Author: Leon

Categories
Entertainment

The inscrutable Dwarf Fortress

It sounds like Dwarf Fortress is more fun than watching golf on TV. Maybe it’s really just performance art.

Dwarf Fortress: Ten hours with the most inscrutable video game of all time | Ars Technica

Who knew trying to build a virtual chair could lead to questions of self-worth?

Dwarf Fortress is one of the most complex computer games in the history of computer games. How complex? In the game’s discussion forum, one player asserts that after 120 failed games, he can finally “get into the swing of things.” One of his many fortress death spirals began, as the downfalls of society often do, with an immigrant dwarf who suddenly succumbed to a “secretive mood.” A short time later—kaboom.

Categories
Business Politics

The chilling effect of a “mother, may I” economy

The tentacles of spying state agents reach into all of our lives, but imagine having no choice but to invite a police detective into your home to open all your drawers on the off chance there’s something that could be turned into an indictment.

Fishing around for lawsuits

When the Department of Justice Antitrust Division sued to stop the merger of two beer makers last month, the complaint filed in court quoted more than thirty times from internal company documents.

The two companies involved (Anheuser-Busch InBev and Grupo Modelo) are private companies. How, one might wonder, did the government get its hands on their private internal documents, prior to making its first legal claim of wrongdoing?

Categories
News Programming

jQuery 2.0 will drop support for IE8

With both Google and Facebook already dropping support for IE8, this makes a lot of sense. It’s more leverage for developers to argue against IE8 support. I recently added a functionality to freshstep.com that makes IE7 users jump through a hoop to log in. It’s bad enough getting all the code to work on IE7, but pulling in Facebook’s SDK means that most users see the little yellow triangle warning about javascript errors.

How correlated?: jQuery conference 2013 Europe Vienna review (part 1)

Some breaking news that popped out: jQuery is going to DROP SUPPORT FOR OLDS INTERNET EXPLORER (6,7 and 8) !!! in it’s 2.0 (big applause from the audience).  It should be noted however that IE9 and IE10 are much more standards compliant so they will be automatically supported.

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Categories
News Politics

Bitcoin is rebellion

Bitcoin recently hit an all time high of $31.9, rebounding from the crash in 2011. Tyler Cowen points out this behavior of a currency is unusual outside war or rebellion. I’m outside my expertise on this, but I have to ask, isn’t Bitcoin an act of rebellion? Isn’t something of an act of war against all states?

Good or bad news for Bitcoin? (Marginal Revolution)

With apologies to Scott Sumner, I say Bitcoin is a bubble.  Outside of war and rebellion, do “normal” new currencies behave this way?

Categories
News Politics Programming

Firefox 22 may reject 3rd party cookies by default

If you click through to the bugzilla item Block cookies from sites I haven’t visited, there’s a debate going on about it. The change essentially makes FF behave like Safari. There is some worry that FF, representing roughly 10x the traffic compared to Safari, could upset many people with this change. Would that result in a drop in Firefox usage? Maybe there non-advertising usages for 3rd party cookies, but it seems unlikely that the would be to domains you’ve never visited. Chrome, naturally, will remain uber-friendly to anything advertising related, so this might be a differentiator for Firefox.

On an unrelated note, Mozilla still uses Bugzilla and Mailman.

» The New Firefox Cookie Policy Web Policy

The default Firefox cookie policy will, beginning with release 22, more closely reflect user privacy preferences. This mini-FAQ addresses some of the questions that I’ve received from Mozillans, web developers, and users.