable on hn for their social effect), but I agree with you because I don't think a comment has to add to The Sum Total of Human Knowledge™ for it to be valuable. It just needs to be an interesting thought that the readers aren't likely to have had on their own.
Comments sections improve blogs because they are a place where readers can point out errors in the parent article.
Sending an email or tweeting the correction is more difficult than making an anonymous comment, and would then need the author to both concede their mistake and take the time to correct the article. Until they do that, everyone who reads the article risks being misinformed.
I can see an argument that comment areas are less necessary on purely opinion blog posts like this one, but on technical blogs they are much more useful, and even on opinion posts I think giving space for dissent is probably a good general rule to follow. For example James Shakespeare seems to base his opinion on the belief that everyone has the same "blog reading algorithm", which I don't think is the case. If there were a comments section I'd post that suggestion, but because of the increased overhead/social investment needed to send an email or tweet I'm not going to bother, and he will probably never read that dissenting opinion.
I agree with your parent, and think you're trying to read it in an over-specific way, it's like saying "You can't compare writing and programming, because writing doesn't have comments."
The parent was making the point that, like writing, good and bad coding style is entirely subjective - necessarily so because many parts of it are simply conventional.
There are some specific constructions in programming that can be shown to be better than others through complexity theory, but even the guidelines we have for these aren't global optimums.
Don't burst a vein arguing over the definition of a profession.
The litmus test is whether or not an occupation has a policing organisation who dictates who is allowed to practice it. Lawyers, doctors, civil engineers are professions. Homeopathers, developers and ditch diggers are not.
It also seems likely that if you're in the kind of fey, excited mood that leads to impulse purchases then you'll be more prone to rage quitting the browser when something annoys you.
I keep reading this hypothesis
Am I right in thinking that it still has no evidence to support it whatsoever, excluding the fact that he announced his identity while in a Hong Kong hotel?