Fice

In my understanding, buttons and tabs are skeuomorphs, no matter if they are rendered flat or pseudo-3D. In a true digital UI (e. g. CLI shell) there are no such things. I am not trying to say that we should get rid of buttons everywhere, my point is that making UI flat is not enough to make it non-skeuomorphic: it may be flat but still based on imitating real-world objects (now doing it badly).

> from a binary blob perspective, EME plugins are strictly better than NPAPI plugins

DRM can't be implemented in a simple binary plugin since the user will still be able to copy the protected content by e.g. modifying the video driver. All system layers from EME module in a browser to hardware will need to be restricted from modification. Do you believe that Secure Boot was created just for malware protection?

DRM can't be properly implemented in free (as in freedom) software. Either you will not be able to run any modified version not signed by the vendor on your device, or any version you build yourself will lack DRM support. DRM is all about restricting the user control over their devices.

DRM-enabled Firefox would be effectively non-free software: you could not modify it and rebuild it from source while retaining the DRM functionality.

And then spend the rest of the day configuring it to match the habits acquired with whatever desktop environment that was used before installing Xfce.

They are not simply removing middle-click paste function, but replacing it with something presumably more useful.

What I learned from my own experience with GNOME 3 (I really like it) and from observing other people's reactions, is that we tend to overestimate the importance of our old habits and are willing to put more effort to protect them than it would take to change them (e.g. spending all day figuring out how to customize the UI while it would take an hour to get used to the defaults).

These obligations are meaningless unless there is a way to verify compliance.

Firefox DOM Inspector showed that each <video> tag has one src attribute pointing to webm file while I expected to see separate <source> subtags for webm and mp4. It turns out that the video tags and other content are inserted by JavaScript.

Great use of HTML5 video! These clips are in WebM, what is shown in browsers that don't support it?

No longer? Like if there were not enough reasons not to trust them (or any other proprietary software vendor) before.

Yes, and about 40,000 people die every year in car accidents in the US. Terrorism is nothing compared to that.

And even if they say they will not keep your data if not encrypted, how can you know for sure?

The first thing to do is to avoid using the most popular email hosts. The world's email should not be centralized around some popular service like Gmail, but should be distributed over many hosts and countries.

And we also need distributed search engines (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_search_engine).

Yes, but it can be a patent trap: https://www.fsf.org/news/2009-07-mscp-mono, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mono_%28software%29#Mono_and_M...

I would rather say that the mentioned problems are typical of languages that use their own VM instead of basing on an established platform like JVM or CLR.

JVM and CLR are not very different. What would be the reasons to want to avoid JVM, but still consider CLR as an acceptable choice?

“There should be no distinction between a file name and a file. A human mind can more effectively use a fast, whole-text search engine, so that any word or phrase from the file can serve as a key to it.... An unlimited length file name is a file. The content of a text file is its own best name.” (Jef Raskin. The Humane Interface)

Why do people who knowingly trust their data and communications to a few corporations expect any privacy in the first place? Why do people who, as it now appears, care so much about surveillance use Skype and Facebook? It is not the government, but careless consumers who are killing democracy.

> hundreds of corporations lobbying the US government to stop

And then if the government say that they stopped, how can you ever be sure they did?

Unless we use free (as in freedom) software, open encrypted communication protocols, and decentralized network services, we are trusting too much of our computing and communication to third parties, which are subject to political powers, that always do whatever they can to protect themselves. The government should not be trusted, it must be controlled. Corporations should not be trusted either.

We saw this already with Skype. FSB: we are not able to eavesdrop Skype calls and Skype is controlled by US, so it must be banned. And some time later: we reached an agreement with Microsoft, Skype is OK.

Any government will do large-scale surveillance if they can. It's been said a thousand times before: do not use centralized social networks, cloud services, proprietary software if you value your privacy and freedom. This may be inconvenient, but we can't have freedom without paying its price. I had hard time explaining my friends and relatives why I am not on Facebook (or vk.com, which is more popular here in Russia) or why I would not use Skype, but at least I know that am not cooperating with those who are taking our freedom away.

I would rather list Red Hat than Canonical.

DRM can't be implemented in FOSS because the ability to modify the software (and use the modified version) makes it possible to circumvent DRM restrictions (eg, insert some code to save the content after it is decoded).

DRM always implies restricting user control over their own computers.

Direct link to the slides in PDF: http://madere.biol.mcgill.ca/cchivers/BIOL597_bayesian.pdf

Also would be great to have it in F-Droid repo (http://f-droid.org/). They have direct APK download over https.

(Tupolev-Bartini law) An ugly plane won't fly.

Everyone blames the system but we should really blame ourselves first. We did not protest Aaron's prosecution enough, we did not make him feel our support. We ourselves allowed this to happen.

It is not just wrongful prosecution that leads one to depression. The much harder thing is the feeling of lack of support. We should have been protesting when Aaron was alive, it's too late now. We are to blame for his death, and we should make a lesson out of it.

In the ideal world of mathematics there is no distinction between creating and discovering. Everything that is possible exists. That makes the infinite monkey theorem or statements like "the answers to all the great questions of the universe can be found in the digits of π" meaningless. For instance, every future masterpiece of literature already exist in mathematical sense, yet it will still take a genius to discover it in the infinite sequence of all possible texts.

Controversy over Intellectual Property provisions: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-Pacific_Strategic_Economi...

Why all the buzz? I thought that the people who buy Apple products or use centralized social networks knowingly sacrifice their privacy and already expect things like this to happen.

Java is not necessarily slower than C++. In some cases it could even be faster due to dynamic optimizations performed by JIT based on runtime profiling information. For example, JIT can directly link or even inline polymorphic calls automatically at runtime.

Here is an overview of performance techniques used by the Java HotSpot VM: https://wikis.oracle.com/display/HotSpotInternals/Performanc...