If I hadn’t read it and fallen in love with the idea of the Metaverse, if it hadn’t made me realize how close networked 3D was to being a reality, if I hadn’t thought I can do that, and more importantly I want to do that, I’d never have embarked on the path that eventually wound up at Valve.

The interesting thing about UI components (different than ads or widgets) is that they can sometimes contain other unrelated components. You can have a tabset that contains headings, paragraphs, media blocks, or even (holy ugly!) another tabset. Ideally, you would scope the CSS of the tabset to the tabs only, so it can’t bleed outward and change styles on the rest of the page, but you also want to prevent the styles from bleeding inward to content components. So we need a way of saying, not only where scope starts, but where it ends. Thus, the scope donut. The styles affect the donut shape, but not the other components which can be found in the donut hole.

Charlie Stross gazes into his crystal ball: @cstross

RT @iamtef: before and after in the same photo

RT @tkadlec: This is good. That is all.

"Designing a space habitat/generation ship with the implicit parameter that the crew are expected to work 40-60 hours a week is a really bad idea; efficiency is the enemy of redundancy, and multiple redundancy (in life support and propulsion) is absolutely vital to any such project (because it provides resiliency that is essential to have any hope of recovering from a disaster). What if the population crashes? If you've designed your ship to require a 40-hour work week by 1000 maintenance crew and you're down to 250 crew, you're going to die. A 10-hour work week, in contrast, gives them a fighting chance of survival in event of a major die-off."

More and more, Yahoo! is looking like the Web2.0 company to watch.