Constantly astonished at how slow Facebook’s Android app is. If I can’t load the news feed while waiting for an elevator, something’s wrong.

I’m constantly astonished at how slow Facebook’s Android app is. If it can’t load my news feed while *waiting for an elevator*, something’s wrong with it. (And that’s when GPS is off. If GPS is on, it sits even longer trying to figure out where I am, even though it doesn’t actually need the location info.)

Google+ and UberSocial (a third-party Twitter app) are both a lot faster to load content, AND they can both sync in the background, so there’s at least something for me to read more or less instantly. Facebook does have a “refresh interval,” but as near as I can tell it doesn’t do anything, or maybe it’s the interval for checking notifications.

/rant

Mitochondrial Eve

Comment in response to The 10 Most Successful Failures in Geekdom

Apologies in advance for the nitpicking, but this is one of those things that Just Bugs Me(tm), and it seems to come up every time the BSG finale is mentioned.

The “Mitochondrial Eve” concept doesn’t mean everyone else died out. It’s finding a common ancestor based on the fact that we only inherit mitochondria from our mothers.

Start with two families. One has all girls, or a mix of girls and boys. The other has all boys. The mother who has girls? Her grandchildren will inherit her mitochondria. The mother who has all boys? Her mitochondrial line will disappear, even if she has more grandchildren than the first.

One character being Mitochondrial Eve doesn’t mean every other family died out. It just means that over time, each other line had at least one generation of all boys.

I remember when Geoff Johns wrote “Blitz” and “Ignition”

I remember when Geoff Johns wrote “Blitz” and “Ignition” in order to make the points that (a) heroes don’t need tragedy to make them great and (b) grim & gritty and decompression have their place, but aren’t the best fit for a character like the Flash.

Then a few years later he gave us Flash: Rebirth, Flashpoint, and the New 52.

Problems with SOPA

“if you’re not breaking the law, you have nothing to fear from SOPA.”

Really?

Feds Falsely Censor Popular Blog For Over A Year, Deny All Due Process, Hide All Details…

And this is under the current law, without the additional tools SOPA provides.

Also, check out CloudFlare’s article about how they already have to deal with people sending bogus DMCA complaints in order to get the data needed to launch DDoS attacks. With SOPA, why bother to launch the DDoS, when you can get the law to do your dirty work for you?

Even the pro-copyright-enforcement Heritage Foundation warns about unintended consequences of the law. It doesn’t matter if the law is only intended to go after rogue sites if it’s written in a way that applies to legit sites as well, and it doesn’t matter who’s targeted if the solutions imposed result in major collateral damage.

Consider also that the “techno-elite” you’re referring to are the people and companies who built and run the Internet, and includes companies like Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Mozilla, PayPal and Wikipedia. Not just their users, but the companies. It seems they might know something about how it works, and how this law would affect it.

“I just don’t see opposing intellectual property protection as doing the right thing.”

Again, you’re falling into that second trap, where “something must be done” implies “this thing must be done.” There are other ways to protect IP than by passing SOPA or Protect IP in its current form.

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