tl;dr: The bill going to the Senate has several amendments now which exist to help small scale or organic/local farms get exempted from the more burdensome requirements.
I'm a pretty big fan of Vanilla (http://getvanilla.com/). It doesn't natively support threading, but I think there may be a plugin for that. It's out of the box install is very clean, very simple, and very useful.
Rolling something from the HN or Reddit codebase sounds like a pretty interesting project, though.
1) I don't really know that this feels like an ivory tower tone. I mean, it was grounded in legit research or anecdotal evidence, not a lot of "this is how it ought to be" talk.
2) I'm pretty sure instances where someone is singled out to have dodgeballs thrown at one's face would be in the 'bullying' category, not 'teasing' which the author admits can be a difficult distinction.
To add to the list of examples of places where you have to roll your own:
At my company we needed a simple CSV reader for a file submission. That's it--just something that could read CSV files. We figured that had to be available in classic .NET We look around, dug into forums, and finally got in touch with the local .NET user group guru. The ideal solution? Use MS's communication tools to open the CSV file in excel and read it there. Or? Roll your own.
We ended up doing the thing in python and imported the csv lib.
I think it might be worth pointing out that this is only applicable to "those seeking cabinet and other high-ranking posts." It's not like every possible White House employee is being asked to hand over the keys to their online lives.
And the submission headline here is a little misleading: the questionnaire appears to focus on affiliations and past financial associations, not facebook pages and IRC logs.
This article is pretty well linkbait. Following up to the actual post by the MS team reveals Linq to SQL isn't being killed--they're just choosing Linq to Entities as their preferred solution.
"We are listening to customers regarding LINQ to SQL and will continue to evolve the product based on feedback we receive from the community as well," is not remotely the same as killing Linq to SQL.
These charts would have been a lot more informative if they had gone to the trouble of stoplisting the words before analyzing. Glue words like 'the' and 'a' shouldn't comprise any thoughtful analysis--obviously they're going to dominate any sample of the English language.
Plastics degrade into smaller plastic particles. Assuming the land mass above them is sufficiently rough to entangle rising particles, the degraded material would still provide buoyancy, and simply contribute to the underlayer of the island.
John Gruber of Daring Fireball (http://daringfireball.net) grumbled today about the closed nature of Adobe/Google/Yahoo's methodology on this one. Which means there's surely an opportunity to appeal to everyone who prefers openness in their web--and that's a lot of people. Go for it.
Granted, and bear in mind I'm not saying the Surface is a viable product--but the assumption in the article is that Multi-Touch is Apple's, when the tech is anyone's.
That Apple has the trademark is another story, and raises (for me) questions of how trademarks are managed and issued.
This piece in a lot of ways reads like a hack piece, but I'd like to point out the author's repeated examples of Microsoft stealing from Apple. In particular:
Apparently Microsoft has already stolen...excuse me...incorporated "multi-touch" into a preliminary version of Windows 7...I suspect there will be a lawsuit if Windows 7 comes with anything resembling the multi-touch features already found on the iPhone.
Multi-touch has been in development for approximately 25 years, and technically in the Apple Vs MS battle, MS struck first with the Surface, which was usable (if not purchasable) in April of 2007. The iPhone was available in June of that year.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-touch)
Currently it only provides availability of data. There's no reason that it couldn't then provided next actions for that data--it's pretty easy to toggle a form that emails your congress person, or submits to local news, or any of a variety of actions.
Indeed, I think that's a direction it's heading, and the combination of information + action could be potent. How many people avoid taking action b/c it's just a pain to get out of their desk chair?