Linked List: 3/11/10

[macmaxbh]

And now, in a shameless rip-off of Daring Fireball's Linked List, I present to my faithful blog readers a list of articles I found interesting over the past couple of weeks (some of which I believe are actually stolen directly from the aforementioned Linked List):

• We Pretend We Are Christians--an very interesting blog post/reader email on the Freakonomics blog talking about a family in Texas who pretend to be Christians so they're not ostracized from their communities. It made me think about some of the failings of American equality and of the pressure and desire of "fitting in", and generally of the difference between the majority of Americans, who seem to be lip-service Christians, and several of my friends, who truly believe in the Christian faith and how much it shapes their lives, and my own agnostic atheist beliefs. (Reading in my history textbook about how similar Christianity is to the earlier "mystery religions" that swept the Western World and how it adopted the customs of pagan religions adds another dimension to the debate). My personal hope (and goal, perhaps) is that I'm not one of those forces that pressure others around me to conform to whatever norm I'm spouting and lets others state their beliefs as they are, even if they're different from mine.
• Hey, Waiter! Just How Much Extra Do You Really Expect?--an blog post/rant, also from the New Yorker, about tipping. I think wait staff should be paid a decent wage (and treated as a serious employment) and a base tip should be included in prices basically because that's how they do it in France and from my perspective at least it seems to work quite well. Even as an American I'm often unsure how much to tip (I generally do something around 15%, rounding to make the totals seem nice). I once got yelled at for (not completely intentionally) giving an <10% tip.
• Why Ad Blocking is devastating to the sites you love--I thought it was an interesting article, especially since I haven't ad-blocked for years (I used to use PithHelmet with Safari). I believe there were enough times my ad-blocker blocked part of the page I actually wanted that I just turned it off, an inability to block Google suggested sites, and the fact it would break with every Safari update which was also rather obnoxious. Apart from Flash ads liking to chew up CPU cycles and crash at regular intervals (affecting nothing else), I'm not really bothered by ads. Perhaps the issue is skewed by the fact that I have paid subscriptions to several of the major sites I view (Ars Technica, Daring Fireball, Slashdot, LiveJournal) so I see fewer ads / see the value in supporting sites I find valuable.
• Browser Ballot--the Microsoft Browser Ballot was in the news recently (such as the fact that its randomization was not actually random), and perhaps you might find it interesting to actually see the ballot and read how browser makers sum up their browser into one sentence. Also interesting: the ballot contains twelve browsers. I definitely didn't know there were twelve, I could have told you half of them at the most (although I know a couple non-Windows ones left off the Windows ballot).
• Two blog posts by David Pogue on various features of Windows Live (Skydrive and Windows Live Sync). As a future intern working for Windows Live Communications, I approve of Windows Live features being publicized, and as someone who may bring Live@Edu/a> to UNC, I think these features could be useful to UNC students. Also, I didn't actually know what Windows Live Sync actually was (I thought it was a mobile contact sync thing, but it is basically more like Dropbox, a folder sync and sharing tool, although Live Mesh is actually even more like Dropbox with cloud storage options). Hmm, I think I need to look at the Live tools more in depth.
• (Federal CIO) Vivek Kundra On US Government Inefficiency--Slashdot discussion which intersects government inefficiency, bureaucracy , libertarianism, private sector inefficiency, health insurance, etc. which I found pretty interesting.
• "Markets are efficient if and only if P = NP"--'nuff said.
• Dutch politics -- a primer for foreigners--a good and thorough explanation of the Dutch political system, of the different parties, of the recent happenings. Interesting to me.
• The Path of Most Resistance--a blog post linked on Daring Fireball on a couple of short topics (tech support, Macs, search engine, design). One of the more interesting things: Time and again he sees that non-techies just don't understand file systems. They just seem like a labyrinth. I think I agree, and I truly believe that special-purpose computing devices like the iPad are the future for the grand majority of computer users (they don't want to do maintenance on their computers, they just want them to work without being messed with).
• Constance McMillen takes fight over same-sex prom date to court--A school (in Mississippi) that would rather cancel prom than allow the horror of a same-sex couple there? *sigh*. Makes me want to join the ACLU.

Hopefully I should post more things soon that aren't just links; but my track record is pretty bad when it comes to that.