ojii

First sentence of the article: "The U.S. Navy is planning sea trials for a weapon that can fire a low-cost, 23-pound (10-kg) projectile"

Absolutely agree with you. It is most certainly possible to not use Facebook (and I commend you on doing so successfully). But stating "Facebook sucks" as fact, as opposed to opinion, is just wrong in my opinion (and it looks like you would agree).

And yes, sending letters is fun. Guess I'm just too lazy/used to the convenience of the internet.

I'm not being robbed if I give it away of my free will. I'd call it "paying" with privacy. Facebook sucking isn't fact, it's your opinion.

Yes, the things I mention are possible thanks to The Internet, but The Internet alone doesn't allow me to do it, we need clients (and possibly servers) to use The Internet to communicate etc. Facebook offers these things. It's not the only offer, but please refer me to a usable alternative that my friends use/would use and I'll gladly consider using it.

For me, Facebook doesn't "suck". It helps me stay in touch with friends on other continents in a more user-friendly and convenient way than email/phone calls/letters. It makes it easier to organize events/get togethers with friends nearby because it allows n-to-n communication unlike SMS/phone calls and virtually everyone has it. I pay a price with my privacy but so far I'm fine with the tradeoff.

Was completely unaware of the upcoming Formula E. Thanks for sharing.

I'm a bit surprised by the "single provider" system used there. Read the Wikipedia article and it sounds like McLaren will supply all teams? Doesn't sound ideal to promote research. Also would love to see a Tesla Formula E team.

There's http://www.skulpt.org/for Python in the browser.

In my opinion, appointing someone as CEO can not be base purely on professional performance. The CEO position is too public to ignore personal actions. Eich is of course allowed to have his own opinion on issues, such as gay marriage. But now being CEO of Mozilla, Mozilla has to ask themselves if his personal views are in line with the views/mission of Mozilla as a company.

The freedom to have your own opinion on things does not protect you from the consequences of those opinions.

And while you're on the way to Sao Paulo, mind stopping by in Tokyo? it's impossible to find decent bread here...

I am aware of the VLC workaround. But I like Twitch enough that I'll actually watch their ads, as I think they're reasonably placed etc. So until they're implementing a flash-free solution (and I'm sure they're interested in doing so), I'll just keep flash around for them.

I always wish we had some sort of standardized way to do Oauth-style payment via e-banking. As in, I go to onlinevendor.com and click "pay", it redirects me to my bank, I log in and accept the charge, it directly charges my bank account.

Online payment is the only reason I have a (pre-paid) credit card, but it really doesn't need a credit card. I don't want/need "credit" and since it's online a "card" is useless. We already have e-banking for many things, why can't I use this for payment?

The sad thing is, more widespread, high profile (eg government) deployment will likely increase the amount of those news stories. Until now attacking desktop Linux with viruses was simply not worth it.

Unfortunately, as far as I know there's still no decent solution to stream video without flash (I'm talking Twitch et al here). Twitch is the only reason I still have flash on my computer (and not actually for watching games being streamed, but for the annual Desertbus event).

Has the HTML5 video streaming improved at all over the past year?

I'd agree. Python developer myself and I think the missing colons might be an issue here.

How are referendums not democracy? It's just direct democracy as opposed to the far more common representative democracy.

It does occasionally result in (in my views) appalling choices, but that doesn't make it non-democratic.

May I suggest Switzerland? At least quite close to a democracy in my opinion.

or else funding stops?

I'd like to disagree. I used to pirate quite heavily back in Switzerland, due to the legal situation, now after having moved to Japan, I do not pirate anymore because I don't want to risk my visa over it (plus we have hulu here which is okayish). I never found the user experience nice at all, and much rather than price, a good legal experience would've made me switch in an instant.

The only reason I ever pirated was/is availability. There was either not watching the content or piracy. One could argue that not watching is a reasonable alternative, but I wanted to see what this whole craze was about for example Doctor Who.

Even with a much worse paying job than what I have, I would pay much more than I currently do for hulu to have access to new movies, TV shows, music... I am fully aware that this might only be true for me.

I'd prefer buying a downloadable file.maybe 5~20 bucks for a movie. not a fan of streaming services charging per month.

I also didn't see the connection at first, but as I understand it the sexism claim comes from the implication that her experiences are at least partially due to her gender. as in, the situations were handled the way they were because she's a woman. as I read her side, the hoola hooping was more so to show an example of the allegedly sexist culture at GitHub.

Android user here, so forgive me for being unfamiliar with the iOS app ecosystem.

Is it common for free apps to offer paid, ad free versions on iOS?

In Django you might have a nullable TimeField and check if it's set via "if obj.time_field".

Google tried that with Wave, which unfortunately was released before it's time.

Yes it's one of those "funny" words in Japanese that is highly context sensitive, so you're probably right.

couldn't one make 3 copies and take the two that are equal as non-modified?

Ruby is the subject in that sentence, not sure why gtranslate injects an "I". I'd translate it as "Ruby is scary, isn't it?"

We have Kit Kat in any flavor you can imagine over here and recently the worlds first Kit Kat store opened in Ikebukuro, Tokyo. Haven't been there yet, but will definitely check it out.

Can't speak for Germany, but for Switzerland.

In Switzerland, it's okay to not tip. You would usually tip at a restaurant though if the service was good. At a bar, you might opt to tip to round up the price, so say a beer costs X.70 CHF you'd pay X+1 CHF. If service was bad, I wasn't happy with the food, or anything else bothered me, I won't tip.

I wouldn't tip anywhere else other than a bar or a restaurant, except very occasionally a taxi driver if they did an absolutely amazing job (this happened maybe once, twice in my life).

The first link to the source is actually all about tipping, which I'm surprised didn't make it onto the list. While American style tipping is odd to me as a European, it just feels even odder the longer I live in Japan (where there is literally no tipping, I couldn't even tip if I wanted to). Quite hard to explain this whole concept to Japanese (that were never in the US) sometimes.

EDIT: So is the third link. Well not entirely, but the first half.

have you looked at Python 3.3 docs? I think they look really clean and nice.

likely a reason WhatsApp is popular in Europe (or at least Switzerland) is that one is likely to have friends in other countries, and international SMS are a rip-off. At least that's why I use LINE/gtalk/fb messenges a lot these days, as they don't care about where people live/are.