More fun statistics, from Wikipedia:

• - Canada has 67% Christians and the United States has 73%
• - 24% of Canadians and 20% of Americans declare no religious affiliation.
• - Only 7% of Canadians are Evangelicals compared to the US's 30-35%.

...I was going somewhere with the Evangelicals stat, since they're generally the most fervent, but then I realised that there are plenty of insufferably stolid palaeoconservative Anglicans in the UK and it wasn't really a point worth making.

It really comes down to the fundamental collectivist-vs-individualist difference between the Canadian and American cultures, I think; despite Stephen Harper's best efforts to destroy the country, our charter of rights and freedoms was still a missive about how we were free from harassment by peers (thus sending the message "we are all siblings"), as contrasted with the American declaration of independence's emphasis on being free from harassment by authority (thus sending the message "you are free to do as you please"). Interestingly, a hundred years ago you would not really find this; Canada was just as much of a racist hellhole as the US at the time, although as there were practically no black people we could only complain about other European ethnicities. It was only as our population and economy fell behind, and we started accepting in huge numbers of immigrants following World War II, that this really started to take shape.

I'm sure the relatively weak levels of religious conviction help too (only 25% of Christians attend church regularly in Canada; above the rates of Northern Europe but far below the rate in the US) and that is doubtlessly a function of what flavour (can we call them 'distros' yet?) of Christianity is in question, too, since many Anglican ministers now preach actual biblical scholarship (my favourite quote, heavily paraphrased, is "Hell (as a threat) was invented in the Middle Ages") rather than what most think of as the typical naive system of "swallow-and-enjoy-your-life-textbook-with-no-critical-thinking" morality. Whatever the exact impact of each component is, it doesn't really jive with the idea of excluding us poor little minority atheists.

...except maybe in profoundly Catholic areas. I bet they care more in Newfoundland and Quebec. British Columbia is barely half Christian (54.9%) so you can bet they sure don't.

I was purely playing devil's advocate; honestly, I agree, it seems that there are plenty of safeguards against this sort of thing. Usually the topic comes up in the context of entire corrupt departments, IIRC.

Everyone likes accountability when they have control over it. The cops would have control over the tapes, right? So they get to choose which parts to show and which parts to "inconveniently lose." Every other time this topic has come up on Slashdot, there's been quite a cynical kerfuffle about precisely this.

Not to be confused with the furniture, which has far more shrubberies in it.

Well, at least it wasn't a... eukaryotic strain of flu virus?

Belarusian uses a Latin-style "i" in place of the typical Cyrillic short i... So you can still phish admirably with "paypaI" and never leave Cyrillic. e, x, c, y, i, o, p, a: how many words can you make?

Scala lacks the webby web-web street cred that this list is laden with. Haskell is mentioned briefly in the article, but not considered worthy of Knowing. Meanwhile, Erlang is popular in certain buzzword compliance requirements considered key to trends in web development as of a year or two ago.

Nice catch, Captain Obvious. That was my point!

...is that really a property of Javascript, though, or just your computer? Do the ECMA standards prescribe memory or reference size limits?

...And somehow, HTML is both on the list and lower than Java. Anyone got any theories?

I believe you'll find it's spelled "navel vassal."

My mistake; the original text merely said "thousands." See ctheme's comment.

That's the one! I would've posted the source but I'd only seen it as an image and didn't remember what to search for. Thanks.

There's this story about an off-duty bridge officer aboard a large US military ship who, groggy after having to get up rather early, called the bridge and requested that the vehicle, some quarter of a million tons of steel, personnel and equipment, be rotated 15 degrees, all so he didn't have to move an inch to get the sun out of his eyes while he drank his coffee.

Maybe whoever wrote that list merely wants to read the Linux Journal forums. Surely we're not pretending as if SELinux doesn't exist and that the NSA hasn't historically contributed to Linux. That would be a foolish thing to do. Of foolishness.

Figure skating just hasn't developed far enough yet—throw in a few mocap suits and compare the recorded data to an ideal performance. Root mean standard deviation == your score. Simple!