En amerikansk domstol beordrar nu Google att plocka bort nidfilmen om profeten Muhammed från Youtube, rapporterar Reuters.

Sverige ser över biståndet till Uganda sedan landet antagit en kritiserad antihomolag.

Kulturminister Lena Adelsohn Liljeroth (M) går på Facebook till angrepp mot skådespelaren Sven Wollter som satt upp en cabaret till förmån för hemlösa i Norrköping.

Att barn till äldre pappor i högre grad riskerar ohälsa är känt sedan länge. Nu visar en ny studie att risken är större är tidigare trott, enligt Dagens Nyheter.

En elev i Umeå utsattes för upprepade kränkningar under sin skolgång. Föräldrarna anmälde mobbningen till Skolinspektionen och Barn-och elevombudet krävde ett skadestånd på 150 000 kronor av Umeå kommun.

theodp writes "The Mercury News' Mike Cassidy reports that women are missing out on lucrative careers in computer science. 'The dearth of women in computing,' writes Cassidy, 'has the potential to slow the U.S. economy, which needs more students in the pipeline to feed its need for more programmers. It harms women by excluding them from some of the best jobs in the country. And it damages U.S. companies, which studies show would benefit from more diverse teams.' The promise of better financial results, says Anita Borg Institute Director Denise Gammal, is making diversity a business imperative. It's 'the sort of imperative that cries out for a movement,' argues Cassidy, 'maybe this time one led not by Rosie the Riveter, but by Peggy the Programmer.' So, where will Peggy the Programmer come from? Well, Google is offering $100 to girls attending U.S. public high schools who complete a Codecademy JavaScript course. 'Currently only 12% of computer science graduates are women,' explains Codecademy, 'and great tech companies like Google want to see more smart girls like you enter this awesome profession!' Google joins tech giant-backed Code.org in incentivizing teachers to bring the next generation of girls to the CS table. But Silicon Valley claims the talent crisis is now (although there are 19 billion reasons to question SV's hiring acumen). So, what about the women who are here now, asks Dr. AnnMaria De Mars. 'If you are overlooking the women who are here now,' De Mars writes, 'what does that tell the girls you are supposedly bringing up to be the next generation of women in tech that you can overlook 15 years from now? Why do we hear about 16-year-old interns far more than women like me? If it is true, as the New York Times says, that in 2001-2 28% of computer science degrees went to women compared to the 10% or so now — where are those women from 12 years ago? It seems to me that when people are looking at minorities or women to develop in their fields, they are much more interested in the hypothetical idea of that cute 11-year-old girl being a computer scientist someday than of that thirty-something competing with them for market share or jobs. If there are venture capitalists or conference organizers or others out there that are sincerely trying to promote women who code, not girls, I've never met any. That doesn't mean they don't exist, but it means that whoever they are seeking out, it isn't people like me.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A few useful facts and tips about Apple Mail didn’t quite make the cut for Joe Kissell’s new book “Take Control of Apple Mail.” The book’s loss is your gain.

 

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The main idea behind my using parent/background and child/main-thread contexts is to prevent blocking the main thread as much as possible.

Digression

The issue of blocking the main thread is one that causes alarm bells to go off constantly in my head as I work with Core Data.

When I write my own persistence engine, I do things in a different way. Like this:

1. Model objects are uniqued and live on the main thread. They exist mainly for the benefit of view controllers.

2. Detached model objects are not uniqued. They’re immutable copies of model objects. They exist for the benefit of API calls, and can be passed around to any thread.

3. All database access — reading and writing — is done in a background serial queue. Changes happen in the correct order.

This system has some nice advantages — particularly that the main thread is never, ever blocked by the database. It takes an entire performance issue and tosses it away.

But it has plenty of disadvantages, too. Many of the nice things about Core Data — NSFetchedResultsController, easy handling of relationships, and faulting — don’t exist. (Though I could write some of them, if I wanted to spend the effort.)

So it’s not that, in order to work with Core Data, I have to learn to ignore those alarm bells about main thread database access — instead, I have to pay more attention to them so I can hear which ones are louder.

Big Saves

Here’s what I insufficiently considered previously: how much data will the main-thread context be saving?

If it’s saving a bunch of data, then it absolutely makes sense to have the main-thread context a child of a parent/background context. This pushes saves off the main thread.

But it won’t be saving much data. The main thread context gets only user-generated changes — you add a tag, change the text, etc. As long as it’s not saving on every keystroke, as long as there’s coalescing, then it should not be an issue to do saves on the main thread.

Florian Kugler writes:

Exactly. If the main context only deals with saves from the UI it should be fine without a parent.

So now my thinking that the best thing for my app is to with a setup like this:

1. Main thread context for UI. Independent.

2. Background, private queue context for syncing. Independent.

They share a store coordinator, but there’s no parent/child relationship.

In addition, I’m going to try creating the background context as needed, a new one for each sync session. I don’t need to keep a long-running background context around, particularly given that syncing is random enough that caching doesn’t help that much. (I could be wrong about this; I’ll find out.)

As Trevor Squires (of the great @protocool Twitter handle) reminds me (not of this particular setup, but of setups in general):

If it creates pervasive performance hotspots then you can review. It's not hard to swap strategies.

Ruling is the latest in a series of victories for gay-rights activists following similar decisions in other US states.

Oppositionsledaren Arsenij Jatsenjuk föreslås bli Ukrainas nya premiärminister - samtidigt som spänningen ökar på den ryskvänliga Krimhalvön.