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Steve Coll writing about the recent revelations of N.S.A. spying on the European Union:

The most likely explanation is that President Obama never carefully discussed or specifically approved the E.U. bugging, and that no cabinet-level body ever reviewed, on the President’s behalf, the operation’s potential costs in the event of exposure. America’s post-September 11th national-security state has become so well financed, so divided into secret compartments, so technically capable, so self-perpetuating, and so captured by profit-seeking contractors bidding on the next big idea about big-data mining that intelligence leaders seem to have lost their facility to think independently.

Ever wonder about the origin of the Mac command key symbol?

One day, late in th afternoon, Steve Jobs burst into the software fishbowl area in Bandley III, upset about something. This was not unusual. I think he had just seen MacDraw for the first time, which had longer menus than our other applications.

“There are too many Apples on the screen! It’s ridiculous! We’re taking the Apple logo in vain! We’ve got to stop doing that!”

NSRange: How does it work?

I should have gotten this put on a t-shirt for WWDC.

Every year at WWDC, the new Objective-C features are almost as exciting to me as the new product announcements. Objective-C is a miserably low-level language, and even small improvements can make big productivity differences. A friend pointed me to this presentation by an Apple engineer explaining how a module system might work in LLVM.

Getting rid of the technical issues and code duplication headers introduce would be wonderful, but having a proper module system for sharing code would be even better. Fingers crossed that this will be announced at WWDC in a few weeks.

Scientology used Photoshop to augment the crowd at one of its events to make it look bigger.

Scientology lies about everything, from the trivial (like this), to monumental matters of life and death.

By Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

Nearly half of all undergraduates in the United States arrive on campus needing remedial work before they can begin regular credit-bearing classes. That early detour can be costly, leading many to drop out, often in heavy debt and with diminished prospects of finding a job.

Scary to hear considering a college education is the safest and most reliable path to a secure, middle-class standard of living.

I managed to get a ticket, but just barely. The system used in previous years where the sell date wasn’t announced beforehand was more fair. It favored the people who are crazy enough to set up alert systems, check the WWDC website every day when they wake up, have arrangements with friends to alert each other, and keep a constant eye on Twitter for weeks on end. Announcing the sale date a day in advance was bound to make tickets sell out as fast as it takes for a computer to process about 5,000 credit cards.

I’m now hearing people suggest systems like a lottery or some other alternative to a mad first-come, first-served rush. This seems even worse, because anyone with even a passive interest can sign up for a lottery, and some fraction of those who win will go. Those people will take the spots of people who want to go far more than they do.

Not every problem in life can be solved perfectly. Apple platforms are about as hot as it gets right now, and the conference is a fixed size. To make it bigger would risk ruining what makes it great, and probably impose an unreasonable burden on Apple, who already has hundreds of engineers on hand all week as it is (not to mention the weeks of prep for those that give sessions). It’s going to sell out fast. That sucks for people who really want to go but weren’t able to get a ticket, but such is life.

So great.