thomasfoster96

Yes, but expressed as a percentage, that's 50%. As in, 50 is 50% of 100.

I did it as a joke at first but it actually works quite well.

Same.

Also, my iPhone 5s seems to read my toeprint better than my fingerprint.

My best guess is that this is the cryptocurrency version of brownie points.

Other than that this is the most information sparse webpage I've visited for a long time.

A similar thing happened to me the other day as well (oddly enough, also in Australia).

I was buying a ticket for a football game, but just to make sure there wasn't a better seat I clicked the back button on my browser to go back to looking at seats. Suddenly I saw that the same seat had gone up by 10% in price.

Anyway, I pressed the forward button to see if the new price would apply, but it didn't. So I somehow avoided paying an extra 10% because their confirmation page was cached, but not the seat selection page.

Chrome's multi-search-engine thing gets in the way for me - it ruins autocomplete.

Agreed - I've found that >75% of my DuckDuckGo searches are !bang searches either for Wikipedia or Google-owned sites. I don't actually end up using DuckDuckGo search results all that much.

Thanks for posting that - keras looks a lot easier to use for mere amateurs like myself.

Crazy is relative.

But I do find it incredibly worrying how much data campaigns can get their hands on in the USA - I'm pretty sure Australia's rules regarding access to the electoral roll pretty much prohibit it ever being used to target voters in a campaign.

That's not a given.

If I can't get a suggestion from DuckDuckGo or Google's instant answers, lately I've been going to Wiktionary. Surprisingly comprehensive, given I thought it was a neglected Wikipedia spinoff.

On a side note, Wiktionary would be 10x as useful if it was structured somehow, rather than being strictly formatted text.

Proxy has already been standardised (in ES6) so it should be coming into browsers soon. It's a little harder to polyfill than O.o though.

I'm not really sure what the point of these sorts of article is - do they want to let feral cats roam free throughout Australia unrestricted? Do they want feral cats to be taken into captivity?

It's not really constructive to try and argue that Dingoes and Tasmanian Devils are excluding cats from the food chain. Dingoes are absent from much of southern Australia - and so they aren't competing with cats in the first place. Devils are stricken by a disease epidemic and are more scavengers than hunters - they aren't outcompeting cats. Native marsupials that cats might be competing with would probably more or less include quolls - and guess what? Quolls don't seem to be able to outcompete cats.

Then when it comes to cat numbers, the argument seems to be that unless we're certain about numbers no feral cat culling is worthwhile. That's a strange argument, given that the link to the ABC's Fact Check on cat numbers seems to conclude that numbers are estimated at anything from 5 to 20+ million but aren't verifiable. While we can't verify numbers (nobody has the time to conduct a survey of every cat in Australia, like we do for humans), I think it's fair to conclude feral cats outnumber domestic cats at least 2 to 1.

Thinking too much about the ethics of conservation is as dangerous as not thinking about it enough - humans caused the cat problem, so we should fix it. And also fix the cane toad problem, the fox problem, etc.

Observations from Australia:

* Lessig is trying to reform US politics with minimal grassroots support and from the outside. That's pretty much impossible, even without the sort of broken system he's trying to reform.

* Bernie Sanders seems to be offering similar reforms, though not as a No.1 priority. Lessig is essentially arguing that he'll implement one Sanders policy as a priority, and then get out of the way - that sounds completely silly to me, and I don't see why you wouldn't just vote Sanders instead.

* I'd contend that the problems in US politics run much deeper than campaign finance - voting systems, the structure of government, separation of powers, etc all need a thorough look and possible overhaul. Any campaign finance reform would probably end up being disappointingly ineffective compared to how it's being sold.

Sure, lots of other factors are important, but ultimately factors like user base growth and active users are just showing WhatsApp gaining a larger revenue stream.

WhatsApp's revenue that they earned from that user base is what was driving the valuation from the perspective of everyone not in Facebook's camp. Facebook woukdnt have been able to buy WhatsApp if WhatsApp thought they could make more money off that username than Facebook.

The $14 million is what justifies the $16 billion.

I didn't refer to Homo naledi in my comment, but nonetheless the article does touch on the fact that Homo erectus was a widespread species across Africa-Eurasia, but after nadeli was around.

So, really, Homo sapiens and Homo erectus will probably turn out to just be very widespread species throughout Afro-Eurasia that had a lot of regional subspecies? Doesn't seem too surprising to me. Perhaps even Homo antecessor and Homo heidelbergensis will turn out to be two subspecies of the same species as well.

It's interesting to see how countries are reinterpreting laws to 'expand' the legal boundaries of conflict. Essentially, Japan now interprets 'self-defense' to no longer just mean defending the country when under attack, but to also include assisting allies in foreign countries. This sort of the same legal basis most countries are using to bomb targets in Syria (and Japan will probably use it too) - Iraq has asked the US and it's allies to help them defend themselves against ISIS, and bombing Syria to defeat ISIS counts as defending Iraq.

I wasn't aware of that policy - thanks for noting it.

This is probably not intentional - the data is from OpenStreetMap, and if you have a look at http://www.openstreetmap.org/ you'll see that there isn't an attempt to make all labels the same language.

Well, I didn't mean to make it so bleak either, because some sites like the New York Times have quite talented developers!

If the employees at media companies can't look beyond w3schools then they have some severe hiring problems.

Gee, sounds like maintains these sites is hell. It also sounds like a huge opportunity if a startup could convince sites they need the fastest ads.

Thanks for that. Sounds like many media companies are just ignorant of where their money really comes from (content).

By the way, what's your company called?

Can someone who works on web development for a major publisher please try and explain why such sites take so long to load?

Just by opening devtools in Chrome I can tell that a lot of sites aren't bothering to minify HTML, aren't bothering to asynchronously load JavaScript, include more frameworks and widgets than anyone could possibly use and don't bother to cache anything (or cache very little). And with all the pointless junk they include, they still can't use proper HTML tags and attributes nor include some basic accessibility features.

I really hate having to reload pages because something didn't load properly or having to turn off JavaScript and/or images just because a site is loading a huge file that is blocking the display of a paragraphs of text. I know some people like to use something like Lynx or only allow HTML to be loaded - but my web browsing shouldn't have to become sadistic.

Making Google, Twitter or Facebook load news articles is a terrible alternative. Given the wide array of compression tools, caching (including service workers on >40% of browsers, appcache on >90% and pretty much everyone having HTTP caching) and the sheer amount of information on improving website performance that's out there, making news websites load fast really should be a solved problem that doesn't need Google to solve it.

Ah, right, I must be confused then. I've seen a lot of texts refer to Homo sapiens sapiens as 'anatomically modern humans', so I assumed that other species of the genus Homo were also commonly called 'humans'.

Things like this really make me wish we were still hunter-gatherers.

Then I remember I'm on my phone and I'm actually far happier not having to hunt for dinner every night and constantly maintain my leaky hut.

If he says he's from Australia then he'd have to be somewhere along the eastern side of the Great Dividing Range in Queensland - that's about the only place you'd find that sort of rainforest.