If you're not French (and don't like Quebec culture and language), then WTF are you doing living there? That's your own dumb fault for moving to a place you don't like.

This is why both Canada and the US should be abolished as nations, and new (smaller) nations should be formed in their places. Quebec should be an independent country, the west coast should have its own country, the US northeast should be a country (perhaps combined with Canada's maritime provinces) the US southeast should be a separate country, etc. Then these new countries can form a trade union much like the EU, with a shared currency (maybe) and free trade between them, but still having a huge amount of autonomy so that each region can do its own thing, such as legalizing pot (as the PacNW wants to do), or banning pot and abortion (as the Dixie states want to do).

Don't blame me, I never bought their crap or attended their shows. But yes, when you worship the "Free market", you get low-forehead crap like Nickelback, Britney Spears, Justin Bieber, Honey Boo Boo, The Kardashians, and the various Hollywood trash movies, so we can thank the masses of our fellow citizens for that.

You really don't understand what decentralized version control is, do you?

The whole point isn't to avoid any centralization at all, it's that you're not utterly reliant on it. It's somewhat similar to the argument between a big server and thin clients (where nearly all computation is on the server) and "thick clients" (PCs) and less-capable servers (for sharing files, etc.). With a big server, if that server goes down or the connection to it goes down, you're screwed, and can't do anything. With today's more common thick-client paradigm, if your office file server goes down, you can't easily share files with your coworkers and other things are inaccessible, but you can still get some work done using whatever local copies you have.

This is what DVCS is all about. With Git, you have a full copy of the repo just by virtue of having "checked out" a copy. You can still get some work done without access to the central server, whether it's down or your WiFi connection is down or your VPN is down. You can't do everything obviously, nor will you ever be able to, but that's not the point. And, in a worst-case scenario, if the central server just disappears one day without accessible backups, everyone with a copy checked out has the full repository, so it's possible to rebuild easily.

No, the main problem with American cars these days is build quality, just like always. UAW simply doesn't do as good a job as the non-union workers at the Japanese plants.

WTF are you talking about? All those workers at the Ford plants in Mexico are not part of UAW.

If I want a car assembled correctly, I buy one which was put together in Germany

You mean like all those VWs built in Mexico? You can probably get an Audi or Mercedes or BMW built in Germany, but if you're looking at something cheaper, it's made in Mexico.

That really doesn't explain anything and just sounds like conspiracy theory talk. How exactly does PayPal not technically being a bank give them such an advantage? Finally, why is it such a problem for PayPal to not be a bank, but for places like authorize.net and other credit-card processors it's OK? Also, I do believe Amazon Payments is doing something pretty similar to PayPal, and I never hear anyone complain that they're not a bank, nor did I ever hear anyone complain about Google Payments (which still exists BTW, but it's only used for buying stuff on the Google Play store now).

What banking regulations, exactly, are making it unprofitable for real banks? And what good are these regulations anyway? Why do we need these regulations? They sure didn't help prevent the whole 2008 financial disaster. In fact, after that disaster, the big banks all got free no-strings bailouts from the government. PayPal never got a bailout. So why are you acting like PayPal is somehow unethical and the banks aren't, when the banks are outright criminal?

It's too bad no one else seems to be able to make a decent competitor to them. Citibank tried a while ago and threw in the towel, even Google tried and gave up too. It's a simple concept: make a payment-processing service which nearly anyone can sign up for, which can allow you to accept credit-card payments from others (without having to get a $$$ merchant account), which lets people send money to each other easily without gigantic wire-transfer fees, and which lets people transfer money in and out of it. Why aren't the big banks doing this? I guess because they can't tack on all kinds of horrendous fees and still get people to use it, and PayPal's business model isn't profitable enough for them.

Elon hasn't been involved with PayPal for ages. He took his money and moved on to more interesting projects.

This is like blaming Woz for anything you don't like about Apple today.

Where? Unless you're like the other responder trying to paint our governments as "terrorists" (which has merit, I'll concede, but it's really beside the point, we're talking about non-state actors here), I can't think of very many still operating. The IRA in Ireland really isn't a problem any more (I haven't heard of any car bombings there in ages), the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka seem to have gone away (plus, they were highly focused, and only attacked targets in Sri Lanka or nearby southern India; they didn't run around hijacking airplanes all over the planet), and that's really all I can think of. All the other groups called terrorists by some government are Islamic.

