onfocus

"And we hate the rich? Come on. Success is the national religion, and almost everyone is a believer. Americans love winners.  But that's just the problem. These guys on Wall Street are not winning – they're cheating. And as much as we love the self-made success story, we hate the cheater that much more." Linked everywhere for good reason--this is an excellent take on the occupy wall street movement.

Chart: the top 1 percent has been doing ok for themselves for the past few years.

Hollywood should not control DNS. I can't believe I even had to write that sentence.

Ben discusses Moore's law, Internet = Modernity, and changing expectations. I love the "translator" metaphor to describe our generation that has lived in both Internet and non-Internet worlds.

Ajax spinning image with no image! (A bit heavier than an image, though.)

"...it would seem that many who claim to be pro-business are trying to 'save' us from exactly the inclusive, creative, tolerant values that have made America's most successful company possible." Anil connects the dots.

UGH. "AT&T's killing their $10/1,000 text plan. Now, you'll have to choose between $20 for unlimited, or forgo a plan and pay $0.20 per message. AT&T calls this 'streamlining.' We call it what it is: an outrageous, gigantic scam."

Mat Honan quoting Mike Monteiro: "We used to design things to take us to the moon, now we design things to keep us from getting out of bed." Like!

Nice toolkit of design elements for building websites.

Interesting look at "password padding" to create memorable AND secure passwords. [via Ask MeFi]

"We’re not going to have a jobless recovery. We’re going to have a jobless future." Painful post to read but it makes sense. Now what?

"When people say there are no easy solutions to our problems, I don’t think they are thinking hard or creatively enough. If our problem is that we don’t have enough technically trained Americans, why are we not focused like lasers on educating people?"

"The kind of naming policy that Facebook and Google Plus have is actually a radical departure from the way identity and speech interact in the real world."

Nice JavaScript dialog/alert system.

"What are Facebook and Google but giant institutions, arms of the new establishment? What are smartphones if not high-tech leashes? Today, online databases hold more information about us than could fit on a mile-high stack of punch cards. Some kind of rebellion seems in order." [via sippey]

Solarized is a color palette for code editors. I've been using these colors in TextMate for a day or so and I'm enjoying it.

"Diesels are wildly popular in Europe, accounting for roughly 50 percent of the car market there. So why don't automakers simply bring the European cars here?" An older article that explains why diesels are hard to come by here.

Interesting thinking about the current state of weblogs. Will all blog-like activity be consumed by Facebook, or will new tools emerge to help with privacy? And how do private blogs mix with public tools like Newsreaders? Complicated questions to answer.

Nelson has a good roundup of the issues surrounding the Wikileaks story.

"Whatever restrictions we eventually end up enacting, we need to keep Wikileaks alive today, while we work through the process democracies always go through to react to change. If it’s OK for a democracy to just decide to run someone off the internet for doing something they wouldn’t prosecute a newspaper for doing, the idea of an internet that further democratizes the public sphere will have taken a mortal blow."

"If you host your content on a commercial provider or on a social network, there are different points at which you can be cut off." The Wikileaks case is pointing out a weakness in the completely libertarian web ideal.

The case for Instagram. I must be a photography snob. I can not see the appeal of a community based solely on heavily-filtered photos. 

Nice sanity check in the mobile Web App vs. Native App debate. Often a Web App will do.

"A naval officer told the present writer that he had often, when on deck, been both amused and surprised at the accuracy with which some of these girls used this form of signalling out of pure fun." People have always found ways to communicate over distances.

Interesting take on Montessori-inspired apps: "In a Montessori classroom, children work from the concrete to the abstract. I fear that exposing young children to virtual Montessori materials may hamper this important developmental process."

Tax patriotism is on the rise!

"There is an error in most photography scaling algorithms." Wha? This is hard to believe.

I think we're safely out of spoiler territory now so I can post this great analysis of Toy Story 3.

Neven Mrgan has a great point: when a satire gets too close to the subject it's taking down is it still satire?

Great 50's comic art.

Frozen bananas in a food processor = ice cream? I need to try this!

Great idea, I'd use them.

Jay Rosen's question/answer site that tries to wed unanswered questions with journalists. "The eventual plan is to recruit journalists, or partner with an existing news organization, to answer the ones that a.) interest the most people and b.) require reporting, investigation and explanation--in other words, real journalism."

What Jay Rosen will say at SXSW about desperately needed explanation of major stories in the news.

"We have all our story elements in place. It's all politics from here on. Bring in the sports and war metaphors and let automated processes carry the rest. Don't dig, just dine. The sausage-machine rocks on." A nice explanation of how journalism's stories need to change. [via mneznanski]

"Unicode 5.0 encodes exactly 98,884 graphic characters on different planes...we collect information on every single character."

Cartoon intro to Neil Postman's book.

I had this reaction to Avatar too, glad to see io9 spend some time explaining this problem. Hadn't made the Dune connection, that's spot on. [via mathowie]

argh, burned by this on my personal mail server.

Regex snark traced back to Unix snark.