“This spec­i­fi­ca­tion defines an API that allows Web appli­ca­tion authors to spawn back­ground work­ers run­ning scripts in par­al­lel to their main page. This allows for thread-​​like oper­a­tion with message-​​passing as the coor­di­na­tion mechanism.”

“In a CouchDB-​​enabled web, data-​​flows don’t have to be cen­tral­ized, which means friends can com­mu­ni­cate with­out going through a fixed domain. This makes the web more effi­cient. It also means I can make data avail­able to my social net­work with­out rely­ing on 3^rd-​​party services.”

“The dis­tinc­tion mat­ters, Harkin­son argues, because the larger fig­ure makes it appear that sup­port for the Chamber’s positions—many of which Mother Jones opposes—is more broad-​​based than it really is. “The Cham­ber claims to speak for the U.S. busi­ness com­mu­nity,” he says, and the wide­spread use of the three mil­lion fig­ure “cer­tainly adds to” the impres­sion that it does. But if many of those three mil­lion aren’t sus­tain­ing the Cham­ber finan­cially or play­ing a role in set­ting its poli­cies, how mean­ing­ful is the num­ber? On Wednes­day, Harkin­son pub­lished an open let­ter to sev­eral reporters who had recently used the “three mil­lion” fig­ure (some­times with caveats or qual­i­fiers), ask­ing them to pub­lish a correction.”