At what point do we just burn modern journalism to the ground and start all over?, The Macalope wonders this week — after all, we now have NY Times journalists judging billion-dollar companies based on Facebook comments.

Clearly, staring at boobs makes men lose at poker. Seriously, though, I’m impressed. (via reddit)

Google Maps finds everything, even Jesus. (via reddit)

Call it trolling, but I find Shatner’s performance in this video more interesting than that kid’s. (via, you guessed it, reddit)

.NET’s String.Format is good, but pales compared to mechanisms such as Ruby’s #{}. For starters, parameters are based on position (i.e. {0}, {1}, etc.), rather than naming. Idle wondering has produced quick results thanks to Stack Overflow, such as Phil Haack’s HaackFormat. You lose IntelliSense this way, but avoid quite a few other issues. Worth a shot.

The iPad Camera Connection Kit’s USB port not only allows audio, as has been found out two weeks ago, but also HID for keyboards. Sounds like Microsoft would have named an equivalent device the ‘iPad® Legacy Connectivity Kit Home Edition’, or somesuch thing. Given that the OS clearly does ship so many USB drivers, it is rather odd that they didn’t simply include a USB port. I’m more inclined to buy ‘excessive desire for thinness and simplicity’ than ‘means to cost people another $29′ as the reason, though.

Doesn’t work in WebKit so I feel left out, but pretty cool: perspective texture in SVG. The demo page is one of the rare actual XHTML pages, correct content-type and all. The thing is supposed to demo Mario Kart, but I was more thinking Wacky Wheels. (via reddit)

Maybe Firefly was a cool series, but fireflies? Bioluminescence is so cool.

An Apple support document for “Keynote for iPad: Best practices for creating a presentation on a Mac for use on an iPad”.

When it comes to managing files between multiple devices, I got some best practices for Apple, and the current iWork for iPad certainly is not it. When you’ve got a Mac desktop app, a (primarily for reading / reviewing / commenting) web app and an iPad mobile app, and it doesn’t occur to you that users should simply be able to transparently edit one and the same document that’s “in the cloud”, you’ve got much to learn before you can take iWork.com out of beta.

I sure hope this is merely meant as a temporary collection of workarounds, and that it is not actually Apple’s opinion that the user should have to take good care to make his documents compatible like this.

David Kernell, the guy who broke into Sarah Palin’s e-mail account two years ago, “faces up to 50 years in federal prison if convicted of identity theft, mail fraud and two other felony charges”.

There’s arguably two stories here — one is being able to access her e-mail account simply by a combination of basic research and guesswork of rather superficial information about her; there is clearly plenty of potential for improvement in computer security. The other is actually breaking in and publishing private information of hers. There is no defending some 4chan members’ rather strange, perhaps entirely lacking, perception of ethics and decency. (via reddit)

Regarding my complaint that YouTube is far too happy to oblige takedown requests, the granular settings of Content ID deserve a mention:

Over 1,000 content owners use Content ID, and we’ve built it in a way that lets them account for fair uses of their content: they can easily create policies depending on the proportion of a claimed video that contains their work, or the absolute length of the clip used. For example, a record label might decide to block videos that contain over one minute of a given song, but leave up videos that contain less than one minute.

Clearly, YouTube is putting some effort into making this fairer for everyone. Between random videos being gone and others being available only in certain countries, all of which could have interested watchers in more content from the same artist, I find status quo distinctly unpleasant, however.