There have been some lone-wolf nutjobs here and there, but it's inaccurate to call them "terrorists" IMO. Terrorists are people who are part of some kind of group which is pushing an ideology, and to further that goal use violent attacks to terrorize civilians in countries they have an issue with. Some lone nutjob shooting up a school is not part of a network of people. Even someone like Timothy McVeigh really wasn't a true terrorist, he had one buddy and decided to attack a government building because he was mad at the government for some reason. He wasn't part of any kind of organization with any socio-political goals. Same goes for the Unabomber, he was just a nutjob thinking he was making some kind of change by assassinating people through the mail. When you look at groups like the IRA, LTTE, Al Qaeda, ISIS, Boko Haram, etc., these are pretty large (relatively) organizations, with dozens or hundreds of members or more (ISIS has tens of thousands), clear leadership and structure, clear goals, etc. They aren't just some lone guy with mental problems who lives as a hermit. There's a really big difference.

Not everyone at a booth needs to know about the product. I was at a conference years ago where some network-security firm was hawking some box, and they had a huge booth with a tent where they had people come in and watch some little video-enhanced skit involving a dragon. They had a couple of booth babes somewhat scantily-clad, in keeping with the castles-and-dragons theme, but they were only really there to be ushers while people waited in line to go in and watch the next show. Ushers don't need to know anything about the product, they just tell people when they can go inside, where to stand in line, who to talk to if you have questions, etc.

Oh please, American cars technologically are no different than any other cars these days. Ford and GM own a bunch of European brands anyway (like Opel), Ford sells lots of cars in Europe (though different models usually than in the US), and most "American" cars these days are made in Mexico anyway.

The main problem with American cars these days is styling. They're usually rather ugly. That's a cultural problem, not a technological problem (the styling is designed to appeal to the customers in that market). But to be fair, they're a lot nicer-looking than they were in the 70s, 80s, and 90s.

Linux on the desktop works just great for people who choose KDE instead of hitting their head on a wall and trying to make Gnome work just because they keep reading people mindlessly regurgitate the idea that Gnome is the primary Linux desktop environment.

Gnome is really the worst thing that could have happened to the cause for Linux on the desktop. Somehow they got everyone to buy into this idea that Gnome is just the default and you shouldn't try anything else, they got distros to all adopt it as the standard desktop, and then they made it into a de-featured turd. Well of course that's going to make Linux on the desktop look like an utter failure. Meanwhile, KDE is working just fine, but everyone ignores that elephant in the room. (From what I hear, XCFE works well too, so there's not just one but at least 2 other desktops out there which will probably work well for you, and that's not counting Cinnamon and MATE.)

This is an interesting, though rather off-topic conversation starter. I'll toss in my view:

To address the last point first, the consequences of "the community" being accepting of openly misogynistic people is possibly that the FOSS community gains a reputation (which it's already fighting) of being a haven for such people, and that anyone involved with it is like this. This isn't very good for the employment prospects for anyone who is prominently involved in FOSS, or attempts to evangelize its use in their organization. At worst, we could see a schism where FOSS advocates are all seen as misogynistic "neckbeards", and clean-cut "professional software developers" who aren't likely to expose a company to sexual harassment lawsuits are all Microsoft (or other proprietary software) advocates.

The quality of a product really doesn't matter as much as other factors, including public reputation, public image, and inertia. We've seen this over and over with Microsoft software over the years. Even back in the Windows 95/98 days, MS software was seen as "high quality" (even though it blue-screened every 30 minutes). Image is everything. Even outside of computing, there's countless cases of a technically-superior product or standard being sidelined in favor of something inferior, and inside computing cases abound (IE6 for example, being a standard for so long even though it's horrible, largely because of ActiveX even though it's a security nightmare). Most people do not look at technical specs for things; their perspectives involve other variables, especially the people involved in something.

However, the FOSS community has no "gatekeepers" as such, and is not a hierarchal organization. People are free to associate how they will here. But this might be something to think about if you're in charge of a project, and one of your peers is a highly outspoken misogynist or racist: he's going to cast a light on your project by association. There's a good reason companies don't employ people like this; the last thing they need is some news article that goes like this: "John Smith, a vocal advocate of amending the Constitution to make women second-class citizens, and also a lead programmer for XYZ Technologies, on Monday declared that..." Guilt by association and all that.

Now of course, there's a difference between refusing to associate with someone because of their outspoken views, and having a witch-hunt. If you're running some little 5-developer FOSS project on GitHub that no one's heard of, and one of your developers says something slightly misogynistic in an IRC chat, big deal. If you're running a FOSS company with millions in revenue and you hire a CEO who publicly spouts misogynistic views, that's an entirely different thing.

You don't need a beard or a dark complexion to be a terrorist. There's lots of cases of whitebread Americans and Europeans adopting extremist Islam and going to fight for various factions in the middle east.

So that means you think it's fine if a restaurant posts a sign saying "NO BLACKS".